Dates matter on this page more than usual. Every written response was filed in 2014, and this audiobook was published in February 2015, so the whole pool is a verdict on the writing rather than on the listening. For once that is genuinely useful: what those five accounts establish is whether the jokes work, and the jokes are the product. Chelsea Handler reads the material herself, so the only thing the page cannot tell you is how the delivery compares with the page.
Is Uganda Be Kidding Me Worth Your Time?
Chelsea Handler goes on safari, attempts to seduce a guide, and torpedoes it by not knowing which continent tigers live on. She wears a bathrobe into the bush because her clothes stopped fitting several margaritas earlier. Elsewhere she ruins a kayak in the Bahamas, escapes a German hospital on crutches, and loses her devoted companion Chunk in Telluride. The family turns up reliably to make each situation worse, which is the collection's most dependable engine.
Half the book is travel, and the page noticed. A four-star from October 2014 describes it as a smattering of random life events with roughly half the pages themed around going somewhere, which is a fair account of a book filed under travel writing. That same response makes the sharper observation: where the anecdotes appear embellished, the exaggeration usually makes Handler look worse rather than better, which is a specific and unusual kind of honesty.
Counting is where the listing falls apart. It reports three ratings averaging 4.3, while five people have written and graded, at five, four, five, five and three. Those five average 4.4. If they were the three counted votes, the page would not display 4.3, so the trio behind that number excludes at least two of the accounts printed directly beneath it. Read the responses; ignore the average.
The Best Parts of Uganda Be Kidding Me
Comedy written in the first person is the one genre where self-narration is not a compromise but the point. These essays were built out of a stage persona, with the timing already baked into the sentences, and Handler delivering her own punchlines removes the layer of interpretation that a hired reader would inevitably add. At five hours and fourteen minutes, the collection is also short enough to work in single sittings, one misadventure at a time.
Appetite is what the March 11, 2014 five-star actually measures. Most of its length goes on dreading how long the wait for the next book might be, which is a backhanded way of admitting this one was consumed far faster than it should have been. Comic essay collections live or die on that reaction, and nobody rations a book like this one.
The structure suits interrupted listening better than most memoirs do. Each piece stands alone, the settings change constantly, and no plot punishes you for putting it down for a week. That makes it one of the more forgiving choices on this shelf for people who listen in fragments, and one of the few where finishing out of order costs you nothing. Memoirs that build toward a revelation cannot be treated that way, and this one never asks to be.
Before You Commit to Uganda Be Kidding Me
Three stars, the lowest grade written here, arrive with the most substantial complaint. That July 2014 response argues the book reads as contracted rather than wanted, slapped together on the fly, with most of it not funny. It also spends its opening line on what the electronic edition cost, which tells you the grade is partly about value. Both halves of that criticism are worth weighing.
The description promises answers to frequently asked traveler's questions, travel tips and travel etiquette, then instructs you not to believe any of it. That apparatus is a joke, and jokes structured as lists are the hardest thing to sustain in spoken form, where you cannot skim to the next one. If a bit is not landing, you wait it out. The copy also misspells its own travel tips as trips, which nobody caught.
Register is the other consideration. The title makes a pun out of a country's name, the safari chapters treat an entire continent as a backdrop for the narrator's own chaos, and the humor is consistently self-deprecating rather than observational about the places visited. That is the deal being offered. Listeners who want travel writing that is curious about somewhere other than the author will find the shelf placement misleading.
Should You Listen to Uganda Be Kidding Me?
Handler's existing readers are the safest recommendation, with one caveat the page supplies. One of the two responses filed on March 10, 2014 calls this a very different type of book from her earlier ones and says it simply reads differently, while insisting it is equally funny. Fans expecting the earlier register should know it has shifted; fans who liked the earlier register anyway will still finish this.
Travel listeners hoping for a sense of place should look elsewhere, since the destinations function as settings for incidents rather than as subjects. So should anybody who needs their comedy clean: the description's own examples involve margaritas, a bathrobe in the bush and a kayak that does not survive the encounter. This is not a collection that holds anything back for the sake of decorum. The margarita count is a running joke rather than an aside.
Go in for the voice rather than for the itinerary. A comedian reading her own misadventures, with the family supplying most of the damage, is a specific and well-defined pleasure, and this collection is unusually clear about what it is offering. Expect the safari material to be the high point and the domestic stretches to vary.
