Frank Sullivan at His Best Book

It's difficult to write humorously. Only a handful have been able to do it and they're all dead or wish they were. Frank Sullivan has that rare ability to string together a series of words that are punctuated with a reader laughing out loud, at least that's this reader's experience. It made my children look at me as if I'm crazy, when they should know better: I'm just neurotic. AT HIS BEST is a collection of his short writings on a variety of topics as topical today as ointment. That is to say, he's bemused by gadgetry and affluence, children and breakfast, among other things, all of which he twists into absurd pretzel logic that salts the appetite. His is not the edgy comedy of late, but the late comedy of blunt trauma. There's a sense of vertigo reading Sullivan, when pulls the logical floor out from under you, unseen outside of metaphysics. He'll also learn you something. His repeating character, the cliché expert, reminded me of how easy it is to fall under the unthinking rhetoric of unoriginal thought. You won't find any of that here, though. Sullivan is an original, the real deal, the real McCoy, the real thing, the genuine article, the goods, the gospel…in fact he's all those mindless synonyms except no joke.