Press for Poking a Dead Frog
Press for Poking a Dead Frog Excerpts George Saunders’s Humor (New Yorker) Marc Maron’s Advice for Would-Be Comedians: “Don’t Kid Yourself” (Vanity Fair) How to Write Jokes for the Academy Awards (Vulture) Interviews RogerEbert.com Psychology Today DangerousMinds Reviews for Poking a Dead Frog New York Times Los Angeles Times San Antonio Current Slate McSweeney’s Publisher’s Weekly
When is a Joke Funny?
“The best thing in the world is writing a joke, having an audience get it. I will never grow tired of that. It’s magical,” says Mel Brooks, one of several dozen comedy writers interviewed in the new book “Poking a Dead Frog.” The title comes from an observation by E.B. White that analyzing humor is […]
Spiked
Mike Sacks’ one-man war against the zeitgeist: The American humourist doesn’t bother with predictable targets like Palin or hicks. He prefers gerbils, the Holocaust, girls’ lockerrooms… By Tim Black Is it funny to mock sad-sack thirtysomething writers who desperately try to write like the kidz? Is it funny to imagine Anne Frank trying to get […]
Blog Critics
Mike Sacks is a prolific writer, refining the art and craft of humor for publications including Esquire, GQ, McSweeney’s, The New Yorker, and Vanity Fair. I had the pleasure of reviewing Sacks’ prior books, and Your Wildest Dreams, Within Reason, from Tin House Books, does not disappoint. Clearly, there is no danger of Sacks growing […]
Publishers Weekly
Your Wildest Dreams, Within Reason Mike Sacks, illus. by Tae Won Yu and Julian Sancton, Tin House, $13.95 trade paper (272p) ISBN 978-1-935639-02-2 Sacks (coauthor of Sex: Our Bodies, Our Junk) offers 54 short humor pieces, including 25 written in collaboration with fellow humor writers Todd Levin, Scott Jacobson, Bob Powers, Jason Roeder, Scott Rothman, […]
The AV Club: Your Wildest Dreams Within Reason
Your Wildest Dreams Within Reason A- In his breezy, imaginative humor anthology, Your Wildest Dreams Within Reason, Vanity Fair’s Mike Sacks taps into the sketch-comedy peculiarities of Mr. Show and Kids In The Hall. Wildest Dreams is populated with oddball characters on the fringe of society, with Sacks devoting great care to the idiosyncratic worlds […]
Dangerous Minds
Vanity Fair’s Mike Sacks (who authored And Here’s the Kicker: Conversations with 21 Top Humor Writers on their Craft, a favorite of mine, in 2009) has a new collection of well-crafted comic essays, out today, called Your Wildest Dreams, Within Reason. Originally published in The New Yorker, Vanity Fair, Esquire, and McSweeney’s, there is no […]
Kirkus Reviews
In Mike Sacks’ collection of humor pieces, Your Wildest Dreams, Within Reason, it’s often technology that serves as a catalyst for comedy: One man accidentally sends a mass e-mail to his co-workers, revealing that he’s created a fantasy kingdom where he rules over them as a talking horse. Another Tweets from bed on his wedding […]
Chicago Tribune
THE SAD TALES OF COMEDY WRITERS, by Christopher Borrelli And Here’s the Kicker, by Mike Sacks I made the mistake of reading Mike Sacks’ new big book of interviews with comedy writers, And Here’s the Kicker (Writer’s Digest, $17.99), just after reading all 693 pages of The Stories of John Cheever, and while you might think the light Q&A […]
The Onion’s AV Club
After devouring And Here’s The Kicker: Conversations With 21 Top Humor Writers On Their Craft, a compulsively readable dissection of the comic mind by Vanity Fair staffer Mike Sacks, I want to give its author the highest praise any writer can give another: His book made me insanely fucking jealous, and not just because he’s kicking ass […]
