Getting Serious About Humor: I'm Done With Wurst For A Long Time

The Thurber Prize folks have announced their semi-finalists for this year's, yes, Thurber Prize for American Humor. It turns out that I've already read one of them, Everyone In My Family Has Killed Someone by Benjamin Stevenson, which I liked, and admired, a great deal. Now I've read another one, Raw Dog: The Naked Truth About Hot Dogs by Jamie Loftus. The book combines two of my interests...humor and eating nonprestige food. I've been a little bit obsessed with it.

Raw dog. An expression with a number of meanings, related to some of kind of risk. Doing something unprepared. I didn't look it up until after I finished reading the book (actually, just now), and now I'm thinking the title...Wow. This could be profound. 

I've read a number of Thurber Prize finalists over the last couple of years, and I'm sure that I've mentioned here before that I find them witty, certainly, but not hugely, wildly funny. I guess this makes a lot of sense, because, as I probably have also mentioned before, I have actually read James Thurber, and, you know, he wasn't hugely, wildly funny. I like the Thurber Prize finalists I've read, which I can't say for a lot of prize books (I'm thinking of you, Booker Prize, which I now avoid). But I don't understand how funny you have to be to be a humor prize winner.

Jamie Loftus is a comedian, writer, and podcaster, and she has a distinctive sense of humor. Raw Dog definitely is a contender for the prize. But the book is a lot. Reading it was an experience.

Superficially, it is about Loftus's hot dog summer, traveling across the U.S. with a boyfriend, a dog, and, I think, a cat in rental cars as she samples hot dogs in various regions of the country. I no longer eat traditional hot dogs, because I avoid smoked meat. But I do eat the occasional bratwurst. When I started reading this book, I went into the freezer where I had a leftover grilled wurst. I heated that puppy up and found a gluten free roll to sort of wrap around it and ate it naked. By the time I was in a grocery store sometime later, while still reading Raw Dog, I just shot by the wurst counter. No, we are not doing that for some time to come. I'm done with dogs for a while.

Loftus went to so many hot dog stands, shops, and wagons and ate so very many hot dogs. This woman ate so much chili on those dogs. And described all those chilis in so much detail. I think that if chili was available, she ate it. And the onions! Good heavens! And relish. Evidently, she'll eat any kind of relish. My digestive system is fragile, and I could feel it failing just reading about what Jamie Loftus ate. It was too much for her digestive system sometimes, too. I know, because she writes about it.

Here's the thing, though, this book isn't just a food and travel story that should be one of those TV shows my husband watches. No, there is a great deal of social commentary here. Real commentary. In a New Yorker article about Loftus, Cat Zhang says that her first job out of college was at the Boston Globe (she was fired) but that she "retains a reporter's allegiance to fact." What she has to say in Raw Dog about things like how the meat industry treats both animals and human workers, gentrification, the pandemic, and Oscar Mayer Wiener Mobile drivers (no joke, they've got some worries) come across as serious and well thought out. And then she gets back to the freaking chili! 

A little digression: Loftus comes from Brockton, Massachusetts where my aunt Esther has lived all my life. I've been to cousin weddings there and a funeral. Honest to God, I had no idea about the city's reputation until another family member went to college in Waltham and tipped me off. Brockton seemed fine to us Gauthiers.

Anyway, I'm feeling about the Thurber Prize the way other people feel about the Oscars and Emmys. I hope one of the two books I've read wins.