Failure Is an Option

March 26, 2018
In this rambling collection of random anecdotes, comedian Benjamin (the voice of characters in the Archer and Bob’s Burgers TV series) tells of his life failures. Stringing together short chapters better suited for standup routines, Benjamin provides fodder for the cliché that learning from failure provides a way forward in life. He can be a hilarious storyteller who fires off witty one-liners (looking back on playing catch with his neighbors, he concludes that “the curveball is the oral sex of baseball. It’s delicate and precarious”), but even those grow tiresome after a while. In a chapter titled “The Early Failure Years,” he attributes his occasional dizziness and his incredible laziness to his mother’s being given nitrous oxide during his birth; later, he lists his various business failures, including an idea for a restaurant called “Leftovers,”which would cut down on food waste and provide cheap meals by serving leftovers. In one of his funnier observations (from a chapter subtitled “How I Failed Hosting a Bar Mitzvah”), Benjamin points to the adolescent character of the present U.S. president: “Teens are a grisly combination of suppressed rage, sexual confusion, vanity, and unrelenting incompetence... just imagine Donald Trump but more agile.” On stage, these anecdotes might work well, but on the page they are cloying and tedious.

April 1, 2018
Voice actor and stand-up comedian Benjamin structures a free-wheeling memoir of his rather uneventful life around the many failures he has experienced.The author, who voices the title characters of Archer and Bob's Burgers, grew up in a middle-class Jewish family in Worcester, Massachusetts, where he watched a lot of TV and recorded interviews with himself. He bounces lightly through his childhood in chapters such as "The Sleepover (and How I Failed to Have One)" (cold tent) and "The Teen Years (How I Failed Hosting a Bar Mitzvah Party)" (the DJ played AM oldies). Then he moves on to stories about failing to move to France, get a graduate degree in Holocaust studies, sell a TV pilot, and ride a motorcycle. Every time Benjamin starts to get into potentially heavy emotional territory, he leaps out and moves onward with a joke. The most effective chapters of the book are those that give a sense of the author's trials and tribulations as he recognizes his shortcomings and goes on with a shrug. These chapters are interspersed with brief intermissions, most of which are padding. Benjamin also initiates long--and increasingly annoying--interchanges of letters with scholars, asking them to explain how failure expressed itself in history, to which they respond with polite confusion. He inserts a sophomoric collection of line drawings of failed sexual positions and a more successful set of failed pickup lines: "Do you work out, or are you just naturally tense?"; "Has anyone ever told you you look like my mother?" Benjamin's descriptions of self-humiliation can get uncomfortable for readers, as in the case of a protracted chapter involving diarrhea, a rental car, and a hotel.More a collection of gags than a thoughtful examination of a life, the book is best experienced in bits and pieces in order to avoid the impression of being trapped in an elevator for hours with a stand-up comic.

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