Review: Deep(-freeze) Thoughts.
Rating: 4 out of 5
Date: 01 26, 2012
Jeremy C. Shipp, <strong>Always Remember to Tip Your Ninja and Other Maxims for the Clinically Absurd</strong> (Attic Clown Press, 2011)Admit it. You, assuming you were old enough to even remember such things, are one of the fools who plunked down $12.95 for a copy of the <em>Deep Thoughts</em> compilation the Saturday Night Live crew put out twenty years ago. You must have been, because the damned thing sold like hotcakes. I know this from personal experience, I was managing a bookstore at the time. In any case, here we have an updated, bizarro, and infinitely superior book of homilies, Jeremy C. Shipp's <em>Always Remember to Tip Your Ninja and Other Maxims for the Clinically Absurd</em>. I was planning on spending my one-paragrapher comparing it to the Handey book (this one is twelve times cheaper and a <em>lot</em> funnier), but as I write this I find myself wanting to compare it more to other bizarro books. Shipp has a subtler sense of humor than a lot of bizarro I've read, which I appreciate. I grant you, "more subtle" is a relative term; where someone like Andersen Prunty or Jordan Krall has all the subtlety of a week-old dead haddock (and I say that with the greatest love, guys), Shipp is a week-old dead haddock who has at least been forgotten in the back of the fishmonger's freezer, and has thus decayed less rapidly. I expected this stuff to be the kind of out-of-left-field originality that one expects from bizarro, but instead Shipp takes his launchpads all too often from the dumbest clichés, old saws, and wives' tales you've ever heard, and simply amplifies the dumb a little. Now THAT'S comedy! And if you're dusting along a bookshelf you totally forgot you had and run across a copy of <em>Deep Thoughts</em>, then trust me, you owe it to yourself to buy a copy of this. ***