In an attempt to get back to its humor-magazine roots, National Lampoon has released a sports satire entitled Balls! Written by SportsIllustrated.com columnist and comedian Steve Hofstetter, the book is a love letter to sports fans, from sports fans.
In his introduction, titled chapter zero, Hofstetter comments on the insanity and partisanship of most sports fans and introduces the modest scope of his book. He informs fans about some of the past obscurities and highlights the comedy inherent to sports.
Does he succeed? Yes, for the most part.
Though he risks alienating people who bought the book without a working knowledge of sports by making a few too many obscure references, Hofstetter gives readers a reverent and informative look at the world of sports.
He dedicates a chapter each to the history of hockey, baseball, basketball and football, saving all other sports for an all-encompassing chapter on “other sports that don’t deserve their own chapters.” Hofstetter manages to breeze through a brief factual history of each sport without too much boring story telling or snarky commentary.
The remainder of the book is dedicated to lists of great players and even greater jerks in the sports world, athletes’ responses to fame and prestige, and the role of fans in sports.
Though the majority of his discussions are fairly academic in scope, if not in tone, Hofstetter does a nice job of supplementing the basic rise of most sports with obscure details that are genuinely funny.
Interwoven throughout the book are lists and boxes with numbers (called fakestats) that function as one-liners.
Though the lists and number boxes help break up the prose, they aren’t consistently worth the readers’ time. Some of the fakestats resemble those present in the first few pages of Sports Illustrated, but they lack the timely real world bite of SI‘s famed statistical analysis.
Hofstetter gets in trouble when he refuses to let a joke die, milking it throughout a few chapters so that, instead of making a welcome return, it annoys the reader with its umpteenth appearance in as many pages.
Hofstetter’s attempts at social commentary also leave much to be desired; his pot shots about the white man’s lack of athletic ability and irresponsible athletes touch on subjects that are too well known and cliché to be funny.
Hofstetter is clearly a writer in the traditional SI mode, crafting funny and largely inoffensive commentary that deals mostly in facts while capturing an appropriate sense of the bizarre that radiates from the sports world.
Gut laughs aren’t really his specialty, and his attempts at creating them are a little too forced and hammy.
It is as though he’s standing in your mind as you read, desperately pleading for a big laugh when his material is not quite up to snuff. Taken in small doses, however, Hofstetter is relevant and entertaining.
Only when attempting to read his book cover to cover (a feat that is not encouraged), do his flaws as a writer and humorist emerge.
Overall, Balls! would make a great gift for your dad or perhaps a sports-crazed uncle.
It gives enough new information from a gleefully skewed but oddly reverent point of view. This is definitely not the book to give to someone who wants to understand what constitutes pass interference or why the NBA allows six fouls and college hoops only allows five, but it should give veteran sports fans something exciting to read during commercial breaks the next time a big game comes on TV.
