Book review: Me of Little Faith

Daily Show fans are familiar with Lewis Black. He delivers hilarious, blistering rants, his face and body twitching as if he's about to have a stroke during his Back in Black segments.
He has also delivered brilliant stand-up comedy in HBO and Comedy Central specials, and he hosts The Root of All Evil on Comedy Central.
In print form, his comedy loses some of its entertainment value. But it's still pretty good.
Me of Little Faith is a collection of mostly short essays, plus one stage play he did with Mark Linn-Baker in the early '80s. Broadly, the book is about Black's "relationship with religion" as an agnostic Jew.
In one particularly funny chapter, Notes from the Land of Dreidels and Hanamantaschen, he relates some of the greatest disappointments he has felt with his ancestral faith.
Take Chanukah, for example. "When you compare [Chanukah and Christmas], there is only one conclusion: Christmas is great and Chanukah sucks. Next to Christmas, Chanukah looks like a retarded crafts fair."
Christmas is celebrated with dazzling displays of electric lighting, he notes, while Chanukah is feted with "itty-bitty, shitty candles."
Christian kids get tons of toys on Dec. 25, while young Jews get a succession of dinky little gifts over eight nights. Gifts like the dreidel, which every gentile knows as a spinning top.
"For God's sake, a top is not a toy," Black writes. "A toy is something you play with. You stare at a top. All a top is good for is if you have toddlers and you want to know how they are going to do in school. Just spin a top in front of them. If they stare at it for more than 15 seconds, you're fucked."
The play, which takes up nearly 40 pages of this 240-page book, is one of Me of Little Faith's low points. It may have been funny on stage, but it wilts on the printed page.