No Funny Business by Amanda Aksel
Contemporary Romance
Published by Berkley on July 12, 2022

Reviewed by Kate

No Funny Business is, in theory, a book I should love. Two stand-up comics go on a road trip across the country together? Delightful. Unfortunately, though the premise was great, it just didn’t work for me in practice. 

Olivia Vincent is a lawyer by day, stand-up comic by night. Raised by her single dad who died of lung cancer prior to the book’s beginning, she moved to New York to pursue her comedy dreams. As the book starts, she gets an amazing gig that happens to coincide with a client dinner, and after bailing on the dinner to open for comic Nick Leto, she gets fired from her job. Luckily, Nick is headed cross-country and invites Olivia to tour with him, the final stop being in Los Angeles where Olivia has an audition booked for a late night TV show. 

Despite the fact that Nick and Olivia spend most of the book on the page with each other, I honestly could not tell you why they should be together. Nick comes off as a bit of a skeezeball in the beginning third of the book, especially when on the second leg of the trip he asks Olivia how often she’s having sex when they’re talking about their dating lives. At this point, he’s known her for about three days, and it just felt unnecessary and weird. Additionally, the book is told from Olivia’s point of view, so while the reader understands a lot about her and her backstory, we don’t get the same feel for Nick, and he’s not super forthcoming to Olivia as it is. He also seems to have a lot of baggage and it doesn’t feel like any of it is resolved by the end of the book, while Olivia has some actual character growth. 

Over the course of the book, Olivia is doing some soul searching as she tries to figure out if she should continue doing comedy. A lot of times in romance novels, this is where a really supportive best friend would come in – I’ll be there for you no matter what, they’ll say. Olivia’s best friend and roommate Imani was not like this at all. Nearly all of the time Olivia and Imani were on the page together they were fighting. They have a cute moment at the end of the book but I was just so annoyed with Imani for being so negative to Olivia about her stand-up dreams. And honestly, I got the same vibe from Olivia, since she spent more time ignoring Imani’s calls when she was on the trip than picking them up. This is not the kind of friendship I want in my romance novels. 

The road trip hijinks are a lot of fun, and Olivia’s stand-up routines are legitimately funny. But at the end of the day, Nick and Olivia’s relationship feels fairly superficial, and I just didn’t buy them together. 

Grade: C

Content notes: Olivia’s father died from lung cancer, brief scene where Olivia is groped by a drunk guy.

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