Isn’t It Kind of Funny That… by Jerry Schaefer

Visionary investigations into the self and challenging existential questions fill the pages of Isn’t It Kind of Funny That…, a mind-opening read by author Jerry Schafer, with illustrations by Gabriel Berron.

The questions posed in this engaging and welcoming tome are put forward in a nearly playful way, but they hit at some of the most paradoxical trends in human nature: our variable/situational trust in science, our constant cognition as an obstacle, our stubbornness towards progress, and our fear of potentially beneficial change, among others. By prying into the metacognitive realms, Schafer is able to use simple language and straightforward questions to expand readers’ imaginations, spark their curiosity, stoke their doubt, and hopefully inspire a measurable change in how they move through the world.

The insightful musings on death, time, consciousness, and awareness are particularly universal, and will make readers return to those passages for another serving of wisdom. Though some of the formatting and text choices could pose a challenge for smooth reading, it also forces some slowness in the reading experience of a short book, encouraging readers to soak up the content both visually and textually, while also abandoning traditional approaches of reading top-left to bottom-right. This subtle manipulation of how the mind works and thinks, even as it peruses these ideas on the page, is an interesting play on the larger themes, and adds to the metaphysical nature of the prose.

While this entire book could be read in a single sitting, the fundamental queries it proposes could take a lifetime to adequately unpack, for an original and audacious interrogation of the mind.