Harry Shearer
Publishing
Not Enough Indians
Shearer, probably best known for his work on The Simpsons and This Is Spinal Tap, sets his farcical first novel in the world of Native American-owned casinos. After being "savaged by downsizing, by outsourcing, by plant-closing," the citizens of withering Gammage, N.Y., successfully petition Washington to be recognized as the Filaquonsett tribe so they can build a casino. Their gambling operation has a negative impact on the casino of a neighboring tribe, and that tribe settles the score by having a toxic waste dump built next to the Filaquonsett casino. It's a silly setup, and Shearer uses it to beat home points about greed, materialism and ethnic identity. The book often becomes a morass of easy one-liners ("the process was proceeding at a pace that glaciers and snails would envy"). Stereotypes about Italian-Americans and Native Americans similarly fail to go over the top, instead occupying the queasy middle ground between funny and unfortunate. One bit of inspired nonsense involves a group of diaper-wearing grownups (they consider holding DiaperCon XII in the Filaquonsett reservation), but the scatological humor won't be enough to pull readers through.
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Released OCT 25 2006
212 Pages
It's the Stupidity, Stupid: Why (Some) People Hate Clinton and Why the Rest of Us Have to Watch
Harry Shearer--actor, radio host, political commentator--takes aim at the controversy surrounding President Bill Clinton, and he's got plenty of criticisms to go around. Not only has he figured out why Bill Clinton's success really, really bothers a certain segment of the American population, he also lobs a few bombs in the direction of career prosecutors, television journalists, and Hillary Rodham Clinton's "vast right-wing conspiracy" theory--in just a little more than 100 pages. Think of him as a calmer James Carville, or a liberal P.J. O'Rourke; however you look at it, Shearer's sardonic analysis of the Clinton administration is a welcome respite from the punditry delivered by TV's usual suspects. As he points out in his index: "Di Genova, Joseph, 57. If you know who he is, you've been watching too much Rivera." --Ron Hogan, Amazon.com
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Released FEB 02 1999
104 Pages
J. Edgar
"L.A. Weekly, June 23, 1994 - The inspired silliness of the premise, the able cast, and direction by Harry Shearer carry the day."
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Released JAN 30 2001
Man Bites Town
From 1989 to 1992, actor and television writer Shearer contributed a humor column to the Los Angeles Times Sunday Magazine , informed by his own brand of sophisticated, rueful satire. Brief newspaper columns rarely translate into worthwhile books, but this collection is consistently entertaining. Shearer comments pithily on the regional scene, including L.A. restaurants, Santa Monica's homeless people and California drivers ("I blame the decline in the quality of local vehicular behavior on the influx of people who learned to drive primarily by watching The Blues Brothers "). Other targets loom larger: invited to a White House Christmas party, Shearer observes, "The notion of exchanging wishes for peace on earth with the man who, at that moment, was building up a huge armed force half a world away held a certain goofy charm for me." Each of these byte-size essays has shape, style, wit and, above all, a resonance that echoes beyond its brief confine.
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Released APR 01 1993
236 Pages
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