My Planet: Finding Humor in the Oddest Places

I love Mary Roach. So much. And finding humor in the oddest places is absolutely the schtick that made her famous.

This is not it. This is finding humor in the most trite, pedestrian places. Like, stop me if you've heard this one: there isn't much knee room on airplanes! Phone trees are incomprehensible! Tech support isn't based in the USA and also doesn't like to help you! Women don't like their bodies as they age! Men are slobs who like sports!

Also, speaking of aging with indignity, many of these jokes didn't age well. About three essays in, when we got to TV channels, I double checked the publication date: 2013. Huh. OK. And then an Anna Nicole Smith sent me to double check...2013. Eight years didn't feel that long ago, but I was show more ready to buy it until the mysterious object called the "Roomba" was discussed with great pomp AND Roach expressed indignity about websites not having phone numbers to call, google sent me to the Reader's Digest archives, where I found that most of these essays date back to the Dubya era...the first term. (If I hadn't figured it out by then, an essay featuring receiving netflix in the mail and an iPod shuffle would have given it away.)

What else didn't age well? Two different jokes making fun of Native American languages. And an internalized misogyny thinly disguised as self-deprecating humor. But the timeline raises more questions than it answers: in My Planet, Roach presents herself as appalled by the extremes of her aging face and body, incapable of adapting to new technology and tottering towards senescence. This feels impossible to reconcile with a woman who in 2008 agrees to have sex in an MRI (wikipedia tells me I'm remembering it wrong and it's an ultrasound...) and then 8 years after that bullies her way into an Army base in Djibouti to investigate diarrhea. The answer is that Roach was an ancient 43 when she wrote this book, an age that feels way younger than these essays read. I wonder which Roach is the real one.

And this is the rub: I'm a Mary Roach fan because she makes my work in the weird biochemistry of the body feel seen and relevant. When I read her other books, part of the joy is imagining her coming to interview me and giggling like old friends about some hilarious joke I tell with the punchline involving an organic acid and the tandem mass spectrometer. When I read this book? And I imagine this woman obsessed with her body shape and gender essentialism and very, very well-trod punchlines...if this woman ever wanted to interview me at work, I'd pawn it off on the fellows. (Maybe she's both things -- the adventurous, witty, dry humorous writer and the cliched wine mom type and it's my own internalized misogyny that won't let me reconcile them. Who knows?) show less

Mary Roach is one of the most quirky, witty, and amazing writers I have ever read. For me, she ranks up there with John Hodgman, Dave Barry, and Simon Winchester. Her latest book, My Planet, is a collection of 62 of her columns previously written for Reader’s Digest. They explore her world—everything from dishwashers to paint chips to RV vacations to makeup and beyond.

Roach’s slant way of looking at life yields a ton more pleasure most people’s. After buying a Touchless Trashcan and finding that it open at random intervals when she passes, she theorizes that it simply wants a conversation or a hug. She wonders aloud why certain cold medicines contains both an expectorant and a cough suppressant, leaving her trapped phlegm is an show more endless, internal loop of despair. While at a new container store, she muses on the possibility of our civilization reaching a point where we’ll need containers for our containers. And so on.

This is a good, slim volume of funny asides. It can easily serve as a bathroom reader or a nightstand book, around when you need a few pages to divert your attention. Although, you can just as easily (much like me) devour the whole thing in 3 hours, giddily laughing along while your wife thinks you’re slowly going insane. An absolutely fun book. show less

Well. Having read this, I begin to understand why I didn't like Packing for Mars as much as I expected to. Mary Roach is a comedian; she doesn't punch down, or up much, mostly she punches level. Which is to say that 99% of her essays here were making fun of herself and her family. That's fine, much better than the folks who make fun of others - but it does mean that (at least in her professional persona) she doesn't like herself much. I really don't enjoy a whole book of someone whining about how her tastes are low-class, her understanding is minimal, when she tries to learn something or buy something fancy she hates it and retreats to her usual stuff...It could be funny. It's not. I got one chuckle out of the book, as far as I recall, show more from the essay about The Container Store - that was the only one that resonated with me. Mostly I like myself and am pleased with what I like, so the rest mostly bored me. And even in the very last essay, which ends on a sweeter note than most of the rest - a crowd in an RV, the trials and tribulations of this trip, focus on needing to stop in every bathroom along the way...they make it to the Grand Canyon, she says it's lovely but kind of empty and isolated, and they pile back into the RV to go quarreling but happy back home. OK, happy with themselves, that's good - but the Grand Canyon gets less than half a paragraph, she'd rather talk about truck stop bathrooms? I will try reading at least one more of her books (I already have Stiff), but I now don't really expect to enjoy it. This is not an author for me. show less

Mary Roach is best known for her terrific books about quirky, sometimes disturbing, science topics, but this collection of short, humorous personal essays focuses instead on ordinary domestic things, from family road trips to the perils of eating in fancy restaurants. A lot of it revolves around her and her husband dealing with their completely opposite attitudes towards everything from hygiene to sports to proper bedtime etiquette. Roach can be extremely funny, and this book gave me a fair few laughs. I also like the fact that her comments about her husband's habits don't come across as stereotypical whiny complaints-about-the-spouse; they seem like two people who work with and are amused by each other's foibles, which is nice to see. show more (Less good is her occasional tendency to indulge in some gender stereotyping, especially in matters involving cars. But there's less of that than you often find books of this sort, so I'm inclined to let it go.)

I really don't recommend reading too many of these pieces back-to-back, though. After a while, you start to realize how slight and inconsequential they are. And the humor may often be funny, but it's a very safe, bland type of humor, compared to her usual willingness to delve gleefully into all kinds of disgusting or ribald topics. Which shouldn't be too surprising, really, as these pieces originally appeared in Reader's Digest -- not exactly the edgiest of publications. show less

I know Mary Roach as a bestselling author of books, like Stiff and Bonk, (wait, they sound slightly pornographic) that incorporate science with humor. But I never knew that she wrote humor columns for Reader's Digest, mostly about her life with her husband Ed.

These columns have been compiled in My Planet: Finding Humor in the Oddest Places, and it had me laughing so loud as I read it, my family stared at me as if I were crazy. I was crazy, crazy with laughter and recognition at Roach's observational humor.

From page one, I was a goner. She describes her first date with her husband Ed, who got up from the table to wash his hands almost immediately upon being seated at the restaurant "like a little raccoon, leaning over the stream to to show more tidy himself before eating."

She goes on to discuss their "hygiene gap". Ed immediately replaces the toilet seat when he moves to a new place because "he didn't know who'd been sitting on it." (I'm with Ed on that one.) Mary flossed her teeth in bed and drank straight from the OJ container. (Again, I side with Ed.)

Mary used the "Designated Countertop Sponge to wash the dishes and the Designated Dishwashing Sponge to clean the bathtub" an act she describes as "tantamount to a bioterror attack", according to Ed. Ed had what Mary called "crud vision" and she didn't.

She said that "like any normal couple, we refused to accept each other's differences and did whatever we could to annoy one another." It just got funnier from there.

Mary makes lists: "daily, To Do lists, long-term To Do lists, shopping lists and packing lists." Ed reluctantly makes lists on the corner of newspapers that are illegible. Making lists keeps her anxiety levels down, while Ed controls his anxiety by forgetting to make lists.

Her best list is composed of party guests that dates from 1997. On occasion she updates it, deleting people who have moved away, adding new friends. They are never having this party, but just updating the list is a party for Roach. (I think I know some people like this.)

Her essay on relatives visiting struck a chord of recognition. After day six, she says that
You begin to view your guests through the magnifying glasses of the put-upon host. A TV set turned four decibels higher that you like it registers as "blaring." Making a 13-cent long-distance call is perceived as "running up my phone bill!"
She concludes this essay by saying
Family are people who live together- if only for a week at a time. They're people who drop towels on your bathroom floor, put your cups and glasses in the wrong place and complain about your weather. You do it to them, they do it to you, and none of you would have it any other way.

One of the essays I most related to was about conjugal hearing loss that affects married couples. She says that married couples attempt to communicate with the other person is in a separate room or on separate floors, "preferably while one is running water or operating a vacuum cleaner or watching the Cedar Waxwings in the playoffs." (This is one of my pet peeves.)

Other humorous topics include entering the Age of Skirted Swimwear, dropping off her car at the mechanic because it won't start only to have him call her and tell her he's charging her $50 because "she is stupid" (the car was out of gas, but she praised him for not ripping her off by claiming it was something more serious), and arguing about buying a sofa.

Roach's essays reminded me of Erma Bombeck. She deals with life's issues in a relatable, funny and good spirited manner. This is a wonderful book to stick in the car and read while you are waiting for the kids at baseball practice or in a doctor's waiting room. It's good for laugh and you'll want to read aloud from it so that others can enjoy her humor too. show less

Look, I acknowledge the difficulties of being consistently funny in short essays, especially ones originally written for Reader's Digest, but this was still not at all what I wanted or expected. For one thing, it is definitely not "humor in the oddest places." It's mostly domestic humor. And Mary Roach, who is great at science-related humor, is not great at domestic humor, turns out. Functionally, this is like reading short, inoffensive, not especially interesting extracts from the diary of a married women in the 1970s.

In this collection of articles from her regular "My Planet" column in Readers' Digest, Mary Roach discusses her life, whether reflecting on how women over 40 have a hard time shopping ("The Naked Truth") or laughing about the difficulties of the self checkout machines ("Check it Out").

If you're familiar with Mary Roach, you know she's best known for her quirky, humorous science books that cover topics such as what happens to cadavers when bodies are donated to science, the afterlife, or sex. This collection doesn't really touch on that part of her life, but home and family. Her husband Ed and stepdaughters make an appearance, and her trademark humor make this collection really delightful reading. The short articles make it easy to pick show more up and put down when I had a few minutes here and there, and I laughed through many of the articles. show less