Bad Advice from Funny People

The Believer

Fight disinformation: Sign up for the free Mother Jones Daily newsletter and follow the news that matters.


 Reading The Believer‘s just-released book of advice, You’re a Horrible Person, but I Like You, it’s hard to remember that the magazine once wore the working title ‘The Optimist’. A week ago, hundreds of advice-seeking Americans and I piled into the San Francisco JCC to hear comics Larry Doyle, Daniel Handler (aka children’s author Lemony Snicket), Eugene Mirman and Marc Maron doll it out at an event cosponsored by The Believer and Litquake. The event, sidesplitting as it was illuminating, did not disappoint. Unfortunately, the book falls short of that high mark.  

Here’s why: As the working title might imply,The Believer is, at it’s heart, enduringly optimistic and intelligent, a mix managing editor Andrew Leland describes as what might happen ‘if the New Yorker drank some beers, then went to Central Park and read the New Yorker‘. The same darkly funny little one-offs that feel like a breath of fresh air in the magazine’s ocean of serious-minded (if not always serious) copy sour after about the first hundred pages. Though the marquee names in the collection (among them Aziz Ansari, Judd Apatow, Janeane Garofalo, Sarah Silverman and the original Believer Dear Abby, Amy Sedaris) each deliver their unique brand of terrible advice, the conceit that worked so delicately in its short form gets bogged down by the sheer volume of absurd questions and their unrelentingly malevolent answers. 

Still, they’re pretty funny. Not as funny as an entire book by Daniel Handler maybe, and certainly not as funny as Eug-Tube, but funny. So here’s my unsolicited advice: if you’re the sort of person that needs something slim to read for several 15-minute intervals over the course of maybe two or three weeks, your $13.95 is money well spent to LOL once or twice and silently hehe a few more times before updating your Twitter status with a new nugget of anti-wisdom. For those commuting by train from Flushing, Queens each morning, try on the more serious, less-ROFL inducing, un-tweetable Believer instead. 


If you buy a book using a Bookshop link on this page, a small share of the proceeds supports our journalism.

AN IMPORTANT UPDATE

We’re falling behind our online fundraising goals and we can’t sustain coming up short on donations month after month. Perhaps you’ve heard? It is impossibly hard in the news business right now, with layoffs intensifying and fancy new startups and funding going kaput.

The crisis facing journalism and democracy isn’t going away anytime soon. And neither is Mother Jones, our readers, or our unique way of doing in-depth reporting that exists to bring about change.

Which is exactly why, despite the challenges we face, we just took a big gulp and joined forces with the Center for Investigative Reporting, a team of ace journalists who create the amazing podcast and public radio show Reveal.

If you can part with even just a few bucks, please help us pick up the pace of donations. We simply can’t afford to keep falling behind on our fundraising targets month after month.

Editor-in-Chief Clara Jeffery said it well to our team recently, and that team 100 percent includes readers like you who make it all possible: “This is a year to prove that we can pull off this merger, grow our audiences and impact, attract more funding and keep growing. More broadly, it’s a year when the very future of both journalism and democracy is on the line. We have to go for every important story, every reader/listener/viewer, and leave it all on the field. I’m very proud of all the hard work that’s gotten us to this moment, and confident that we can meet it.”

Let’s do this. If you can right now, please support Mother Jones and investigative journalism with an urgently needed donation today.

payment methods

AN IMPORTANT UPDATE

We’re falling behind our online fundraising goals and we can’t sustain coming up short on donations month after month. Perhaps you’ve heard? It is impossibly hard in the news business right now, with layoffs intensifying and fancy new startups and funding going kaput.

The crisis facing journalism and democracy isn’t going away anytime soon. And neither is Mother Jones, our readers, or our unique way of doing in-depth reporting that exists to bring about change.

Which is exactly why, despite the challenges we face, we just took a big gulp and joined forces with the Center for Investigative Reporting, a team of ace journalists who create the amazing podcast and public radio show Reveal.

If you can part with even just a few bucks, please help us pick up the pace of donations. We simply can’t afford to keep falling behind on our fundraising targets month after month.

Editor-in-Chief Clara Jeffery said it well to our team recently, and that team 100 percent includes readers like you who make it all possible: “This is a year to prove that we can pull off this merger, grow our audiences and impact, attract more funding and keep growing. More broadly, it’s a year when the very future of both journalism and democracy is on the line. We have to go for every important story, every reader/listener/viewer, and leave it all on the field. I’m very proud of all the hard work that’s gotten us to this moment, and confident that we can meet it.”

Let’s do this. If you can right now, please support Mother Jones and investigative journalism with an urgently needed donation today.

payment methods

We Recommend

Latest

Sign up for our free newsletter

Subscribe to the Mother Jones Daily to have our top stories delivered directly to your inbox.

Get our award-winning magazine

Save big on a full year of investigations, ideas, and insights.

Subscribe

Support our journalism

Help Mother Jones' reporters dig deep with a tax-deductible donation.

Donate