Title: Stop Dressing Your Six-year-old Like a Skank and Other Words of Southern Wisdom
Author: Celia Rivenbark
Genre: Humor
I must admit that the title is what grabbed me, and I don;t even have kids. In fact, I have probably spent less time with six-year-olds in the last decade than most people spend in front of the TV in a given week. And even less time with skanks. And yet, I felt compelled.
I am not now, nor have I ever been, Southern. I can’t even properly pronounce “y’all”; the best I’ve been able to come up with is a flat, Midwestern “you all”. Therefore, I tend to assume that I’m missing something when I read humor that is predicated upon being Southern…much in the same way that Kevin Smith’s humor is, to a large degree, predicated upon being from a specific part of New Jersey.
Nonetheless, I find Celia Rivenbank’s collected columns hilarious, mostly because she says the kind of things I would love to say myself, only she says them differently (and better), and not just because it’s with a Southern accent. In the recent past, I discovered exactly how inhibited and uptight I can be. Rivenbark does not seem to suffer from the same problem. Womens’ humor—especially in stand-up but also in writing—has a long history of self-deprecation, and while she’s not afraid to be the butt of her own jokes, she’s also not afraid to tell it like she sees it, whether it’s celebrity moms, the economy, trash TV, or Dick Cheney. So, she comes across as an equal-opportunity satirist.
Most of all, I appreciated a break from some of the more academic nonfiction, while not straying to far from my inherent interest in human behavior. It’s just a different, and more entertaining, perspective on the same subject.