Tom Gleisner

Warwick Todd, the alter ego of comedian Tom Gleisner, is an old school Australian cricketer, by which I mean that he is a pisshead that enjoys carousing more than training or beep tests. Following the success of the earlier books in the series, Todd has come out of retirement to diarise his cricketing year, complete with drinking, inciting riots and occasionally scoring runs. The law of diminishing returns starts to come into play here.

One of the funniest books ever. Seriously. For those who don't know, Molvania is a small, former Soviet republic in eastern Europe. Or so the authors would have you think. The book is a spot-on spoof of a travel guide to this country, with detailed examinations of the people and culture as well as the usual tour-book examinations of where to stay and eat and what to do. The humor is very dry, but laugh-out-loud funny. (Some of my favorite examples include the fact that the Molvanian language show more has been slow to catch on outside of the country due to the insistence on the use of the triple negative [e.g., "Is it not that the water is not not unsafe to drink?" or the hotel where the staff can provide virtually everything from clean linen to a teenage girl or the public park in the downtown of a "major" city that is underutilized, perhaps because of the large minefield in the middle.) Absolutely hysterical and well-worth reading (even if you only pick it up and read random bits). show less

Reading this travel guide parody is equivalent to lying on the couch on a Sunday afternoon watching the dumbest television show in creation, but unable to muster the energy to turn the show off. I was lying on the couch reading, and perhaps it would have taken less energy if I just shut the book and closed my eyes, but I just HAD to keep reading even if I rarely broke a smile, much less laughed at the tired repetitions of the same jokes about a country really too awful to consider visiting.

Molvania: A Land Untouched By Modern Dentistry is a spoof travel guide to a fictitious Eastern European country, written by Santo Cilauro, Tom Gleisner and Rob Sitch. The cover bears effusive praise from the Observer, the Daily Telegraph and Time Out ("It will be genuinely surprising if anyone publishes a funnier book this decade").

I have to admit I was severely underwhelmed by the reading experience - the book is stuffed full of cleverly set-up one-liners, but there is a limit to how many show more put-downs of eastern Europeans stereotypes (most of which are somewhat outdated, if the immigrant population of the UK is anything to go by!) I can read in one sitting.

The jokes are really quite funny:

"Taxis used to be a nightmare throughout the Eastern Steppes region but are now properly regulated. In Lublova all cabs must be licensed and fumigated at least once a month. Drivers are also obliged to have their photo ID on constant display, showing name, licence number and proof they've recently attended an anger management class." (to be introduced in London? Please?)

"When the imposing six-storey chateau Sucjevitaopened in 1996, Sasava did not have a single high-quality hotel. It still does not."

But in high doses (more than a page), the jokes become galling. The book would make marvellous toilet reading, or an excellent gift for someone you don't really know at all. Or serialised on one of those desk calendars. show less