‘The year 2002 was like a fairy tale -- the middle of a fairy tale, when despair grows exponentially with each turn of the page […] Bush’s State of the Union address included his infamous designation of Iraq, Iran and North Korea as an “axis of evil.” Iran and Iraq are blood enemies, and North Korea is far removed from both nations, being located just slightly north of South Korea. The war on this particular axis proved to be a success. There wasn’t a single summit between the leaders of the three nations throughout the rest of the year.’ [page 16-17]

Given the current controversy surrounding the euphoric critical consensus about Alexander Payne’s wonderful film Sideways -- many contend that the picture has been unanimously praised by critics not because of its innate value, but rather because its focus on the life of a tragic, unrealized middle-aged male writer who goes to bed with a beautiful woman appeals specifically to the demographic of unrealized middle-aged male writers who review films, and want to go to bed with beautiful women -- I feel as though I ought to explain why Barry Crimmins’s new book, Never Shake Hands with a War Criminal, might appeal specifically only to me.

As an anti-war, left-wing humorist and sometimes stand-up comic who has lost a loved one to cancer, I may very well be uniquely positioned to appreciate the memoirs of Crimmins, an anti-war, left-wing humorist, a pioneer of Boston’s stand-up comedy scene, who takes a chapter to describe his loss of a loved one to cancer. My guess is that the few of us who know from experience how it feels to stand on a picket line and on stage performing for restaurant patrons who may or may not have known there was a comedy show that night and sat bedside in the hospital as a series of “cures” demonstrated a powerfully destructive force on par only with the ailment that they’re supposed to fight -- we’ll understand more of what Crimmins is talking about, while the rest of you will still get a kick out of his very funny, very touching book.

Never Shake Hands with a War Criminal is a sometimes-unsuccessful and uneven, nevertheless enjoyable and engrossing mix of quasi-linear memoirs, straight humour and pages of one-liners and pot-shots (“The Drug War -- where Jim Crow meets Joe McCarthy” [page 50], “Do you get the feeling that were CNN’s Paula Zahn born fifty years earlier, she’d have done voiceover work for Leni Riefenstahl?” [page 139], and on Dennis Miller: “To sell out that much and still end up on CNBC is just pitiful” [page 46]).

Crimmins’s humour, the book’s strongest hand, is biting, insightful, and sharply funny. Unlike many comedians -- who broaden their comedic options by cynically equating the powerful and powerless, holding each up for ridicule -- Crimmins is unequivocal, giving his satire a weighty sincerity. “I love taking on big targets,” he says on page 29. “In my work as a stand-up comic, I’ve always hated listening to comedians whose stock-in-trade is belittling the weak and defenceless.” He continues:

“I’ve always done a lot of what is called preaching to the choir. I don’t apologize for this since the choir in America really needs a night out every now and then. The choir is made up of the best people in the world, the kind of people who will hold a sign that says “No War,” even when every TV newscast is nothing short of a pep rally for carnage [… The choir’s] ranks include courageous and weary sweethearts who will leave my performance reenergized if I do my job well. Much the same as you never hear a misogynist comic called political, you rarely hear all the inveighing that reinforces American mainstream wrong-headedness as preaching to the choir. Well, their choir is a lot bigger than mine…” [page 29]

The titular reference is to Crimmins’s chance encounter with Henry Kissinger, an anecdote shared in a chapter of the same name. Kissinger -- along with the Bushes, Dick Cheney, Newt Gingrich and Dennis Miller -- is held up for particular revulsion and ridicule. Crimmins’s surgical cruelty when dealing with this rogue’s gallery seems inversely proportional to the tenderness with which he describes his friends and fellow comedians in very love-filled and touching writing, that tends unfortunately to be less engaging than the rest of the work.

But in all, Never Shake Hands with a War Criminal is a welcome addition both to the flighty, apolitical world of humour writing as well as to the often leaden, all-too-serious and alienating world of leftist polemics.

For another review of a left-wing humourist from the United States, see last week’s review of Lewis Black’s Vancouver performance.

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