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Genre - Humor
Rating - PG13
More details about the book
In no time, the candles were gone and I had a big wad of
cash. Just before I got into my car to drive back home, a lady came over and
thanked me for making such great joke candles. Joke candles? My masterpieces
were NOT joke candles. They were art to brighten the lives of women everywhere!
Then again, they did sell. And the police or hospital weren’t involved this
time. I think this was my most successful venture to date.
Page 99 of The Life and Times of Car
Johnson is the very end of a chapter detailing the results of Car’s attempt to
create fancy scented candles for women. He finds himself incensed that people
were only buying his candles because they thought they were joke candles, but
eventually decides that it’s okay, since without visits from the police or a
trip to the hospital, it was actually more successful than any of his other
business ventures. It’s only one paragraph, so it doesn’t have the impact of
the previous pages. All the steps of figuring out what to put in the candles
and the ridiculous conclusions Car comes up with have already passed And page
99’s paragraph is just after the mention of the catastrophic explosion of the
candles, so there is a lack of the over the top oomph factor that describes the
book.
But page 99 does showcase what’s under the
silly parts of the story, the overall basic humor template that makes it more
than just a story about a crude and pathetic man who matures on the pages to
simply pathetic. Car plays straight man to his own shenanigans, always acting
as if he is completely normal and the world just doesn’t understand his
maligned genius, but settles for humiliation because it’s better than what he
normally receives.
Page 99 shows that there is more to the
story than just random silliness and rude thoughts. It shows that I actually
attempted to create it with an underlying comedic structure and create a
humorous book that is not just a bunch of random statements that sit on the
page simply to be called humor. The story has stakes, even if they are not
serious to the reader, are serious to Car and made serious through his eyes.
This is not to say the story is serious
literature or secret commentary on the state of the world, only that it was
written taking the humor seriously, even though the premise of the page is
about a man getting upset over people assuming his two foot tall candles with
gun powder scent were jokes when they exploded. The structure behind The Life
and Times of Car Johnson is there to give a backbone to make the laughs even
funnier. That said, structure is best left combined with actual humor, so I
would probably not read further if I only read page 99. A punch line with no
build up is like a cold glass without any beer.
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