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This Is a Book
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Published:
Grand Central Publishing 2011
Status:
Available from OverDrive
Description
From the renowned comedian, creator, star and executive producer/multiple title-holder of Comedy Central's Important Things with Demetri Martin comes a bold, original, and rectangular kind of humor book.
Demetri's first literary foray features longer-form essays and conceptual pieces (such as Protagonists' Hospital, a melodrama about the clinic doctors who treat only the flesh wounds and minor head scratches of Hollywood action heroes), as well as his trademark charts, doodles, drawings, one-liners, and lists (i.e., the world views of optimists, pessimists and contortionists), Martin's material is varied, but his unique voice and brilliant mind will keep readers in stitches from beginning to end.
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Format:
Adobe EPUB eBook, Kindle Book, OverDrive Read
Street Date:
04/25/2011
Language:
English
ISBN:
9781609418779, 9781609418762
ASIN:
B0047Y17PM
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Citations
APA Citation (style guide)

Demetri Martin. (2011). This Is a Book. Grand Central Publishing.

Chicago / Turabian - Author Date Citation (style guide)

Demetri Martin. 2011. This Is a Book. Grand Central Publishing.

Chicago / Turabian - Humanities Citation (style guide)

Demetri Martin, This Is a Book. Grand Central Publishing, 2011.

MLA Citation (style guide)

Demetri Martin. This Is a Book. Grand Central Publishing, 2011.

Note! Citation formats are based on standards as of July 2022. Citations contain only title, author, edition, publisher, and year published. Citations should be used as a guideline and should be double checked for accuracy.
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Needs Update?:
No
Date Added:
Jun 12, 2018 18:26:04
Date Updated:
Jun 12, 2018 18:26:04
Last Metadata Check:
Mar 24, 2024 09:54:29
Last Metadata Change:
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Last Availability Change:
Jan 22, 2024 21:21:20
Last Grouped Work Modification Time:
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      • bioText: Demetri Martin rose to relative obscurity when he started doing stand-up comedy in New York City at the end of the 20th Century. Later he became a writer at Late Night with Conan O'Brien and then a regular performer on The Daily Show with Jon Stewart. In 2003, Demetri won the Perrier Award at the International Fringe Festival for his first one-man show, If I. He released a comedy album called These Are Jokes and then created and starred in his own television series called Important Things with Demetri Martin.
        His first stand-up comedy special, Demetri Martin. Person is considered by many to be his longest and only hour-long stand-up comedy special. Martin has appeared in movies as an actor, most recently in Steven Soderbergh's Contagion and most lengthily in Ang Lee's Taking Woodstock. His first book, This Is a Book by Demetri Martin is a New York Times Bestseller. Demetri has brown hair, and he is allergic to peanuts. You can find him at www.demetrimartin.com, at www.facebook.com/demetrimartin, on Twitter @demetrimartin, and in various places in the actual physical world.
      • name: Demetri Martin
subjects
      • value: Essays
      • value: Nonfiction
      • value: Humor (Nonfiction)
publishDate
2011-04-25T00:00:00-04:00
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shortDescription
From the renowned comedian, creator, star and executive producer/multiple title-holder of Comedy Central's Important Things with Demetri Martin comes a bold, original, and rectangular kind of humor book.
Demetri's first literary foray features longer-form essays and conceptual pieces (such as Protagonists' Hospital, a melodrama about the clinic doctors who treat only the flesh wounds and minor head scratches of Hollywood action heroes), as well as his trademark charts, doodles, drawings, one-liners, and lists (i.e., the world views of optimists, pessimists and contortionists), Martin's material is varied, but his unique voice and brilliant mind will keep readers in stitches from beginning to end.
isOwnedByCollections
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title
This Is a Book
fullDescription
From the renowned comedian, creator, star and executive producer/multiple title-holder of Comedy Central's Important Things with Demetri Martin comes a bold, original, and rectangular kind of humor book.
Demetri's first literary foray features longer-form essays and conceptual pieces (such as Protagonists' Hospital, a melodrama about the clinic doctors who treat only the flesh wounds and minor head scratches of Hollywood action heroes), as well as his trademark charts, doodles, drawings, one-liners, and lists (i.e., the world views of optimists, pessimists and contortionists), Martin's material is varied, but his unique voice and brilliant mind will keep readers in stitches from beginning to end.
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reviews
      • premium: True
      • source: Publisher's Weekly
      • content:

        February 14, 2011
        In this collection of essays, musings, and drawings, Comedy Central host Martin (Important Things with Demetri Martin) gently skewers contemporary social trends, conventions, and insecurities, taking on topics from social hotlines to family and relationships. With a gift for describing awkward situations, Martin challenges readers to recognize the human need for connection and recognition. The theme is seen in a panel in which a limousine displaying two flags on its hood is labeled "important"; another displaying seven flags is "very important." He also answers the big questions with essays like "Who I Am" in which he declares: "I am bravery. I am courage. I am valor. I am daring. I am holding a thesaurus." Throughout, Martin jokes in many guises, silly one moment, barbed the next, and he achieves a satirical brilliance that moves easily among surprising topics, like philosophy, to easy targets, like healthy lifestyles.

      • premium: True
      • source: Kirkus
      • content:

        February 1, 2011

        A grab-bag of one-liners, stories and cartoons from the hipster-favorite comic.

        In his stand-up performances, Martin presents himself as the cheerier cousin of comedians like Steven Wright and Mitch Hedberg, experts at simple, observational gags. His debut book is larded with plenty of that brand of Twitter-ready humor—e.g., "You never forget your first kiss. And that's what makes it so hard to forgive my uncle"; "Tell me again how a silver lining helps me?"; "100% of people who give 110% do not understand math." But Martin shines in the longer comic pieces. "Dad" is narrated by the grumpy child of a man who was raised by wolves. In a deleted scene from A Christmas Carol, Scrooge is visited by the Ghost of Christmas Future Perfect, leading to an entertaining riff on grammatical tenses. "Socrates's Publicist" imagines the deadly consequences of the Greek philosopher acquiring a chirpy PR rep eager to brand him and bring his "question thing" to a wider audience. The best, and longest, piece, which imagines a relationship in the afterlife, is so rich with ironic twists it would be at home in one of Woody Allen's classic books. Martin occasionally tries too hard—one piece makes too much of the phrase "green with envy" —but mostly he displays an enthusiasm for finding literate jokes wherever he can find them, from describing a person's schedule entirely in abbreviations to providing clues for a crossword puzzle in which the grid entirely filled with the letter A. Less successful are the dozens of simple doodles that stuff the book. When they're presented onstage by his deliberately stiff, AV-club–alumnus persona, the cartoons can be endearing. On the page, however, they mostly read like rejected Far Side panels.

        Not every joke works, but Martin has energy to burn when it comes to mining linguistic absurdities for laughs.

        (COPYRIGHT (2011) KIRKUS REVIEWS/NIELSEN BUSINESS MEDIA, INC. ALL RIGHTS RESERVED.)

      • premium: True
      • source: Booklist
      • content:

        March 15, 2011
        Comedian, former Daily Show correspondent, and all-around prodigious talent Martin brings his wryly captivating voice to the page. Featuring dozens of sketches, lists, essays, stories, conceits, statistics, dialogues, monologues, and even a crossword puzzle, this collection dazzles with Martins characteristic unpredictability and charm. Readers will be delighted by his test to find out if they are a robot, suggestions for updating various real and imaginary flags, a breakdown of the phrase better than sex, honors and awards only the author would qualify for, and, of course, his customary list of impressive and hilarious palindromes. While not all the pieces succeed in originality and humor, Martin always remains surprising, sharp, entertaining, and enthralling. The funniest moments are found in his sketches, charts, and diagrams, which include a drawing of a bucktoothed vampire and a time line that notes the medieval and Renaissance periods on one end and When I Had a Mustache on the other. Martin may not convert any new followers with his literary debut, but fans are sure to enjoy the smart and amusing comedy theyve come to expect.(Reprinted with permission of Booklist, copyright 2011, American Library Association.)

      • premium: True
      • source: Kirkus
      • content:

        February 1, 2011

        A grab-bag of one-liners, stories and cartoons from the hipster-favorite comic.

        In his stand-up performances, Martin presents himself as the cheerier cousin of comedians like Steven Wright and Mitch Hedberg, experts at simple, observational gags. His debut book is larded with plenty of that brand of Twitter-ready humor--e.g., "You never forget your first kiss. And that's what makes it so hard to forgive my uncle"; "Tell me again how a silver lining helps me?"; "100% of people who give 110% do not understand math." But Martin shines in the longer comic pieces. "Dad" is narrated by the grumpy child of a man who was raised by wolves. In a deleted scene from A Christmas Carol, Scrooge is visited by the Ghost of Christmas Future Perfect, leading to an entertaining riff on grammatical tenses. "Socrates's Publicist" imagines the deadly consequences of the Greek philosopher acquiring a chirpy PR rep eager to brand him and bring his "question thing" to a wider audience. The best, and longest, piece, which imagines a relationship in the afterlife, is so rich with ironic twists it would be at home in one of Woody Allen's classic books. Martin occasionally tries too hard--one piece makes too much of the phrase "green with envy" --but mostly he displays an enthusiasm for finding literate jokes wherever he can find them, from describing a person's schedule entirely in abbreviations to providing clues for a crossword puzzle in which the grid entirely filled with the letter A. Less successful are the dozens of simple doodles that stuff the book. When they're presented onstage by his deliberately stiff, AV-club-alumnus persona, the cartoons can be endearing. On the page, however, they mostly read like rejected Far Side panels.

        Not every joke works, but Martin has energy to burn when it comes to mining linguistic absurdities for laughs.

        (COPYRIGHT (2011) KIRKUS REVIEWS/NIELSEN BUSINESS MEDIA, INC. ALL RIGHTS RESERVED.)

popularity
28
publisher
Grand Central Publishing
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bisacCodes
      • code: HUM000000
      • description: Humor / General
      • code: HUM003000
      • description: Humor / Form / Essays
      • code: HUM004000
      • description: Humor / Form / Jokes & Riddles