Tickling the English

Dara O'Briain's Tickling the English is one-and-a-half books. The one book, which is very funny, is a tour diary for what I assume is his 2008 tour which is full of anecdotes about the places he visits, great or sometimes terrible moments in his shows, and how Ken Dodd is about four hundred but can do five hour shows. This doesn't fill up the necessary number of pages however, so the other half of a book, is O'Briain trying to get to grips with 'the English' and what 'Englishness' is. He doesn't know, we don't know and none of these sections really go anywhere, other than to point out that we generally think standards in society are lower than they actually are. He does sometimes bring up Ireland to contrast it with Britain (Ireland generally thinks more positively towards it's teens even though they on average are worse with the alcohol than their British counterparts) but generally it's "hey, enough about my background, let's talk about you".

So yes, fun but largely uninsightful.