(Part 2) Reddit mentions: The best political humor books

Who's the most underrated genius in comedy, to you?
The one who leaps to mind is Rick Overton. I saw him do a one-man show at the Aspen Comedy festival a decade ago, and it still stands in my mind as one of the most amazing performances I've seen. He did this thing where he stood in front of a map of the English-speaking world, and he moved his hand across it gradually, changing his accent as he went from region to region, so you could see how each accent developed from the ones near it. It sounds incredibly dull, but somehow he made it hysterically funny. It was like some kind of comedy magic trick that it worked as well as it did. I still have no idea how he did it.

How much of your sense of humor do you share in common with your friends and colleagues?

The work I've done most lately is writing humor books. I wrote The Government Manual for New Superheroes, The Government Manual for New Wizards, and The Government Manual for New Pirates with a friend of mine. We have a similar sense of humor, but it's not the same; his is dryer and more deadpan, mine is bigger and more joke-y. But we each think the other is very funny, and we each respect the other as a writer. It took a fair amount of back-and-forth on the first book to find a joint authorial voice, but once we had it, we used it for the other books.

I wrote How Not To Kill Your Baby on my own-- but I have the same agent and the same editor that I had on my three joint books.

Obviously, since an agent and an editor aren't writing the manuscript with you, it's not as challenging if they have different sense of humor. But you have to respect them, and trust that they respect you. If they don't like one of your jokes, you need to trust that it's because it's not a good joke, and not just because they don't get it.

For example, you would not believe how many different versions we went through of the cover for "How Not To Kill Your Baby." After considering and rejecting literally dozens of possibilities, we came down to two that seemed most promising. My agent and I liked one; my editor liked the other. Ultimately, my agent and I yielded to my editor's judgment. And it turns out she was right-- the cover gets a laugh from everybody I've shown it to. And when I show people the alternate cover I wanted, they always pause like they're trying to think of how to put it politely, and then they say, "Your editor made the right choice."

I don't think we'd have ended up with such a good cover if we hadn't all trusted and respected each other's sense of humor, even while we were disagreeing about particular things.

Florida native here! (That doesn't necessarily give me more credibility to answer your question, I just think more people should be at least somewhat proud to be from here.) Basically, those southern regions of Florida were never very Southern to begin with.

Until the early 20th century, the vast majority of peninsular Florida was sparsely populated frontier and swampland. Since the historic population centers of Florida were in the less swampy and more easily accessible panhandle and northern sections of the peninsula, the cultural traditions of the rest of the American South were able to take root and flourish there.

The construction of major railways through peninsular Florida in the 1910s made it much easier to traverse, but it wasn't until the great land boom of the 1920s that the state started to become much more populated. During that time, shrewd real estate speculators with dubious scruples began buying up and developing land in South Florida, and to a lesser extent, the Gulf Coast and South-Central Florida. They then heavily advertised Florida in the Northeast and Midwest population centers as a pristine tropical paradise, to the point that most of the people moving into these new developments were from those areas. What those new residents found when they got here was often...less than what had been advertised. (Think houses literally sinking into the swamp.)

In any case, the massive speculation created a bubble that inevitably popped, and the whole thing went sideways around the time of the Depression. Population growth dropped off significantly after that, but by that time, cities like Miami, West Palm Beach, Tampa, and Orlando had been well established, populated mostly by former Northerners. When economic times got better, that migration pattern mostly continued, with those cities becoming prime destinations for retiring Northerners post-WWII. The construction of the Orlando theme parks beginning in the 1970s and growth of tourism as the state's primary industry made Florida a top destination for people from up north, many of whom decided to return here for good.

As an aside, the whole Florida land boom really was an interesting time in the state's history. I highly recommend "Oh, Florida!" by Craig Pittman for more on this and other interesting bits of Florida history and current affairs.

Also this: https://www.amazon.com/EVERYTHING-GREAT-ABOUT-PRESIDENT-TRUMP-ebook/dp/B075PKP76C

> Research conducted from January 20, 2017 to the present day led us to publishing this exhaustive educational tool. A great gift for your liberal friends who don't appreciate the President as much as the rest of us. Also a great gift for the conservative readers out there.

> The astute observer will notice that this book is entirely blank.

Milo has a chapter dedicated to GamerGate in his book.

The audiobook is recommended, as it's more entertaining to listen to him read it to you. The audiobook is free if you create an Audible account (which sucks, so I just cancelled/uninstalled it straight after I got my free audiobook).

@mayoremmanuel did it first, and like the true badass that Rahm is, he didn't give a shit. In fact, he showed up for the book signing for the book detailing the adventure Dan Sinker (The author) went through along with all the tweets. I was there. It was awesome. Some people just need to get their heads out of their asses.

The beginning of the book the fucking epic twitter quest of @mayoremanuel one of the co-founders of twitter talks about parody accounts, and how their allowed and for what reasons. I think the big thing is, without the "verified" checkmark its up to the user to know that its not real

I just self-published a satirical book about Fox News (For Fox Sake!) and the advice I was given from a lawyer friend of mine was that even though they would likely lose a lawsuit it would be very costly and therefore it would be wise to publish the book under an LLC which provides some added protection for yourself since they wouldn't be able to come after you personally, only what LLC itself has in terms of assets. I followed his advice and it only cost about $225 to incorporate in my state and it was pretty fast and easy. I hope that helps.

Read a few books, even skim a few articles on the subject of that election and you will quickly realize that even without Nader Gore would have not won.

Gore could have won had the supreme court not meddled in the affair. Or if Katherine Harris had not scrubbed the voter rolls, and in the process requested that the list amount to larger than the number of felons that were registered (35% of her scrub list was composed of non-felons half of whom were minorities).

Edit:the best book on the entire election/recount

Love this book. Clever and funny, especially if you're a stand-up fan like I am Nothing's Sacred-Lewis Black

I'm not a Feminazi, but I enjoyed Are Men Necessary. It was an interesting and fun look at gender today. A good read for both men and women

I liked Supreme Courtship by Christopher Buckley.

>President of the United States Donald Vanderdamp is having a hell of a time getting his nominees appointed to the Supreme Court. After one nominee is rejected for insufficiently appreciating To Kill A Mockingbird, the president chooses someone so beloved by voters that the Senate won't have the guts to reject her -- Judge Pepper Cartwright, the star of the nation's most popular reality show, Courtroom Six.

>Will Pepper, a straight-talking Texan, survive a confirmation battle in the Senate? Will becoming one of the most powerful women in the world ruin her love life? And even if she can make it to the Supreme Court, how will she get along with her eight highly skeptical colleagues, including a floundering Chief Justice who, after legalizing gay marriage, learns that his wife has left him for another woman.

>Soon, Pepper finds herself in the middle of a constitutional crisis, a presidential reelection campaign that the president is determined to lose, and oral arguments of a romantic nature. Supreme Courtship is another classic Christopher Buckley comedy about the Washington institutions most deserving of ridicule.

To be honest, I really like most of Buckley's stuff- a lot of which is based in politics, lobbying and legislation and comedy!

1. If voters had a clear path to reject the two current parties they would.
   
2. I think the best possible path is laid out in the book Two Tyrants (the ebook is free, if anybody hasn't read it http://www.amazon.com/Two-Tyrants-Two-Party-Government-Liberation-ebook/dp/B00O64U8HQ/ref=tmm_kin_title_0?_encoding=UTF8&sr=8-1&qid=1416565943 )

This is from The Onion Book of Known Knowledge. Pretty much every page is this funny-- it's pretty fantastic. Find it at a book store and open up to any page in any one of the 27 letters of the alphabet.

Two that I think are great without going back too far are Naomi Wolf's The Beauty Myth, and Female Chauvinist Pigs.

I'm looking at amazon.com and thinking of ordering a new one from bell hooks, who I've always liked. As an African-American woman, hooks has always had a broader perspective.

I'd also recommend Susan Faludi's Backlash.

Amanda Marcotte's recent It's a Jungle Out There was a quick read and good.

I'm currently looking at Valenti's Full Frontal Feminism and by Siegel and Baumgardner's Sisterhood, Interrupted: From Radical Women to Grrls Gone Wild, but they're about 4th and 5th on my current reading list and I can't yet say how I'd rate them.

Also on my reading list is Does Feminism Discriminate Against Men?: A Debate (Point/Counterpoint) by Warren Farrell, Steven Svoboda, and James P. Sterba on my list. Looking forward to that one. Warren Farrell is a former feminist and the father of the men's liberation movement. The movement had progressive roots, but I think Farrell's moved more center, and certainly the men's movement has some very conservative branches. I think it will be interesting splitting apart any anti-feminism from the pro-men's liberation stuff.

I personally don't think there's any conflict between men and women's liberation, but I want to be more informed as to the current arguments.

Sounds like you might be a libertarian-leaning conservative. (Old type, before the neo-con takeover.)

Some question you should ask yourself:

What is your definition of utility, and how can the worth of a utility be measured?

When is it moral for a government to do something that it is not moral for an individual to do? Why?

How do you know Democracy is the least bad system of government? There are good arguments against it. Some examples:
http://www.amazon.com/Democracy-Economics-Politics-Monarchy-Natural/dp/0765808684
http://www.amazon.com/Notes-Democracy-H-L-Mencken/dp/0977378810/ref=pd_sim_b_8


Without answering some of those questions, and many others like them, if only for yourself, you will be working with assumptions that you aren't even aware of.

Well all I will say as one of Kodi's most trusted advisors that I am quite fond of this book.

Here are all the local Amazon links I could find:


amazon.co.uk

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amazon.co.jp

Beep bloop. I'm a bot to convert Amazon ebook links to local Amazon sites.
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Novello also wrote a few books in which he would compile some very strange letters to customer service departments of various companies, presidents, universities, etc. all as a character named Lazlo Toth, then print their responses; they're hilarious and worth picking up.

The Lazlo Letters

Citizen Lazlo!

From Bush to Bush

I've been a fan of Novello for a long time. When I first heard Andrei Codrescu on NPR, I sincerely thought it was one of Novello's characters.

It's certainly not a desi-specific question. This is an issue everywhere in the world. It's not obvious how desi virginity culture now is any different than the culture in the US in, say, 1940. And certainly modern desi culture is not the culture that's objectively most obsessed with virginity.

I'd suggest understanding this as a human phenomenon first, then delve into the interrelationship with desi culture. Otherwise this is going to be a shitshow with racial and sexual generalizations galore.

If you're unwilling to ask on reddit, I can provide a list of books for you to look at. This sub has a bad history of agenda-laced posts by throwaways, so a lot of us are now very wary of feeding trolls with a topic like this.

EDIT: Here's some books I thought of, because YOLO. Books that focus on this tend to be left-wing feminist, please be forewarned if you're a TRP dude with an ax to grind.

• The Purity Myth about virginity culture in the modern United States
  
  
• Virginity or Death - the namesake essay by Katha Pollit might be useful. Her essay collections often touch on virginity culture.
  
  
• Saint Augustine's works on virginity and women form the basis of about 1500 years of "Western" thought on women's purity
  
  
• Ayan Hirsi Ali's books The Caged Virgin and Infidel are good at identifying certain problematic practices in Muslim traditions, though her conclusion that it's all Muslims and "ban them all" etc. etc. is ridiculous
  
  ... oh eff it, the post got deleted. If you need more reading material PM me.

"The American press has always had a tendency to assume the truth must lie exactly halfway between any two opposing points of view. Thus, if the press present the man who says Hitler is an ogre and the man who says Hitler is a prince, it believes it has done the full measure of its duty.



This tendency has been aggravated in recent years by a noticeable trend to substitute people who speak from a right-wing ideological perspective for those who know something about a given subject.Thus we see, night after night, on MacNeil/Lehrer or Nightline, people who don't know jack-shit about Iran or Nicaragua or arms control, but who are ready to tear up the peapatch in defense of the proposition that Ronald Reagan is a Great Leader beset by com-symps. They have nothing to offer in the way of facts or insight; they are presented as a way of keeping the networks from being charged with bias by people who are themselves replete with bias and resistant to fact. The justification for putting them on the air is that 'they represent a point of view.'"


-- Molly Ivins, The Fudge Factory, from Who Let the Dogs In (2005).

book

As is Brain Droppings

• my recommendation is the Onion Book of Known Knowledge
  
  
  
  

The Onion Book of Known Knowledge. http://www.amazon.com/Onion-Book-Known-Knowledge-Encyclopaedia/dp/B00FY2R9TE