Reviews

I Thought You Would Be Funnier by Shannon Wheeler

dahliaf1aff's review

funny slow-paced

3.0

crowyhead's review

5.0

I am a big fan of Wheeler's work, and this collection is just great! Wheeler's style here is lively and clean, with great facial expressions sometimes evoked with the smallest quirk of a line. There are all cartoons rejected by The New Yorker, and in some cases I can see why -- the cartoons are often caustic and weird. Occasionally they just don't strike me as that good. But for the most part this book is riotously funny and I sort of want to pin 3/4 of the book to my office bulletin board, which I think is a good sign.

sandphin's review

3.0

It's fine?

A couple of the comics seemed to me to be in poor taste, such as a comic with the caption "enhanced interview techniques," showing the interviewee with a bag over his head.

lulujoanis's review against another edition

1.0

Me too.

rickklaw's review against another edition

5.0

Best known for creating the iconic slacker Too Much Coffee Man, cartoonist Shannon Wheeler always entertains with his humorous observations of relationships, politics, and society, in multi-panel stories or as in the case with I Thought You Would Be Funnier, single gag panels. A regular contributor to The New Yorker, this volume collects Wheeler's cartoons that the respected publication rejected. Though always funny and insightful, several of the strips may have been to caustic for the magazine. The second strip in this volume has two women sitting at a table drinking wine, one of them looking over an open newspaper, with "Here's one: 'an unattractive incompetent man seeks an attractive bitchy woman for a sitcom-type relationship.'" scrolled across the bottom. Perhaps not New Yorker material but hilarious nonetheless. Within, Wheeler pulls back the thin veneer of American society to reveal the comedic underbelly. I Thought You Would Be Funnier supplies yet further evidence that Shannon Wheeler is one of the preeminent cartoonists of his generation