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Spoiled Rotten America
Outrages of Everyday Life |
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I worked in my school dining hall, and it's the best job I ever had. It provided me all the money a soft-spoiled, sexually ignorant, middle-class dink needed for liquor and cigarettes. And it taught me two great lessons. One day, I was told to dish out a giant tub of yogurt into small bowls. So I rooted around and found one of those yard-long metal spoons. Guess what? Bad idea. The top was too wide, so you had to swipe delicately, taking several passes at each bowl. In other words, my solution was awkward, sloppy, and slow. But I plodded on. I found that spoon, and I was sticking with it. That's when May came over. May was a full-timer, and she didn't like me very much. But when she saw me struggling, she said, "Hey, that's not the way you do it." She grabbed a coffee cup, dipped it in the yogurt, and poured it flawlessly into a bowl. It took three seconds. "Come on, May, what's the difference?" I snorted. As soon as she left, I started doing it her way. The first lesson was obvious: Don't get stuck in a bad idea. But the other lesson took me thirty years of guilt to learn: It's easy to be rude. I've never forgotten that. Larry Miller is one of the most enduring and irresistible comic personalities at work today. Hundreds of stand-up appearances on The Tonight Show with Jay Leno, The Late Show with David Letterman, and other TV shows and unforgettable roles in films as diverse as Pretty Woman and Best in Show have made Miller's acerbic wit and character (he calls himself a founding member of the "Cranky Nit-Pickers of America") a staple of the American comic diet. And in recent years he has gained a new, more political following, writing a humor column in The Weekly Standard and makingfrequent appearances with TV hosts such as Bill Maher and Dennis Miller. Now, in Spoiled Rotten America, he fixes his gaze on the outrages of contemporary life--from "pop stars thinking deeply and sharing their thoughts" to "pillow-soft Americans who stop by the Pizza Hut before collapsing into Wide-O-Lounger just in time to watch 22 pimple-faced steroid-eaters slam into each other at 14 miles an hour." Mixing the political with the personal as deftly as P.J. O'Rourke or George Carlin, Larry Miller is today's new voice of outrage for the little guy--for "anyone who walks into the backyard at night, lifts a proud chin, and screams, 'I am not wrong!' before going back inside to resume getting quietly hammered while his wife sits in the next room watching figure skating."
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