The Ridiculous Race: 26,000 Miles. 2 Guys. 1 Globe. No Airplanes » (First Edition)

Steve Hely writes for the Fox animated comedy American Dad! He was twice president of The Harvard Lampoon, and has been a writer and performer on Last Call with Carson Daly and a writer for The Late Show with David Letterman, the latter earning him an Emmy Award nomination for Outstanding Writing for a Variety or Comedy Show.

Vali Chandrasekaran writes for television’s My Name Is Earl. In 2006, his script Jump for Joy was nominated for a Writer’s Guild Award. He has been an editor of The Harvard Lampoon and a management consultant for Boston Consulting Group, and he runs the Web site Vali’s Views. In a memorable turn on-screen, he played the role of “Vali” on the NBC hit comedy The Office.

The most absurd, hilarious, and ridiculous travelogue ever told, by two hit-TV comedy writers who raced each other around the world—for bragging rights and a very expensive bottle of Scotch

It started as a friendly wager: two old friends from The Harvard Lampoon, now hotshot Hollywood scribes, challenged each other to a race around the globe in opposite directions. There was only one rule: no airplanes. The first man to cross every line of longitude and arrive back in L.A. would win Scotch and infamy. But little did one racer know that the other planned to cheat him out of the big prize by way of a ride on a quarter-million-dollar jet pack.

What follows is a pair of hilarious, hazardous, and eye-opening journeys into the farthest corners of the world. From the West Bank to the Aleutian Islands, the slums of Rio to the steppes of Mongolia, traveling by ocean freighter and the Trans-Siberian Railway (pranking each other mercilessly along the way), Vali and Steve plunge eagerly and ill-prepared into global adventure.

The Ridiculous Race is a comic travelogue unlike any other, an outrageous tale of two gentlemen travelers who can’t wait to don baggy cardigan sweaters, clench corncob pipes between their teeth, and yell at their sons, “You lazy bums! When we were your age, we raced around the world without airplanes!”

Publishers Weekly

Hely and Chandrasekaran are friends, TV comedy writers, and 20-something Los Angelinos who decide to circle the globe and make a race of it, starting in LA and going in opposite directions. The hook: no planes. Told in alternating voices, their story fails to engage, but is funny. Hely, for example, arranges passage on a container ship from Long Beach to Shanghai: "about as exciting as a giant floating Kinkos... Entire days I spent staring at the ocean. I read so much that my eyes broke and I couldn't see words." Chandrasekaran begins his adventure with a days-long drive to Mexico City, where he makes an absurd attempt to purchase a jetpack. Beyond comedy, the experiment yields little. Virtually formless, the narrative becomes a slave to its subject, racing from antic to antic without slowing for reflection or a sense of the world's impact on the travelers. At the finish line, Hely confesses that their conclusion is "impossibly anticlimactic," but given the setup it's more like an inevitability. What's seemingly impossible (and unfortunate) is how quickly this speedy narrative runs out of momentum.
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