Selling Out: If Famous Authors Wrote Advertising

by Joey Green

In Selling Out, author Joey Green has taken the voices of famous writers past and present - from Nathaniel Hawthorne to e. e. cummings, Jane Austen to Erica Jong - and fashioned their words into the ad campaigns they might have written if their prose pushed brand-name products.
Sure to raise a chuckle from anyone who ever watched television commercials, as well as from those slightly familiar with classic literature, Selling Out is a hysterical look at what our most famous authors might have written if they'd sold their souls to advertising.

Genres: Fiction, Humor

115 pages, Hardcover

First published May 1, 1996

About the author

Joey Green, a former contributing editor to National Lampoon and a former advertising copywriter at J. Walter Thompson, is the author of more than sixty (yes, sixty) books, including Not So Normal Norbert with James Patterson, Last-Minute Travel Secrets, Last-Minute Survival Secrets, Contrary to Popular Belief, Clean It! Fix It! Eat It!, the best-selling Joey Green's Magic Brands series, The Mad Scientist Handbook series, The Zen of Oz, and You Know You've Reached Middle Age If...—to name just a few.

Joey has appeared on dozens of national television shows, including The Tonight Show with Jay Leno, Good Morning America, and The View. He has been profiled in the New York Times, People magazine, the Los Angeles Times, the Washington Post, and USA Today, and he has been interviewed on hundreds of radio shows.

A native of Miami, Florida, and a graduate of Cornell University—where he was the political cartoonist on the Cornell Daily Sun and founded the campus humor magazine, the Cornell Lunatic (still publishing to this very day)—Joey lives in Los Angeles.

Reviews

[Don Incognito · Rating 2 out of 5]

I found this book annoying and not funny--until I got the joke. Its subtitle is "If Famous Authors Wrote Advertising," so I thought it would be a spoof of advertising. But the commercials made by writers and philosophers actually have very little to do with advertising, so eventually I realized the point of the book is actually to mock the writers and philosophers. The author's foreword actually gives this away, by talking only about literature and how most people don't know anything about it (e.g., claiming most Americans think Oscar Wilde makes bologna).

It's still not particularly funny, with some exceptions. "Catcher in the American Express," which a literary reader can easily guess is a parody of Catcher in the Rye, is funny just because it adds Holden Caulfield's gratuitous swearing to the American Express slogan "don't leave home without it." Nietzche doing "Where's the Beef?" is also funny. So is "Mmmm Mmmm Good," a Campbell's Soup-themed parody of Upton Sinclair's The Jungle--but that one is disgusting and will probably offend older and more genteel sensibilities. That's about it--the other parodies didn't make me laugh. I think I'll dump it in my library's donation bin.

Unless you're broadly familiar with literary classics, the jokes will be lost on you.

[Gem · Rating 5 out of 5]

Like a Weird Al style parody, you have to have a good working knowledge of the source material to be in on the joke. I can only assume that's the reason for the middling rating on this site. After all, as he states in the intro these are classics that are more likely read in Cliff Notes form than their original. And the ads themselves may not be familiar to those under 30.

If you've read the authors these parodies are based on, I think you'll appreciate the way Joey Green has captured the overarching flavour of each. From the ridiculously detailed description of the workings of a toilet for a Tidy Bowl ad by Melville, to Poe's terror at a talking carton of Parkay, Green aptly mimics the voices of the authors and the brands. At only 115 pages a quick little read and worth it for the well-read and well-watched.