The following is a quote from David Cross’ I Drink for a Reason: “Larry [the Cable Guy], whether Northern, Southern, straight, gay, male, female, liberal, conservative, Christian or Jew, I’ve walked them all. It didn’t matter if it was a roomful of ‘enlightened’ hippie lesbian Wiccans at Catch a Rising Star in Cambridge, MA, or literally hundreds of students at the University of St. Louis (a Jesuit school)…”
Oh, no – as the saying goes – he didn’t. Not the hippie lesbians- no problems there- but did he really have to go and call us the University of St. Louis? In a book filled with all manner of pedantic outrage, I feel justified in nailing Cross to the wall over this, this quote from which I can infer that we here at Saint Louis University didn’t even matter enough to such a vaunted comedian and actor- a man who once “blue” himself on screen to the laughter of millions- to the point at which we don’t even get the name we deserve?
Come on, Mr. Cross. If your publisher is going to send us a book to review, they might as well make sure our university name is correctly attributed within your pages. I grant that factual accuracy is not a strong suit of this book or of comedy in general, but surely we weren’t that terrible of an audience? You might see fit to – rightly – skewer everyone from Jim Belushi to the people who review music on Pitchfork, but what did SLU ever do to you?
Within the pages of I Drink for a Reason, Cross is as prone to profanity, as seduced by scatological humor, as hip to hyperbole as those who have followed his career thus far can expect him to be. If you don’t know anything about Arrested Development or Mr. Show, shame on you, but so long as you have a vague suspicion that Dane Cook is about as funny as watching Schindler’s List at a funeral, you’ll probably enjoy this book.
Perhaps it might be worth it to note that Cross is both very liberal and very much an atheist, and you may or may not get much pleasure out of this book if you do not share those values, even if you hate Dane Cook. Hopefully you can at least see the comedy in his writing even if you can’t see the point of his prose.
Still, I never quite laughed out loud while reading I Drink for a Reason, but that’s not because the book is not funny. The problem is that the material is very much suited to the stage: some bits either come from his stage shows or read like outtakes from the same. Amusing is an excellent word to describe this book – I did indeed chuckle and spent certain portions of the book with an idiotic grin on my face. It was, in short, worth reading.
Cross isn’t who he is because of his ability to put together prose on a page, but because of his ability to perform live in front of audiences or TV cameras.
He is a smart, twisted, dirty comedian who can pull off a performance that will leave you laughing for hours, but do not expect an Arrested Development or a Cross stand-up level performance from I Drink for a Reason.
Besides, he commits the sin of forgetting our University’s name, something for which he should be forever apologetic. Perhaps he might even come back here, for a performance of penance. Until he does, I guess that little slip-up will just be his Cross to bear.
