Lame of Thrones: The Final Book in a Song of Hot and Cold

by The Harvard Lampoon

Overview

From Harvard's legendary humor publication comes an outrageous, uproariously funny parody of Game of Thrones, in the tradition of their previous bestselling parody book classics Bored of the Rings, Nightlight, and The Hunger Pains.



An affectionate but take-no-prisoners send-up of the massive literary and television franchise, Lame of Thrones offers fans a way of reentering the fictional world they have come to love and merrily explodes all of its conventions — as well as their expectations of the characters — to hilarious ends. It may even leave you more satisfied than the actual TV ending of Game of Thrones. In fact, if it doesn't the Lampoon has really dropped the ball.


Lame of Thrones will take you to Westopolis, where several extremely attractive egomaniacs are vying to be ruler of the realm and sit on the Pointy Chair. Our hero Jon Dough was a likely bet, but his untimely murder at the hands of his own men of the Night's Crotch has made that seem less likely. Will Dragon Queen Dennys Grandslam escape from her Clothkhaki captors and return to conquer the world? Or will she just get left in the desert counting grains of sand for the rest of the book? And what about Jon Dough's siblings? Will they be mentioned? Probably? Almost definitely, yes? It would be weird if they weren't prominent characters in the book, you say?


To find out, read the book you wish George R.R. Martin would write but never will. The Lampoon — the place where such comedy writers and performers as Conan O'Brien, Colin Jost, B.J. Novak, Patricia Marx, Alan Yang, Andy Borowitz and many more all got their start — is ready to serve parody notice to the most entertaining, infuriating, and inescapable cultural phenomenon of the past decade.

Product Details

ISBN-13:	9780306873676
Publisher:	Hachette Books
Publication date:	11/10/2020
Pages:	320
Sales rank:	1,086,490
Product dimensions:	5.40(w) x 7.80(h) x 0.90(d)

About the Author

The Harvard Lampoon is the world's oldest continuously published humor magazine. Many of its alums go on to be famous and successful-including Conan O'Brien, Kurt Andersen, Colin Jost, Lawrence O'Donnell, B.J. Novak, Andy Borowitz, Patricia Marx, Ian Frazier, dozens of SNL writers, the writer-producers of Atlanta, Veep, The Office, Parks and Recreation, 30 Rock, and almost every Simpsons writer ever.

Editorial Reviews

04/27/2020

Fans of George R.R. Martin’s blockbuster A Song of Ice and Fire cycle will recognize many of the tropes in this lowbrow pop-literature parody from the Harvard Lampoon editors (Nightlight; The Hunger Pains). The book is rife with dragons, zombie armies, slit throats, and incest. Framed as a last-minute piece of hackery churned out by a wealthy, distracted, deadline-plagued Martin—the author himself pops in while vacationing in Cabo and pounding Bellinis—the story is a frantic mess of extravagantly named characters vying to rule the land of Westopolis from the Pointy Chair. But in satirizing Martin’s penchant for Byzantine plotting (there is a reference to the “Valleys of Infinite Adventure and Endless Plotlines”), the authors have created a book-length non sequitur: given Martin’s complex story, the satire is far more difficult to discern than in Lampoon satires such as Bored of the Rings, whose R-rated antics were designed to puncture Tolkien’s self-seriousness. Here, the authors are mostly content with poorly punned naming (“Queen Mommy Cervix Bangsister”), endless battles, and lavishly detailed scenes of excreta and sex. The result is a convoluted volume of middle school humor. (June)

Publishers Weekly

2020-03-29
George R.R. Martin’s sprawling saga comes in for a satire not worthy of the Crackedcutting-room floor.

Martin has made a considerable fortune and built a massive following with his long-running Game of Thrones franchise, which makes him and it fair game for the parody served up here by the editors of the Harvard Lampoon. “I’m, how do you put this delicately, really goshdarn fucking rich now,” the presumed Martin of this slender volume begins, adding snootily that HBO has turned his books into “the preeminent softcore porn series” of its day. The book—the one you wish Martin would write, according to the cover copy—proceeds by sounding the depths of the lowest common denominator, which is pretty low indeed. Remove 90% of Mel Brooks’ brain, including the parts that control humor, and this is what you would get. “Once again his inability to read had prevented him from reading,” goes one gag, an extremely faint echo of the joke trope that Groucho Marx started with, “I’d like to stay, but that would prevent me from leaving.” Most of the remaining shtick is built around characters with sophomoric names like “Ratpiss,” “Asserhole,” “Fucknugget,” “Yomomma,” and “Cervix Bangsister” (??), characters who witness and/or commit some pretty nasty stuff. There are lashings of violence, too, which is faithful, at least, to some of the more extreme elements of Martin’s original: “Dog Shit unsheathed his sword and began making his way toward Whoremund….Whoremund began to launch into an impassioned speech about how this was a historic day for Mildling rights, one sentence into which his throat was cut by Dog Shit.” It’s not worthy of the National Lampoon of Douglas Kenney’s day, which was just as dumb and sex-addled and pun-crammed but with one difference: It was funny.

The operative word is “lame.

Kirkus Reviews