Jackie Mason and Raoul Felder have created a wonderfully irreverent, and sarcastic look at the people, places, and things that they hate most. Not even the most outragous publicityseeker would want to find their name mentioned within the pages of Schmucks!: Our Favorite Fakes, Frauds, Lowlifes, Liars, the Armed and Dangerous, and Good Guys Gone Bad.
Written in a wonderfully humorous Jewish style, they explore the schmucks, putzs, schnooks, and schemeils of the world. And according to the authors there are plenty of them around. Being ‘fair-minded’ (although I suspect that the average reader might be able to spot their political leanings), they pick on schmucks both living and dead, and from many different backgrounds and beliefs.
This book is what I call perfect bathroom literature - it is very funny, and the stories pertaining to each schmuck tends to be only a couple of pages of reading. This is ideal for those idle moments while sat pondering the ways of the world.
It is hard to pick out specific schmucks to spotlight, because Jackie Mason and Raoul Felder do such an admirable job on each of their victims. But some of my favorites definitely include the Clinton family. Bill, they claim, is such a big liar, and proof of this allegation comes in the fact that he had his Arkansas law license suspended over the Paula Jones case. As they put it “In other words, he was too big a liar even to be a lawyer”. Hillary fares little better, the sub-heading for her chapter reading ‘Blowing harder than Monica Lewinsky’, and it goes downhill from there.
The entire country of France also receives a scathing entry. French food is summed up as: being big plates, and really small portions, so small that you often have to move the string bean out of the way to find the steak. They do, however, have some good things to say by way of balance. “About the nicest things we can say about France now is that they gave us Impressionism, the Statue of Liberty, and the freestanding street pissoire where you can take a private leak in public”.
Article comments
1 - Natalie Bennett
This article has been selected for syndication to Advance.net, which is affiliated with newspapers around the United States. Nice work!