Excerpts from Tony Hendra’s ‘The Messiah of Morris Avenue’
Tony Hendra, author of the mammoth bestseller Father Joe, attended Cambridge University, where he performed with Monty Pythons-to-be John Cleese and Graham Chapman. He served as editor in chief of Spy magazine, was an original editor of National Lampoon, and also played Ian Faith in This is Spinal Tap. He has written for New York, Harper's, GQ, Vanity Fair, Men's Journal, and Esquire. His book, The Messiah of Morris Avenue, is a satire.
An Excerpt from The Republican Playbook by Andy Borowitz
In 1972, President Richard M. Nixon ordered a team of burglars to break into the Democratic National Committee headquarters in Washington, D.C., to steal the Democrats' plans for the upcoming election. While this burglary and the subsequent cover-up became known as the Watergate scandal, the real scandal, from the Republican point of view, was how few plans worth stealing the Democrats actually had. After ransacking party headquarters, the best that the Watergate burglars could come up with was a cocktail napkin with the words "Nominate a Liberal" scrawled on it. All in all, such a "secret plan" hardly justified all the time, effort, and money we put into breaking into the place.
101 History Facts
1. Heathens who insulted the Ark of the Covenant were doomed to be inflicted with a horrible case of hemorrhoids from God himself. The Bible is super specific on this: "He smote the men of the city, both small and great, and they had emerods in their secret parts." People actually died.
Reality: The Novel
The reality for Trent Tucker, the lead character in comedian Jeff Havens’ Reality: The Novel, is that he, like a good many of us, abhors reality television.
The reality for poor, idealistic, altruistic Trent, though, is that he works at Nova Consulting, a firm that creates reality shows with one goal in mind: make the raunchiest stuff possible that the FCC will allow.
Interestingly enough, the cast of characters that are employed at Nova include a dumb blonde, an angry black man, flamboyant homosexual, frosty bitch, fast-talking Sicilian and their megalomaniacal boss, PT Beauregard.
Everyone at Nova is out to get ahead, no matter what the cost. In other words, not the kind of crowd with whom you would want to find your self trapped on a deserted island – which is exactly how they find themselves – involved in a murder plot.
Backstabbing, plotting, lying and various and sundry nefarious bits of intrigue ensue in this incisive parody of modern pop culture and office politics that you must read from cover to cover – especially as the book gets progressively better as it goes along.
One Nation Under George
Reviewed by Marshall Dunn
Z.M. Wagner’s One Nation Under George
uses the “future-history” format in this satire
of the entire second term of President George W.
Bush right through to his emergence as vice president
under brother Jeb. Difficult as it may be to believe,
there are those who think that this scenario is
improperly categorized as satire and should instead
have been grouped with the likes of Stephen King.
Not that most satire writers have any problem with
the Bush political continuum. As a matter of fact,
we are banking on one to keep our creditors at bay.
Wagner outlines Bush’s historical conservative revolution
through 2008, and his creation of everything from
national IDs and swipe-card pornography to U.S.
shock troops consisting entirely of “convict
brigades.” Of course this results in an orgasmic
Utopia lodged in many a neo-cons fantasy, and
created in the span of just four years. Given
that it has taken the president five years to
string together a complete sentence on his
own, this would be a miraculous feat indeed.
Sadly, the plot rapidly becomes far-fetched. Besides,
as everyone knows, the convict brigades won’t emerge
until the summer of 2012. Furthermore, the soon-to-be
infamous ‘Two-Second War” of 2007 renders Wagner’s
suggestion of a protracted conflict with Iran as far
off-target as Bush’s “Mission Accomplished” banner.
Anyone who would enjoy reading about a preternaturally
efficient Bush and his Machiavellian take-over of U.S.
democracy, probably already believes this tripe anyway
and would be highly offended at the mere suggestion of
this being a work of fiction. But if what Mr. Wagner
writes actually comes true, be very, very quiet and
don’t drink the Kool-Aid.
