Created in Darkness by Troubled Americans: The Best of Mcsweeney's, Humor Category Book

Amazingly, McSweeney's has invented yet another hipster trend - that of the genre being "humourous without being funny."

No, the magazine itself was not the first to tackle such an element. For years prior to its death, the National Lampoon featured any number of deadpan articles which were essentially born dead, whether the result of a poor concept, inept writing, faulty comic timing, or just plain comedic bombing. But the difference between Nat. Lamp. and McSweeney's is that the latter seems to revel in its presentation of unfunny humour writing. The Lampoon took its criticisms to heart, and expired. McSweeney's acts like it achieved its intended goal.

Enter Created in Darkness by Troubled Americans. The book reads like a snarky remark that lingers too long, as if intended to be read while slouching against a wall with hands in pockets. It isn't funny. It isn't even trying to be - witty, yes, but funny, absolutely not. It is, simply, humour writing without the humour. It's been removed, as if by design. Even the perennially amusing Neal Pollack has had his funny bone ground into a fine pulp and smeared across the pages of this "Best Of" compilation in the guise of a "funny" article which lacks all mirth.

Why isn't it funny? Because "The Newest from Jokeland" is comprised of cliched jokes, sans punchline - deliberately. Because "El Wusso" is provided along with "The Bulimic Cheerleader" as potential Bad Names for Professional Wrestlers. Because "I Know What You Did Two Moons Ago" is a spoof on detective fiction inexplicably interbred with stereotypical Native American tomfoolery. Because "Unused Audio Commentary by Howard Zinn and Noam Chomsky, Recorded Summer 2002, for The Lord of the Rings: The Fellowship of the Ring DVD (Platinum Series Extended Edition), Part One" is an 18-page meandering tribute to writers Jeff Alexander and Tom Bissell's familiarity with Zinn and Chomsky and the Lord of the Rings movie franchise - and nothing more. Because "Candle Party" is narrated by a person hosting a dull candle party, and "Reviews of my Daydreams" is an inside joke that only the writer really gets, and "It's Not Actually A Small World" is the same joke over and over and over and over and over again - that it's not actually a small world because people rarely meet up with specific people from their pasts.

The book's not funny. Well, no - that is not entirely true. It is funny in very specific places, but these places are so few and far between that the reader actually feels retroactively ashamed of himself for snickering at such an unfunny - such an unabashedly forced - book as this. Because it truly is not funny. It's not really clever, either. Though you can tell that it tries very hard to be. It's essentially the "witty" guy at a party who is slyly relying upon a rehearsed "spontaneous" monologue, which would be devastated should it allow any verbal input from an outside observer - the guy you'd feel embarrassed for if only he weren't so goddamned smarmy, so goddamned smug about how clever he thinks he's being. This book is trying so hard to be hip, to be young and filled with verve, that it is a shameless poseur. And it's embarrassing to read, although to the rest of the world the reader probably looks like a hipster who gets it. The book is, in essence, a hipster prop.

But what the book isn't, once again, is funny. It simply isn't. It's dry, and monotonous, and stilted, and would have been much better off as a small forest of living, breathing, oxygen-producing, habitat-providing trees instead of the unfunny pile of paper taking up space on a dusty bookshelf. The former of which, I might remind potential readers, this book once was, but is no more. Now it's a bound sheaf of dead trees, bringing as much mirth as a silent, lips-moving, finger-following reading of Ecclesiastes.

McSweeney's winds up - once again - with Eggers on its face. But the book does unequivocally succeed in being humourous without actively being funny. If this was, indeed, its dubious original intent.