On the flight over to Trinidad I finished reading James Acaster’s Classic Scrapes by James
Acaster, which I received as part of our family’s traditional Christmas Eve book exchange. I’m a big fan of his stand-up work (and I maintain
that his 2018 serialised show Repertoire is among of the most artfully-crafted pieces of live comedy ever written) and clearly JTA recalled this fact when giving me this book.
Many of the stories in Classic Scrapes have featured in his work before, in various forms, and I found myself occasionally recognising one and wondering if I’d accidentally skipped back a chapter. It helps a lot to read them in Acaster’s “voice” – imagining his delivery – because they’re clearly written to be enjoyed in that way. In the first few chapters the book struggled to “grab” me, and it wasn’t until I started hearing it as if I were listening in to James’s internal monologue that it gave me my first laugh-out-loud moment.
After that, though, it got easier to enjoy each and every tall tale told. Acaster’s masterful callback humour ties together anecdotes about giant letter Ws, repeated car crashes, and the failures of his band (and, I suppose, almost everything else in his life, at some point or another), across different chapters, which is fun and refreshing and adds a new dimension to each that wouldn’t be experienced in isolation.
A further ongoing concept seems to be a certain idolisation of Dave Gorman, whose Are You Dave Gorman? and Googlewhack storytelling style was clearly an inspiration. In these, of course, a series of (mis)adventures with a common theme or mission becomes a vehicle for a personal arc within which the absurdity of the situations described is made accessible and believable. But with James Acaster’s self-deprecating style, this is delivered as a negative self-portrayal: somebody who doesn’t live up to their idea of their own hero, and becomes a parody of themselves for trying. It’s fun, but perhaps not for everybody (I tried to explain to Ruth why I’d laughed out loud at something but then needed to explain to her who Dave Gorman is and why that matters.)
A fun read if you enjoy Acaster’s comedic style.
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