Dick’s Joke by Clint Mannschaft
Publisher: Self-Published
Genre: Contemporary, Fiction
Rating: 3 Stars
Reviewed by AstilbePain. Hate. Fear. Death. Stand-Up Comedy. A Novella.
The dark underbelly of stand-up comedy is something worth examining in greater detail.
To be perfectly honest, I didn’t find most of the characters in this tale to be likeable people, but that didn’t stop me from wanting to figure them out. Some of them were sexist, while others were so absorbed in their own quirky hobbies that it was tricky for them to see the world from other perspectives or consider the feelings of those around them. My opinions of them often shifted in a positive direction as I got to know them better, though. How someone acknowledges, or sometimes chooses to remain willfully obtuse about, their flaws can say so much about them as an individual. Characters don’t have to be morally upstanding citizens in order to teach readers about the world by any means, and I felt I learned a lot from these characters even if I often disagreed with their behavior.
There were pacing issues that interfered with my interest levels. Some scenes moved much more quickly than other ones did. When combined with the large differences between how many pages different scenes lasted, I never knew what to expect next. The middle portions, particularly the monologue, seemed to slow down which made it harder for me to want to keep reading.
I appreciated how much effort Mr. Mannschaft put into experimenting with how a story should be told. There is definitely something to be said with playing around with a genre and seeing which tropes from it are actually necessary to keep readers’ attention versus which one can be safely sidestepped. This was creative.
Dick’s Joke pushed the boundaries of storytelling and came up with some interesting conclusions.
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