Donna Sirianni's Review of Death’s Blog

Last updated: August 29, 2008

It’s cute, it’s quirky but it gets old quickly.

At least for me, anyway.  The writing’s great, the voice is pretty close to awesome and just the whole set-up and concept of Death’s blog is fun and fresh so why the three stars?  In my eyes, it didn’t stay fresh very long.

I kept thinking of Norm MacDonald’s Death in The Family Guy when I was reading this and there’s a stark difference between the two.  Family Guy’s Death isn’t seen very often so when we do see him, it’s with something new and the laughs at what he does maintain their freshness.  With Death’s Blog, it was cute and quirky for the first few entries (I actually read the first ten since they were so short) but I think the schtick got old quick.  The constant reiteration that he was once Death and is searching for a new life just dampened the humor that could have been there.

On top of that, I didn’t find Death’s life all that interesting, probably because I was getting so much of it.  This is a type of humor that I think would work better in spurts (again, see the Family Guy reference) as opposed to constantly trying to maintain that delicate balance of "normal" with "funny."

I think this’ll be one of the stories where either you like the humor or you don’t, you either stick with it or you don’t.  It reminds me a lot of Seinfeld in that respect.  It’s a show about nothing and the same nothing happens every episode with the same kind of humor yet the same kind of redundancy.  You’re either going to think it gets old or it doesn’t and you’ll continue to be entertained by it or you won’t and you’ll stop watching.

I commend the author for taking a different route in the serial world and he definitely has writing talents but it’s just the type of humor he’s chosen that’s very hard to maintain.  I was quirked out after ten postings.  It’s three stars because I’m in the middle of the road on it.  The level of writing, the voice and the concept counter the fact that there isn’t too much for plot outside of Death’s everyday musings which, I don’t think, are able to be kept interesting by the type of humor alone.  The scales are equally balanced here.

I would recommend people read this just to see something different, something that doesn’t follow your standard serial chapters and to see some genuinely good writing and read a great voice.  Humor is such a subjective thing and while it’s not that I don’t like it, I don’t like it enough to keep reading.

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