By 2003 Gordon Korman was already transitioning into writing adventure books, but he certainly still had a lot jokes in him, and he had some more ideas to make readers laugh. The result was Maxx Comedy: The Funniest Kid in America.
Summary
Maxx Comedy is about a kid named Max Carmody who loves comedy so much he wants to go into it as a career. The only problem is that he’s not really that funny.
When he hears about a contest for the funniest kid in America, however, Max is psyched. He know he needs to go, and he makes his stepdad promise to take him there. First, however, he needs to ensure a spot in the thirty finalists by his audition tape. Of course, he enlists the help of his best friends, Maude, Big, and Syndi.
Each of them have their quirks: Syndi wants to be on the student council but is always making Amanda Locke mad. Big is huge and has some kind of a weird medical condition so he’s always humming out his nose. And Maude is a perpetual complainer, always happy to tell anybody who will listen that the worst stuff always happens to her.
The plot of the story goes crazy in a lot of directions, typical of Korman’s style at the time. Some of the things that happen include the purchase of an $85 pair of pants bought with stolen money that rips, a dog that is taken in by the kids’ class in an attempt to impress the student council and get on TV but gets exchanged with a panther, and a mooing sound that makes Max national news.
Review
Despite the fact that this has many of the aspects of a classic Korman comedy, it fails to live up to his standards, and is truthfully not a very impressive book. It reminds me a lot of Radio Fifth Grade, written a decade earlier, except that everything is wrong. Instead of a dedicated radiocaster like Benjy, we have Max who can barely tell a joke to save his life. Instead of a smart, practical girl like Ellen we have bumbling idiots like Maude and Syndi.
The characters in this book simply don’t make all that much sense, and it doesn’t add up. In classic Korman books like the MacDonald Hall series, we loved characters like Bruno, Cathy, and the Fish. In this book, there is no one to love. We don’t get to know the characters, and they are so either weird or surface level that doing so doesn’t seem possible.
I like that the plot is crazy and full of rollicking fun, but even the use of Korman’s classic scene at the end where everything comes together doesn’t do it for this book. Sure, some of the stuff is funny. But for most of the book the primary attitude is confusion. The characters and story are simply not identifiable and therefore we are relegated to observing the action from the vantage point of an observer who doesn’t really understand, instead of living it excitedly along with the characters like we have come to expect from this author. This book is nice, but if you’re looking for a Korman book there are much better options.
Leave a Reply