Cherry Farcical

What do you get when you mix Chuck Shepherd’s News of the Weird and a toned-down Jon Stewart? Cherry Farcical, of course! Miller’s fourth book is a collection of thirty-six tongue-in-cheek essays that are—for the most part—based on strange news segments that range from the ridiculous to the, uh, ridiculous-er. Pulling from a wide variety of sources (i.e., Associated Press, New York Daily News, Reuters, and Huffington Post), Miller follows brief introductions to news snippets with sidesplitting scenarios that play out what the situations could have possibly looked like.

Doug Miller offers a fresh take on news oddities in his latest read. Miller’s writing style is punctuated with a mix of puns, facts, and a whole bunch of malarkey and has designed in an engaging conversational environment with his reading audience. Set largely in first person viewpoint, Miller’s short narratives are nothing less than creatively amusing. Accentuated with random line drawings from graphic artist Steve Hussey, Miller’s essays feature embellishments on news items, such as a school teacher’s rare phobia of young children (a court scene concerning a different type of clothing issue), a store having to apologize for labeling the color of a plus-sized woman’s dress as “manatee gray” (two oversized women and their clothing shopping experience), an 8-year-old boy who was suspended from school for nibbling a Pop-Tart into the shape of a gun (and a new weapon-related food scenario—this time with eggs), and a lady who mistook Super Glue™ for lip balm (can you imagine a conversation between her and her husband?)—just to name a very few.

Miller’s imaginative collection is not all scenarios, though. Constantly captivating his audience, Miller adds variety to each story by throwing in different twists. Great examples include his 21st Century list of aphorisms, a collection of “guiding light epigrams,” musings on various topics regarding world leaders, a pilot script to “What’s on tonight? And let’s take everything off to watch it,” and lyrics to a song (sung to the tune of “Smile”) taken from the imagined Broadway musical adaptation of Donald Trump’s TV show The Apprentice. Cherry Farcical is uproariously funny from beginning to end!