recommends three LOL books for your summer lite reading from a comedian, a best-selling joke book author and cartoonist, and a historian. And this reminder:
to download free resources from the 20 management buckets (core competencies) and
. See Mistake #6 below.
3 LOL Books for Summer Lite Reading!
It’s summer here in the Northern Hemisphere—and time for some lite reading (or listening). Pick one of these three LOL rib-ticklers:LOL #1 - A COMEDIAN’S PRAYER BOOKBritish comedian Frank Skinner pairs his superb imagination to his faith journey and delivers (okay I’ll say it) a laugh-out-loud 106-page delight,
A Comedian’s Prayer Book. He confesses, “The title is a worry, isn’t it?”
But no worries. No lightning strikes if you read it. It’s deep and wide—LOL-funny with poke-in-the-ribs (pie-in-the-face?) theological musings.
He prays:“One of the joys of prayer is that you get all my references. I could do a joke about El Greco or Efrem Zimbalist Jr, but there’ll never be any need for footnotes. It’s beautiful. You’re the audience I’ve always dreamt of.”Using theatrical terminology, Skinner sets the stage: “…I’ve tried to retain the bare candour of the simple rehearsal-room improvisation, but infused it with all the production values required to make it a passable public entertainment. I’ve taken my convictions, my questions, my fears, my doubts, my elations, and presented them in what I think is an eavesdropper-friendly form. Hell, judgement, atheism, money, faith and the X-Men all feature.”
“So, this rich man, camel, eye-of-a-needle thing.” It’s probable that this thinking-man’s comedian has plumbed the depths of Matthew 19:24 far deeper than most of us. In his prayer, he admits “Yes, I have a few bob in my pocket…” so looking for loopholes, he wonders, “Imagine if there’s one word missing from the Gospel text, an exhausted scribe rendering an understandable error.” Maybe it really reads,
“It’s easier for a camel eyelash to pass through the eye of a needle than for a rich man to get into Heaven? At last, I could enjoy some of this money I’ve worked so hard for.”Noting that the TK Maxx stores in Britain sell bargain buddhas (yet also flyswatters!), he suggests to the Lord, “So why didn’t I see a single Jesus for sale? I’m not here to lecture you about marketing, but it worries me that we’ve lost so much ground with the I’m-up-for-a-little-bit-of-spirituality crowd.”
His prayer continues:“I know our biggest seller is the crucifix and, of course, it’s been a Christian symbol for two thousand years. It is an enormous inspiration to me, personally, and I have, more than once, wept as I’ve knelt before it. I just wonder if it’s a symbol with something of a specialist appeal?
Has an interior designer ever suggested a room needed something torture-themed?” (He suggests a more “user-friendly” symbol for people outside the Faith.)
He prays for “the chosen, the accepters and refusers. This is the kind of work I feel suited for, petitioning you on behalf of the heroes and the deserters, my eyes to the floor, last-three-pews.”He’s comfortable (but with guilt)—like many of us—with a self-conscious level of church involvement: “I’m a last-three-pews Catholic. I don’t want to be organising the Harvest Festival. I put money on the plate, but I don’t even want to be the guy who takes the plate around.”
Warning: your second read through
A Comedian’s Prayer Book delights/convicts even more:
•
The honesty—
extraordinary. •
The humility—
quotable. •
The humor—
off-the-charts. (I’d fly to London for an evening of conversation between Frank Skinner and Father Darrin Merlino, CMF, author of
30 Days Unplugged: How a Catholic Priest Turned Off His iPhone and Took a Call From God.)
On the Lord’s Prayer (“It’s that bit when you conduct an impromptu prayer-workshop, offering advice and examples for the would-be kneeler.”),
this comedian prays:“When someone asks me, directly, about doing a charity gig or opening a fete or something, I always tell them to speak to my agent. It gets me off the hook.
I like the idea that, when you returned to Heaven, the Father said, ‘Did you tell them about prayer?’ and you said, ‘Yes. I told them to call you’. I imagine there was a resulting loud creak, like an oak tree splitting, as the Almighty’s eyebrows were raised, followed by a hurricane-like sigh.”
Enjoy this special book—and don’t miss Skinner’s running gag, “The Devil has all the best tunes,” deployed humorously across a hundred LOL pages.
Click here to view a six-minute interview with the author, excerpted from the BBC’s
Song of Praise telecast.
Click here to view a BBC interview with Frank Skinner (6 min.).
To order this book from Amazon, click on the title for
A Comedian’s Prayer Book, by Frank Skinner.
LOL #2 - LAUGHTER THERAPY: GOOD MEDICINE TO MAKE YOUR HEART GLADAfter COVID (
we pray it’s “after” asap)…we’ll all need therapy and—just in time—my favorite joke book guru and bestselling author, Bob Phillips, has teamed up with cartoonist Jonny Hawkins to deliver the perfect summer read,
Laughter Therapy: Good Medicine to Make Your Heart Glad. Here’s a funny one from the 168 pages of hot-off-the-press jokes and cartoons:
SHOCK! “A minister was asked to inform a man with a heart condition that he had just inherited a million dollars. Everyone was afraid the shock would cause a heart attack and the man would die.
“The minister went to the man’s house and said, ‘Joe what would you do if you inherited a million dollars?’ Joe responded, ‘Well, Pastor, I think I would give half of it to the church.’
“And the minister fell over dead.”To order this book from Amazon, click on the title for
Laughter Therapy: Good Medicine to Make Your Heart Glad, by Jonny Hawkins and Bob Phillips. And thanks to Bob for sending me this hilarious review copy!
LOL #3 - HUMORISTS: FROM HOGARTH TO NOEL COWARDHere’s a third LOL option for your summer reading.
Humorists is a very satisfying book/comedic journey from historian Paul Johnson who channels W.C. Fields:
“We know what makes people laugh. We do not know why they laugh.” (
Read my review from April Fools’ Day 2015.)
Johnson, with his unique style of short historical chapters, elegant writing, and deep insights, delivers a cavalcade of comedy—while spotlighting an amazing list of humorists and their secret formulas for making us laugh.
3 CLERGYMEN DON’T WALK INTO A BAR. If you’re looking for a joke book, this is not it. If you’d enjoy a deep dive into a British historian’s hunches on humor—have at it.
Johnson profiles 15 humorists including Benjamin Franklin, G.K. Chesterton, Toulouse-Lautrec, W.C. Fields, Laurel and Hardy, The Marx Brothers, James Thurber, Noel Coward, and others. He includes Groucho’s famous line,
“I don’t want to belong to a club which would have me as a member.”I started at the back of the book with Johnson’s four-page color commentary on how he came to write
Humorists. Fascinating! (And...my thanks to David Curry, who often makes me laugh, for recommending this and all of
Paul Johnson's books.)
To order this book from Amazon, click on the title for
Humorists: From Hogarth to Noel Coward, by Paul Johnson. Are you a listener? Listen to the book on
Libro.fm (7 hours).
YOUR WEEKLY STAFF MEETING QUESTIONS:1) Comedian Frank Skinner prays and affirms Jesus’ request that “when we do charitable works, we should do them in secret.” His prayer acknowledges, “This advice makes complete sense, but it has, nevertheless, almost certainly cost me an MBE [Member of the Most Excellent Order of the British Empire].” LOL! Okay, colleagues—let’s have a gut-check discussion about our motivations for charitable giving and acts of service. Is our generosity genuine?#2. Skinner prays further, “Early Christianity feels like a thin person’s game. Hence ‘enter by the narrow gate’. That would certainly explain why five loaves and two fishes was more than enough for the five thousand—‘Thanks, but I don’t really do bread’. I wish the Bible gave a name to the first fat Christian. It must have been like when Heaven’s entrance-conditions were broadened to include the Gentiles.” LOL! Do your prayers include humor? Does God laugh?
In 2004, the staff at CMA (now CLA) awarded John the first ANNUAL MEATLOAF AWARD—not exactly an honor (per Pearson’s Mistake #6).
MISTAKE #6 of 25:
Prioritizing Convenience Over Generosity
Insights from Mastering Mistake-Making: My 25 Memorable Mistakes—And What I Learned
“I failed to inspire and give permission for the staff to call audibles.” That’s the subtitle of Mistake #6 in the new book by John Pearson with Jason Pearson. Too focused on production, John had not yet read the mistake-making insights from Leadership for Dummies, and this wisdom from Ken Blanchard and Don Shula: “Winning coaches make their teams audible-ready.”
For Mistake #6, John shares what he learned from two books:
• Leadership Smarts: Inspiration and Wisdom from the Heart of a Leader, by Ken Blanchard
• The New One Minute Manager, by Ken Blanchard and Spencer Johnson, MD
Click here to view the list of all 25 mistakes and read the introduction to Mastering-Mistake Making. To order this book from Amazon, click on the title for Mastering Mistake-Making: My 25 Memorable Mistakes—And What I Learned (10 Minutes for Lifelong Learning Workbook), by John Pearson with Jason Pearson.
For supplementary resources, click on John's "Bucket" book and workbook below.
JASON PEARSON: UNEXPECTED CREATIVE. Do your communication pieces include appropriate doses of humor—or is it stale, corny, or confusing? To explore the art and science of appropriate humor, contact Pearpod Media (Design, Digital, Marketing, Social).
