Hannah
Kochuk May
15, 2012
Squirrel
Seeks Chipmunk
1.
What type of comedy is your book?
(use specific examples to prove your answer)
2.
Would you recommend it? (use specific
examples)
Squirrel Seeks Chipmunk by David
Sedaris is combination of low comedy and a comedy of ideas. This book is a
series of short stories all of which have a different comedy type. One of the
stories, The Grieving Owl, is an
example of low comedy. In this short story an owl, who recently lost his wife,
travels around the country and talks to his prey before he kills them, if they
teach him something interesting he lets them go. The low comedy in the story
comes when the owl is talking to a hippo. The hippo told the owl that she has
leeches living in her rear end. But David Sedaris didn’t stop there, the hippo
asked the owl if he could go listen to the leeches to see what they were
saying, when he went to listen, he hear that they were singing. This is an
example of low comedy because firstly, it is a gross joke, which would never
happen in real life, and secondly, because of the language he uses to explain
the leeches, he says “the two hit it of immediately, and within minutes the
gerbil was vis a vis the anal parasites.” This book is also a comedy of ideas because,
the whole book mocks today’s society. David Sedaris uses the animal kingdom to portray
events that happen in everyday life. The thing that makes it funny is that
animals would never act this way.
I would recommend this book, I found
most of the short stories hilarious, but some of them were very
inappropriate. David Sedaris uses vulgar
language that some people would find offensive, but others find hilarious. In
the short story “The Toad, The Turtle,
and The Duck,” the three animals are waiting at the DMV, they are speaking
about what they would do to torture the man at the desk who kept turning them
away. They used rude racial slurs, and I did not find this story funny at all.
To tell the truth I thought it was very arrogant and uncouth. I don’t think
that all people would find this funny. I would recommend this book to Katie because
I think that she enjoys this type of comedy, but I would definitely not recommend
this to any person younger than me. Some of the jokes went right over my head,
therefor anyone younger than me probably wouldn’t get the book at all.
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