Description

Is there a secret to happiness? Comedian Paula Poundstone conducts a series of “thoroughly scientific” experiments to find out, offering herself up as a guinea pig and recording her irreverent, laugh-out-loud funny data for the benefit of all humankind. Armed with her unique brand of self-deprecating wit and the scientific method, in each chapter Paula tries out a different get-happy hypothesis. She gets in shape with taekwondo. She drives fast behind the wheel of a Lamborghini. She communes with nature while camping with her daughter. Swing dancing? Meditation? Volunteering? Does any of it bring her happiness? And more important, can the happiness last when she returns to the daily demands of her chaotic life? You may be laughing too hard to care.

The Totally Unscientific Study of the Search for Human Happiness is both a hilarious story of jumping into new experiences with both feet and a surprisingly poignant tale of a stand-up comic and mother raising three kids. Paula is a master of her craft. Her comedic brilliance, served up in abundance in this book, has been compared to that of George Carlin, Tina Fey, Lily Tomlin, and David Sedaris.

“The bravest and best improv comic of our time has now done the impossible and created a Work of Literature that has the wild, hairy spirit of performance about it … There is not a bad seat in the house.”
—Garrison Keillor

“Paula Poundstone deserves to be happy. Nobody deserves to be this funny.”
—Roy Blount Jr.

“I’ve discovered that the secret to happiness is to let Paula do all these things while I read her hilarious book about it.”
—P. J. O’Rourke

“Paula Poundstone never disappoints … An informative and highly entertaining book that deserves to be read and discussed … and I highly recommend that it is.”
—Carl Reiner