Bird's Eye View

Edinburgh Tip! Bussmann’s Holiday: The Worst Date Ever

The Worst Date Ever

Jane Bussmann, writer of the phenomenal South Park, was one of the extremely funny women who took part in our Last Laugh: Women Create Comedy residential training lab. She also came along to our Last Laugh Comedy Night at the festival in March, and read extracts from this brilliant new book, The Worst Date Ever: War Crimes, Hollywood Heart-Throbs, and other Abominations. Now, she’s back again from LA, this time to Edinburgh, with a series of live shows. Which will, we know, be just too funny to miss.

We figure the best thing is tell you what the critics have said about the book, which you’ll see is incredibly high praise, and back that up with telling you she’s just as sharp and funny in person as in print. This is the kind of lady-action humour we’re just dying to read, see, hear more of. So if you’re in Edinburgh, get thee to the Assembley Rooms at 4.50pm any day this week!

Jane Bussmann at the Birds Eye View film festival 2009

“Imagine The Last King of Scotland written by Shazzer from Bridget Jones’s Diary, and you’d still only get halfway to appreciating Jane Bussmann’s funny, incongruous and artlessly perceptive account of ditching the day job to pursue a chisel-jawed peace negotiator into the heart of a child-corpse-strewn Ugandan war zone, Topshop diamante knickers and Gucci luggage in tow… this is one of the funniest books I’ve read for a long while.” Sunday Times
“This potty mouthed, sarky, self-deprecating female journalist with no track record on Africa and a ludicrously inappropriate CV has succeeded where scores of doughty, better-qualified males routinely come a cropper. A small African war, headache of foreign editors and reluctant publishers, has never been captured to such hilarious and heart-wrenching effect. You go girl.” Michela Wrong, The Spectator

“This book will change your life, or a least your sense of celebrity. Comedy writer Bussmann’s hilarious, brilliant memoir shifts from Hollywood to Uganda as she finds herself struggling to make sense of a senseless world, when all she really fancied was a gorgeous peacemaker.” Daily Mirror, five stars ***** must read at all cost

“By turns extraordinarily amusing and gruesomely inappropriate, it is a messy tale of Hollywood vacuity, Ugandan corruption, child kidnapping, poverty and torture. The book perpetually straddles the divide between wry and wrong… Bussmann perfectly skewers the lunacy of Hollywood, proving a likably weary narrator… a comedy that is truly funny.” Observer

“The Worst Date Ever is as full of scurrilous asides about the famous as you might expect from someone who has written for both South Park and the Brass Eye Paedophile Special.” Private Eye

“I love this book. Heart-breaking, demented and screamingly funny.” Sally Phillips, Smack the Pony

“Very funny. Jane’s got a death wish.” Matt Stone, South Park

“Ballsy, deranged and hilarious. Jane Bussman’s ludicrous quest had me laughing on every page” Arthur Smith

“Great summer reading - Jane Bussman’s The Worst Date Ever. Black-listed by Ashton Kutcher, Jane goes to Africa to find Ugandan Warlord Joseph Cony. Funny, horrific and naughty things happen.” Popbitch

“It’s a funny, fierce and chaotic tale, excruciatingly honest about her own inadequacies and the ghastly side of LA.” The London paper

“Even in this dangerous part of Africa, she chases her stories, observes minute details and harangues key players until she gets good quote… as a juxtaposition of two very different worlds of journalism it’s fearsomely entertaining.” Metro

“Marrying vociferous rage with self deprecating humour at her own ditzy foibles, this is a marvelously maverick approach to the investigation of war crimes.” Marie Claire Five stars

GO JANE!!

Bussmann’s Holiday: the Worst Date Ever is at the Assembley Rooms at the Edinburgh Festival at 4.50pm every day this week. More info here.