Or should I say the story of every vacation of my life? This short story by John Hughes is possibly the greatest literary comical work of art I have seen in years. I laughed out loud on the third floor of Tucker as I was reading this today (and probably scared more than a couple engineers and math majors walking around). I'm actually planning on reading this story again soon just to make sure I didn't miss a single priceless phrase penned by Hughes.
I'm not sure if Hughes just appeals to my sense of humor, or if I laughed so hard because I watch National Lampoon Christmas Vacation every year with my family and we all find it hilarious, but this type of comedy is definitely my favorite: the ridiculous followed by more ridiculousness with just a touch of the slight sense that this could all really happen on any vacation (and I'm fairly certain most of these have happened on people's vacations, including a couple on my own!) Hughes' writing in this piece slowly got more and more unbelievable over time. Starting from the car refusing to start, to having to take a relative across the country with them, (even leaving the dog chained to the bumper is fairly reasonable, even if I didn't find that event particularly humorous) each event just becomes slightly more unrealistic, but Hughes does it at such a subtle pace that the reader is drawn into believing everything more! By the time I got to the car chase, I was totally immersed in the idea that it was still reasonable considering they had already stolen cash from a motel and been swindled by the auto repair man and the sherriff! (At some point I did draw the line, however I must say that point didn't come until Walt Disney was actually shot by Clark Griswold.)
I really enjoyed this short story (in case you couldn't tell). I know that there is a movie based off of this as well (National Lampoon Vacation) and after some research I found out that Hughes actually was the screen writer for the vacation series of movies as well, a fact that helped keep the humor of his tales intact on the screen when translated from the book. Like I said earlier, I will probably read this again tonight just for fun, and I'm definitely recommending it to my dad considering we share the same sense of humor. Although he won't be picking out the cognitive shifts or pointing out superiority theory as he reads it, I'm sure that he will get just as big of a kick out of it as I did.
In summary: John Hughes is in my opinion humor at its finest.
Hey Austin, I agree with you because this was one of my favorite readings so far! I have definitely had some crazy family vacations myself and, while my dad has never shot Walt Disney, my family does get into some similarly weird situations while on road trips. I think John Hughes does a superb job illustrating the struggles and hardship that go into vacations and the way he pokes fun at them is just plain hilarious! The exaggerations are what make this story and, even though the are hard to believe, they are still really fun to read.
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