Is it possible to find humour -- corrosive, taboo-shattering, laugh-till-you-cry humour -- in the story of a 38-year-old- cartoonist who's both a quadriplegic and a recovering alcoholic? The answer is yes, if the cartoonist is John Callahan -- whose infamous work has graced the pages of Omni, Penthouse, and The New Yorker.
John Callahan was a legend during his lifetime. His untimely death in 2010 has done nothing to diminish the power of his life story, which has now been turned into a major motion picture starring Joaquin Phoenix, Jonah Hill and Jack Black and directed by Gus Van Sant. Callahan's uncensored account of his troubled -- and sometimes impossible -- life is also genuinely inspiring. Without self-pity or self-righteousness, his liberating book tells us how a quadriplegic with a healthy libido has sex, what it's like to live in the exitless maze of the welfare system, and the dark places where a cartoonist finds his comedy.
'When people laugh like hell and then say, "That's not funny", you can be pretty sure they're talking about John Callahan.'
P.J.,O'Rourke
