White Trash Etiquette

2 out of 5

By Kyle Massey on Jun 25, 2011

This would be a good book to read in the bathroom--i.e., in small doses. It's what I like to call a "blog book," in that you could easily picture its contents coming from somebody's blog that he thinks is really funny, and all his friends are just bowled over by his humor and tell him he should make a book out of it. I don't know if that's actually the case with this book, but you know the type--one rung below than comedian books. This is an AMATEUR comedian book. But for what it is, it's often funny. "Dr. Verne" does the whole Larry The Cable Guy thing, with a bit of an upper-midwest twist. The flavor is a little different from your typical "you might be a redneck if ..." stuff, and Verne even touches (briefly) on the difference between white-trash and rednecks. But too often, the line is blurred, and often, it would seem that all you have to do to be white-trash is watch a lot of sports and have a blue-collar job involving power tools. That sort of thing is mixed in with more over-the-top gags, including about a million robbery jokes. Edstrom directs a lot of contempt toward yuppies (don't we all?), but despite (or because of) his obviously fabricated biography, you get the feeling Dr. Verne might actually BE a yuppie, albeit one possessed of a crippling self-loathing. The humor gets old as the book wears on, and a lot of his jokes are outdated, even in 2006 when it was published (an Ernie Irvan reference?!) I laughed a lot during the first half of the book, laughed less during the second half, and was glad when I got to the end. The whole thing just started to take on the hollow ring of somebody playing a character and flogging his own jokes to death. He's the guy at the party who's hilarious for a few minutes, but if you had to spend a few hours with him, you'd want to strangle him just to shut him up. Bonus drinking game: Drink every time he name-checks a pro sports team (I think he managed to work in just about every one in existence). I'd give it two and a half stars if that were possible, just because you know going in this is basically a joke book, but as it is, I have to round down to two.