Quick Take
- Narration: H. Jon Benjamin reading his own material is essential. The deadpan delivery is not a performance choice so much as the entire point, and it cannot be separated from what makes the book work.
- Themes: Anti-success as cultural critique, comedy as coping mechanism, the freedom available in giving up on competence
- Mood: Absurdist and occasionally chaotic, like a very funny late-night conversation with someone who has given up on making sense
- Verdict: Genuinely funny for those who share Benjamin’s frequency, and completely alienating for those who don’t, with very little middle ground.
I want to be transparent about my relationship to this audiobook. I am not the primary target audience for H. Jon Benjamin’s brand of anti-humor. I came to Failure Is an Option partly as research and partly because a colleague who finds very little funny would not stop recommending it, and I have learned over the years that her comedy radar operates on frequencies I should take seriously. She was not wrong, with qualifications I’ll get to.
Benjamin is best known as the voice of Archer in the animated series of the same name and Bob Belcher in Bob’s Burgers. Both characters share a specific tonal register: they operate with a kind of exasperated, deadpan certainty that makes even reasonable things sound slightly deranged. Failure Is an Option deploys that register at book length, and the question the audiobook ultimately asks is whether that register can sustain itself across nearly five hours of material in a format that does not have animation or supporting cast to absorb some of the burden.
What Benjamin Means by Failure
The philosophical premise here is more interesting than it first appears. Benjamin argues, or performs arguing, that society’s failure aversion is a problem, that the cultural mandate to succeed, to optimize, to treat every setback as a lesson to be extracted and monetized, has made us worse at being alive. His alternative is not precisely failure but something closer to voluntary mediocrity as liberation. The vision he offers at the end of the synopsis, gardens overgrown and most people staying home with their pets, is genuinely funny because it is also secretly appealing.
The chapters that carry this argument most successfully are the ones grounded in specific experience: the failed attempt to deliver a sizzling fajita, the family fracture at P.F. Chang’s, the aborted children’s television project. Benjamin has a gift for finding the precise moment where ordinary human incompetence tips into something philosophically revealing, and when he is working in that mode the audiobook is very funny in a way that rewards close listening rather than just passive absorption.
When the Anti-Structure Becomes the Problem
The most honest thing I can say about Failure Is an Option is that its formal strategy, being a memoir that occasionally declines to be a memoir, a comedy book that includes lists of failed band names and illustrations of failed sexual positions, works unevenly. Some chapters are extended and sharp. Others are deliberately slight, performatively underdeveloped in a way that is meant to enact the failure thesis rather than just describe it. One reviewer drew the line at diarrhea humor. Another found parts of the book lazy, and conceded that this was probably intentional while noting that intentional laziness can still be lazy.
Benjamin himself pre-empts this criticism in the book: many will be confounded by what they read, many or all will be disappointed. This authorial inoculation is clever but it cannot fully neutralize the disappointment it predicts. The audience for this kind of comedy, those who find the form of the joke as funny as its content, will not feel cheated. Those who want a more conventional satirical memoir, one that uses absurdism to build toward a coherent point, will find the structure more frustrating than liberating.
The Audiobook as the Definitive Format
This is one of the clearest cases I have encountered where the audiobook format is not merely adequate but necessary. The humor in Failure Is an Option is inseparable from Benjamin’s delivery. His cadence, his pauses, his ability to make a completely sincere statement sound faintly ridiculous, are the engine of the comedy. A third-party narrator reading these sentences would produce something charming but substantially different. Benjamin narrating them produces the actual book. One reviewer’s five-star pre-review, which reviews the table of contents and acknowledgements before the reviewer has technically read the book, is itself performing Benjamin’s methodology, and the audiobook version is the native habitat of that joke.
Who Should and Should Not Listen
This free audiobook is for listeners who love Benjamin’s voice work, who enjoy comedy that wears its structure ironically, who can follow a joke into deliberately anticlimactic territory and find something there. It is not for listeners who want a self-help memoir with a real failure-recovery arc, or for those who need their comedy to add up. At just under five hours it is short enough that the audience-mismatch problem, if you are in the wrong audience, is contained. But those in the right audience will find this among the most distinctive comedy audiobooks produced in recent years.
Frequently Asked Questions
Is Failure Is an Option a straightforward memoir, or is the structure intentionally unconventional?
The structure is deliberately unconventional. Benjamin describes it as a memoir-ish chronicle, and the book includes lists, illustrations, and sections that decline to be as developed as conventional chapters. The anti-structure is part of the comedy.
How does the audiobook compare to reading the print version?
Most reviewers and critics agree the audiobook is the definitive version. Benjamin’s deadpan delivery is inseparable from what makes the material work, and a third-party narrator would produce a substantially different experience.
Is this free audiobook appropriate for fans of Archer or Bob’s Burgers who haven’t read Benjamin before?
Yes, and it is probably the ideal audience. Listeners already attuned to Benjamin’s comedic frequency will find the audiobook an extension of the persona they already enjoy.
How long is the audiobook and does the comedy sustain itself across the full runtime?
The audiobook runs just under five hours, which is relatively short for the memoir genre. Whether the comedy sustains itself depends heavily on the listener’s compatibility with Benjamin’s style. The shorter runtime limits the damage if the answer is no.
