Every social circle has one: the funny guy who constantly muses about how great life would be if dogs spoke in rhyming couplets or if a huge child could share diapers with a small geriatric. One of them finally made it to print: Simon Rich, the 22-year-old author of the comedic jaunt, Ant Farm. Weighing in at 139 pages, this series of vignettes, most of them only a couple pages long, can be read on a lunch break. Rich’s observational theme park satirizes almost every possible subject, resulting in a hilarious if occasionally incoherent literary ride.

Rich, Harvard Class of ’07, admittedly has accomplished a great feat, writing a book that he can buy at his own college’s bookstore, but at certain points Ant Farm falls short. The work starts out strong; its Part I is a clever take on childhood and how Rich, and perhaps most children, viewed adults: UNICEF’s Evil Empire, which created a child force of change-collectors, puzzling over the incomprehensible behavior of parents and being able to see PG-13 movies. The childhood vignettes culminate with one of the strongest stories in the short work, “My Friend’s New Girlfriend,” noteworthy not just for its comedy, but as the book’s only story with real heart.

Overall, a few of Rich’s vignettes are a little too absurd, or just not that funny, reminiscent of short skits The Kids in the Hall would have rejected. The inside cover states that over half of the vignettes were written for and published by the Harvard Lampoon, but these are not distinguished. Overall, it’s easy to separate Rich’s good work from filler. Had Ant Farm only been produced a little more judiciously, the result would have been a short, tightly written book that is as funny as its marketers want it to be. — Aviv Rubenstein