Just Plain Bored (Bored Of The Rings - The Harvard Lampoon)

Member Name: IainWear

Product:	Bored Of The Rings - The Harvard Lampoon
Date:	07/09/08 (101 review reads)
Rating:

Advantages: It's really cheap

Disadvantages: It's really not all that funny

For years, a friend of mine kept going on about a book that was a parody of "The Lord of the Rings". At the time it was out of print, but he would quote one of the lines from it at every opportunity and bemoan the fact that he never had a copy of his own. Fortunately, the surge of interest in the original books when the films were being made resulted in a republication of the parody and so he was finally able to own his own copy of "Bored of the Rings". Intrigued by years of his going on and on about it, so was I.

Following rather loosely the plot of "The Lord of the Rings", Frito Bugger is charged with a quest to travel across the world and destroy a ring. He is accompanied on his quest by his friend Spam, the magician Goodgulf and a couple of rather annoying boggies, Moxie and Pepsi. Legolam the elf, Gimlet the dwarf, Stomper the Ranger and Bromosel complete the party.

We get to follow their journey from the boggies' home in the Sty, to meet the elves in Riv 'N' Dell, travel through the lands of Twodor and Fordor to destroy the ring before Sorhed and Serutan can steal it, and use it to rule the world. Some of them have to help defend the city of Minas Troney from attack from the narcs.

Fans of "The Lord of the Rings" in either book or film form will note that some of these names sound vaguely familiar, but not quite. Unfortunately, this is the main source of attempted humour in the book; plays on words with character and place names. Essentially, pretty much all has happened here is that parts of the story have been taken and rewritten with some names changed and that really is about it.

Fortunately, it's not the whole story they've taken, as the majority of the book is made up of a parody of "The Fellowship of the Ring", the first part of Tolkien's trilogy. The rest of the book, which in Tolkien's version was mostly their respective journeys, would be far less easy to parody as there would have been less opportunity for comedy in there, so the authors have largely ignored it. This comes as something of a relief, as I didn't find the bits that were included terribly funny anyway.

Normally I would enjoy something like this, as I've always been a fan of the parody style of writing, particularly in the music of someone like "Weird Al" Yankovic. However, it just doesn't work for me here, largely because the majority of their invention is just in the changing of names into something half way between Tolkien's name and something in English. It's clever that they've managed to do this so consistently, but one clever joke isn't enough to sustain a whole book and even the joke wears thin after a while.

The other main aspect of the humour is the conversations between characters that are peppered with cliché and slogan, but little of substance. Again, this is something that might amuse the first time around, but each joke is stretched out longer than it needs to be. When one character is exclaiming a cliché prior to an action, all the characters seem to feel the need to have their own line, which is stretching a not terribly funny joke twice as long as it needs to be.

Slightly more intelligent and entertaining humour actually comes from the songs that, in Tolkien's original work, were one of the things that annoyed me most. Here, they are mostly re-written as a series of random words, frequently brand names, but as the time has been taken to make sure they scan and rhyme, the effort has to be applauded. Tim Benzedrine's song was particularly well done, although this did highlight another problem with the book.

Despite all this, though, the thing that made me laugh the most was the failure of a joke caused by the particular printing of this version. A character receives a prediction of his doom on a particular page number that is, at that point in my version, already several pages in the past. I did at first think that this was a deliberate error that would be cleared up later on, but when his demise came, it was immediately clear that the joke was on the authors, not by the authors, which amused me greatly.

Whilst I accept that a parody is going to suspend many of the rules of writing, I still don't believe that is an excuse for sloppy writing. There is far too much author intervention of the kind that makes you painfully aware that you are reading an attempt to cash in, including pretty much the entire introduction and several lines throughout the book. If this were a film, the characters would be looking at the camera with a knowing wink and this, like the use of certain jokes, happens far too often to remain amusing or entertaining for long.

The other annoyance was that the book now feels horribly dated and, in some parts, very American. Whilst neither are necessarily bad things, the original 1968 publication date does mean that many of the jokes would be lost on a younger audience and even more on a younger, non-American audience. Whilst I'm old enough to remember Edsel and when V8 juice was at its most popular, the joke about French war debt seemed far too old to be funny and I had to look up who Harold Stassen was to understand another joke. It may be that an older reader gets more from this book than I did, but I found that too many of the jokes were a bit hit and miss and more misses than hits.

Perhaps I've been spoiled by the far superior weblog, "The Secret Diaries of Cassandra Claire", which came out around the time of the film releases. These were generally very funny and, being written at the time, far more modern. This, by comparison, felt old, badly written and very out of date. Maybe my expectations were too high thanks to my friend, although I now realise that the line he'd been quoting from the book for so many years was the best line by far.

On the plus side, the book is available for 1p from either eBay or the Amazon Marketplace and I can't see it's worth a huge amount more than that. If I were a "Lord of the Rings" devotee, I would be more offended than amused by this, as Tolkien's work deserved far more thought and effort than appears to have gone into this. Those who aren't fans of either book or film version won't be amused by this either, as it adds nothing new and it's not funny enough to be worth a look by anyone and should be avoided.

Summary: Some books go out of print for a reason...