Howard J. Morris and Jenny Lee. Women Are Crazy, Men Are Stupid: The Simple Truth to a Complicated Relationship. New York: Simon Spotlight Entertainment, 2009. 240 pages.
Relationship books are always popular, and since a flood of books by purported experts hasn’t stopped couples from breaking up, why not a book by a boyfriend/girlfriend pair of comedy writers? This book’s basic premise is its title: women are crazy, but men are stupid. Put less bluntly, women can act irrationally, while men are often incapable of seeing more than the latest sports highlights.
It’s not a novel, or nuanced, view, but Morris and Lee put a new spin on it with their he said/she said style–each chapter by Morris is followed by a rebuttal from Lee. Both writers have some genuinely funny material that you could easily see turning up on a sit-com, as well as some insightful thoughts, like Lee’s epiphany, which came while watching a New England Patriots football game on Morris’s high-end television, that romance is “those moments in life that are in HD.” That’s certainly a language that Morris, and any other empathy-challenged, TV-loving male should be able to understand.
In the book, Morris and Lee tackle many of the major issues in relationships, including the difficulty of maintaining romance and the crippling effect of “grating expectations.” One of the most interesting chapters revolves around Morris’s brave decision to sit though the extended-version DVD of the Sex in the City movie with Lee, in an effort to prove his commitment and willingness to learn.
The tension and interplay between Morris and Lee is the best part of the book, particularly when they both share their perspective on the same incident. In a book like this, the characterizations are pretty broad: any author who reduces an entire gender to a single, over-riding quality (and a negative one at that) isn’t writing a psychology dissertation. Humor is inherently idiosyncratic, so not everyone may find this to their liking. The low point for me might have been Lee’s 12-page monologue about buying a pair of boots. This just didn’t work for me, although your mileage may vary.
On the whole, however, Morris and Lee come across as a likable couple. The reader wants them to be happy, and as we follow them through the conception and writing of the book, we really hope they work out the kinks in their relationship and find a happy medium. For couple who want a humorous way to start a serious discussion about how to make their relationship work better, this is a fun, provocative read.