Demetri Martin rose to relative obscurity when he started doing stand-up comedy in New York City at the end of the 20th Century. Later he became a writer at Late Night with Conan O'Brien and then a regular performer on The Daily Show with Jon Stewart. In 2003, Demetri won the Perrier Award at the International Fringe Festival for his first one-man show, If I. He released a comedy album called These Are Jokes and then created and starred in his own television series called Important Things with Demetri Martin. His first stand-up comedy special, Demetri Martin. Person is considered by many to be his longest and only hour-long stand-up comedy special. Martin has appeared in movies as an actor, most recently in Steven Soderbergh's Contagion and most lengthily in Ang Lee's Taking Woodstock. His first book, This Is a Book by Demetri Martin is a New York Times Bestseller. Demetri has brown hair, and he is allergic to peanuts. You can find him at www.demetrimartin.com, at www.facebook.com/demetrimartin, on Twitter @demetrimartin, and in various places in the actual physical world.
This Is a Book
Paperback
$16.00
- ISBN-13: 9780446539692
- Publisher: Grand Central Publishing
- Publication date: 04/10/2012
- Pages: 288
- Sales rank: 163,275
- Product dimensions: 5.40(w) x 8.20(h) x 0.80(d)
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From the renowned comedian, creator and star of Comedy Central's Important Things with Demetri Martin comes the paperback debut of his bold, original, New York Times best-selling humor book.
THIS IS A BOOK was an instant and long-lasting New York Times best seller, and is the renowned comedian's hilarious foray into prose comedy. In these pages, Martin expands on the sensibility he's developed on stage as an award-winning stand-up comedian and on television as a writer-performer on Late Night with Conan O'Brien, The Daily Show with Jon Stewart, and his own Comedy Central series, Important Things with Demetri Martin.
Featuring narrative essays, short stories, and conceptual pieces (such as "Protagonists' Hospital," where doctors treat only the shoulder wounds of Hollywood action heroes) as well as Martin's signature drawings, absurdities, and one-liners, THIS IS A BOOK delivers sharp jokes, colorful characters, and interesting surprises.
Martin takes readers to places as far-off as Ancient Greece ("Socrates's Publicist") and the distant future ("Robot Test," where everyone must take a test to prove that they are not robots). He recounts a lonely man's visit to a strip club in the form of a five-hundred-word palindrome ("Palindromes for Specific Occasions"). And he examines the human condition ("Human Cannonball Occupational Hazards") and the competing world-views of divergent groups ("Optimist, Pessimist, Contortionist").
Martin's material is varied, but his unique voice and brilliant mind will keep readers in stitches from beginning to end.
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From the Publisher
"This book embodies the essence of Demetri's comedy to perfection, which is a good thing since he wrote it. Silly but incredibly smart, it's exactly what puts me in awe of his work."-Will Ferrell
"When I first saw Important Things With Demetri Martin, I said to myself, "this is the funniest thing ever." I was wrong. This Is A Book is better." -Malcolm Gladwell, author of Outliers: The Story of Success
"This book is so funny I forgot to laugh. I know that sounds like a childish criticism, but I mean it literally: This book is so funny, I forgot a whole bunch of things—who I am, what I stand for, large chunks of my childhood, my sense of equilibrium, how to fall asleep, and when I'm supposed to laugh at things."-Chuck Klosterman
"Demetri Martin has a very funny and original mind. If I could draw a graph explaining how funny and original he is, I would. But I don't do that. Demetri does that."-Conan O'Brien
"Throughout, Martin jokes in many guises, silly one moment, barbed the next, and he achieves a satirical brilliance." -Publishers Weekly
"The best [material] would be at home in one of Woody Allen's classic books...Martin has energy to burn." -Kirkus
Michael Cavna
If you like random, short-attention-span riffs built on pithy comic premises, Martin's your man. If you delight in writing that deconstructs comedy even while constructing it, his self-aware style will appeal. And if you relish literary humor, This Is a Book is a book for you…Martin's absurdist wit has become distinctly his own, bearing fresh fruit even as the taproot stretches back decades.—The Washington Post
"He is a palindromist, an anagrammatist, an amateur inventor, and, most visibly these days, an ascendant comedian." This New Yorker accolade was written before Demetri Martin added "author" to his numerous list of accomplishments. In This Is a Book, the star of Comedy Central's "Important Things with Demetri Martin" comes center stage with a collection of skits, one-liners, doodles, charts, lists, asides, and all manner of other outlandish frolics. Of this book, Will Ferrell exalted, "Silly, but incredibly smart. It's exactly what puts me in awe of his work." Now in trade paperback and NOOK Book.
— Jules Herbert
Publishers Weekly
In this collection of essays, musings, and drawings, Comedy Central host Martin (Important Things with Demetri Martin) gently skewers contemporary social trends, conventions, and insecurities, taking on topics from social hotlines to family and relationships. With a gift for describing awkward situations, Martin challenges readers to recognize the human need for connection and recognition. The theme is seen in a panel in which a limousine displaying two flags on its hood is labeled "important"; another displaying seven flags is "very important." He also answers the big questions with essays like "Who I Am" in which he declares: "I am bravery. I am courage. I am valor. I am daring. I am holding a thesaurus." Throughout, Martin jokes in many guises, silly one moment, barbed the next, and he achieves a satirical brilliance that moves easily among surprising topics, like philosophy, to easy targets, like healthy lifestyles. (Apr.)Kirkus Reviews
A grab-bag of one-liners, stories and cartoons from the hipster-favorite comic.
In his stand-up performances, Martin presents himself as the cheerier cousin of comedians like Steven Wright and Mitch Hedberg, experts at simple, observational gags. His debut book is larded with plenty of that brand of Twitter-ready humor—e.g., "You never forget your first kiss. And that's what makes it so hard to forgive my uncle"; "Tell me again how a silver lining helps me?"; "100% of people who give 110% do not understand math." But Martin shines in the longer comic pieces. "Dad" is narrated by the grumpy child of a man who was raised by wolves. In a deleted scene fromA Christmas Carol, Scrooge is visited by the Ghost of Christmas Future Perfect, leading to an entertaining riff on grammatical tenses. "Socrates's Publicist" imagines the deadly consequences of the Greek philosopher acquiring a chirpy PR rep eager to brand him and bring his "question thing" to a wider audience. The best, and longest, piece, which imagines a relationship in the afterlife, is so rich with ironic twists it would be at home in one of Woody Allen's classic books. Martin occasionally tries too hard—one piece makes too much of the phrase "green with envy" —but mostly he displays an enthusiasm for finding literate jokes wherever he can find them, from describing a person's schedule entirely in abbreviations to providing clues for a crossword puzzle in which the grid entirely filled with the letter A. Less successful are the dozens of simple doodles that stuff the book. When they're presented onstage by his deliberately stiff, AV-club–alumnus persona, the cartoons can be endearing. On the page, however, they mostly read like rejected Far Sidepanels.
Not every joke works, but Martin has energy to burn when it comes to mining linguistic absurdities for laughs.