Comedian Amy Schumer's new essay collection, The Girl with the Lower-Back Tattoo, is out. It's ranking No. 2 in Amazon's list of bestsellers and No. 1 in Satire and Humor sections. Nettled, perhaps, by the book's success, or by the fact that a female comic's business acumen landed her one of the most lucrative celebrity book deals in the business, a small group of fans of the now-defunct Opie and Anthony radio show are trying to sabotage the comedian by leaving fake one-star book reviews.
The plan was hatched in a subreddit dedicated to the show, which was hosted by shock jocks Gregg Hughes and Anthony Cumia until Cumia was fired for racist rants in 2014 (he was subsequently arrested for allegedly strangling a woman). (The show was renamed "Opie with Jim Norton.") Fans admired Cumia and Hughes for outrageously pushing the envelope on what comedy could do. The Amazon caper was proposed by one poster yesterday and got off the ground on a dedicated thread about an hour later, as users advised each other on how to create fake accounts and congratulated each other on especially witty entries (one poster broke the fourth wall by plugging another comic in his Amazon review, while a third suggested that "someone do that thing where you give a 5-star review but it's actually still a bad review disguised as a good one.").
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"Do your part. Submit more reviews. It's still too high at 2.4 stars," said one poster yesterday. The book remains the No. 2 bookseller on all of Amazon, but with a 2.3 rating and comments like "boooo" and "Lena Dunham is fat" rising to the top, these self-declared comedy experts are teaching Amazon readers a lesson on what humor is.
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