One Nation, Extra Cheese: Your Guide to the Bestest Country Ever

In this thin book of jokes about the American way of life-its food, people, leisure activities, etc.-the writers of Modern Humorist (John Aboud, Patrick Broderick, Michael Colton, Martha Keavney and others) use the conventions of a travel guidebook to say something about the strangeness and contradiction that is America. Unfortunately, they don't have much to report. Using pie charts, info-graphics, and bullet-points to underscore their gags, they tell us that America is violent, New York is full of Jews and Southern California is polluted. While a satirical publication such as the Onion uses a staid format to deliver jokes slyly, even subversively, the writers of Modern Humorist use the travel brochure template to place air quotes around their own material, effectively distancing themselves with a tone of faux-naivete. At its best, the humor of Modern Humorist exhibits a clever resilience; at its worst it feels patronizing.