Get on The Raft

Praising the Comedic Genius of Phil Rot

Image 1. My physical copy doesn’t have the warning, but the image for Kindle on Amazon does.

There I was, in another manic-obsessive YouTube binge, cycling through the greatest hits of the CumTown podcast. Classic Cum, if you will. One video always sparks the journey. Host Nick Mullen recounts a childhood story where he witnesses a bullying older brother “innocently”destroying his little sister’s Victorian dollhouse with a crowbar: “Ooh, what’s in there?” [smash]

Was this funny to ole Nick? Hell yeah dude: “I can't inhale. I'm laughing too hard and my larynx is seizing.”

I remember that archetype of kid from my youth. Even their names were hilarious: Masters Mongee, Jeffers, and who can forget Krestal? These kids made me laugh more than any comedy special. They can seize the larynx. Why though?

Their jokes and actions were subversive. If they were punching down, it was “punching down as hard as you can… like you're driving Excalibur into the stone.”

Consequences were coming in some form or fashion. Often they made you laugh in class and then you got in trouble. But it was worth it.

There is a lot of content masquerading as humor that is not actually funny. Think: New Yorker cartoons, Funny or Die, or Jon Stewart presents: “Clapter.” The “joke” is actually class-posturing to ensure you’re not a low-status deplorable.

But who are these deplorables, really? Well, I’m at a military school right now (hold your applause please), and this dude from Arkansas thought D.E.I. meant “Dale Earnhardt Incorporated.” I’ll take the company of that guy versus a 1,000 NYT readers.

The initial heuristic for comedy is the following: would it irritate the cranky lady at the front of classroom?

What if one the kids I mentioned grew up and wrote something that bottled the same subversive and mischievous energy that made your larynx seize?

Phil Rot

’s The Raft is one of the funniest creations I’ve experienced in years. It is second only to seeing Dave Attell live a couple years ago.

The Book starts beautifully:

The sun beat down on the heartland like a cedar rod

and then:

across the back of a haughty servant girl.

The tone is set. Moby Dick and a Tale of Two Cities and The Raft, unforgettable journeys all.

The Raft is a story of two brothers, Jimmy and Billy, journeying the Kentucky Ocean on their late, “lousy” father’s raft equipped with a problematic mid-century 20th German flag.

As the book warns on the cover: “WARNING: EXTREMELY PROBLEMATIC CONTENT.” So full steam ahead I guess.

Rot writes in an absurd, transgressive tone. For example, Jimmy repeatedly riffs on similes (most notoriously variations on “like a whore”) throughout the brothers’ episodic journey, a habit that helped earn the book its “Extremely Problematic” label.

But the warning is sly, because this this story, like O Brother, Where Art Thou?, is an micro-masterpiece - a funhouse-mirror homage to Homer’s Odyssey.

Image 2. The Great Sea Monster that becomes dinner, my dude.

What adventures await?

• They uncover treasure, a surgically implanted mineral inside Billy’s Chest

• A battle with with a 20,000 leagues under the sea monster.

• An encounter with unwelcome visitor named V (a great send-up of a Social Jihadi)

• The arrival to the blue cottage

• A beautiful, and tragic, reunion.

If you don’t see Lotus Eaters, Charybdis, Calypso’s Island, and Odysseus’ final familial reunion in Ithaca (this last one is disturbingly hilarious) you need to culture the fuck up.

When we consider the absurdity of this book, this applies to the growth of the characters and subverting those expectations. Jimmy is Peter Griffin in that sense:

There is no growth. Just a continuous, deterministic, white-trash spiral that is damn near larynx seizing.

So does The Raft tell us anything about the world?

Nope. It entertained the hell out of me and I actually laughed out loud from a book.

In a pretentious meta sense, The Raft revealed something about comedy as a whole.

The visceral, chaotic, innocent transgression from childhood will never be equaled by a David Sedaris. Early Jackass always beats Jon Stewart. The Raft beats all.

Spend the $10, laugh your ass off, and thank me later.