A book in which a comedian forces bad humor on you, while complaining about the lack of enthusiasm service workers have during a pandemic.

Loftus almost definitely went on her hot dog tour and wrote this book as a joke and it shows.

I just wanted to know about hot dogs, and Jamie wanted to write a different book.

Raw Dog is light-hearted, vulgar, and appropriately entertaining.

I am, unfortunately, a killjoy. Yes I hate fun, yes I take everything way too seriously. Naturally, I didn't enjoy this book.

Jamie Loftus' humor is not my cup of tea. I absolutely despise when I can feel the author's intention to make me laugh behind the text. It's a feeling similar to a Buzzfeed article that relies on quippy one-liners to extract a slight exhale of air as a laugh - a bit forced, a bit too on-the-nose, a bit of over-reliance on low-hanging fruit.

This is my first introduction to Loftus, and how she relies heavily, emphasis on heavily, on vulgarity for a large majority of her jokes. I can't tell you how many times I was subjected to a joke about her diarrhea, or to condiments looking like cum or period blood, or comparisons to genitals, or jokes about people having sex.

I wouldn't call myself a prude, and I obviously expected some of this. I mean the book is titled Raw Dog for God's sake. But is it necessary to describe every single experience with the same no-brainer crudeness? It's like being around that person that can't have a normal conversation and has to make everything sexual or gross for shock value.

The book is entirely hinged on this humor, on the centering of Loftus to the point that the book is more memoir than food history. What should be the star of the show, the hot dog and its history, seems to always take a backseat to Loftus, her surface-level observations, and her endless complaints.

There's a self-deprecating tone to much of her reflections that gets old quickly. Loftus talking about her eating disorder and body image issues, about feeling like shit for eating so many hot dogs, about how "complicated" it is to hate capitalism and still want to support corporate cash grabs like the Dodger Dog merchandise. Between this and the crude humor, the book is repetitive to a fault, and an exhausted feeling creeps in by the halfway point.

While I appreciated the inclusion of more leftist-informed values, like talking about labor rights, American exceptionalism, racism, and class, the politics often stop short of anything meaningful. It's more a vague gesturing at surface-level systemic critique than a commentary on anything useful.

Of course, I didn't expect academic level political commentary, but Loftus' tendency to talk about something horrific like police brutality, followed by a joke about sharts, was frankly distasteful. The deeply unserious tone completely ruined any aspect of political or historical commentary for me.

At the risk of being the friend that's too woke, I left this book with an overall sense of subtle classism. Hot dogs don't have to be treated like some holy grail, Michelin star meal, but it is undeniable, as Loftus herself points out, that the hot dog is closely related to the working class and is well-known as a "poverty food".

When the book is built around these hot dog joints, which often requires traveling through more impoverished areas of the country, and the jokes revolve around making fun of how shitty the food is, how shitty Loftus feels for eating it, and how "backwards" the people are, it just leaves a rotten taste in my mouth.

I recognize that Jamie Loftus tried to include as much history as possible within such a limited space, while also balancing the entertainment value of the book. It's a book about a road trip dedicated to eating hot dogs, so of course it's not going to take itself too seriously, and I absolutely didn't expect it to!

However, Raw Dog had a lot more potential to be a biting commentary on sociopolitical issues using the hot dog as a vehicle. Everyone knows the hot dog represents good ol' American exceptionalist values, and its history is clearly interestingly intertwined with different political issues that could have been explored in detail.

Unfortunately, every aspect of the book falls flat, propelled by humor that's so painfully unfunny that it's more likely to elicit a pity laugh than anything.