SNL Writer's Book Lacks Actual Comedy

When you pick up a book written by a "Saturday Night Live" writer, you expect it to be funny, right? When you pick up a book written by a "SNL" writer and the former editor of Harvard University's parody magazine, The Harvard Lampoon, you expect it to be really funny. Enter Simon Rich, master of comedy. As a 22-year-old student at Harvard, Rich published his first book, Ant Farm, which was praised by the likes of Jon Stewart and Time Out New York. Now, at age 23, he writes for "SNL" and has published his second book, Free-Range Chickens. An author's note in the beginning reads: "This is a joke book that I wrote. Nothing in it is real. It's just some things that I made up." The book is a short 129 pages and could easily be read in one sitting. The format is situational comedy in a dialogue format. Rich explores such humorous situations such as "Count Dracula's Match.com profile" and "A conversation between the people who hid in my closet every night when I was seven" (including a murderer, Freddy Krueger, Chucky and a dead uncle). Each dialogue lasts about a page or two, making it easy to pick up and put down when needed. Rich divides his book into categories: "Growing Up," "Going to Work," "Daily Life," "Relationships," "Animals" and "God." His situations are easy to identify with and sometimes make light of serious situations, such as in "The final moments of the Titanic," where the legendary band members who continued to play do not actually realize that the ship is going down. Arguably, the funniest collection of dialogues is the last - "God." The section includes seven dialogues between God and an angel. The angel questions God's actions while looking down on the world. When asked about the notion of "everything happens for a reason," God replies that everything does happen for a reason- so that he can see the look on people's faces if it does. While Rich's book is good for some amusement, it unfortunately misses the mark in the "rolling on the floor laughing" category. Perhaps his excessively dry sense of humor is an acquired taste, but some of the dialogues end awkwardly (and not in the funny-awkward way), leaving the reader wondering, "What was the point of that?" Upon further reading, it is possible that some of these situations would be funnier if the characters were played by Amy Poehler and Seth Meyer in an "SNL" sketch and require a visual imagination to make them work on paper. Although Rich's outrageous hypothetical situations are funny for the most part, Free-Range Chickens might be best digested slowly as opposed to reading it cover to cover in one sitting. If nothing else, it is a great conversation starter. What would free-range chickens say if they could talk, anyway?