Wigfield: The Can-Do Town That Just May Not

by Amy Sedaris, Paul Dinello Stephen Colbert

book data

1,099 ratings, 3.52 average rating, 173 reviews (more data...)

rating	frequency	%
5		20%
4		30%
3		31%
2		12%
1		3%

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published

May 19th 2004 by Hyperion

binding

Paperback, 224 pages

isbn

078688696X (isbn13: 9780786886968)

description

Wigfield is in peril. The Bulkwaller Dam, which towers over the tiny town, is scheduled to be destroyed which would in turn wipe out Wigfield. Journal...more

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other reviews (showing 1-20 of 1,489)

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09/10/07

Bronwen rated it:

bookshelves: jan07

Read in January, 2007

I love Amy Sedaris. And I love Stephen Colbert. I even love Strangers with Candy, so I was surprised to find myself so disappointed in this book. I've decided it's because their humor is best experienced in short bursts, or the same jokes just become overkill. I laughted out loud during the first couple chapters, though, and the photos were hilarious. I think a book of short stories of essays would have been more enjoyable.

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04/16/07

Susie rated it:

bookshelves: i-commented, possible-audiobook-consumption

recommends it for: people who can still love strangers with candy despite having read this horrible book.

this book (and my other current read, stephen colbert's "i am america...") taught me the valuable lesson that i need to stop borrowing 'comedy' books from the library, no matter how much i love their authors. i think the audiobook reading of this was probably significantly more entertaining than if i were to read it in print, but even then -- with the funny voices and the tag team storytelling -- it was really bad. roughly 100 times in this book, the narrator mentions his needs for fil...more

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11/06/07

Gil rated it:

(review of isbn 1565117719)

Read in October, 2007

recommends it for: Naral city slickers

This book was a really mean stereotyping listen about people who live in small town America. I realize it was joking. I realize it was unfair and biased, but I still didn't appreciate the characterizations of small town America--obviously a way to target conservatives.

I'm not exactly conservative and I appreciated a lot, but it was really crude and talked about gun-toting, uneducated people in a way that was unfair.

I gave it two stars because it was really funny. Really funn...more

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02/18/09

Patrick Gibson rated it:

bookshelves: humorous

Read in February, 2009

recommended to Patrick by: the voices in my head
recommends it for: people who don't take it all seriously

Still lamenting the fact ‘Strangers with Candy’ has been off the air now for half a decade, one should rejoice that three of the “biggies” got together and wrote a book. (Stephen Colbert went on to do something, not sure what.) But alas, the funniest part of this mindless drivel is the fact they were contracted to write a book and had to come up with something. It’s a running joke—and a pretty good one. The town of Wigfield is about to be destroyed and a reporter (Colbert) arrives an...more

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03/14/09

Alex rated it:

Read in March, 2009

This review has been hidden because it contains spoilers. To view it, click here.

A writer - well sort of a writer, at least in the sense of having spent most of his life painting the divider lines on highways and deciding such isn't all that different from drawing lines on paper to spell out words - is tasked with capturing the spirit of the American small towns whose can-do spirit stands strong against plummeting populations, lack of amenities, and zero job growth. And that's just what he does... as soon as his book deal advance runs out and his car breaks down near Wigfiel...more

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04/08/09

Xiphias rated it:

bookshelves: general-fiction

I cheated and listened to the audibook version - which both helped and hurt the book. The writers all come from improv / performance backgrounds, and, surprisingly enough, most of the book's jokes really only work when said aloud.

The downside is that three authors are doing the voices of a good twenty or so characters - and there's only so many fake, goofy southern accents I can really stand to listen to before I kind of thing they all need to be slapped.

It has the same ...more

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07/17/08

J rated it:

(review of isbn 1565117727)

Read in June, 2006

At the time this book was written, Amy Sedaris, sister to writer David, was probably the best known member of the three writer-performers behind the bizarre Comedy Central show, Strangers with Candy. Of her cowriters Paul Dinello and Stephen Colbert, it was the latter, later on Jon Stewart’s The Daily Show, then his own show, the satire of rightwing talk, The Colbert Report, who has moved into the ascendant. His recent showing at the White House Correspondents' Association Dinner, in a mercile...more At the time this book was written, Amy Sedaris, sister to writer David, was probably the best known member of the three writer-performers behind the bizarre Comedy Central show, Strangers with Candy. Of her cowriters Paul Dinello and Stephen Colbert, it was the latter, later on Jon Stewart’s The Daily Show, then his own show, the satire of rightwing talk, The Colbert Report, who has moved into the ascendant. His recent showing at the White House Correspondents' Association Dinner, in a merciless skewering of both the President and the press has, if anything, increased his stock.

That flair for comic genius is on show here in Wigfield: The Can-Do Town That Just May Not, the three writers’ novel about a small town that just might not even be a real town. When you put three comedians together, you most commonly get some kind of sketch comedy, and that’s what we have here, tied together by a supposed writer who is writing a profile of the small town about to be disbanded when the local dam was scheduled for demolition. Sedaris and Dinello take turns portraying the dirtbag denizens of Wigfield while Colbert plays the kind of ethics-free, self-absorbed fake journalist that is now his full-time gig.

In situations like this, the common assumption is that each writer wrote the bulk of the lines for their character, with some assistance from the others. Thus in a town like Wigfield, with its string of clubs with names like Twat Shop and Tit Time, Sedaris plays a number of women of easy virtue, while Dinello picks up the DJs, the bouncers, the customers, and all three of the town’s competing mayors. Wigfield is also the kind of town with two competing oldest resident, neither above the age of fifty, and an art scene for which the term "dying" would imply more life than it really has.

Settled at the foot of the completely useless Bulkwaller Dam, built so as to demonstrate “our country’s ability to construct monolithic concrete structures in the midst of adverse conditions,” Wigfield’s residents are seeking from the government compensation for their losses when the dam is blown. We likewise learn from an informational pamphlet that the dam was designed as to be “a structure so magnificent that it rivals any creation that God has put on this earth, thereby causing angels to weep with the knowledge that our Savior has been bested.”

Russel Hokes, our unscrupulous narrator, has a dream, to write a book “like a sword of swift justice in service of the truth, but in an easy-to-read, highly marketable way.” But first he needs “an idea and a healthy advance.” In one scheme after another to pad out his manuscript to the golden requisite fifty thousand words (including at the beginning of each chapter the heading “One – Chapter One”), Hokes interviews members of the “town;” quotes liberally from the local paper, court transcripts, high school poetry, and “off the record conversation[s] that I thoughtfully recorded.”

Along the way we meet out of work employees of the shut-down plutonium ditch, strip club managers and employees, the local Wiccans, the owner of Mack Donalds, each of Wigfield’s mayors (including the brain-damaged Charles Halstead, a fudge fanatic man-child kept in power by “appointed” pyromaniacal chief of police), the psychotic town taxidermist/morgue attendant (“One of the things I do over there is to make sure that all the bodies that come in are dead. Here’s my test: I just do things to them that no living being would allow, and if they don’t react, then I know they’re dead. And if they do react, well, the severity of the test usually makes that moot.”), among others.

“And of course there’s those stories about the Wigfield maniac, how there’s a madman in town, but I don’t believe it’s real. I think somebody’s killing folks just to scare people,” as one resident puts it.

The town’s fortunes take a possible turn for the better when the local State Representative convinces the authorities to blow up the dam, and all of the citizenry hope to cash in on sizable handouts. When this plan runs into a snag, as the town has no articles of incorporation, no sewers, sidewalks, real streets, or facilities, when it becomes clear through court testimony that they are not a real town but a collection of shanties filled with nutty squatters, the “citizens” of Wigfield are promised absolutely nothing. A tenderhearted judge provides them with a stay of execution to prove themselves an actual community, and Hokes convinces the town members to hold non-stop parades and public functions to prove they are indeed part of America’s small town fabric, leading to the novel’s climactic bit of hilarity.

Each author takes his or her turn narrating the various characters, Dinello and Sedaris demonstrating a keen knack for accent, characterization, and delivery, while Colbert provides us with the kind of quick speaking double-talk that is his hallmark. “In short there was no downside, but at what cost?” he asks at one point, then later, as the court case begins: “I have to say, the idea of the legal system being fair and impartial always rang a little hollow to me, considering the number of times I woke up in handcuffs.” The three of them together provide something a little different from the average audiobook, a project that comes off as part book, part play, and wholly entertaining.(less)

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06/10/08

Michael rated it:

Read in June, 2008

recommends it for: susan, joshua, gwyneth, meq,

This book is hilarious in the perverse way that Amy Sedaris and crew are known for. If you like things such as Strangers with Candy, and the satire of the Colbert Report this is highly recommended. I read this on audiobook and that seems to be the preferable format because the main character/narrator is played by Colbert with Stephen Colbert, Amy Sedaris, and Paul Dinello all playing various characters from the creepy little town of Wigfield. Esp. amusing are the passages in which all the charac...more

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11/07/08

Chris rated it:

Read in March, 2009

A book about a scam artist writing a book about a "town" of used auto parts stores and strip clubs. Wigfield is a small town in the desert built at the foot of a dam that is due to be demolished. Someone must chronicle the plight of the townfolk; that someone is Russel Hokes the former street lane marker painter turned author. Russel shows us lots of bizarre people who like stabbing and arson, over the top scenery with mercury mounds and arsenic pits and a town with a collective IQ of ...more

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12/21/07

Tracey rated it:

bookshelves: libraryread

Read in September, 2003

Checked this out from the library -- and I'm glad I didn't spend any money on it.

It sounded clever, a wanna-be writer documenting a community's struggles against a State mandate to tear down the local dam, which would flood them out.

It turned out to be mean-spirited and semi-sordid. Wigfield is a squatter's town - with the main "industry" being strip clubs and used auto parts. The interviews with the townspeople weren't as funny as they wanted to be and the ac...more

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01/20/09

Sheila rated it:

Read in January, 2009

This book satirizes both America's nostalgia for small-town America - and the act of writing itself, with its bottomless bag of cliches and mixed metaphors, thrown together by a self-defined "writer" who doesn't like to write.

The first quarter of the book had me laughing to the point of exhaustion; after that, I had to go for longer periods between the laughs (although they do continue, intermittently, until the end of the book).

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02/27/09

Sheela rated it:

Read in March, 2009

This book was hilarious! A must-read if you are a Colbert fan. It's about a brainless "journalist" who attempts to save a small town named Wigfield by writing a book about the neglect of small communities in America. In his quest for 50,000 words or more for his book, he gets to interview the residents and you get to meet the most interesting characters with the oddest stories.

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07/27/08

Charlotte rated it:

Read in August, 2008

This dark satire is good for some laughs, especially for those who like Stephen Colbert/Amy Sedaris-esque humor (I'm a big fan of the Colbert Report, not so much of Strangers with Candy). The book's narrator, Russell Hokes, is a reporter assigned to cover the story of Wigfield, a small town about to be wiped off the map by the removal of the Bulkwaller Dam. Most of the book consists of Hokes interviewing the town's trashy, completely off-the-wall residents. The interviews are funny, but they ten...more

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02/17/09

Wes rated it:

(review of isbn 1565117719)

Read in February, 2009

This was really, really funny, as you might expect coming from the 'Strangers with Candy' crew. It just happened to be an added bonus that the audio version was actually read by the authors; Stephen Colbert takes the lead character and a few others, Sedaris' characters a constant source of smiles. And, as with most humorous works, the jokes either wane, or you're just tired of the barrage, by the books end.

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01/21/09

Ellie rated it:

Read in January, 2009

What I learned from this book....hmmm, mostly that Stephen Colbert & co. are completely out of their minds! The very "touching" story of Udell & Eleanor Grimmett's attempts to have a child, Russell Hokes mistaking Lenare Degroat's taxidermist shed for a port-a-potty, the fine cuisine at Mack Donald's (not to mention the fry king there)...great fun!

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05/10/09

Sarah rated it:

Read in May, 2009

I listened to the audiotape instead of reading the book, and I think this was the better way to read/listen to it. All three authors read various parts (with various accents depending on the characters they're portraying), and it was absolutely hilarious.

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07/01/09

Amy rated it:

Read in July, 2004

You know what? You should listen to this book (because the audio version stars Amy Sedaris, Stephen Colbert, and Paul Dinello) AND you should read it (because it's full of brilliant pictures) and then you should get me a briefcase full of fudge.

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06/03/08

Beth rated it:

Read in January, 2008

I actually got this as a book-on-CD from the library. I needed something to laugh at on my drive to and from work. This fit the bill perfectly. The story is rather intriguing, and it could have been a serious commentary on what constitutes community amongst folks if the book wasn't so dang funny and outrageous. The characters are...well, let's just say I don't think I've encountered their parallels in the annals of literature. Their accounts of life in Wigfield make you want to stay as far a...more

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01/02/09

Jessi rated it:

Read in January, 2009

this book was just completely, absolutely unfunny. i think i laughed once. it wasn't even clever-funny... you know, where you are laughing on the inside? yeah, not amusing at all.

i kept hoping it would get better, but it, in fact, got worse. a total slog.

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06/16/09

Kristiana rated it:

(review of isbn 1565117727)

bookshelves: at-work

Read in June, 2009

So ridiculous. If you want a good laugh and lot of craziness it's fantastic. It's Amy Sedaris and Stephen Colbert and someone else I don't know, but if he's friends with those two than he's all right in my book.

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