In today’s episode, Quark is back to shill some more useless bathroom-library fodder, and this time he’s decided two showrunners are better than one. But this may be a case where less turns out to be more. What are the best word game rules? Which parts of the 90s are better off left behind? And why did I have to pay so much money for this? All this and more in Legends of the Ferengi, the book that’s actually an Excellent on the Quark scale.

Legends of the Ferengi
Author: “Quark” (as “told” to Ira Steven Behr and Robert Hewitt Wolfe)
Pages: 158
Published: August 1997
Timeline: n/a
Prerequisites: None

A little less than two years ago, we touched on a tiny bit of miscellany: a short chapbook called The Ferengi Rules of Acquisition, which contained the text of some of the 285 titular Rules—some of them recurring from the show, some of them made up for the book—and tossed in a few black-and-white stills for flavor. And that’s pretty much all there was to it. You would never see it in a store nowadays—not when you could just look the information up on the wikis—but even then I can’t imagine it not being kind of a tough sell, really only justifiable as maybe a selection for one’s bathroom library or a conversation piece for a completionist’s shrine. It wasn’t bad, per se. It was just kind of … nothing.

Regardless of its lack of substance, however, it must have been a hit with someone in one of the right places, because 1997 brought more of the “wit” and “wisdom” of the Ferengi to bookstore shelves, this time under the care and guidance of both of Deep Space Nine‘s showrunners, not just Ira Steven Behr. But even though there’s more to sink one’s teeth into on this go-round, so much of it is so bad. Some of that is a reflection of the time, which gets talked about more in this review’s unusually lengthy Stray Bits section. But a lot of it is a kind of bad that you can really only get in a book like this; it would get cut from a novel on the first editorial pass at the very latest, and more than likely by the author(s) themselves before the first draft was even finished.

Much of Legends of the Ferengi feels written by a 12-year-old whose entire existence is armpit fart noises and backwoods Playboy stashes. The book is lousy with stupid names like Splort and Shnoo and Popodoopopop. The stories are loaded with some of the most puerile humor you’re liable to encounter in a Star Trek product, and their connections to the Rules of Acquisitions are incredibly flimsy even for anecdotes that are only meant to take up space in a silly novelty diversion. It’s actually kind of hard to come to grips with the fact that the chuckleheads who wrote this are the same guys who shepherded Star Trek through its most mature iteration to date and its first serious run at serialization. Truly, human beings contain multitudes.

As with the other Ferengi book, I don’t think you need this one on your shelf unless you’re a diehard completionist, and even then, I’d probably try to dissuade you. Legends of the Ferengi would be a paperweight if it wasn’t so slight. It’s juvenile and (mostly) cripplingly unfunny, and its only function is to separate you from your hard-earned latinum. Quark would be extremely proud of it.

Stray Bits

• Legends of the Ferengi is, to date, the most expensive book I’ve purchased for the site. At the time, I couldn’t find it for less than $35 and finally caved. Searches today reveal that there seem to be a few copies floating around for somewhere between seven and nine bucks now though, not counting shipping. Alas.
• #8 (“Small print leads to large risk”) has a skeevy “joke” about agreeing to surrender all your naked pictures of [list of women who were considered hot in 1997], which is pretty gross to begin with, but the real cherry on the whole garbage sundae is the over-18 qualifier for Drew Barrymore they slipped in. This whole bit is super weird and super gross. One could argue it’s in character for Quark, but still, like. Come on. Do better.
• #31 (“Never insult a Ferengi’s mother … insult something he cares about instead”) is styled in the manner of the old David Letterman Top Ten lists. They’re all pretty weak except for one, number nine, that I’m mildly upset actually managed to squeeze a laugh out of me: “You’re so ugly, you have to wear your headskirt in front of your face.”
• #40 (“She can touch your lobes, but never your latinum”) tells of Iskel the Unimpressed, “Ferenginar’s most respected holodrama critic,” who wrote a vicious pan of a book called Vulcan Love Slave, which he also anonymously authored, so he could make out like a bandit when his poison pen drove sales. Worth nothing that his name is only one letter shy of “Siskel”. There’s also an excerpt from Vulcan Love Slave‘s ending included, but you don’t need to see that. It’s appallingly misogynistic even for something ostensibly Ferengi.
• #58 (“There is no substitute for success”): This one introduces us to Success, the Ferengi equivalent of the Beatles. They’re from a town called Kidneypool. Get it? Womp womp. Unlike a lot of characters created for this book, they actually recur sporadically throughout it.
• #76 (“Every once in a while, declare peace … it confuses the hell out of your enemies”): The only Earth comedy Ferengi find funny is The Three Stooges, “and even then, only those shorts featuring Shemp”, which is a reversal of what I assume either currently is the prevailing theory about Stooge shorts or was at the time—namely, that only the ones with Curly are funny. I specifically remember Cody (the Codemeister) on Step by Step once getting excited about The Three Stooges coming on and then being disappointed when it turned out to be a Shemp episode. I disagree with this take; Shemp gets a bad rap, but he’s still funny—just in a different way than Curly. And anyway, I’m fairly certain the actual shorts that pretty much all Stoogeheads can agree are to be avoided at all costs are the ones featuring Curly Joe DeRita and Joe Besser.
  • Also in this one, I should not have found “Klang the Incontinent Klingon” as funny as I did, but I insist that “I will kill you where you stand! But first I must visit waste extraction!” is a hilarious line to scream out in a Klingon bark.
• #82 (“The flimsier the product, the higher the price”) is a fantastic self-burn. No dumb story, no tortured joke; just elegant simplicity. Biggest, most genuine laugh in the entire book. Nothing else comes close.
  
• #95 (“Expand … or die”): The only Rule of Acquisition ever written by a non-Ferengi (a Breen, to be precise).
• #106 features a word game, which it appears the previous owner of my copy briefly attempted:
  
  The game is meant to illustrate, per the 106th Rule, that “there’s no honor in poverty.” Unfortunately, you can only use each letter once, so it doesn’t follow Spelling Bee rules, limiting some of the possibilities. Also, typo isn’t one of the answers, but it really should be.
• #113 is perhaps the ultimate Hall of Shame candidate:
  
  In case you don’t remember the 90s as well as I do, let me assure you, “jokes” like this were everywhere. It was called gay panic, and it covered the comedy landscape like kudzu. Imagine! via a series of wacky contrivances, a straight man somehow ends up in an intimate entanglement with a gay man! Can you think of anything more EMBARRASSING? And can you imagine how HILARIOUS that straight guy’s embarrassment would be?? Ugh. Shameful. I’m a big 90s fan—surely blinkered by bias, since it’s when I came of age—but there are some parts of it I’m more than happy to leave back there. I think the part I hate the most is that little “Yikes” stinger, which singlehandedly infuriates me almost as much as everything leading up to it combined.

Final Assessment

Terrible. Although it’s quite a bit meatier than the printed listicle that was The Ferengi Rules of Acquisition, more does not equate to better in this case. It’s crass, misogynistic, homophobic, cruel, and not as fun or charming as its “author” manages to be despite also being all those things. (It’s because he’s more often the one getting laughed at. Good comedy punches upward.) I hate that I had to pay as much for this schlock as I did. It doesn’t even have the decency to be the same size as the other Star Trek books on my shelf. Legends of the Ferengi is raw sewage. Avoid.

NEXT TIME: The Day of Honor festivities kick off with Ancient Blood