5 Bonnes Raisons De Mettre Une Droite à Un Dauphin (et Autres Conseils Pratiques) (2011) - Plot & Excerpts
It's the Oatmeal. You either love him or suck at humor. This isn't my favorite of his collections (too many of the infographic cartoons for my taste) but still awesome and hilarious.And he's not just same idiot on the internet. He has utilized his fame to support some interesting causes, including the building of a Nikola Tesla museum. He also turned an idiotic lawsuit from someone who had stolen one of his cartoons (yeah, you read that right) into a massive fundraising campaign. After raising thousands and thousands of dollars, he donated it to the National Wildlife Fund (partly because of his obsession with bears). The organization even sent him a plaque naming him "Champion of Bears."So read the book, read his site, and appreciate some truly weird but funny cartoons. I'm a huge fan of The Oatmeal, as is everybody but certain Edison fanatics and litigious corporate attorneys. This first collection of comics taken from The Oatmeal website is a good composite of the first incarnation of what The Oatmeal is all about. However, Part of the charm of the website is the short comics that pop up every other week or so and give you a good chuckle. When bound together, the techniques seem to get fairly worn, fairly quickly. Also, what is included in this compilation is, by Inman's own admission, much more fluffy click-driven comics, rather than his more recent longer, deeper, and intrinsically more funny and readable fare. And with so little to actually read in a graphic-driven book like this, it made me remember one of the first things that I read on The Oatmeal, which is one of only a few essays that Inman has written on the site. The essays are, or course, interspersed with the signature comics, but they are "essays" rather than "comics" because of the high volume-to-fat-cartoon ration. That essay was entitled "Why we should eat horses instead of riding them." Reading through that the first time, I nearly lost all control of my bowel functions. It was that good. And his writing, even in long form, can be that good too. More recently, Inman has honed his style and improved his delivery. There is still quite a bit of funny to be found in these older comics, but I am glad that The Oatmeal is getting better with age.
What do You think about 5 Bonnes Raisons De Mettre Une Droite à Un Dauphin (et Autres Conseils Pratiques) (2011)?
An amusing "read" but I've found his later comics to be more consistently funny.
—Otterwallace
8 reasons to keep a Canadian as a pet: you had me at 1.
—bekka
