Quite Enough of Calvin Trillin: Forty Years of Funny Stuff

For at least forty years, Calvin Trillin has committed blatant acts of funniness all over the place — in The New Yorker, in one-man off-Broadway shows, in his “deadline poetry” for The Nation, in comic novels like Tepper Isn’t Going Out, in books chronicling his adventures as a happy eater, and in the column USA Today called “simply the funniest regular column in journalism.”

Now Trillin selects the best of his funny stuff and organizes it into topics like high finance (“My long-term investment strategy has been criticized as being entirely too dependent on Publishers Clearing House Sweepstakes”) and the literary life (“The average shelf life of a book is somewhere between milk and yogurt.”)

In Quite Enough of Calvin Trillin, the author deals with such subjects as the horrors of witnessing a voodoo economics ceremony and the mystery of how his mother managed for thirty years to feed her family nothing but leftovers (“We have a team of anthropologists in there now looking for the original meal”) and the true story behind the Shoe Bomber: “The one terrorist in England with a sense of humor, a man known as Khalid the Droll, had said to the cell, ‘I bet I can get them all to take off their shoes in airports.’ ” He remembers Sarah Palin with a poem called “On a Clear Day, I See Vladivostok” and John Edwards with one called “Yes, I Know He’s a Mill Worker’s Son, but There’s Hollywood in That Hair.”

In this, the definitive collection of his humor, Calvin Trillin is prescient, insightful, and invariably hilarious.

"Humorist Trillin (A Heckuva Job; Deciding the Next Decider) entertains with this collection of his song lyrics, comic verse, and more than 130 of the brief essays he originally wrote for the New Yorker, the New York Times, the Nation, and his syndicated King Features column. His acerbic wit is evident in 50 poems, such as 'Condoleezza Rice' ('So to serve her guy, she will testify to a lie she hopes you'll buy'), and his Barbra Streisand — styled song for Sarah Palin ('On a Clear Day, I See Vladivostok'). Jesting about everyday life, Trillin can get very close to the truth, as indicated by his 2006 shoe bomber comments in which he predicted the 2009 underwear bomber: 'If someone is arrested one of these days and is immediately, because of his MO, referred to in the press as the Underwear Bomber, you'll know I was onto something.' He divides the material into sections, such as food, sports, holidays, New York ('I live in Greenwich Village, where people from the suburbs come on weekends to test their car alarms'), technology ('Everyone knows that the only people in an American family who understand electronic devices are the children'), language and literature ('The average shelf life of a book is somewhere between milk and yogurt'). Trillin dances around a subject, examines it from different angles, and often finds fun in the commonplace throughout this huge and hilarious comedic compendium. (Sept. 13)" Publishers Weekly Copyright PWxyz, LLC. All rights reserved.

"A classic American humorist." The New Republic

"I spent my college years deep into the great humorists: Benchley, Perelman, Woody Allen. Calvin Trillin is up there with any of them." David Brooks, The Daily Beast

"Trillin may be the funniest columnist in America — bemused, amused, wry and right on the mark." People

A longtime staff writer at The New Yorker, Calvin Trillin is also The Nation’s deadline poet. His bestsellers range from the memoir About Alice to Obliviously On He Sails: The Bush Administration in Rhyme. He lives in Greenwich Village, which he describes as “a neighborhood where people from the suburbs come on weekends to test their car alarms.”