Welp, I was warned.

You know that parable about the scorpion and the turtle? (Note: I almost certainly have the animals wrong, but for reasons that will become obvious, I’m not looking it up). The scorpion asks the turtle to take it across a river, turtle balks, scorpion points out they’ll both drown if he stings the turtle, turtle takes the scorpion halfway across when he gets stung.  Turtle’s dying words amount to “WTF, bro?” and the scorpion says “you knew I was a scorpion when you picked me up.” I’m almost certainly conflating two fables, but I’ll be dammed if I spend more time on my review than Benjamin spent writing it.

I’m not mad though. I knew he was a snake when I picked him up (that’s one of the parables I’m confusing, but hell if I’m going back.) As an exercise in meta humor, the book is hilarious.  As something I actually read, it barely qualifies as a book, though there were humorous parts.

Basically, the laconic humor we fans of Archer, Bob’s Burgers, and Home Movies have come to expect from Benjamin is present in book form, but in even more improvisational form.  In a book. That was edited. And went to print.  I’m pretty sure it went through one draft and took about the same time to write as it did to read.  But dammit, it’s Archer! How do you get mad at Archer for half assing something that’s still moderately entertaining?!

You don’t. But you also resell that book to the local shop ASAP. The joke on the reader may have been funny, but I’ll be dammed if I help it get played on the next guy.