Wigfield Review
This book is great. I found it to be hilarious! You can see the personalities of the authors in the writing. I have always liked Sedaris, Dinello, and Colbert. I am a big fan of Exit 57, Strangers With Candy, The Colbert Report, and other various movies and things that they have been in.
Wigfield Overview
Wigfield is a small bucolic hideaway, situated in front of a massive dam which is about to be torn down by the state government to restore the salmon run. Wigfield's only hope lies in the self-righteous, self-involved "journalist" Russell Hokes, who arrives hoping to capture the quiet dignity of the disappearing American Small Town. However, Wigfield is nether quiet nor dignified. As the date of destruction draws nearer, Hokes casts about desperate to find something about Wigfield worth documenting. WIGFIELD is a razor-sharp satire by three major talents.
Wigfield Specifications
Wigfield is in peril. The Bulkwaller Dam, which towers over the tiny town, is scheduled to be destroyed which would in turn wipe out Wigfield. Journalist Russell Hokes travels there to profile the brave and honest citizens who are struggling to save their community. Well, sort of. Actually, Wigfield is not so much a town as a series of ramshackle strip clubs and used-auto-parts stores, lacking any kind of civic infrastructure whatsoever. And its people are not so much "brave and honest" as "brutal," "homicidal," and "lacking any redeeming virtue whatsoever." Similarly, to call Hokes, who narrates his own struggles to gather accumulate 50,000 words, a "journalist" is at best an exaggeration and at worst an abomination against the institution of journalism itself.
The world of Wigfield, as concocted by the brilliant Stephen Colbert, Paul Dinello, and Amy Sedaris (creators of the Comedy Central series Strangers with Candy), is somewhat reminiscent of the slice-of-life small-town humor of Christopher Guest's Waiting for Guffman. But instead of putting on a musical, as the Guffman folks did, the people of Wigfield busy themselves trying to acquire government handouts and stabbing each other to death. When the government rebuffs their efforts, based on the fact that they're not technically a town, they come up with a plan to get paid anyway. Wigfield's residents (as played by Colbert, Dinello, and Sedaris) are portrayed in a series of compellingly grotesque portraits by renowned designer and photographer Todd Oldham. The humor of the book--much like the town's mentality--is dense, as nearly every sentence contains one or several grimly hilarious references. Fans of feel-good whimsy are advised to navigate toward lighter fare but social pariahs, disgraced journalists, brooding malcontented sociopaths, and anyone who enjoys dark, twisted, and profoundly funny writing will find a home in Wigfield. --John Moe
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Customer Reviews
Hilarity - K. Verma -
I loved it...so funny. Classic Strangers With Candy type humor/greatness.
I thumb through it every now and then and laugh it up.
Not as Funny as it Should Be - JustinWrites - Los Angeles
The first ten to fifteen pages of this humor novel -- about a fictional "town" nestled at the base of a dam that's about to be destroyed and will bring about the flooding of its denizens -- gave me some of the biggest laughs I've had in quite some time. The three humorists, who met at Second City in Chicago and are responsible for creating "Strangers With Candy," teamed up to create Russell Hokes, a non-writer who gets a contract with Hyperion Books to write a non-fiction tale of a small town on the brink of extinction. The book is composed of Hokes trying desperately to fill the 50,000 words that his contract requires, allowing lots of twisted metaphors, wacky similes and just badly constructed sentences that are pretty amusing. There are also a ton of first-person accounts of life in Wigfield, from the 3 competing mayors, to the local str1ppers, to the oldest women in Wigfield (in their mid-late forties) and all the townspeople in between.
While it starts strong and has a few really hilarious passages, overall I thought it ran out of steam and was just too slight a premise to sustain for 200 pages. Much better than the Steve Martin book, "The Pleasure of My Company," which takes an idea that could sustain a tight 20-30 pages nicely, but becomes just unbearable at 200 pages.
Wigfield revisited - heidi sullivan - boone, nc
Hilarious book, I have purchased 5 copies just so I can give them to friends.
*** Product Information and Prices Stored: Aug 23, 2010 04:28:04
