How to Archer

The most readily available comparison I can make for How to Archer, a book ostensibly written by the fictional protagonist of one of the funniest shows on TV, is to Pawnee: The Greatest Town in America, another book ostensibly written by the protagonist of one of the funniest shows on TV. Both were silly little quick reads that probably hardly even qualify as "books" in terms of how much they enriched my mind. But a book is a book, and I'm not going to abstain from posting about a book just because it's hardly a book at all. (Sweeney certainly hasn't.) At any rate, How to Archer can best be described as a manifesto for how to live like Sterling Archer, the world's greatest secret agent. Part of the humor, of course, as anyone who has seen Archer knows, is that Archer lives an impossibly awesome life, even for a cartoon character. He's ripped, athletic, handsome, and rich, but spends virtually all of his free time getting drunk, screwing women, and using awesome weapons and gadgets in foreign countries. So more or less right off the bat in this book, he drops all pretenses, and just starts talking about how awesome his own life is, while admitting that the reader is probably very unlikely to take anything useful away from all this. The book is divided into sections on how to spy, how to drink, how to dress, how to dine, and "how to women." Clocking in at 140 pages or so (and many of them sparse, illustrated, or entirely empty), it made for a quick and enjoyable two-session read. Unlike the Pawnee book, which at times felt like a collection of Parks and Recreation's greatest one-off gags expanded and watered down into a pseudo-nonfiction book, How to Archer never felt like something I'd experienced before via the TV show, as narrator Archer never spent time re-telling anecdotes. Instead, he just prattled on and on about fine silk neckties, hookers in Monaco, and the pros and cons of airboats and snowmobiles as means of transportation. All of it felt extremely true to character - in fact, I don't think I could have read the book without H. Jon Benjamin's distinctive voice floating through my brain-ears - and the entire body of work is a well-made (if slight and trivial) companion for the TV show.