Backbiting

In yesterday’s Times Book Review, A.J. Jacobs was allowed a rare privilege—he wrote a review of his Times reviewer, the alleged humorist Joe Queenan, and it was better than the original review. Heck, it was better than Jacobs’ book.

You may recall that A.J. Jacobs was a front-of-book editor at Entertainment Weekly and then at Esquire. At one point during his illustrious rise through the magazine world, he proposed a very funny article—he would attempt to read the entire Encyclopedia Britannica in one year. That article then became a book, with the tongue-in-cheek title “The Know-It-All: One Man’s Humble Quest to Become the Smartest Person in the World.”

We’re green with envy that Jacobs was granted this sort of favor (we assume his claim to have received the meanest review in Times Book Review history carried some water with editors there; this guy has made a very handsome living indeed on hyperbole. Watch your back, Neil Pollack!). Especially after he admits that he’s had quite a ride on a PR shimmy-shimmy that included our humble little magazine. We were tempted to leave it at that, because there is nothing more pathetic than a writer complaining that his tea is not sweet enough.

But we went back and re-read Queenan’s review, and we’ll hold Jacobs’ coat on this one. The hemorrhoidal Queenan accused Jacobs of writing what he calls a misguided, juvenile, tired book just “to fullfill his book contract.” What a grump!

If there is one thing that is harder than writing humor, it is writing about or reviewing humor. It is an old adage of editing that a humorless piece about humor is less fun to read than the phone book. Couple that with an assignment you’re not crazy about (making fun of the weak, a wicked path indeed), Queenan is certainly projecting. He either can’t stand other humorists (yawn, how predictable is that?), or he was pissed at his editors at the Times for charging this book against his account, or he’s just an ungracious, unfunny jerk. Among humorists, the biggest cause of spleen-inflammation is a fat wallet, maturing irrelevance, and jealousy of youth.

As a young friend of mine once said, “We will bury you.” Depending on how long you intend to live, it is probably wise to cultivate sympathy for your pallbearers.