Do you remember the two grumpy critics, Statler and Waldorf, who heckled the Muppets?

I’ve always fancied Steven Beattie, if he grew a mustache, as Canada’s own spitting image of Statler. Beattie, not Statler, wrote a nice little piece on the Quillblog, Sh*t Some Publishers Put Out, the other day.

There is a new apparently unstoppable literary trend poised to join the ranks of carbon-copy publishing: “Sh*t My [Blank Does]” books. This one kicked off with Justin Halpern’s Sh*t My Dad Says, a memoir loosely structured around the gut-level wisdom of the author’s father, who amuses the Twitterverse with daily bon mots such as, “I lost 20 pounds…. How? I drank bear piss and took up fencing. How the fuck you think, son? I exercised.”

Following Halpern’s lead, Julie Haas Brophy has landed a deal for a book based on her Tumblr blog, Sh*t My Kids Ruined, which invites people to submit photos of their children engaging in the titular activity.

Beattie has a good point (and Statler would if you asked). While the world did need one book like this (it’s very funny), a slew of copy-cats need not follow. I’m reminded of the late-great Neil Campbell, author of the best-selling textbook Biology, who I worked with when I started in publishing many years ago. He always used to lament that we, as publishers, were always following rather than leading. He’d pound the table and say, “skate to where the puck is going to be!” Indeed.