I admit to being a huge Andrew Hanskinson fanboy, his first book (about British killer Raoul Moat) blew me away, it was amazingly well written.

This book is also very well put together, Hankinson carries out a series of interviews with comedians and employees from the famous Comedy Cellar club in New York. The individual characters (especially the club owner Noam Dworman) are very interesting and passionated people.

However the book, as a whole, does not hang together as well as his first book and I found myself drifting at times. This is not a disparagement of Hankinson's writing, he is really is a first class author, I just found that the concept of this book did not hold my attention across its breadth.

Good but not amazing.

I read this on the basis that I loved the author's book on Raoul Moat. This is a more challenging book than the first but that is a compliment and this is not less interesting. It is a careful, nuanced and very balanced portrayal of stand up at the Comedy Cellar. The use of transcripts presented without authorial comment leaves the reader to judge the comedians and comedy themselves, while the backwards, spiky structure forces the reader to constantly pay attention. To lean in. A really smart and surprisingly gripping book that made me think hard about a lot of contemporary culture issues