If It S Not Funny It S Art

New York Times bestselling author of This Is a Book and Point Your Face at This, Demetri Martin is back with another collection of hilarious drawings: IF IT'S NOT FUNNY IT'S ART Packed with hundreds of new illustrations and one-liners, IF IT'S NOT FUNNY IT'S ART is a peek into the ingenious mind of author/comedian/filmmaker Demetri Martin. Exploring the meaning of art, life, death, ennui and the elegant fart joke with a sensibility all its own, this collection is a perfect gift for word lovers, art appreciators and fans of Demetri's unique brand of comedy. Sure to make you laugh out loud, and if it doesn't, then you know it's art.

!--[if gte mso 9] ![endif]--New York Times bestselling author of This Is a Book and Point Your Face at This, Demetri Martin is back with another collection of hilarious drawings: IF IT'S NOT FUNNY IT'S ART Packed with hundreds of new illustrations and one-liners, IF IT'S NOT FUNNY IT'S ART is a peek into the ingenious mind of author/comedian/filmmaker Demetri Martin. Exploring the meaning of art, life, death, ennui and the elegant fart joke with a sensibility all its own, this collection is a perfect gift for word lovers, art appreciators and fans of Demetri's unique brand of comedy. Sure to make you laugh out loud, and if it doesn't, then you know it's art.

Jargon-spewing corporate zombies. The sociopath who checks voice mail on his speaker phone. The fascist information systems guy. The sadistic human resources director. The technophobic vice president. The power-mad executive assistant. The pursed-lip sycophant. The big stubborn dumb guy. They're Dilbert's coworkers, and chances are they're yours, too. If you know them, work with them, or dialogue with them about leveraging synergies to maximize shareholder value, then you'll recognize this comic strip as a day at the office, only funnier.

Point Your Face At This is a wonderfully entertaining book of cartoons and absurdity from Demetri Martin, the Perrier Award-winning comedian, and author of This Is A Book If you want to laugh, point your face at this. In his first book, This Is a Book, Demetri Martin introduced fans and readers to his unique brand of long-form humour writing. Now Demetri returns with an eclectic volume devoted entirely to his trademark drawings and word play. Point Your Face At This contains hundreds of hilarious drawings and visual jokes, showcasing Martin's particular penchant for brevity. With a sensibility all its own, this is a great gift book and an absolute must-have for fans of the brainy, ambidextrous, comedian, palindromist (and author), Demetri Martin. Praise for Demetri Martin: 'Highly inventive . . . Martin is a genius' Telegraph 'A refined sense of the absurd' Guardian Demetri Martin rose to relative obscurity when he started doing stand-up comedy in New York City at the end of the 20th Century. Later he became a writer at Late Night with Conan O'Brien and then a regular performer on The Daily Show with Jon Stewart. In 2003, Demetri won the Perrier Award at the International Fringe Festival for his first one-man show, If I. He released a comedy album called These Are Jokes and then created and starred in his own television series called Important Things with Demetri Martin. Demetri has brown hair, and he is allergic to peanuts. You can find him at www.demetrimartin.com, at www.facebook.com/demetrimartin, on Twitter @demetrimartin, and in various places in the actual physical world.

Isn’t That Clever provides a new account of the nature of humor – the cleverness account – according to which humor is intentional conspicuous acts of playful cleverness. By defining humor in this way, answers can be found to longstanding questions about humor ethics (Are there jokes that are wrong to tell? Are there jokes that can only be told by certain people?) and humor aesthetics (What makes for a good joke? Is humor subjective?). In addition to humor in general, Isn’t That Clever asks questions about comedy as an art form such as whether there are limits to what can be said in dealing with a heckler and how do we determine whether one comedian has stolen jokes from another.

Like many ambitious New York City teenagers, Craig Gilner sees entry into Manhattan's Executive Pre-Professional High School as the ticket to his future. Determined to succeed at life—which means getting into the right high school to get into the right college to get the right job—Craig studies night and day to ace the entrance exam, and does. That's when things start to get crazy. At his new school, Craig realizes that he isn't brilliant compared to the other kids; he's just average, and maybe not even that. He soon sees his once-perfect future crumbling away.

"Smart, knowing, and deeply reported, the definitive history of one of modern American humor’s wellsprings." —Kurt Andersen, author of Fantasyland, host of NPR’s Studio 360 Labor Day, 1969. Two recent college graduates move to New York to edit a new magazine called The National Lampoon. Over the next decade, Henry Beard and Doug Kenney, along with a loose amalgamation of fellow satirists including Michael O’Donoghue and P. J. O’Rourke, popularized a smart, caustic, ironic brand of humor that has become the dominant voice of American comedy. Ranging from sophisticated political satire to broad raunchy jokes, the National Lampoon introduced iconoclasm to the mainstream, selling millions of copies to an audience both large and devoted. Its excursions into live shows, records, and radio helped shape the anarchic earthiness of John Belushi, the suave slapstick of Chevy Chase, and the deadpan wit of Bill Murray, and brought them together with other talents such as Harold Ramis, Christopher Guest, and Gilda Radner. A new generation of humorists emerged from the crucible of the Lampoon to help create Saturday Night Live and the influential film Animal House, among many other notable comedy landmarks. Journalist Ellin Stein, an observer of the scene since the early 1970s, draws on a wealth of revealing, firsthand interviews with the architects and impresarios of this comedy explosion to offer crucial insight into a cultural transformation that still echoes today. Brimming with insider stories and set against the roiling political and cultural landscape of the 1970s, That’s Not Funny, That’s Sick goes behind the jokes to witness the fights, the parties, the collaborations—and the competition—among this fraternity of the self-consciously disenchanted. Decades later, their brand of subversive humor that provokes, offends, and often illuminates is as relevant and necessary as ever.

“One of the finest writers of the new nonfiction” (Harper’s Bazaar) explores the role of art in our tumultuous modern era. In this remarkable, inspiring collection of essays, acclaimed writer and critic Olivia Laing makes a brilliant case for why art matters, especially in the turbulent political weather of the twenty-first century. Funny Weather brings together a career’s worth of Laing’s writing about art and culture, examining their role in our political and emotional lives. She profiles Jean-Michel Basquiat and Georgia O’Keeffe, reads Maggie Nelson and Sally Rooney, writes love letters to David Bowie and Freddie Mercury, and explores loneliness and technology, women and alcohol, sex and the body. With characteristic originality and compassion, she celebrates art as a force of resistance and repair, an antidote to a frightening political time. We’re often told that art can’t change anything. Laing argues that it can. Art changes how we see the world. It makes plain inequalities and it offers fertile new ways of living.