How to Make Your Baby an Internet Celebrity
Year: 2014
Author: Rick Chillot
Length: 128 pages
I’m starting to think that these satirical “how-to” books genuinely only have one joke. If you’ve read the title and a few pages, you get the joke. Books like How to Talk to Your Cat About Gun Safety or How to Traumatize Your Children wear out their singular joke much too fast. While How to Make Your Baby an Internet Celebrity doesn’t have a lot of depth, at least it has cute pictures and diagrams of babies.
Humor books with a “bit” like the ones mentioned above are usually better when they fully commit. That’s why I prefer The Baby Owner’s Manual for its ability to translate raising a baby into car mechanic terms. How to Make Your Baby an Internet Celebrity isn’t quite that clever, since you might read it not knowing it’s satire and try these techniques on your own baby. And perhaps my appreciation of satirical humor comes when it’s so ridiculous that you can’t take it seriously. I’d almost wager that there are some people out there blogging about this very topic and are very serious about it.
With the fast growth of the internet age, one thing that becomes clear here is how this book feels dated almost a decade after it was released. On the flip side, it’s almost prescient in its examination of how algorithms control almost everything we see on the internet nowadays. Almost as a case in point, half of this book is filled with cute pictures of babies. If the satire doesn’t quite hit, at least you get to see professional pictures of adorable children.
One-joke satire that’s half-saved by its cute pictures, I give How to Make Your Baby an Internet Celebrity 3.0 stars out of 5.
