This is fun! We’ve gotten a grand total of four customer reviews on the Amazon.com site. The first two were lovely, five-star assessments of the book. We didn’t talk about those publicly. That’s not our style. We brag only on rare occasions. We let the upward thumbs speak for themselves.

The fun part comes when the negative reviews come in!

We know– we said we were probably not going to trash every bad review we got… but we left ourselves an out! (“We aren’t going to fisk every review of the book…”) And this one is so delicious that we couldn’t pass it up! Herewith, agnew.peter’s review of “The Comedy Bible: The Complete Resource for Aspiring Comedians” in its entirety:

Anybody could write a book like this and, contrary to the title – it will not help the aspiring comedian in the slightest. Please – if you are considering a career in comedy – spend your money on Judy Carter’s bible – a robust and legitimate piece of work. ….unless of course you need to read drivel like: “Punch Line: Position this at the end of your joke.”

This is probably the worst book I have ever purchased. The (cruel) joke is on me! and anyone else foolish enough to purchase this so-called book.

“Anybody could write a book like this?” Yipe! We’ll listen to legitimate criticism, but that’s just childish.

And we don’t think it’s catty to say that agnew.peter– were he commissioned to write a book like this– would have a rough time of it. After all, he refers to our book as “this so-called book.” Uh… the last time we checked, it had pages, words and a cover. No one would dispute that it’s a book. (And anyone who uses this tired rhetorical gesture has some cajones writing such a harsh review.)

Agnew.peter says our book, “will not help the aspiring comedian in the slightest,” and his main complaint seems to be that we offer “drivel”– or information that is so basic as to be useless. We suspect that agnew.peter hasn’t hung around an open mike lately. Or conducted a comedy seminar for aspiring comedians. These are things that we’ve been doing for 25 years.

Folks who aspire to do standup– or who aspire to give their nascent career a kick in the pants– quite often have gaping holes in their knowledge of standup. We are often aghast at some of the questions that up-and-coming comedians ask us. (Of course, we quickly suppress our horror and patiently attempt to answer any and all questions, for we recall all too vividly that time when we knew NOTHING about standup.)

Agnew.peter makes the very basic mistake of not remembering. It’s like not failing to recall that time when you possessed absolutely none of the skills necessary to drive a car. The first time behind the wheel is intimidating. The prospect of piloting 2,000 lbs. of steel and glass seems near impossible. Fast-forward a few months and you’re cruising down the street, steering with one index finger and trying to tune in your favorite station. After a decade or three, you can only recall those initial, sweaty driving attempts with great effort.

But we remember. That’s why we offer advice like “Put the punchline at the end of the joke,” we’re speaking to someone who hasn’t the faintest notion of how to approach the art of joke-telling. There are probably novices who have been performing at open mikes for months or years who haven’t figured out that the reason they aren’t getting a laugh (or the laugh that they might) is because they’ve consistently failed to put the punchline at the end of the joke. It is for them that we’ve included such “drivel.”

As for agnew.peter’s advice to purchase a book by a rival author instead of ours, we say, “Buy them both!” You’ll get free shipping and you’ll be out a total of $26.51! In spite of the claims made by their respective titles (“Ultimate” and “Complete”), neither book is comprehensive, so buying and reading both would probably make for a better-informed (and not that much broker) student of comedy.

We’re surprised by the emotion contained in the title of the review– “Utter garbage– How to write a scam book”– but we understand how passionate people can get about comedy. And we understand just how excited people get when they’re granted the “privilege” of reviewing someone else’s work.

As for calling our book a “scam,” we would say that calling our book a “dishonest scheme” or a “fraud” (both basic definitions of the word “scam”) overstates things and strains credulity. (Ask anyone who’s been ripped off by Bernie Madoff if buying our book– for the grand total of $15.63– is anywhere close to being a scam.)

We may sound defensive, but we’re not. We’re slightly befuddled that someone could read a 45,000-word book and fixate on one, short tidbit in order to condemn the entire work. There’s a lot of handy, interesting information in the book and it’s fairly wide-ranging. And, like we’ve already said, we didn’t choose the title… or the sub-title.

And, just as it might behoove a 40-year driver to take a refresher course in driving, it might be a good idea for a professional comic to browse through a book like ours to recall long-dormant fears, read a new take on hecklers or maybe pick up some new knowledge that puts our profession in an historical context.

When turned in the final chapter, we said privately that folks are either going to either love it or hate it. Force of habit, we suppose– folks have either loved SHECKYmagazine.com or hated it and folks have either loved our standup or hated it. And that’s pretty much how it’s breaking down with the book. Five-stars followed by one-star.

We suppose that it’s not such a bad thing that one’s work should evoke such extremes. Perhaps it’s an indication that we’re doing something right.