What is it that makes this book so hilarious? I don't think I've ever laughed out loud as much as I did reading this book. Part of it is stereotypes and the way the characters talk I guess, not to mention Ignatius being such an insufferable asshole who happens to be extremely intelligent. The valve thing always gets me too.
Are there any other books that are like this?
It's only funny because he's fat.
His obesity definitely adds to the comedic value. I just feel like there's something more that truly makes what he says/does/thinks funny.
It's funny in a similar to the reason why My Twisted Life is hilarious, although Toole had the intelligence, reference database and self-awareness to express his own sincere beliefs and self-image in a way that didn't leave the spotlight shining on him and instead on the puppet he created in the form of Ignatius. I don't think this book could have been written by somebody who went on to write other novels, or even live for that long. There is no way out for Ignatius except a pathetic laughable suicide, being institutionalised or simply becoming a burnt-out NEET whose mother looks after him, and the same probably goes for Toole. Also Toole just has a natural ear for humour, especially when it comes to pacing and referencing biases and tropes we're all familiar with, be it racial or simply exaggerated forms of our own occasional drifts into anger, frustration, social criticism or whatever.
Why IS it that fat people are funny?
Did you mean My Twisted World? Thinking of reading that next, but don't see many people considering it a humorous book.
Great response
My Twisted World is a very funny book, and for many of the same reasons Confederacy is funny but credit to Toole due to the fact he was self-aware and intelligent whereas Rodgers is just the victim of his own self-parody. I also recommend The Young Adolf I Knew for a similar sense of humour.
Thank you.
I would further add that I believe all great humour, as evidence in Toole's work, is the kind of humour which seems to be written (or spoken) from the perspective of an observant child who does not really know he is being funny. It doesn't come across a forced, or unfamiliar, or carefully manufactured. Instead it's the sort of thing you can easily imagine yourself saying or thinking or behaving, despite the fact that you carry around this great big construct of Adulthood and Personality and so on as a means of coping within real life. It's very disarming.
>considering reading My Twisted World
>the ramblings of a beta in which a primary tragedy is having his WoW privileges revoked
>like it has any worth
Jesus Christ why do I come here, you faggots are beyond help
Go to /r/books if you want normie discussion, or go to twitter if you want academy approved (tm) lit.
My Twisted World is the book Bret Easton Ellis wished he could have written. Very rarely can an individual take himself so seriously and possess such little self-awareness that his absurd thought process and behaviour, allied with a distinct writing style and hyperbolic sense of grievance manifest into a memoir / manifesto / novel as hilarious as Rodger's work. Again, it could only have been written by someone who died shortly after. It is essentially the transferring of one's life source into a work of literature leaving your own existence a husk. It is the result of a kind of childlike desire to do one's best while under immense emotional / psychological stress and ending up being so sincere and so willing to reveal things other people would instinctively keep well-hidden or deny to their conscious mind that the work itself ends up being hilarious.
I bet you think ALOTIAT is garbage as well.
>ALOTIAT
What's that?
I imagined Ignatius to talk with a mincing British accent. I don't know why.
Kinda like Uncle Monty in Withnail & I.
It was meme trash. How to Bomb the US Govt is everything Legacy could ever dream of being but will never come close. Legacy is a giant piece of shit.
>hurry durr thats the point
A collection of shitposts and dead memes is just an attempt at Internet dadaism and it's just as irrelevant and hacky as that sounds
He means TLOTIAT
He probably wasn't even around when we wrote it, he probably wasn't even around for Hypersphere, and he even thinks it has literary worth
MTW is pretty funny, but only in small doses. if you attempt to read swaths of it you either get very tired or you start embracing the meme
We naturally see them as less than human.
This is an uncomfortable reality to accept.
You're probably justified in doing that, considering that social class wasn't and isn't as conspicuous in American society as it is in Europe, and Ignatius makes it clear early on that he (like Toole) is the direct descendant of some French nobleman. His appreciation of class (and his own position atop the class structure) is influenced by Europe, and thus European class systems and the literature such structures products, especially in England where the upper class have remained relatively unscathed and dominant, unlike in France etc.
Thankfully it's very short but very intense, much like Elliot's life.
Unironically agree.
There were times I was laughing out loud then remembered it was 100% sincere and felt very uncomfortable.
On a vaguely related note has anyone here read that thousands-page manifesto by the failed normie who shot himself in a church? I've heard it's actually very interesting but I'm daunted by the scale of it.
Mitchell Heisman killed himself outside a synagogue on Yom Kippah or whatever.
I've read the first 200 pages and although I didn't appreciate it the first time reading, on second reading I was very impressed. I may read the rest but I don't have the time or energy to invest a dozen or so hours into understanding Anglo-Saxon class structure or whatever.
Because they are cognitively dissonant, and lack willpower, self-awareness, self-respect, and shame, and their fatness is the manifestation of all of these qualities in physical form. This is why we laugh at the morbidly obese who ride on electric scooters.