Almost everyone has been fired from a job, and just about everyone has a story to go along with it. Annabelle Gurwitch, the actor and screen writer, decided to capitalize on this fact by compiling and editing a collection of humorous "down-sizing" stories in her book Fired! Tales of the Canned, Canceled, Downsized & Dismissed. After being fired by the media icon (and consequently her idol) Woody Allen, Annabelle decided to take her story to the publishers- along with several other tales from well known actors and media personal, including Bill Maher, Tim Allen, Tate Donovan (actor and director in The O.C.), Harry Shearer (actor in This is Spinal Tap), Dana Gould (writer for The Simpsons), Bob Saget and more.
The book is divided into five chapters: The Job So Terrible You Can Only Hope to Be Fired, The Firing You Didn’t See Coming, The Time You Deserved to be Fired, The Time Getting Fired Leads You to Something Better, and The Time You Had to Fire Yourself. Each chapter is as witty as the last, and will keep you reading and laughing through till the next. And with over a dozen "tales of the canned" in each chapter, you will have plenty of laughing to enjoy.
Many of the true stories found in this book are so funny, they will have you laughing out loud. The story of Paul Feig (director of Arrested Development and The Office) losing his Ronald McDonald gig because of a magical comparison between a rubber chicken and Chicken McNuggets he made to a group of school kids while wearing the clown suit will probably remain with me for the rest of my life. In another favorite story, Jeff Garlin (actor in Curb Your Enthusiasm) explains how he was fired for throwing a bowl of Fruity-Pebbles at a hotel wall… and all just because they stuck. Larry Charles (writer for Senifeld) reminds us that Taxi companies should never offer employment to a teen-age kid who has just acquired his license that very day; wrecking his cab before he even got it out of the parking lot. Stories like these are worth the price of this book alone.
To round each story off, the book also includes "Fired Facts": brief and amusing factoids about being fired, and the workplace in general. For example: "Increased risk of heart attack faced by employer firing an employee in the week after wielding the ax: 100%". What a great way to end your career - with your former boss in the hospital!
While Fired! Tales of the Canned, Canceled, Downsized & Dismissed is entertaining (being fired with the line "Take that hanger off your head, you idiot!" may be the best thing that has ever happened to me), it completely fails to connect with the reader. Each story falls into one of two major camps: meaningless high school jobs that no one regrets losing, and glamorous Hollywood jobs that, while interesting, are entirely foreign to the average reader.
In the introduction to this book, Annabelle Gurwitch concludes "So you were fired. Welcome to the club. We’ve been waiting for you." However, this book fails to present any "club" you or I are ever likely to be a member of. While almost anyone can related with being fired from a job, the stories in this book are quite different from any workplace axing I have experienced. And unless you have felt the horror of losing a job because your character was shot in the last episode, you will probably be unable to relate as well.
If you are looking for a light, entertaining read to get you through the work week, I would recommend Fired! Tales of the Canned, Canceled, Downsized & Dismissed. Though the book will probably not help you reminisce about jobs long past, that may be for the best. What better way to forget about your own "down-sizing" experiences that to hear the stories of a celebrity with their head on the chopping block.
Jeff Beck is an entrepreneur and founder of several notable companies, including the Book Price Comparison website CompareBook.com. As a student of the world around him, Jeff seeks understanding through history and reasoning.
Visit CompareBook.com to read reviews, find similar titles, and search for the lowest possible price for Fired! Tales of the Canned, Canceled, Downsized, & Dismissed and other great books.
Before we begin to crack open Faustus with venerate instruments tipped with the blood of morality, we need to make our peace with what the definition of ‘morality’, as a word, as an expression, as a universal truth is. Then, we need to cartwheel toward what the mechanics of the discrepant channels of ‘morality’ could be. So, let us pick up that scalpel, polish it out until it blinks blindingly, and begin to dissever with an unmatched callousness and a precision conversant only to unfailing flagrant egos.
Notions of Morality and Morality Plays
Morality is without definition, it is based more on structure but that’s so vastly variant that it cannot be called structure, but instead we can ideally define it as a highly malleable sort of conviction within oneself, ’subjectivity’ is perhaps the word I am striving to mine out. Morality is subjective. And this subjectivity again does not belong to one man or a set or a faction or a universe of them; this sort of subjectivity is impressive and it is dependable entirely on the solidarity of its conception. Weak minded men bear a delicate sense of morality; resolute men carry morality as their firmest assets. So, morality is subjective and subjectivity is the height of resolution, but, take note, both morality and subjectivity are parallels, even if they share the same source of origin and search the same habits for cultivation.
The intention of anything that surprises the knowledge of the prevalence of morality in men is or has to be handled by the same and set form of subjectivity. Something of this nature is what a Morality play is all about. Morality plays weren’t critical, seditious or subversive, but still, in a dearth of these attributes they were, most consequentially, didactic. That is, that they gave direction and motive to having an inbred impulse of morality, that could not be employed by perception or deceived in perspective, i.e., that couldn’t be impressed upon by subjectivity, and necessitated succoring it with the goal of its preservation. In matters of morality, all or any subjectivity is at a loss and without foundation. And sometimes, men commit the very endemic error of misconstruing morality, instead of subjectivity, as the basis of action. This is perhaps the reason why the very first form of plays, or theatre at its infancy, discussed an issue that though presented levity but enforced the fickle formula of man’s favorite fallacy - his morality.
Morality Plays, as is rampant in popular knowledge, resuscitated the oldest hypothesis of Good and Evil, to what man must owe his predilections and what aims he must defend, what he must uphold and what he must scorn. They were didactic not in teaching something exclusive, but conveying the rigidity and grandiose, august austerity of something as non-exclusive as one’s own moral preference. They magnified what men must commit themselves to, what men have committed themselves to and what these commitments must aspire to at most and what they must at least encompass; that conduct when bad made for untoward endings and when good, was a sanctioning passport to the pearly gates; that the Bible was as chaste and righteous in its each syllable as the breath of God in Bethlehem; and they helped the oldest notions foster, sometimes the means varied and often the content, but rarely did the intention waver. If you must ask why, recall that this was for the likes and sakes of a broader spectrum of subjectivity that belonged not to the composite nature of one man but the dull indifference of multitudes, and commit multitudes to their common fallacy, and they’ll delightfully lap it up, for what wrong can men find in a place wherefrom they derive the premises of what’s right.
What authors like Marlowe himself, did was to make such stalwartly puissant and fanatical subjects as endurable and cause to rejoice, they either corrupted their protagonists beyond all reprieve and expiation, or cast them so unsullied, so unblemished by the execrable that all and any of their attributes were extremities and what more, they coded it impeccably (quite judiciously too) with the marveling combo of epithet and noun - the Common Man. That, it is to be reckoned, is what bolstered the edifying, didactic element in these plays. As an old song goes, ‘a spoonful of sugar makes the medicine go down’, the masses swallowed up the interfering nature of the play disguised as insouciant, when writers like Marlowe used sartorial writing styles to dress these insinuations up, and tone the commandment-like mandate allusions to moral-preening down, and bedeck them in raiment, idyllic, literary and most crucially… passable.
‘Doctor Faustus’ - Christopher Marlowe gets down with the boogie
Ghosts in attics do not exist in cardinal corporeal form. Neither does morality. However, we bear a feeling for them, like we bear a feeling for the expectation of finding a newspaper on the porch, receiving a call in the afternoon, and getting laid in a brothel. Morality is ghost-like, we bear only a presentiment towards it; it is not something tactile, tangible and talking from personal experience, infallible and in that case, not in the least bit reliable. (Ha, ha, wouldn’t that be convenient? Imagine, a guiltless rapist, a superhuman politician and a saintly strumpet!)
Christopher Marlowe dishes out his own share of the large palette of morality, and takes up the murkiest nuance and wets the tip of the sable-hair brush sharpened with wetness, dips in an ion’s worth of resolution and poses in a majestic stance for a coup de grace. ‘Doctor Faustus’ is a Morality play by the same standards and grounds that any Morality play is a Morality play - it confirms morality as a necessity, almost an ideal, and the course of the consequences when its not.
Can you not just imagine Marlowe all dressed up with that very pliable Malacca cane breathing down the nape of you neck and sighing hoarsely, intoning syllables like a foreigner intent on butchering dialect, ‘Moral is Good. Amoral is Bad. Everything else is secondary.’?
It was the attitude of an age, and writers are nothing but mediums of attitudes, and if not that, then they’re supposed rebels; Marlowe was not a rebel. ‘Doctor Faustus’ parades most perceptibly even to the most unprofessional eye that it lugs all the paraphernalia of a Morality Play. It is like a transcendent cricket match: Good versus Evil, nine wickets down, Faustus on batting, last over, and the last sextet of balls, and the bloke’s pretty much cutting the cropper on each one. You’ve got Satan leading the host team and Mr. Almighty heading the adversaries, got Good Angel and Bad Angel in the line up, Mephistopheles to boot and a right wing non-diplomatic, uncompromising demeanor to hack the hole in the floor. Faustus caves in for itching temptations that need the balm of self-indulgent gluttony, and now he must face the repercussions of his blighted, insubordinate-to-moral-values outcast nature. At the end of it, for his deeds and for yielding, he feels up the wrath of a nice boot up his privates, metaphor intended.
What’s all Morality-play-ish about it? It is goddam exacting. It intimates that a pregnant cessation on one’s voracity is imperative, that overkill breeds evil and dissatisfaction imports it, that only stern principles of morality can engineer and engender true satiation and no pleasure can aim to compare to the one of rigidity in uprightness, that no man must readily or otherwise acquiesce to the demands that men often make of themselves, the one of surpassing and over-reaching. Too bad, that Marlowe and his chums never saw a Bollywood flick, I can wager my wits that they would’ve loved the picture perfect ending, bad pun also intended.
All queries and questions regarding the text should be shot at - mosaics12@rediffmail.com