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Formats
Hardcover Details
  • 10/2022
  • 979-8-9858877-3-0
  • 284 pages
  • $28.75
remo perini
Author
HA! (Humanity's Absurdities)
Remo Perini, author

Adult; General Fiction (including literary and historical); (Market)

From the mind of a retired harpsichord psychologist, HA! (Humanity's Absurdities) touches upon the meaning of life in much the same way that a misplaced moist towelette does not. HA! is a sardonic parody, rife with irony, satire, and lampoons of every-day drivel-laden gibberish. Complete with a glossary of insightful and meaningless original vernacular, this volume will exercise your mind and keep you laughing, grinning, or smirkingly amused as you try to discern fiction from fabrication or mere falsehood. Replete with yasplarian and spongnacious content that may be ambiguous, biguous, or even tribiguous, but almost never factual. In this stunning debut entry into the humor genre, Dr. Remo Perini, Poet, Scientist, Harpischord Psychologist, and winner of the rarely celebrated Insignificance Award for Unknown Literature, dives into an elaborate portrayal of Humanity's Absurdities which is abbreviated HA! As an author who aspires to become fictional, Perini looks at the world from an oblique angle and serves up ten mind-widening chapters of gibberish, drivel, and insanity that demonstrate respect for but complete misunderstanding of History, Writing, the Arts, Sports, Science and Medicine. The range of topics is further extended with the inclusion of periodical sections such as Missed Connections, For Rent, Employment, For Sale, and Entertainment that includes a crossword puzzle based on newly introduced jargon. Given that the majority of the content is drivel, Perini presents a Drivelometer to measure drivel content based on minimizing facts. With two co-authors who coincidentally have the same nickname, Tweebs, we learn that those contributors are sock puppets, one a right-foot white athletic sock, the other a left foot black dress sock. Despite these differences, both Tweebs' believe in their right to shoes.
Reviews
Subtitled “Volume VI” (it isn’t) and claiming its author is the recipient of the “Insignificance Award for Unknown Literature” (the what now?), Perini’s collection of comic essays, parodies, and absurdities is powered by a prankish sense of play, from its thirteen (!) prefatory/introductory throat-clearing passages, to its account of the discovery of Universal Field Theory (by a young girl eating a grilled-cheese sandwich and working out the physics on an Etch-a-Sketch), to its insistence that, down the hall from Perini’s orthodontist is a “polkadontist”’s office where patients’ mouths get filled with colored dots. Unclassifiable except perhaps by terms like “bonkers” and “engagingly upbeat,” Perini’s miscellany ranges widely and wildly, standing as a compendium of often-inspired nonsense.

Faux-authoritative rundowns on subjects like “The Science of Kindness” or near-death experiences suggest the daft compendia of John Hodgman or the Hitchhiker’s Guide to the Galaxy, as Perini presents, in accomplished literary deadpan, many assorted “facts” (Learn how Hoagie, the chef for the Earl of Sandwich, accidentally invented the corndog), new coinages (“fignorance” is “ignorance about figs”), and a host of advertisements (including solar-powered flashlights and for a university in a parallel universe.) Especially amusing are the abundant footnotes, an inscrutable quiz, a series of “Missed Connections” personals, and Perini’s lists of standard, hidden, and anonymous acts of kindness, which edge between goofy (“Offer to go clothes shopping for your children’s school principal”) and cheerful dada: “Late at night, put cream cheese on the low hanging leaves of a cherry tree.”

The only clear throughlines are Perini’s straight face and restless invention, which means HA! is best taken in brief reading sessions, one short essay or section at a time. This is a book to browse, laugh at, puzzle over, and let surprise you. Readers who relish poker-faced parody from authors whose humor tends toward a frisky oddness—and eschews the divisive and mean-spirited—will discover much here that stirs a smile.

Takeaway: A truly funny compendium of invented facts, ads, advice, and other madness.

Great for fans of: John Hodgman, Merrill Markoe’s Late Night with David Letterman: The Book.

Production grades
Cover: B+
Design and typography: A
Illustrations: A-
Editing: A
Marketing copy: A-

Formats
Hardcover Details
  • 10/2022
  • 979-8-9858877-3-0
  • 284 pages
  • $28.75
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