H. Jon Benjamin - the voice behind Archer and Bob's Burgers - narrates his own memoir-ish chronicle of deliberate failure in this audiobook, and that single casting decision is the entire proposition. Failure Is an Option runs four hours and fifty-eight minutes and would be a substantially different experience without Benjamin's specific deadpan register. The AV Club's assessment, quoted in the synopsis - "writing this funny requires immense talent" - is correct, but the talent is audible as much as it is written, and hearing Sterling Archer describe his inability to deliver a sizzling fajita adds a layer of comedy that the page cannot fully replicate.
What H. Jon Benjamin Delivers
Benjamin's central thesis is that society is failure-averse in ways that are both unnecessary and counterproductive, and that his own career in comedy is partly a product of having embraced failure early enough to stop being afraid of it. This is not a self-help book that has dressed itself up as comedy, which is the more common genre maneuver. It is a comedy book that contains a genuine argument, and the argument is better for being delivered through specific absurdist episodes rather than through assertion.
The failures Benjamin chronicles are organized into categories - early days, romantic life, family, career - and each category contains multiple entries that range from genuinely pathetic (the failed fajita delivery) to philosophically significant (the failed kids' show launch, with its reflection on what the entertainment industry actually rewards). One reviewer described the book as "hilarious and relatable for other sarcastic, cynical, or self-deprecating folks" who "couldn't put it down." That is the core audience accurately described. Another reviewer noted that while "parts of this book were lazy" in terms of effort - an accusation Benjamin himself might not contest - the stronger chapters "will have you laughing very hard." And they are right on both counts.
Benjamin is not straining for profundity; he is comfortable with the material being exactly as lazy as it needs to be, which is itself a demonstration of the book's argument. The sections on illustrated failed sex positions and lists of failed band names are genuinely less substantive than the career and family chapters, and the book makes no attempt to hide that imbalance. The can't-do attitude promised in the synopsis is delivered without ironic quotation marks around it.
What H. Jon Benjamin Gets Right
The audio format is not just preferable for this book - it is definitionally correct. Listening to Benjamin deliver these failures in his own voice, with his own comedic timing, produces a qualitatively different experience than reading the text. The pauses, the flat affect on material that should sound dramatic, the way he delivers the word "failure" with what sounds like genuine professional satisfaction - these are performance elements that the text can only gesture toward. One reviewer noted that people bought extra copies for friends, which is a reasonable response to something that functions as comedy gift-giving while simultaneously functioning as memoir.
At four hours and fifty-eight minutes, the runtime is perfectly calibrated - long enough to develop the philosophical thread across multiple failure categories and to let Benjamin's specific persona build real comic momentum, short enough that it does not start to feel like an endurance test. The book moves efficiently through its sections, and Benjamin's energy does not flag across the runtime. For listeners who have spent time with his other work and wanted more extended Benjamin, this audiobook delivers that without any of the constraints of an interview format.
Where H. Jon Benjamin Loses Some Ground
The book's most surprising section is Benjamin's account of the failed kids' show launch, which transitions from comedy into something more like an honest examination of what kinds of failure the entertainment industry actually produces. The reflection on what it means to launch something that fails commercially rather than artistically - the show that no one saw because no one bought it, not because it was bad - turns out to contain a more precise account of creative failure than most books on the subject manage. The distinction between a work that fails because it is bad and a work that fails because the system does not have a place for it is one that artists in any field will recognize immediately.
The earlier sections - the romantic failures, the family P.F. Chang's incident - are where the comedy is most dense and Benjamin's voice work is most satisfying. The final chapters, where the philosophical argument about failure-acceptance becomes most explicit, are less funny and more earnest, which is a shift some listeners will appreciate and others will find slightly anticlimactic after the sustained absurdism of the earlier material.
Who Should Pick Up Failure Is an Option
Fans of Benjamin's voice acting work who want to hear him apply that specific register to self-narrated memoir will get exactly what they are hoping for. The audio format is not merely preferable here - it is the version of the book that the author clearly intended, given that his voice is doing as much argumentative work as his sentences are. Listeners who respond to self-deprecating, anti-success-culture comedy will find this a natural fit, though Benjamin's register is drier and more absurdist than most of the memoir-humor genre. Listeners who need their comedy memoirs to have a redemption arc or a clear self-improvement payoff will find this book actively resistant to those expectations - which is either the joke or the problem depending on your tolerance. This is not an audiobook for background listening; Benjamin's timing requires attention to land correctly.
Quick Take
- Performance: H. Jon Benjamin narrating his own memoir is the entire proposition - the Archer and Bob's Burgers voice delivering absurdist personal failure with deadpan timing that no one else could replicate.
- What it covers: Deliberate failure as philosophy, self-deprecation as genuine worldview, the comedy of expectation
- Feel: Gleefully low-stakes and unexpectedly subversive
- Our call: A comedy memoir audiobook that Benjamin's voice transforms into something more than the sum of its failed chapters - funnier in audio than it could possibly be in print.
A Few Questions About Failure Is an Option
Is Failure Is an Option actually funny as an audiobook, or does the humor depend on reading the text?
Benjamin's narration is the primary vehicle for the humor. His deadpan delivery and the specific comedic timing he has developed through Archer and Bob's Burgers make the audio version significantly funnier than a reading experience could be. The AV Club specifically cited the talent required to write this material, and that talent is most apparent in the performance.
Is this audiobook more comedy than memoir, or does it have substantial personal content?
It is primarily comedy, structured loosely as memoir. The personal episodes are real but treated with sustained ironic detachment. The book does develop a genuine philosophical position about failure and success over its runtime, but it arrives at that position through comedy rather than sincerity, and the comedy takes priority throughout.
