the Mighty Book of Boosh

This book, the efforts of Julian Barratt and Noel Fielding (and Rich Fulcher, Dave Brown, Michael Fielding, Richard Ayoade, and a few other people) to convert into glossy hardback book format the same zany spatchcock whimsies and characters who populated the stage show, radio show and ultimately TV show known as The Mighty Boosh. If you've not heard of this show, go away and buy the boxset right now and devour it, you'll love it; basically if you don't know the show there's no point in you reading this post other than to the end that you might come to know the show. If you do already know the show, well done, feel free to read on. I must admit, I feel slightly delegitimised in my book-blog-doing lately since this is the third book in a relatively short space of time that I've read that has basically been a content-transplant from a televised comedy (see also The Thick of It and Alan Partridge) - but who cares, culture is culture, and I've had enormous amounts of university reading to do recently so I've been taking on much less heavy stuff for recreational word-consumption. I don't need to justify my habits to you. Who even are you? Nobody reads this blog.

   Anyway: this book, to those who enjoy Boosh, is nothing amazing but is a nice fat compendium of reminders of what you love about the show, presented in a hugely creative range of visual formats and styles. Amid the majority of the book being more-or-less random graphics and visual mashup pages of behind-the-scenes rough-work content from the show, The Mighty Book of Boosh actually contains a lot of amusing stuff: there's an extended bickering email chain between shamans Saboo and Tony Harrison, there's extracts from black magic tips & tricks from Naboo the enigmatic stoner shaman (by far the best character), there's Bob Fossil's full list of 'talkbox' notes-to-himself, there's a short gallery (with commentaries) of Old Gregg's watercolour paintings, there's one of Dixon Bainbridge's manly accounts of colonial heroism, there's a full-length story about Charlie in which he has a fight with a black and white rainbow, there's an extract from Bollo's scrapbook (including his letters to Peter Jackson when he, as a gorilla, tried to audition for King Kong), there's a memoir from the Hitcher about his Victorian upbringing, and needless to say there is a huge amount of edgy-fashionista pulp from Vince Noir and pretentious-jazzy drivel from Howard Moon. Howard and Vince carry the content just as they carry the show, the borderline-surreal angles taken by the world of Boosh kept in balance by their gloriously relatable comedic chemistry, drenched in pop-culture savvy wit, their contemporary-twentysomething-Londoner lifestyles overlapping the talking forest animals and dark magic and whatnot of the show in a single weird internal logic.

   Other than the short-but-hilarious full-colour sixteen-page comic inserted in the book's middle (in which Howard buys an old Spider & Rudi jazz-fusion record), the highlight of the book has to be the crimps. The crimps, in the show, are playful shortish improvised-sounding funny little songs (seriously, watch these) that Howard and Vince chuck about every so often, in quiet moments, just between them; they're so distinctively Boosh though, and so delightful, that they encapsulate so much of the beating heart of the show by directly capturing the pure creative synergy and flow between Howard and Vince, two characters who are so different but who work together to form a twosome perfectly, and the crimps display this perfectly. In the book the lyrics to the crimps are written out in expansive twisty flowing colourful text, graphic and often difficult to read but if you're familiar with the crimp you can follow it, and the drawn visualisation of the words fits Howard and Vince's performance of them brilliantly. Crimps are the most delightful aspect of Boosh as a show, and I think it's genius that they managed to convert it into something printable.
   Overall, the whole book follows this creative line really closely, and manages to be as visually enjoyable and engaging as it is genuinely funny to read, with intensity of both words and pictures spaced out nicely. So, this book would be a pretty good present for someone who loves The Mighty Boosh, and introducing someone to The Mighty Boosh would be a pretty good idea for anyone who appreciates innovative fantastical comedy.