But the sales of this have created a new sideline for him. So not great, but in the easy-read department you could do worse.

And this didn’t quite do enough for me there. But I’m not reading it for that – I wanted to laugh.

And being in the parenting game I even found plenty here to relate to, and moments of interest, sure. I want to like this book more than it deserves because I like Gaffigan. A shame, too, given his consistency as a comic performer. He’s a competent writer but this never really ‘pops’ as you might hope. And/or they aren’t (quite) good enough.Īiming for the tone (and subject matter) of something like Bill Cosby’s Fatherhood (is it really the right time to be aping Cosby in any way?) Dad Is Fat deals with Gaffigan’s own attempts at parenting and the humour he finds in the situation (five kids, one tiny two-bedroom apartment) with some flashbacks to his own childhood. There are a few lines you can spot as exactly that, lines, bits-of- bits but actually, in this case, there aren’t enough. But Dad Is Fat is not that really great book, maybe it’ll be the swift follow-up (I’ll get to that next…) but this first set of essays-as-memoir is nice rather than great. But it turns out 140 characters are not enough to express all the joys and horrors of life with five kids, so he's now sharing it all in Dad Is Fat.įrom new parents to empty nesters to Jim's twenty-something fans, everyone will recognize their own families in these hilarious takes on everything from cousins ('celebrities for little kids') to growing up in a big family ('I always assumed my father had six children so he could have a sufficient lawn crew') to changing diapers in the middle of the night ('like The Hurt Locker but much more dangerous') to bedtime (aka 'Negotiating with Terrorists').ĭad is Fat is sharply observed, explosively funny, and a cry for help from a man who has realized he and his wife are outnumbered in their own home.There’s a really good book inside of Jim Gaffigan – and he isn’t so fat that it’s simply hiding. Those tweets struck such a chord that he soon passed the million followers mark. Though he grew up in a large Irish-Catholic family, Jim was satisfied with the nomadic, nocturnal life of a standup comedian, and was content to be 'that weird uncle who lives in an apartment by himself in New York that everyone in the family speculates about.' But all that changed when he married and found out his wife, Jeannie 'is someone who gets pregnant looking at babies.'įive kids later, the comedian whose riffs on everything from Hot Pockets to Jesus have scored millions of hits on YouTube, started to tweet about the mistakes and victories of his life as a dad.

Jim Gaffigan never imagined he would have his own kids.

My dad is fat book