Join Ricky Gervais, Steve Merchant and Karl Pilkington as they probe the nature of human society.In this episode: Athenian democracy and arboreal investments; Karl on road safety; President Pilkington's pronouncements; Malthusian musings; Karl's adoption agency; the ins and outs of organ donation; social injustice on the busses; morality and entomology; Karl's Luddite attitude to plate sanitation; euthanized ensifera; social orthodoxy at the orthodontist's; and splenetic etiquette.

    Now I don't want to seem callous, but to me that's not a tragedy - that's natural selection.'In SURVIVAL OF THE DUMBEST, Wil Anderson turns his sharp gaze and wicked wit to the stupid, strange and perplexing quandaries of popular culture. Wil spares no-one, not even himself, as he delivers an almighty forehead slap to the modern world. And let's face it: between TV, politics, oversexed sports stars, advertising and automatic phone-banking systems - there are a lot of foreheads that need one.Wil Anderson caused cornflake snorting incidents as a breakfast announcer on Triple J, hosts ABC TV's ever-popular The Glass House and continues to thrill audiences at just about every comedy festival known to man. Now Wil has set down some of his funniest rants and observations in this book. Let's just hope there are enough people left who can read…

    Here, featuring gloriously pseudo-scientific diagrams and the inimitable writing style that made footballcliches.com a smash hit, they are covered in all their glory.

    Now, after breaking up with his longtime boyfriend, Smith looks back to his painfully normal childhood to see where all the trouble really began. Like every other American kid, Bob's adolescence was marked by alternating moments of blissful ignorance, hazy confusion, and humiliating self-consciousness. And in these pages, Bob evokes his youth with a vividness that will make you shudder and howl with recognition.In these hysterically humorous pages, Bob Smith introduces readers to his comically unsympathetic grandmother, who makes light of his carsickness: "Bob only throws up because he's near the window and he can"; to his first teacher crush, whose "five-o'clock shadow could plunge a room into darkness"; and to his first brush with fame, when he fainted from his chair during a biology filmstrip ("Way to go, Smith!"). Sharp, observant, ingeniously ironic and wholly satisfying, this new Lambda Award-nominated collection is at once bittersweet nostalgic fun and a testament to the unquestionable gifts of a highly original comic writer.

    

    The first of these came out in 1946: the ever famous "How to be an Alien." Later he enlarges the picture with "How to be inimitable" and "How to be Decadent." All three books were illustrated by the master of the cartoonists' art, the late Nicolas Bentley. Here they are, all in one volume, which will make life much easier for today's would-be Brits than it was for those who pervaded them. It is said that a few of the latter actually failed to become indistinguishable from the genuine British article because they found it too tiresome to seek out three separate books: a misfortune that need never again occur to anyone.

    The story captures the struggles of a family as it was pulled apart by poverty and alcohol, yet bound by witty—and sometimes ribald—humor.The cast of characters reads like fiction, but it is actually truth. There’s the father, the sarcastic, anti-government, alcoholic, and general ne’er-do-well. He moved his family from state to state, only to leave them again for years at a time in search of construction work. He’d return with empty pockets and bizarre interests such as ESP, pyramid power, and telekinesis. The mother, an Irish Catholic, stayed devoted to him.Her lack of education and access to transportation in a small town led to a dependence upon welfare.Two older sisters complete the picture, acting as sources of tension and strength throughout the book. And then there’s the narrator, the youngest—the snoop, the clown, and the observer.In the spirit of memoirs such as Blackbird and Angela’s Ashes, the narrative addresses serious issues while avoiding self-pity. Don’t Spend it All on Candy continuously comes back to the humor that sustained them while celebrating the tenacity that led all three daughters to break the cycle of poverty.

    To make up for that missed final conversation - and in the hopes of impressing beautiful nurse Sophie - he engages in some good-willed acts of deception- posing as the neglectful relatives of lonely old people in the Peggy Day Aged Cared Home. But when he meets Tamara, a frail and sick 76-year-old with a son she hasn't seen in twelve years, who will really be deceiving who? The Good Son is a story about people fulfilling each other's needs, sometimes unexpectedly. It is about love and fear and relationships, and how we treat the elderly people in our lives. And it is about the difference between blood relatives and the families that we make by choice rather than by birth. And, like all good stories, it involves a road trip.

    Combining his trademark humor with an acute eye for the ridiculous, Mark admits his part in bands like The Berlin Airlift, the life-changing punk revolution in Bob Sleigh and The Crestas, and even a flirtation with thirty-something pub rock. Interwoven with the musical disasters is the appealing rites-of-passage story of a middle-class grammar school boy who finally leaves Bolton for university. Splattered with memorable episodes and Viz-like characters, Showbusiness retraces the steps that should have led Mark to headlining Wembley Arena, but which took him to Radio 1 instead.

    When inexperienced entrepreneurs ask my advice about their idea for a tech startup, they often worry "What if Google decides to compete with us? They will crush us!" I respond that far more startups die of suicide than homicide. If you can avoid hurting yourself, then you are already better off than most of your competitors. Startups are a chance to build something entirely original with brilliant and ambitious people. But startups are also dangerous. Limited money means there is little room for mistakes. One bad decision can mean bankruptcy. The potential payoff attracts capital, which in turn attracts scam artists. The unscrupulous often lack the skills needed to succeed, but sometimes they are smart enough to trick investors. Even entrepreneurs who start with a strong moral compass can find that the threat of failure unmoors their ethics from their ambition. Emotions matter. We might hope that those in leadership positions possess strength and resilience, but vanity and fragile egos have sabotaged many of the businesses that I’ve worked with. Defeat is always a possibility, and not everyone finds healthy ways to deal with the stress. In this book I offer both advice and also warnings. I've seen certain self-destructive patterns play out again and again, so I wanted to document one of the most extreme cases that I've witnessed. In 2015 I worked for a startup that began with an ingenious idea: to use the software techniques known as Natural Language Processing to allow people to interact with databases by writing ordinary English sentences. This was a multi-billion dollar idea that could have transformed the way people gathered and used information. However, the venture had inexperienced leadership. They burned through their $1.3 million seed money. As their resources dwindled, their confidence transformed into doubt, which was aggravated by edicts from the Board Of Directors ordering sudden changes that effectively threw away weeks' worth of work. Every startup forces its participants into extreme positions, often regarding budget and deadlines. Often these situations are absurd to the point of parody. Therefore, there is considerable humor in this story. The collision of inexperience and desperation gives rise to moments that are simply silly. I tell this story in a day-to-day format, both to capture the early optimism, and then the later sense of panic. Here then, is a cautionary tale, a warning about tendencies that everyone joining a startup should be on guard against."

    He discovers that entering the United States with his British wife is more difficult than he had anticipated.***A journey of a thousand miles begins with a single step.--Chinese ProverbA journey of seven thousand miles begins with a trip to the US Embassy-- Travis Casey Experience

    Read it and weep!When George Lopez gives a comic performance, there’s not a dry eye or empty seat in the house, and for six years, millions of viewers tuned in to get their weekly G-Lo fix with ABC’s The George Lopez Show. Now, George is back, and he’s made the switch from prime-time family guy to late-night talk show host. Lopez Tonight combines George’s irreverent and very opinionated humor with spontaneous celebrity interactions to create a party of a show; with George, the audience knows the conversation will be high-energy, low-formality, and 100 percent unpredictable. But while he can make his audiences cry with laughter, Lopez’s own life—before becoming one of America’s most popular Latino personalities—was anything but funny. Abandoned by his California migrant-worker father at the tender age of two months and deserted by his own mother at the age of ten years, Lopez was raised by grandparents who viewed “love” as a different four-letter word. Co-written by Emmy Award-winning writer and sportscaster Armen Keteyian, the darkly funny narrative of Why You Crying? riffs on the importance of family, the stark, often hysterical differences between Chicano and gringo culture, and the inspirational message that anybody can become Somebody. Read it and weep!

    For this new edition Pam has written a general introduction, as well as individual introductions to the poems, many of which are now illustrated with specially commissioned line drawings by Susan Hellard. This is the first time The Works has been available in hardback and is certain to delight Pam's fans of all ages. Pam is one of Britain's best-loved personalities and has been a regular on television and radio for more than 30 years—most recently on Just a Minute, The Comedy Quiz, Countdown, and her own series, Ayres on the Air.

    NPR writer Gewn Macsai gives you some lip on chin hairs, bad boys, sagging breasts, going to the bathroom in twos, and many other rites of womanhood...