"Larry the Cable Guy" has written his first book, titled after his popular catchphrase, Git-R-Done! It's so dirty I can't review it -- not properly, anyway.

I never realized how perverse Larry is. I've seen the Blue Collar Comedy Tour movie and watched his Tonight Show appearances. Either he cleans it up a whole lot for the visual media or I just wasn't paying that much attention.

The book started well enough. I was laughing all over the place, so much so that I called my mother to tell her a couple of the jokes and that she should read the book when I was done. Then I got a little further in and became self-conscious about lending it to my mother. A little further in I decided there was no way I could share the dirty thing. It should come in a plain brown wrapper.

That's pretty much the road this review traveled. I planned on writing a review, then wondered how I could without using the "Adult Content" tag, decided there was no way to even paraphrase the contents without labeling it "Adult Content," and finally reached the point where the only way to review it was to not give any concrete examples. That's no way to review a book.

But I'm gonna try anyway.

Larry is perverse and so is the book he crapped out. It's also, up to a point, very funny. Unfortunately it exceeds that point very quickly because Larry repeats himself ad nauseum. The same joke will only go so far, and he reaches that point about a third of the way in. By the midway point I wasn't even chuckling anymore. By the end, Larry's typing, "I know I said that before but it's funny!" No, Larry, after the 200th time, it isn't.

Don't get me wrong, there's a place for repetition in comedy. There's even a thing called the law of threes, wherein the first repetition establishes a thing, the second sets it up, and the third becomes a de facto punch line. Saying something upfront, then referring back to it later as a punch line without set up is an equally honored technique -- one Larry manages to use with great success a couple of times. Where repetition isn't funny is when it becomes painfully obvious that the repeater is not using it for effect, but simply because he's a five joke wonder. There's nothing left in the bag to pull out.

Larry's bag is very empty, indeed. Again and again we read about Larry and others holding in bodily functions, conquests with fat girls and cousins fifth removed, why mentally and physically disabled people are funny, how Rosie O'Donnell, Hillary Clinton, lesbians and any other females Larry doesn't like have male anatomy, and why NASCAR is God's gift to redneck-kind. I'd like to give you more examples, but I had to twist myself inside out to make those clean enough for public consumption. Rosie O'Donnell in particular takes such a repeated drubbing, one begins to wonder about Larry's sanity. Rosie might consider using this book as grounds for a protective order.

Git-R-Done's contents can be divided into two main categories: The origin of Larry the Cable Guy including his original material, and a lot of random commentary. In the former we find out his real name, how "Larry the Cable Guy" came about, and the origins of his catchphrases -- things I'd wondered about but probably could have learned after five minutes on Google. The latter provides some almost insightful Conservative commentary with a humorous twist. Both have a lot of stuff that would make Ron Jeremy say, "I cant believe he wrote that."

It actually would have worked better as two books, each devoted to one of those categories, and published a year apart. Being a faster, tighter read would have helped immensely, and it also would have alleviated a lot of the repetition induced tedium. As it is, the book's a difficult read. I spread it out over three weeks and still found it hard to finish.

The book feels like a rush job, instant publishing at its worst. On the Tonight Show last week, Larry said he's been married "about 5 weeks" to a girl referred to in the book as "my girlfriend, now my wife." That's an awfully short lead time from writing to publishing -- and it shows in sloppy editing. Back when I was writing, they'd say it took anywhere from one to two years after submitting the manuscript before a book would hit the shelves. Git-R-Done still needs a lot of editing. Without the rush to print, it could have been a much better, tighter, funnier book.

I can't really give the book a thumbs up or down. It's funny enough to make it worth a cursory read, but way dirty and boringly repetitive enough to counteract that. If you're a Larry fan, go for it. If you're totally turned off by gross-out humor involving bodily functions and puerile sex antics, avoid the book like the plague.