No Filter Book Club: Brilliant, Brilliant, Brilliant Brilliant Brilliant by Joel Golby
If you’ve never heard of him, some might say Joel Golby is a staff writer for Vice and they would be right. But he is much much more than that. Joel is the author of the best and funniest essay of all time: A Man Shits Himself On A Plane So Hard It Has To Turn Around And Come Back Again and he writes a column called London Rental Opportunity of the Week where he uses his words to tear the London rental market limb from limb.
Joel is also the writer I Stan the hardest. I behaved like a full-time neek in 2017 and sent Joel a copy of No Filter’s Christmas Zine; I wrote him a little note and sent it off to Vice’s London office. I’ve not heard anything back weirdly but if he did read the zine then he now knows all about my first encounter with a poo-shelf in Germany.
I Stan Joel hard for three reasons: he is sidesplittingly hilarious, he has an excellent command of the English language and he can write about any topic and make it deeply engaging. To make the mundane fun is one of my main ambitions as a writer so sometimes reading Joel’s work is as annoying as it is joyous because he sets the bar high. This guy turns bants into an art form.
So Joel wrote a book which I paid the full RRP for and here’s what I think:
We have here a series of essays and articles hitting a spectrum of issues that us millennials can directly and indirectly relate to. In here you’ll find more information than you thought possible to know about camels from his trip to a Camel Festival in Saudi Arabia. You’ll be taken on a journey of personal growth presented through Joel’s favourite flavour of hot sauce. You’ll be walked step-by-step through a water-tight analysis of which Rocky Movie is the very best and you’ll learn exactly why the red M&Ms would beat the shit out of him in a fight.
Much of Golby’s charm lies in his ability to obsess, over-analyse and then convince the reader to agree with his way of thinking.
Example: After reading Wayne Rooney Is The Main Antagonist Of My Life it’s impossible not to agree that, despite Rooney being a record goal scorer, despite the cold hard facts laid right out in front of us, that Rooney actually is shit at football.
Same with Pitbull. In Joel’s essay I Will Never Be As Tough As Pitbull it takes all of two minutes to concur that the Cuban-American pop star and creator of that hair-tearingly annoying song Timber is indeed ‘one of the most singular and unparalleled examples of masculinity in our culture today.’
Or you can’t help but empathise when, in PCM (Per Calendar Month), Joel declares war on landlords and goes on to describe graphic, Battle Royale style executions of all the landlords that have ever wronged him. “Here’s my fantasy: I am a sniper and landlords are prey. […] Four fields away a series of captive landlords (they have been starved, for days, the landlords, so they are somewhere between desperate and insane), the landlords are given an opportunity: run the length of the field without me exploding their head with a bullet and they will be given their freedom.”
Joel is perhaps at his best when he describes the monstrous and transformative power of Monopoly. “I am holding on to Sam’s leg. Sam was my friend before this started but he isn’t now. He has lost both his adilette slides in the tussle. We are both lying on the floor in a position which, if it wasn’t for the aggressive energy in the hallway, could be described as ‘pre-erotic’. We are twisted together so I am both on top of and below him. Sam is holding on to his upright girlfriend’s leg.”
Joel escapes any dismissal as a class-clown writer because these articles and ponderings are sandwiched between two beautiful essays about the experience of losing both his parents by the age of 25. The first essay Things You Only Know If Both Your Parents Are Dead lingers as we ride camels, analyse hot sauce and receive hand jobs from sex robots. His expression of grief is raw, funny and untarnished by seriousness. He views death through exactly the same lens as he views Pitbull. I fully sad-laughed when I read: “This is another thing they never tell you about death: how, logistically, getting rid of two-and-a-half-kilos of ground Mum is a nightmare.”
Big Stan coming up: On the front and back of the book we have “Joel is the funniest writer I know”, “No writer is funnier than Joel Golby.” I disagree with labelling Joel as ‘funny’ as it doesn’t do justice to his skilled dialogue, his crystal clear descriptions or his ability to convey emotions and extract empathy. I almost punched the air when, after a three year hunt that forced him to shop-lift from various Mexican chain restaurants, Joel unexpectedly finds Chipotle-flavoured Tabasco-brand hot sauce in a corner shop in Stoke Newington. So what I’m saying is this: ‘funny’ doesn’t cut it.
Brilliant, Brilliant, Brilliant Brilliant Brilliant is the reading equivalent of going to the pub with your best mate on a Sunday night and finding yourselves still there at last orders, 6 pints down, chatting shit, convinced you’re the funniest people alive and if only the rest of the world knew.
Golby’s just packaged that up and published it.
Buy it here.
By Alice Austan
Oh and here’s the funniest essay in the world, didn’t want you getting distracted.
