"Crap Cars" and the figures of speech they inspire.

Roy Blount Jr. reviews Richard Porter's book "Crap Cars":

The DeLorean DMC-12 of 1981-83, he writes, had an engine "so weak it would struggle to pull a hobo off your sister." Not since Raymond Chandler have I met a metaphor so much more powerful than would do.

Which is not to say that Porter slings figures of speech around indiscriminately. The body of the G.M. EV1 (1996-99), he tells us, resembles "a snake trapped under a rock," and so it does. With regard to performance, Porter turns phrases the way sports cars should take corners. The Chrysler K-Car (l981-89) may have "pulled Chrysler from the depths of financial trouble," he concedes, "but did it have to be such a weedy little griefbox?" The handling of the 1974-78 Datsun B210 was "like trying to steer a wheelbarrow full of logs."

Do you like the outlandishly-overstated-metaphor style of humor? Overused, isn't it? I tend to think people who feel a lot of pressure to be funny use it when they don't really have a humorous observation to make.