The Snark Handbook: A Reference Guide to Verbal Sparring by Lawrence Dorfman

 

I think I'm funny-- but people who think they're funny are a lot like mediocre white dudes: they tend to grossly overestimate the effect of their own appeal. So obviously, as one who aspires to snarkdom, when one of my friends (who does NOT follow me on Goodreads btw, and therefore won't see what an asshole I'm about to be LOL) offered me this book (along with a couple other humor books/bathroom books), I was like YES. GOALS.

Sadly, this book was not goals. If goals were, well, a goal (I literally just Googled "what do you call the soccer basket"), and you were using a soccer stadium as an allegory for where this book fits into said goals, than this book would be the hot dog vendor selling mystery meat a la day-old bread to people in the nosebleeds. (Do they sell hot dogs at soccer games? I just Googled and it seems like they do in Europe, so I guess only Europeans will Get the Joke.)

This isn't a tongue-in-cheek handbook or even a guide. It's literally just a collection of quotes that you could easily see for free by logging into Facebook and looking at the memes your aunt likes to repost from that one local radio station she follows. Some of the quotes are funny, but calling this a "handbook" is incredibly misleading unless your definition of a handbook is "a book that fits in your hand." And then... yes.

If I had paid money for this, I'd be sending it back.

1 out of 5 stars