The Future and Why We Should Avoid It

This scattershot stand-up routine in book form runs out of comedy gold well before it finishes. The occasionally funny but repetitive material covers the human and especially capitalist propensity to waste efforts on trivial matters (such as developing "427 different Coke products") and to prioritize all the wrong things. Magazine columnist and author Feschuk (Searching for Michael Jackson's Nose) looks at politics, aging, science, entertainment, and killer robots. He habitually riffs on events from the recent past, to dubious effect in a book purportedly about the future. He devotes jokey pages to parodying classic movies if they had been scripted by George Lucas, men's midlife crises, the 2012 Democratic National Convention, Barack Obama's 2009 visit to Canada, a Canadian version of Fifty Shades (of Eh), hockey parents, and the nation's winter despair; and he's deeply fond of shopworn cracks about American celebrities like Tiger Woods, Kirstie Alley, and Donald Trump. As a comedian, the author's motto seems to be "Try everything and see what sticks." It's a questionable tactic that leads to clever bits interspersed with stale leftovers. (May)