Hyperbole and a Half: Unfortunate Situations, Flawed Coping Mechanisms, Mayhem, and Other Things That Happened
By Allie Brosh
4.5/5
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About this ebook
“Funny and smart as hell” (Bill Gates), Allie Brosh’s Hyperbole and a Half showcases her unique voice, leaping wit, and her ability to capture complex emotions with deceptively simple illustrations.
FROM THE PUBLISHER:
Every time Allie Brosh posts something new on her hugely popular blog Hyperbole and a Half the internet rejoices.
This full-color, beautifully illustrated edition features more than fifty percent new content, with ten never-before-seen essays and one wholly revised and expanded piece as well as classics from the website like, “The God of Cake,” “Dogs Don’t Understand Basic Concepts Like Moving,” and her astonishing, “Adventures in Depression,” and “Depression Part Two,” which have been hailed as some of the most insightful meditations on the disease ever written.
Brosh’s debut marks the launch of a major new American humorist who will surely make even the biggest scrooge or snob laugh. We dare you not to.
FROM THE AUTHOR:
This is a book I wrote. Because I wrote it, I had to figure out what to put on the back cover to explain what it is. I tried to write a long, third-person summary that would imply how great the book is and also sound vaguely authoritative—like maybe someone who isn’t me wrote it—but I soon discovered that I’m not sneaky enough to pull it off convincingly. So I decided to just make a list of things that are in the book:
Pictures
Words
Stories about things that happened to me
Stories about things that happened to other people because of me
Eight billion dollars*
Stories about dogs
The secret to eternal happiness*
*These are lies. Perhaps I have underestimated my sneakiness!
Editor's Note
Honest, vulnerable & funny...
Even if you’re self-disciplined & cat-obsessed, there’s a good chance you’ll still love & relate to Brosh’s honest, vulnerable, and laugh-out-loud funny prose in this essay collection by a dog lover prone to delusions of grandeur.
Allie Brosh
Allie Brosh is the author of the #1 New York Times bestsellers Solutions and Other Problems and Hyperbole and a Half, which was named the Goodreads Choice Award Winner for Best Humor Book of the Year. Brosh has also given herself many prestigious awards, including “fanciest horse drawing” and “most likely to succeed.” Find out more at HyperboleandaHalf.blogspot.com.
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Reviews for Hyperbole and a Half
2,802 ratings303 reviews
What our readers think
Readers find this title to be a hilarious and relatable book. The author's witty humor and hilarious illustrations make every page a joy to read. The book tackles a range of topics, from childhood confusion to crippling depression, with ease and authenticity. Readers have found themselves laughing out loud and relating to the author's thoughts and experiences. The illustrations are perfectly imperfect and add to the comical and relatable nature of the book. Overall, this book is a refreshing and enchanting read that is highly recommended for anyone looking for a good laugh and relatable stories.
- Rating: 5 out of 5 stars5/5When my sister and I were kids, she wrote this hilarious story called Mr. Jaws, which was constructed on a type of MadLibs concept, but using song titles. I remember laughing until it hurt as I read it, then feeling totally jealous of her talent for crafting such hilarity.
I had the same feeling as I read the much anticipated Hyperbole and a Half by Allie Brosh. I had already enjoyed some of the material included in the book on Brosh’s website, but Simple Dog and Helper Dog travel well from interweb to book. Of course, God of Cake will always be one of the funniest things I have read. E.V.E.R.
Brosh has an uncanny talent for nailing feelings and emotions using what appear to be childishly crude drawings. She conveys disappointment, rage, and happiness with just a few well placed lines. The accompanying text tells stories that we can all relate to on some level.
The most powerful piece in the book, however, is Brosh’s description of her battle with depression. We are given a glimpse into the very real, very confusing, and wholly debilitating experience of suddenly finding yourself in the middle of a severe depression. Anyone who has grappled with depression can relate to what Brosh endured, and I am sure that pieces of her artwork and text are printed out and taped up on walls all over the world. My favorites are “Not today! I’ve got legs, motherfucker!” and “I wish to rent all these movies and purchase all of these Skittles!” Those two acts of defiance can rally me on my worst days.
I have to wonder if the tremendous attention Brosh has experienced through her website and now the publication of her book has contributed to her owns struggles. Suddenly discovering that there are legions of fans out there who totally get her work has got to be startling. She has been missed on the web, but has returned triumphantly with a new story about the power of a dinosaur costume, another true gem of childhood.
Hyperbole and a Half is an awesome book and everyone should buy it. It has alot of heart. ;-) - Rating: 4 out of 5 stars4/5A book compilation of comics and sketches that look like they were done in MS Paint, sharing observations, life happenings, hard things, not hard things, and all manner of anecdotes that delight and amuse and provide understanding at just the right time. Stories about learning to function like a proper adult, dealing with depression, or training a dog. It's a book that's easy to leaf though rather than read front to back but that's okay, too. It's an excellent book to share with someone who needs a laugh or a hand or to see that other people might be experiencing the same things, whatever those "things" might be.
- Rating: 4 out of 5 stars4/5It's over and I want more. A hilarious book full of relatable exaggerated stories!
- Rating: 4 out of 5 stars4/5Hyperbole And A Half :Unfortunate Situations, Flawed Coping Mechanisms and other things that happened.by Allie Brosh2013 Touchstone Book That girl that can make mediocrity hilarious and fun....That girl that looks at life with a unique twist...That girl hat can make you smile and grin and chuckle out loud, at the most inappropriate times...That girl whose humorous outlook and style reflect a life on the edge...That girl is Allie. Allie Brosh.You will love her too.This girl has her priorities straightShe loves Cake.And has a story about a goose that rivals any horror story.The simple graphics and bold colors, with the twisted wit and humorous outlook made this one of those books you will turn to when you need to be reminded of the hilarity of life.A keeper!
- Rating: 5 out of 5 stars5/5Seriously one of the funniest things I have ever read. Even the sad parts were kind of funny.
- Rating: 5 out of 5 stars5/510/10, WILL READ AGAIN
- Rating: 5 out of 5 stars5/5Five stars! There's a reason everyone loves Hyperbole and a Half. It's funny, but also thoughtful. Things are pointed out that everyone probably thinks at some point, but we are all too embarrassed to say them ourselves. This book (and the webcomic) say those things. And it has pictures. And stories about simple dogs and attack geese. And about depression and navigating social situations. The chapters go by so quick you're done with the book before you want to be. It will make you laugh even when you're supposed to be quietly reading so as not to wake up others. And it will make you feel not-alone about all those little human quirks we try to hide to pretend we're "normal".
- Rating: 4 out of 5 stars4/5This great collection of cartoons is for every depressed person and everyone who has a depressed person in their lives. It is also for dog lovers. I hope Allie Brosh goes on to write Even More Hyperbole and a Half with even more dogs.
- Rating: 5 out of 5 stars5/5This is a great book I really enjoy how she describe her problems and her fight against depression is a good look to a topic that can be misunderstood many times. I also like the way she put all the stories about her life with a comical point of view but keeping them as close as possible to reality. Wish they were more authors like her.
- Rating: 5 out of 5 stars5/5best. ever.
- Rating: 4 out of 5 stars4/5It's over and I want more. A hilarious book full of relatable exaggerated stories!
- Rating: 5 out of 5 stars5/5I LOVE this book! Allie's simple drawings are so evocative and her story-telling is wonderful. She tells it like it is and is frank and honest. I am looking forward to more from her!
- Rating: 5 out of 5 stars5/5Totally worth staying up to read cover to cover. I will definitely re-read this.
- Rating: 5 out of 5 stars5/5Hilarious and heartbreaking. I received this as a Christmas present from my mother (per my request). I inhaled it (my class may or may not have been assigned sustained silent reading so I could finish it). I then post-it noted several places and asked my mother to read it so she could understand me better. I don't know her feelings on it yet, but I'll update when she returns it...
- Rating: 5 out of 5 stars5/5A collection of essays from Brosh's blog, each one includes stick figure drawings illustrating the essay. Very funny and most of the essays are very affecting as well. Her pieces on depression and motivation are particularly good. The piece on moving her dogs (simple dog and helper dog) to a new home had me laughing so hard I scared *my* dog. Recommended.
- Rating: 5 out of 5 stars5/5Allie is simply amazing. Sure wish her blog was active and she continued to post. I'm sure she's on to much more lucrative things. But I, and a special person in my life, connected so much with the stories shared on her blog (which are contained in this book). Her ability to relates pain, humor, fear, etc... She has a rare talent. Highly recommended.
Gotta run... must clean all the things!
(Thanks Allie) - Rating: 3 out of 5 stars3/5Nice book.
- Rating: 5 out of 5 stars5/5Just fabulous.
- Rating: 4 out of 5 stars4/5A collection of Brosh's blog posts as well as new material created for the book.If you've never stumbled across Hyperbole and a Half before, you don't know what you're missing. Allie Brosh's often hysterical anecdotes and observations paired with her Microsoft Paint illustrations are epic on every level. I've been a fan of Brosh's blog for several years and I was pleased to see some of my favourites included in this collection. As these anecdotes are prone to causing snorts of laughter, I don't recommend reading this one in public.
- Rating: 5 out of 5 stars5/5This is such a wonderful book! I'm looking forward to reading more!
- Rating: 5 out of 5 stars5/5So, so funny. I'm glad I purchased a hard copy because this one is a keeper.
- Rating: 4 out of 5 stars4/5Me and my girlfriend have been big fans of Allie's blog for quite a while now. After she stopped updating to start working on her book, we kind of forgot about her blog and stopped checking it. Then one day we stepped into a bookstore and there it was on the shelf. A real thing. She finally, really did it.
Good job girl.
For those of you who don't know, Hyperbole and a Half is one of the funniest things to ever exist. Seriously. Some of the hardest laughter in my entire life was due to this woman's stories and absurd drawings (and maybe a little bit by my girlfriend's live readings, complete with a cute voice for Allie and funny noises for reaction shots and the dogs).
So why only four stars? Well, this is an expensive book. Makes sense. It's full color pages and ink is expensive. I get that. But the book only contains eighteen stories, and some of them, perhaps half, are recycled from Allie's blog, where you can read them for free, and where I had already read them ages ago. I felt like I didn't get my money's worth.
Not only that, but the stories she chose to recycle from the blog were, in my opinion, not the funniest stories she's ever written.
So, if you've never heard of Hyperbole and a Half, definitely pick this up. Allie is a comedic genius who deserves whatever money you can throw at her. But the stories don't stop just because you've hit the back cover. After finishing the book, be sure to head over to her blog. There's more stories to be had. Some of her best, in fact. - Rating: 5 out of 5 stars5/5I loved this book! I will definitely be adding it to my collection sometime soon
- Rating: 4 out of 5 stars4/5This book is hilarious! Allie Brosh is great at turning simple, every day stories into hilarious, epic journeys. Her warped sense of humor and the weird thoughts that pop into her head (like wanting to throw sand at kids at the beach) are spookily like thoughts that I have. Her chapter on depression was so realistic and worded in a way that I think people who haven't suffered with depression would be able to understand what she's going through. The illustrations are fun, and I read this through very quickly, laughing nearly the whole time.
- Rating: 5 out of 5 stars5/5Allie Brosh is a successful blogger with more than half a million followers and her reflective self-deprecating humour is endearing and very funny.I read her book Hyperbole and a Half over a couple of sittings and really admire her honesty in addressing topics like depression and responsibility in relatable stories and observations. I also respect her ability to take a long - and sometimes difficult - look at herself and her character/nature in ways few of us ever do.Her drawings are comical and hilarious but don't be fooled by their apparent simplicity. I read on the FAQ page of her blog that she often re-draws a scene or a character's face up to 10 times before she's 100% happy with it.I chuckled, I laughed and enjoyed the stories and observations in Hyperbole and Half and will be following her work from now on.If you haven't come across Allie's work before, you can read some of her work for FREE on her blog. My favourites are her stories about the simple dog and the helper dog.
- Rating: 5 out of 5 stars5/5Made me laugh and gave me a lot to think about. We've been reading sections of it out loud while I make dinner in the evenings. The dog sections are especially hilarious and have the reader [Jim] in stitches so hard he has trouble continuuing. Love this book.
- Rating: 5 out of 5 stars5/5I recognized far too much of myself in there. Highly recommended.
- Rating: 4 out of 5 stars4/5This book was pretty hilarious at times. I really enjoyed her stories and would definitely recommend this book.
- Rating: 5 out of 5 stars5/5Great collection of self-deprecating, autobiographical humor. You've probably come across some of her comics online already, why not buy this book to read the rest? :)
- Rating: 4 out of 5 stars4/5I love Brosh's work and her pieces about her dogs never fail to make me laugh out loud. The book is a quick read and is full of unexpected insights. She writes candidly about her struggle with depression, but still manages to make it entertaining in her own oddball style.
Book preview
Hyperbole and a Half - Allie Brosh
It seems like there should be some sort of introduction to this.
Here is a re-creation of a drawing I did when I was five:
It’s a guy with one normal arm and one absurdly fucking squiggly arm. If you look really closely, you can see the normal arm under the squiggly one. What you can’t see is that in the original, the squiggly arm continues for the entire length of a roll of butcher paper. It started on one end and then just kept going until I ran out of paper.
I remember drawing it and thinking, This is insane . . . I can’t even believe how long this guy’s arm is. If I had not run out of paper, who knows what would have happened.
In its entirety, the arm takes up more paper than this book. Theoretically, I could have cut the roll of butcher paper into squares, stapled them together, and created Squiggly Arm Book.
I didn’t, though.
I considered that possibility, but, in the end, I decided I couldn’t realistically expect to get away with it.
When I was ten years old, I wrote a letter to my future self and buried it in my backyard. Seventeen years later, I remembered that I was supposed to remember to dig it up two years earlier.
I looked forward to getting a nostalgic glimpse into my childhood—perhaps I would marvel at my own innocence or see the first glimmer of my current aspirations. As it turns out, it just made me feel real weird about myself.
The letter was scrawled in green crayon on the back of a utility bill. My ten-year-old self had obviously not spent much time planning out the presentation of it. Most likely, I had simply been walking through the kitchen and suddenly realized that it was entirely possible to write a letter to my future self.
The overwhelming excitement of this realization probably caused me to panic and short-circuit, making me unable to locate proper writing implements. There was no time for that kind of thing.
I did, however, manage to fight through the haze of chaos and impulse long enough to find a crayon stub and a paper surface to mash it against.
The letter begins thusly:
Dear 25 year old [note: not Dear 25-year-old me
or Dear 25-year-old self,
just Dear 25 year old
],
Do you still like dogs? What is your favarite dog? Do you have a job tranning dogs? Is Murphy still alive? What is youre favarite food?? Are mom and dad still alive?
I feel it’s important to note the order of those questions. Obviously, dog-related subjects were my chief concern (Murphy was my family’s dog), followed closely by the need to know my future favorite food (I feel that the double question marks speak to how important I thought that question was). Only then did I pause to wonder whether my parents had survived.
The letter continues with a section titled About me
:
My name is Allie and I am ten years old. I have blound hair and blue eyes. My favarite dog is a german shepard. My second favarite dog is a husky. My third favarite dog is a Dobberman Pincher.
This is troubling for a number of reasons, the first of which is that I apparently thought my future self wouldn’t be aware of my name or eye color.
The second thing is the fact that I just tacked on my favorite dog breeds at the end there, like it was every bit as important to my identity as the other things. As if my past self had imagined my future self standing in the yard above the upturned earth, clutching my letter and screaming, "BUT WHAT DOGS DID I LIKE??? HOW AM I SUPPOSED TO UNDERSTAND MY IDENTITY WITHOUT KNOWING WHAT DOGS I LIKED WHEN I WAS TEN???"
I took a break from writing at that point to draw several pictures of what appear to be German shepherds.
Below the German shepherds, I wrote the three most disturbing words in the entire letter—three words that revealed more about my tenuous grasp on reality than anything else I have uncovered about my childhood. There, at the bottom of the letter, I had taken my crayon stub and used it to craft the following sentence:
Please write back.
Judging by the thick, purposeful lines in each letter, I was applying a truly impressive amount of pressure to the crayon. The sincerity of the request is unmistakable. When I asked my future self what my favorite dog is or whether my mom and dad were still alive, I actually expected to get answers. And, apparently, I still expected to be ten years old when I got those answers.
Please write back. I imagine myself patiently standing in the yard, day after day, thinking, Any time now . . . It’s going to happen soon, I just know it . . .
Time travel is a complex subject that I don’t expect a ten-year-old to fully understand, but this is more than just a basic misunderstanding of time travel.
I’m almost definitely not a time traveler, but in case I am, I decided to write back. In fact, I decided to write letters to several iterations of my past self, because I felt there were important things I could explain to myself or things I could warn myself about.
Allow me to begin with a letter to my two-year-old self:
Dear two-year-old,
Face cream is not edible—no matter how much it looks like frosting, no matter how many times you try—it’s always going to be face cream and it’s never going to be frosting.
I promise I wouldn’t lie to you about this. It’s honestly never going to be frosting.
For the love of fuck, please stop. I need those organs you’re ruining.
Dear four-year-old,
Allow me to preface this by saying that I don’t know why you started eating salt in the first place, but regardless of the precipitating circumstances, there you are.
As soon as you became aware that eating huge amounts of salt is really, really, uncomfortably salty, you should have stopped eating salt. That’s the solution. The solution is not to begin eating pepper to cancel out the salt.
You’ve found yourself in this predicament several times now, and every time you get trapped in this totally preventable cycle. You’ve done more than enough experimenting to come to the conclusion that pepper is not the opposite of salt all by yourself, but somehow you seem to remain stubbornly unaware of this fact.
To reiterate, no matter how much pepper you eat, it won’t undo the ludicrous amount of salt you ate before it. The only thing you are accomplishing by eating pepper is making your mouth taste like pepper AND salt.
Similarly, switching back to salt again won’t cancel out the burning from the pepper you ate to cancel out the original salt. How is this so difficult to understand? You can stop whenever you want to.
As a side note, you really need to start learning from your mistakes. Believe me, I know what happens when you discover electric fences next year, and you could do without that seventh jolt of electricity.
Dear five-year-old,
What the fuck is wrong with you? Normal children don’t have dead imaginary friends. Normal children don’t pick open every single one of their chicken pox scabs and then stand naked and bleeding in the darkened doorway to their bedroom until someone walks past and asks what they are doing. Furthermore, normal children don’t respond by saying, I wanted to know what all my blood would look like.
Normal children also don’t watch their parents sleep from the corner of the room. Mom was really scarred by The Exorcist when she was younger, and she doesn’t know how to cope with your increasingly creepy behavior. Please stop. Please, please stop.
Dear six-year-old,
You’re having an absurdly difficult time learning the letter R. You practice all the time, and you have mastered every other letter in the alphabet—both uppercase and lowercase—but for reasons beyond my comprehension, R just destroys you.
Look at this:
How does that happen?? How do you mess something up that badly?
The first one is understandable, but what’s going on with that middle one? How did that extra protrusion get there? And look at the tiny one on the right—that one has four protrusions. I’m not an expert on protrusions, but that’s