Camels Are Easy Comedy S Hard

DIVDIVAn eclectic collection from Roy Blount Jr., master of American humor writing/divDIV I’ll tell you what kind of book I believe in: one that makes people say, at first sight, what the first person who ever saw a camel must have said: “What in the world is that?” And then, after a while, “Yet it seems to fit together some way.”/divDIV In this laugh-a-minute assortment of essays, travel writing, poems, and even the occasional crossword puzzle, Roy Blount Jr. covers sixty-four different subjects, all unified by his trademark humor. “Tan” is a personal essay about Blount’s lifelong battle with—sometimes for and sometimes against—that elusive summer glow. “Wild Fish Ripped My Flesh” chronicles his misadventures navigating the Amazon River. And “Lit Demystified Quickly” is a tongue-in-cheek poem about larger-than-life literary figures such as James Joyce, William Faulkner, and Walt Whitman./divDIV Camels Are Easy, Comedy’s Hard is a classic compendium of the wisecracks and wisdom for which Blount is renowned./divDIV/div/div

Laugh-out-loud observations from “America’s foremost humorist” (Chicago Tribune). What Men Don’t Tell Women: Well, that’s just for starters. Roy Blount Jr. realized that nearly all of his writing involved things people don’t tell people: what Southerners don’t tell Northerners, what the sick don’t want to hear from the well, what no one would ever tell their mother, and what authors rarely admit to their readers. That all changes in this “honest . . . funny” collection of confessional essays about sex, friendship, marriage, male bonding, female patience, and Elvis (The Boston Globe). One Fell Soup: A deliciously funny stew of reviews, diatribes, investigations, meditations, assorted grumblings, and verse about the absurdities of American life, death, fears, and ambition. Included in these fifty-nine easy pieces: the truth (as Blount sees it) about nudism, cricket-fighting, bowling, macaroni and cheese, black holes and black socks, nuclear holocausts, the CIA, domesticated fowl, pork bellies, God, and more. The whole shebang from “one of the most clever (see sly, witty, cunning, nimble) wordsmiths cavorting in the English language” (Carl Hiaasen). Camels Are Easy, Comedy’s Hard: Flesh-eating piranha! Synchronized swimming! Rubber chickens! Edith Wharton! Crossword puzzles! All and then some in this giddy compendium of essays, celebrity profiles, silly games, and side trips. Parts sports journalism, literary criticism, travel writing, and aborted novel, tossed with a few poems and a neo-Biblical one-act play, this is an uproarious—and sometimes heartening—anthology of adventures from “one writer who never fails to please” (The Village Voice).

This volume is an encyclopedia of country music performers who have used comedy as a central component of their presentation. Loyal Jones offers a conversational and informative biographical sketch of each performer, often including a sample of the musician's humor, a recording history, and amusing anecdotal tidbits. In an entertaining style, Jones covers performers throughout the twentieth century, from such early stars of vaudeville and radio barn dances as the Skillet Lickers and the Weaver Brothers and Elviry, to regulars on Hee Haw and the Grand Old Opry, continuing to current comedians such as the Austin Lounge Lizards, Ray Stevens, and Jeff Foxworthy.

This new edition of Southern Writers assumes its distinguished predecessor's place as the essential reference on literary artists of the American South. Broadly expanded and thoroughly revised, it boasts 604 entries-nearly double the earlier edition's-written by 264 scholars. For every figure major and minor, from the venerable and canonical to the fresh and innovative, a biographical sketch and chronological list of published works provide comprehensive, concise, up-to-date information. Here in one convenient source are the South's novelists and short story writers, poets and dramatists, memoirists and essayists, journalists, scholars, and biographers from the colonial period to the twenty-first century. What constitutes a "southern writer" is always a matter for debate. Editors Joseph M. Flora and Amber Vogel have used a generous definition that turns on having a significant connection to the region, in either a personal or literary sense. New to this volume are younger writers who have emerged in the quarter century since the dictionary's original publication, as well as older talents previously unknown or unacknowledged. For almost every writer found in the previous edition, a new biography has been commissioned. Drawn from the very best minds on southern literature and covering the full spectrum of its practitioners, Southern Writers is an indispensable reference book for anyone intrigued by the subject.

In the book his laughing and loving readers have been waiting for, our generation's master of full-hearted humor lays open the soul of his life story. Roy Blount Jr.--Georgia boy turned New York wit, lover of baseball and interesting women, bumbling adventurer, literary lion, salty-limerick virtuoso and impassioned father--journeys into the past and his psyche (also all the way to China, sixty feet underwater and to various Manhattan hot spots) in search of the answers to three riddles that have haunted him intimately: One: the riddle of "the family curse." Two: the riddle of what drives him (or anyone) to be funny. Three: the riddle of what so cruelly tangled his unseverable bond with the beguiling, beaten orphan girl who became the impossible mother who raised him to Be Sweet. Roy Blount's memoir is sardonic and sentimental, hilarious and grieving, brazen and bashful, tough and tender--sometimes by turns and sometimes all at once. Almost harshly honest, yet sportively wayward, Be Sweet resonates with the complex but bouncy chords of a whole man singing, clinkers and all.

Ali G: How many words does you know? Noam Chomsky: Normally, humans, by maturity, have tens of thousands of them. Ali G: What is some of 'em? —Da Ali G Show Did you know that both mammal and matter derive from baby talk? Have you noticed how wince makes you wince? Ever wonder why so many h-words have to do with breath? Roy Blount Jr. certainly has, and after forty years of making a living using words in every medium, print or electronic, except greeting cards, he still can't get over his ABCs. In Alphabet Juice, he celebrates the electricity, the juju, the sonic and kinetic energies, of letters and their combinations. Blount does not prescribe proper English. The franchise he claims is "over the counter." Three and a half centuries ago, Thomas Blount produced Blount's Glossographia, the first dictionary to explore derivations of English words. This Blount's Glossographia takes that pursuit to other levels, from Proto-Indo-European roots to your epiglottis. It rejects the standard linguistic notion that the connection between words and their meanings is "arbitrary." Even the word arbitrary is shown to be no more arbitrary, at its root, than go-to guy or crackerjack. From sources as venerable as the OED (in which Blount finds an inconsistency, at whisk) and as fresh as Urbandictionary.com (to which Blount has contributed the number-one definition of "alligator arm"), and especially from the author's own wide-ranging experience, Alphabet Juice derives an organic take on language that is unlike, and more fun than, any other.

Fresh-squeezed Lexicology, with Twists No man of letters savors the ABC's, or serves them up, like language-loving humorist Roy Blount Jr. His glossary, from ad hominy to zizz, is hearty, full bodied, and out to please discriminating palates coarse and fine. In 2008, he celebrated the gists, tangs, and energies of letters and their combinations in Alphabet Juice, to wide acclaim. Now, Alphabetter Juice. Which is better. This book is for anyone—novice wordsmith, sensuous reader, or career grammarian—who loves to get physical with words. What is the universal sign of disgust, ew, doing in beautiful and cutie? Why is toadless, but not frogless, in the Oxford English Dictionary? How can the U. S. Supreme Court find relevance in gollywoddles? Might there be scientific evidence for the sonicky value of hunch? And why would someone not bother to spell correctly the very word he is trying to define on Urbandictionary.com? Digging into how locutions evolve, and work, or fail, Blount draws upon everything from The Tempest to The Wire. He takes us to Iceland, for salmon-watching with a "girl gillie," and to Georgian England, where a distinguished etymologist bites off more of a "giantess" than he can chew. Jimmy Stewart appears, in connection with kludge and the bombing of Switzerland. Litigation over supercalifragilisticexpialidocious leads to a vintage werewolf movie; news of possum-tossing, to metanarrative. As Michael Dirda wrote in The Washington Post Book World, "The immensely likeable Blount clearly possesses what was called in the Italian Renaissance ‘sprezzatura,' that rare and enviable ability to do even the most difficult things without breaking a sweat." Alphabetter Juice is brimming with sprezzatura. Have a taste.