Love Advice for Guys
New ‘guide’ offers little instruction, but an abundance of fart jokes
by Michael Ray Taylor
In 2005, Nashville humorist Michael Crider enjoyed a surprise hit with the terribly long-titled paperback The Guy’s Guide to Surviving Pregnancy, Childbirth and the First Year of Childhood. Now he follows with what the author calls “a prequel, in the vein of the cash cow that spawned Darth Vader”: The Guy’s Guide to Dating, Getting Hitched and Surviving the First Year of Marriage (Da Capo, 177 pp., $12.95). The book offers the beer-swilling, commitment-avoiding male of the species practical dating advice in the fine tradition of Dave Barry.
Which is to say, no useful advice whatsoever.
This is a good thing, because guys don’t really want to read dating advice. Sure, they might peruse advice on precision-tuning a ’72 Mustang, catching the elusive brown trout or, perhaps, developing a daily workout that builds washboard abs while watching episodes of SportsCenter. But dating? That’s not so much a subject for advice as for narrative. When guys deign to speak of dating and marriage, the conversation usually boils down to a mix of horror stories and braggadocio (a four-to-one ratio being preferred in most sports bars). Crider understands this tendency, and wastes none of his short, readable chapters on tips for actually finding and snaring a mate.
Instead, following the formula developed in his fatherhood book, Crider offers a lighthearted memoir of the college romance that led to his successful marriage. Along the way, the reader encounters painfully familiar scenes of things gone awry with the first date, meeting the parents, popping the question, surviving the bachelor party, honeymooning and (in the final seven pages, mostly to live up to the promise of the title) making it through the first year of married life. Not to mention fart jokes.
Crider’s personal stories are punctuated with short dialogues at the beginning of each chapter, presented in the pseudo documentary, he-says/she-says style of When Harry Met Sally. She tends to be heartfelt and sincere, while he tends to be crude and stereotypical, thus getting the best laughs, as when he says, “If my inflatable blonde doll could cook a steak, I’d marry her in a heartbeat. I guess I’m just old-fashioned that way.”
At his best, Crider evokes Barry’s ability to play not only with familiar differences between the male and female outlook, but with the familiar language of advice books, as when he lists the two incorrect answers to the question, “Does this outfit make my ass look fat?” Those incorrect answers are, of course: (1) Yes and (2) No.
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