by Shannon Wheeler
Publisher: Boom! Town
ISBN: 978-1-60886-034-0
Shannon Wheeler is a regular gag contributor to the New Yorker and The Onion. You may also know him as the creator of Too Much Coffee Man. This collection brings together some of his New Yorker cartoons and is represented in a mono-chrome square format with a gag per page with the cartoons divided up into loose chapters.
I bought this one on the strength of a forward by Dan Piraro, creator of the delicious single-panel daily cartoon Bizarro, and the cover cartoon featuring a woman in bed with a clown having a post-coital discussion that results in the book's title line. It made me smile. Other highlights include a guy with writers' block whilst in the corner a monkey with a typewriter is churning out pages – Stop mocking me! – and an engaged couple who announce they're getting hyphenated. The pedantic in me scowled at the Large Hadron Collider joke, though. Wrong, wrong, wrong.
I did feel that the contents were a little hit and miss, though. You always expect a couple not to tickle your funny bone because that's just the way humour operates, but there seemed too many so-so gags for a collection of this size. The cartoons are reproduced much larger than they'd appear in the New Yorker, but this appears to be a tactic to fill space as Wheeler's cartoon style doesn't warrant the larger size like, for example a Giles or Bizarro cartoon would. I may be being a little unfair, but I was expecting more for my money here, and, I almost dare not write it, I thought it would be funnier.
And if you liked that: Try Bizarro & Other Strange Manifestations Of The Art Of Dan Piraro
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