See that? That lovely item is an inanimate... • The Automaton

See that? That lovely item is an inanimate multi-hyphenate. It is a gorgeously crafted paperweight-doorstop-coaster-pillow-dustpan-hamper-book.

Yes, believe it or not, that piece of parallelogrammatic perfection indeed also functions as a book—but if and only if you don’t mind abnormally chortling, guffawing, chuckling, tee-heeing, or demonstrating whichever word listed under laugh in the thesaurus best describes your reaction to something you find incontrovertibly funny while reading it.

As a book, it is called Ant Farm and Other Desperate Situations, a collection of impossibly hilarious, one-to-two-page plays, essays, and stories written by Saturday Night Live scribe and former Harvard Lampoon president Simon Rich, injecting humor in almost every aspect of human life. As a book, it must never, under any circumstances, be read while drinking any type of liquid, in deference to your olfactories. As a book, it deserves a permanent place in your shelf, between the autobiography of Groucho Marx and Side Effects by Woody Allen.

As a paperweight, it is curiously self-serving.