Earth (The Book) is a mock textbook by writers for The Daily Show With Jon Stewart — or “the authors of the popular television program The John Daly Show,” as they put it in a fake Wikipedia blurb on the book’s back cover. It is conceived as a handy guide for extraterrestrials who arrive on this planet after humanity has become extinct, in case those extraterrestrials want to know what they’re missing. It explains everyday details about how we live(d), from our use of the fork (“a way to hurt food one last time before eating it”) to our wearing of pants.
“We put these on one leg at a time,” it says. “You may require a different approach.”
Earth adopts a faux-scientific tone to explain the planet, its life forms and their quantifiable characteristics. Like the Daily Show this parody delivers wittily framed absurdities in a sweetly deadpan way. So there are statistics. (“Length of day (in days) — 1.”) There are charts. (Time We Were Willing to Wait for a Baked Potato: from 8 hours in 1900 to 1 second in 2010. Lifetime Food Consumption of First Slices of Wedding Cake: 2.1.)
There is a handsomely illustrated Periodic Table of the Synthetic that includes such elements as Wo (Wite-out), G (Gummi), Jq (Je ne sais quoi), DD (Silicone) and Li (Listerine). And there is a set of FAQs (“Future Alien Questions”) for each topic covered here. For instance:
Question: “How many different living beings existed on Earth when you were there?”
Answer: “3,000 quintillion.”
Question: “How rough an estimate is that?”
Answer: “It is the exact number.”
That happens to be a perfect example of what Charles Seife’s new book calls “proofiness”: an exact-sounding number that represents the antithesis of knowledge. And although such numbers can be as funny as Earth makes them, they are dangerous too. Seife identifies a phenomenon that we see all around us, whether in advertising claims, crowd estimates, voter polls, economic analyses and warnings about the extent of global warning. “If you want to get people to believe something really, really stupid, just stick a number on it,” Seife succinctly claims.
We all know what he means. So in some ways “Proofiness” is just stating the obvious. But it’s one
of those books that validates
pre-existing perceptions, making them more egregious and much easier to see. After all, Seife has dug up a pair of articles from The Associated Press, one with the headline “AP Poll: Americans Optimistic for 2007” and the other with “Poll: Americans See Doom, Gloom for 2007.” Since these reports ran on Dec. 30 and Dec. 31, 2006, and were based on the same survey, a closer look at manipulative number crunching is surely in order.
Proofiness, subtitled “The Dark Arts of Mathematical Deception,” can be seen as part of the life cycle of The Daily Show. It owes its title to the “truthiness” of Stephen Colbert, who was once a twinkle in the eye of The Daily Show, though he might not put it that way. And the same kind of sneaky logic that is nailed by Proofiness is regularly spotted by the eagle-eyed staff of The Daily Show. Incidentally, Seife takes care to make his politics sound neutral, or rather, to make himself appear equally enraged at number fakers whatever their political leanings may be. Inflating the size of a crowd to 1 million is the same offense, whether perpetrated about Glenn Beck’s “Restoring Honor” rally (Representative Michele Bachmann) or a Million Man March (Louis Farrakhan).
Beware an exact-sounding number, even if it’s more credible than 3,000 quintillion. According to Seife, nice round numbers convey an automatic message of exaggeration. So do precise-sounding measurements of concepts that are ill-defined, and so do voter polls, thanks to systematic and statistical errors. Those are different kinds of mistakes, and this indignant, excitable book is eager to explore them. It also pays particular attention to the 2008 Senate race in Minnesota, with its heated legal argument over one ballot full of write-in votes for “Lizard People.” Really.
The Daily Show writers deal with political craziness like the “Lizard People” fight nightly. And the previous Daily Show book, America (The Book): A Citizen’s Guide to Democracy Inaction, more than covered politics and government. So Earth doesn’t go there, concentrating instead on civilizations, structures, artifacts and physiology. A photo that purports to show half of a naked Larry King wearing only one red suspender is used as a gruesome anatomy lesson, a la the naked United States Supreme Court in “America.” The rest of this book’s illustrations are a whole lot better than that.
The early sections are dependably great looking and sporadically funny. (Planet Earth, the aging hottie: “Despite a pronounced equatorial bulge and receding polar iceline, she still stubbornly maintains a jaunty 23.4-degree axial tilt that belies her 4.5 billion years.”) The mock-textbook style gives the writers an easy template, even if they seem to be supplying filler from time to time.
But this book, like the show, is best when it takes on subjects of real substance. (Masturbation jokes don’t count.) That’s why the funniest material is about religion and science. Take special note of the tippy-toeing around Islam (“a beautiful harmless happy daffodil”), the calendar of December religious holidays for all persuasions (“Mission Impossible IV” premiere for Scientologists, “Charmonukkah” for “Blues Judaism”), the claim that the word Torah is “German for ‘kindling,’” and the map of Jerusalem. That map includes “Holy Missile Attack Rubble” that “burned for eight nights, despite only one night’s worth of explosives.”
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