Failure Is An Option: An Attempted Memoir by H. Jon Benjamin

 

Reviewed by Kristin

H. Jon Benjamin set out to write about his many failures. This is perhaps the one thing at which he was successful. His chapter titles spell out how he failed in childhood and his teen years, then moved on to failing in adulthood. He writes about failing in tying knots in Cub Scouts. He writes about failing to be cool because he liked disco. He writes about his bar mitzvah, and how even the disco ball was a failure when the DJ hired by his parents began to play Tony Bennett and Nat King Cole.

In this review I think I have established that Benjamin is telling us about his failures. But then he gets into some of his more personal and intimate failures and it just got a little…weird. Moving beyond the wide open window he opened into his failed sexual escapades, he also failed at a college degree in Holocaust studies, and failed to sell a sit-com pilot, and failed in his use of a whole list of pickup lines as well.

Somewhere around this point, I decided to start skimming the rest of the book. I don’t think I missed much. Some of the first few bits were funny, but they became repetitive all too quickly.

Benjamin may be some people’s favorite actor, comedian, and writer. But I must say that he isn’t mine. He is known for his voice roles in several adult animated series, such as Sterling Archer in Archer, Bob Belcher in Bob’s Burgers, and Carl in Family Guy. However, I haven’t watched any of those shows. He may be a really funny guy, but this self-proclaimed “attempted memoir” fell a little flat for me.

Actually, I enjoyed watching Benjamin in the Star Trek: Short Treks episode “The Trouble with Edward”. This is how I became aware of him and decided to seek out this book. He is so good at playing an inept starship scientist that I thought a self-deprecating memoir might be funny. (As stated above, I was wrong.) But if you have access to Paramount Plus or some other way to watch this short episode, please do. Benjamin plays a scientist on a Star Trek research ship where his experiment gets a little out of control. The Tribbles backstory is expanded here, and fits perfectly into the Star Trek canon regarding Klingons hating the constantly reproducing little fur balls. As Edward’s captain sits before a governing board trying to explain how her first mission resulted in such chaos and how it was all the fault of one crew member, she simply says, “He was an idiot.”