America: The Book by Jon Stewart

The book was generally witty and made me laugh out loud an average of twice a chapter, but any enjoyment I might have gotten from the book was negated by two unpleasant attitudes the kept cropping up:

1. The writers seem to believe that having sex with someone is some kind of ultimate way to insult or degrade them, and they were using this metaphorically throughout the book. While I think this strange attitude would be excellent fodder for psychology research, it's just bizarre and vaguely unpleasant in a comedy book.

2. The writers (all male) had a strange attitude towards women. I don't want to use the word misogyny because that's a bit strong - it's more that it appears to never have occurred to them that someone reading this book might a) be female and b) be a human being with thoughts and feelings. In some parts it felt like they were deliberately trying to be as unpleasant as possible for the express purpose of making me stop reading the book, like you sometimes hear that workers in mostly-male workplaces do to push out female co-workers (something I've heard of but never experienced).

Now these two attitudes weren't 100% pervasive, it's just that they kept popping up here and there, frequently enough to make reading the book a not entirely fun experience. I don't quite understand why they did this. I watch The Daily Show somewhat regularly and I don't find these attitudes are present on TV. I know the writers are smart, and they are, after all, writers, so they should be able to easily make the text not feel exclusionary to the reader. The fact that neither the writing team nor the editing team chose to make the few editorial changes necessary to make the book not feel exclusionary rather ruined the experience for me.

Again, the vast majority of it was amusing, and it was only a few ill-chosen words, phrases, images and "jokes" that felt exclusionary, but it was enough to alienate me and, consequently, make me think twice about whether I should watch The Daily Show or just go straight to bed.