A review by rosekk
Work! Consume! Die!: You Are Bored. This is the Antidote by Frankie Boyle
3.0
I've seen Frankie Boyle live recently (and loved the show), and enjoyed his TV appearances, so the 3 stars is not a rating of his comedy. A lot of this book is funny, and some of it is thought provoking. There were sections I really enjoyed.
The problem was that without Frankie's delivery a lot of the jokes were, though still amusing, shadows of what they'd be on stage. And 300-odd pages of the same humour is a lot in one dose. The story-based sections of the book didn't provide the variation required. They were my least favourite part of the book, as I didn't find them very engaging as nothing that happened in them felt important even though there were relatively high stakes at play. Oddly, the fact that it was a fictionalised version of a real person made me less concerned than I would be over a wholly fictional character, as it's hard to feel for a character when you're reminded that they have a real-world counterpart who's probably fine.
The problem was that without Frankie's delivery a lot of the jokes were, though still amusing, shadows of what they'd be on stage. And 300-odd pages of the same humour is a lot in one dose. The story-based sections of the book didn't provide the variation required. They were my least favourite part of the book, as I didn't find them very engaging as nothing that happened in them felt important even though there were relatively high stakes at play. Oddly, the fact that it was a fictionalised version of a real person made me less concerned than I would be over a wholly fictional character, as it's hard to feel for a character when you're reminded that they have a real-world counterpart who's probably fine.