- Performance: Jim Gaffigan performs his own material, which closes the gap one reader describes, that of supplying the comic's voice from memory while reading.
- What it covers: Fatherhood at volume, a crowded New York apartment, Irish-Catholic upbringing, stand-up turned domestic.
- Feel: Affectionate, quick, relentlessly domestic.
- Our call: Take this one in the author's own voice, since the readers on this page spend their reviews reconstructing it from memory.
Nothing about the setup sounds promising: a stand-up comedian writes down his thoughts on raising five children in a New York apartment. Then the description starts telling the jokes itself. Cousins are celebrities for little kids. Changing a diaper in the middle of the night is like The Hurt Locker but much more dangerous. Bedtime files under Negotiating with Terrorists. Five hours and twenty-six minutes of this audiobook exist, and Jim Gaffigan reads every one of them himself, a detail that turns out to carry unusual weight on this particular record.
Mrosethor's Memory of Gaffigan's Voice and Face
The most revealing sentence in the whole review column belongs to mrosethor, writing in July 2013, who describes the pleasure of reading the words on paper and thinking of that goofy voice he did and that face he made when he told the joke in that one special. That is a reader performing an audiobook manually, from memory, without the tape. On this edition the voice arrives already attached, along with the timing, and for material that began life on a stage that is not a small difference. It also tells you what kind of comedy this is. What that reader remembers is not a line but a face and a delivery, which is exactly the sort of thing a page loses and a recording gets back.
A comedian's book about parenthood can go two ways, and the copy is candid about which one this is. Gaffigan grew up in a large Irish-Catholic family and was content, by his own description, to be that weird uncle who lives in an apartment by himself in New York that everyone in the family speculates about. Then he married Jeannie, described here as someone who gets pregnant looking at babies. Five kids later he was posting about the mistakes and victories of fatherhood, passed a million followers, and concluded that 140 characters could not hold the joys and horrors of a house with five children in it. The copy lists the range from there: cousins, large families, diaper changes at three in the morning, bedtime negotiations, all observed from inside a household the description flatly calls outnumbered.
CJ the Mother of Three Laughs Start to Finish
That origin explains the shape of the book and it explains the format. Material assembled from short posts and stage bits is short-form by nature, which makes five and a half hours the right size and makes listening the natural way in. LakeMead Jim, filing four stars in July 2013, reaches the same point from another direction: the best moments, that review says, come when Gaffigan verbalizes the inner voices in his head, though in the case of a printed book he has to manage it, in the reviewer's own coinage, literarily. In audio the coinage stops being necessary. Five hours and twenty-six minutes is also short for the category, which suits a book with no plot to sustain, since you can stop anywhere and lose nothing by it.
This lands hardest on people currently inside the situation. CJ, a mother of three children five and under, laughed from start to finish and could relate to nearly everything, with the single exception of a five-story walk-up in New York, which she is relieved not to be living in. A reader in the United Kingdom worked through it between school pickups and naps and wanted it longer. The description aims wider, from new parents to empty nesters to Gaffigan's twenty-something fans, and on the evidence here it is the parents who report actually laughing. Erika Marie takes a different route entirely, comparing each chapter to a cream-filled pastry and finishing the review hungry, which is either praise for the pacing or praise for the food jokes and possibly both.
Six Votes That Cannot Average to 4.4
What the badge claims is arithmetically impossible. It reads 4.4 across six votes, and six whole-star votes cannot average 4.4, because the total would have to land between two whole numbers. The grades on display run 5, 4, 5, 5, 5. Whatever produced that 4.4, it was not the six votes as the record presents them, which leaves the written responses as the only evidence worth weighing. The badge ends up doing the opposite of its job on a page where the writing is close to unanimous already.
When mrosethor warns that you will recognize quite a few of the jokes if you know the stand-up, that is the one substantive caution on the page, and it presses harder on the audio, where you get the original delivery as well as the original wording. The same review treats that as a feature. Three of the remaining four describe reading a copy, never hearing one, one calling it a great read, another enjoying reading it, a third discussing what happens in the case of a book, which puts the entire column on the printed edition. Nobody here has commented on the recording at all. The dates run from June 2013 to August 2014 against a May 7, 2013 publication, so the column is at least genuinely about this book, whichever format each reader held.
Five and a Half Hours in Gaffigan's Own Voice
If you have small children, this is aimed straight at you, and the parents in the column confirm the aim is good. If you know the stand-up, you get the voice already in your head, performing material some of which you will recognize. If you know neither, the description's own samples are a fair test: six children assumed to have been produced as a lawn crew, cousins who count as celebrities to little kids, a night-time diaper change measured against The Hurt Locker. It suits anybody who wants a book they can start and stop around a child's schedule, since nothing here depends on remembering chapter four.
Once you have heard forty minutes you will know whether the register suits you, because it does not change. The jokes stay short, the subject stays domestic, and the tone stays affectionate even where the copy calls the book a cry for help from a man who has realized he and his wife are outnumbered in their own home. Anyone after a serious memoir of family life should look elsewhere, and so should anyone after cynicism, since the warmth is the whole engine. My own view is that five and a half hours in Gaffigan's own voice is the version this book always implied, and that the readers on this page spent their reviews reconstructing exactly what this edition simply hands over.
