Some people overlook minor inconveniences, accommodate other people’s peculiarities, and accept that everyday life involves a certain amount of irritation. Kitty Flanagan is not one of those people. In More Rules for Life, the Australian comedian returns to the business of telling everyone how to behave, issuing another 157 instructions covering everything from badly organised cafés to inappropriate greetings, unnecessary kitchen appliances, and the indignities of getting older.
Published by Allen & Unwin in 2021, More Rules for Life: A Special Volume for Enthusiasts is the companion volume to Flanagan’s earlier 488 Rules for Life. Its rules continue the original numbering, beginning at 489 and finishing at 645, followed by four additional suggestions. The premise remains deliberately absurd: one comedian’s preferences are presented as though they constitute a comprehensive legal code for civilised existence.
This time, however, the COVID-19 pandemic gives Flanagan an entirely new collection of human behaviours to examine. Panic buying, masks, lockdown entertainment, Zoom meetings, and corporate declarations of solidarity enter a world already crowded with questionable fashion, irritating language, and social awkwardness. Beneath the exaggerated complaints lies a recurring distinction between people who consider how their behaviour affects others and those who seem oblivious to the inconvenience they cause. Much of the comedy comes from Flanagan’s confidence that she can identify the difference, even when her own judgments are spectacularly unreasonable.
Why the Rules Keep Coming
When Flanagan published 488 Rules for Life, she believed she had exhausted the subject of proper conduct. Within a week, she began thinking of additional rules. The arrival of COVID-19 then introduced situations that had barely existed in ordinary social life, while other observations that she had previously considered too severe suddenly seemed worth publishing.
The sequel consequently combines three kinds of material: rules forgotten during the first book, rules responding to pandemic life, and unusually sharp opinions that Flanagan had originally decided to leave out. Its subtitle, A Special Volume for Enthusiasts, reflects her conviction that the ideal reader actively appreciates boundaries and instructions rather than approaching life with an easygoing willingness to accept whatever happens.
The introductory instructions are important because Flanagan explicitly describes the books as comedy. She does not expect universal agreement, and she anticipates that readers will occasionally find her judgments offensive or ridiculous. Her suggested response is to turn the page, or even throw the offending book across the room, rather than becoming genuinely enraged.
She also repeats a qualification from the original volume: nobody should shout these rules at another person. If someone must be corrected, the correction should be delivered with humour and courtesy. This creates an entertaining contradiction between the uncompromising language of the rules and the much gentler behaviour she recommends when applying them.
Unlike the first book, which included sealed sections, this volume has specially marked pandemic passages distributed among its ordinary thematic chapters. Readers tired of COVID-19 can skip those sections without losing the rest of the material. A combined index covering both books reinforces their continuity, although the sequel can be understood independently.
The arrangement is thematic rather than argumentative. Flanagan moves between lifestyle, generations, shopping, communication, food, entertainment, and social relationships, interrupting the sequence whenever a pandemic-related subject fits. There is no cumulative programme that readers must follow. Each group presents another opportunity to observe how people behave when they assume nobody else is paying attention.
Leisure, Home, and Travel
The first rules concern leisure activities, appearance, household design, and accommodation. Their subjects establish the book’s characteristic mixture of practical consideration, exaggerated disgust, and judgments that become entertaining precisely because Flanagan treats them as universal truths.
She begins by advising people to check whether their yoga pants have become transparent. Her objection concerns the unsuspecting people walking behind them, who may see far more than they intended. A brief challenge to apply mascara without opening one’s mouth follows, turning a familiar unconscious facial expression into a miniature experiment.
Golf receives more sustained criticism. Flanagan objects to enthusiasts who discuss the sport as though its complications place it beyond ordinary human comprehension. She is particularly amused by the elaborate accessories used to protect golf clubs, objects that she imagines being treated as delicate creatures requiring their own knitted clothing.
The next two rules introduce more pointed judgments. Flanagan permits people to dislike women’s football provided they dislike men’s football equally. The distinction separates a genuine lack of interest in the sport from a double standard based on the players’ gender. Hunting, meanwhile, does not qualify as a sport in her view because the pursued animal cannot compete on equal terms. She proposes the absurd alternative of hunters pursuing other armed hunters, thereby creating the contest she believes the activity otherwise lacks.
Household design becomes the next target. An oversized television in a small room forces viewers to move their eyes around the screen, while a television mounted above a fireplace requires them to crane their necks upward. Her recommended arrangement is straightforward: choose a screen appropriate to the room and position it near seated eye level.
Decorative choices receive less sympathetic treatment. Elaborate water features seem unnecessarily noisy and complicated when a simple birdbath would suffice. Garden-centre Buddha statues strike her as another example of spiritual imagery being reduced to fashionable decoration. She also objects to comfortable armchairs in bedrooms, reasoning that adults already have other rooms for sitting around, and to sleigh beds whose elaborate frames make ordinary tasks such as changing sheets unnecessarily difficult.
These rules frequently begin with an identifiable inconvenience before expanding into a personal verdict on taste. A television positioned too high can genuinely be uncomfortable to watch; the supposed pointlessness of a bedroom armchair depends entirely on how someone uses their home.
The holiday section gives Flanagan’s practical instincts more convincing material. Airbnb listings should show prospective guests what they need to know about the property. She is unimpressed by atmospheric photographs of wine glasses, seashells, and decorative arrangements when the listing fails to communicate something useful about the accommodation.
Hosts should provide appropriate amenities, particularly enough towels, functioning cooking equipment, and furniture that guests can use without anxiety. Flanagan objects to holiday properties containing obsolete utensils, damaged pans, and household objects apparently relocated there because the owner no longer wanted them at home. A rental should not double as storage for possessions that ought to have been discarded.
White furniture is especially unwelcome because it seems designed to make guests nervous about leaving marks. Yet she is equally suspicious of aggressively colourful interiors that make relaxation impossible. Her preferred holiday home would be comfortable, properly equipped, and visually unremarkable enough for visitors to enjoy themselves.
Hotel guests have obligations too. Flanagan complains about irons left with melted material attached and kettles apparently used to prepare food instead of boiling water. The relevant principle is that a communal appliance should remain suitable for whoever uses it next.
Finally, she turns to passengers who evade budget-airline baggage charges by wearing excessive layers of clothing and stuffing their pockets with belongings. The resulting image of people carrying luggage on their bodies provides an effective conclusion to a sequence concerned with the strange compromises people make to save money or avoid ordinary inconvenience.
The Generations According to Kitty Flanagan
Flanagan introduces her generational rules by identifying herself as a member of Generation X, generally understood as people born between the mid-1960s and around 1980. She recalls a generation that imagined it would reject conformity, transform politics, and correct the mistakes of its predecessors. Looking at the world that followed, she wonders whether Gen X abandoned those ambitions once home ownership, personal comfort, and conventional success became attractive.
Her account invokes political changes involving Barack Obama, Julia Gillard, and Donald Trump as symbols of the gap between youthful expectation and subsequent disappointment. This is a personal, comic account of generational identity rather than a historical explanation of political change. Its central joke is that a group once convinced of its radical importance has become ordinary, middle-aged, and increasingly invisible.
The Generation X rules begin with the complaint that younger people often categorise anyone older than themselves as a Baby Boomer. Flanagan describes the resulting sense of demographic disappearance before turning to the generation’s musical nostalgia. Bands that were popular decades earlier should think carefully before reuniting and charging old friends to hear them perform again.
Ageing then becomes a matter of physical comfort and declining dignity. Flanagan recommends abandoning impractical underwear in favour of much larger, more comfortable alternatives. She warns against oversized novelty spectacles, which she associates with advancing age, and advises Gen Xers not to surrender too quickly to tablet styluses when they still have functioning fingers.
The body’s unreliability provides another opportunity for embarrassment. Her discussion of the declining ability to predict flatulence converts an ordinary feature of ageing into a mock technical problem, complete with an imaginary warning system that occasionally fails.
One rule becomes unexpectedly serious. Flanagan criticises members of her generation who accept unreliable vaccination claims encountered on Facebook. The generation that once regarded itself as independent and sceptical has, in her account, become vulnerable to alarmist material circulating through familiar social networks.
For Baby Boomers, the principal offences concern communication and technology. Older people should recognise when they have already told a story, avoid shouting conversations between different rooms, and allow younger people to operate devices when demonstrating something on a screen. Flanagan’s mother provides an example of the energetic, sometimes inefficient way an older person may navigate an iPad.
Ancestry research becomes another source of comic frustration. Flanagan accepts that investigating family history can be fascinating to the researcher, but doubts whether relatives are equally interested in hearing every discovery. She mischievously proposes making the stories more entertaining if they are going to be shared, even when that means embellishing the findings.
Physical safety receives its own arbitrary regulation. Men who have reached a certain age should surrender their right to climb ladders, with a little extra allowance for experienced tradespeople. What sounds like a safety warning becomes funny through the absurdity of assigning an official expiration date to a commonplace household activity.
The remaining Boomer rules address photographs taken with giant tablets, messages ruined by predictive text, outdated memes forwarded to younger relatives, and excessively slow storytelling. Flanagan is particularly irritated by narrators who interrupt an anecdote to establish whether an insignificant event happened on Monday, Tuesday, or Wednesday. Her preference is for stories that reach the interesting development before their audiences lose the will to listen.
Millennials receive a shorter and harsher collection of judgments. Flanagan argues that ordering meal kits is not the same as learning to cook and suggests that many people could manage a simple meal without outsourcing so much of the preparation.
Workplace conduct supplies a more substantial example. She recounts hearing of a Millennial who could not attend work because a fence had fallen down at home. Flanagan considers this an insufficient reason to inconvenience an employer and colleagues. Her related rule advises anyone claiming to be sick to avoid posting photographs that reveal an enjoyable day at the beach.
These observations reveal her expectation that employment requires a degree of inconvenience and that younger people should develop practical resilience. The argument is recognisable, but its generalisation is questionable: one anecdote cannot establish the attitudes of an entire generation, and legitimate reasons for absence may extend well beyond physical illness.
The Millennial section closes with a complaint about the revival of 1980s fashion. Flanagan regards the decade’s clothing as sufficiently disastrous the first time around and sees little reason for younger people to embrace it again.
Generation Z receives a more complicated mixture of impatience and sympathy. Flanagan acknowledges that COVID-19 deprived many young people of graduations, school celebrations, and other milestones. Nevertheless, she discourages the belief that making TikTok videos automatically constitutes a worthwhile career and urges them to pursue broader ambitions.
She then turns to young adults who remain in their parents’ homes. Eating every meal in a bedroom, leaving dishes to accumulate, and treating the room as a permanently occupied private world strike her as unhealthy household habits. Her preferred arrangement involves occasional appearances in shared living spaces and a willingness to participate in family life.
The rules about pronouns and accusations of toxicity are unusually brief. Flanagan asks young people to show patience when older relatives make mistakes with pronouns and suggests that ordinary parental foolishness should not automatically be interpreted as malicious behaviour. These remarks reveal her preference for forgiveness and tolerance, but their brevity also leaves little room for recognising how persistent disrespect can differ from an isolated mistake.
The final Generation Z rules concern romantic partners staying overnight in the family home. Flanagan accepts that housing costs make moving out difficult and that Gen X parents often want to appear relaxed and progressive. She nevertheless insists that overnight guests should introduce themselves properly to the household rather than disappearing directly into a bedroom.
Privacy also creates obligations. Young adults may be allowed intimate relationships in their parents’ homes, but the author would prefer not to hear the evidence.
Across all four generations, Flanagan distributes ridicule with considerable enthusiasm, including toward her own age group. The portraits are strongest when they identify recognisable family interactions and weakest when a limited observation is presented as characteristic of millions of people.
How to Behave in a Pandemic
The first specially marked pandemic section responds to the disruptions of COVID-19. Flanagan approaches the crisis as a period in which ordinary standards of behaviour seemed to collapse just when people most needed to cooperate.
Her opening rule condemns the consumption of endangered wildlife. She refers jokingly to competing stories about the origins of the coronavirus, including bats, laboratories, and conspiracy theories. These are examples of public speculation circulating at the time, not reliable conclusions about how the pandemic began. The objection to exploiting endangered animals is distinct from the uncertain origin claims she invokes.
Panic buying supplies the section’s central grievance. Flanagan is appalled by shoppers hoarding basic goods and leaving others unable to purchase what they need. Her criticism focuses on people who treat an emergency as permission to abandon consideration for their neighbours.
She draws a comic comparison with people who prepare for disasters in advance. Their careful stockpiling may once have seemed eccentric, but it now appears more orderly than the last-minute competition for toilet paper, pasta, and other essentials.
From hoarding, she moves to fighting in supermarket aisles. A shortage of desirable products does not justify shouting matches or physical confrontations. She advises readers to walk away rather than contribute to the spectacle, reminding them that humanity has survived much worse difficulties.
The possibility of being filmed supplies another deterrent. Shoppers should behave as though somebody is recording their actions, since an embarrassing confrontation might become entertainment for strangers around the world. The joke reflects the additional embarrassment created when ordinary misconduct becomes permanently visible through phones and social media.
Lockdown hobbies become the next target. Flanagan mocks the widespread enthusiasm for homemade sourdough and suggests supporting the local bakery instead. Her irritation is directed less at baking itself than at the collective determination to turn a previously ordinary activity into a major domestic achievement.
Hand sanitiser manufacturers receive qualified praise for helping meet urgent demand, followed by criticism of products with unpleasant smells or textures. Having experienced enough sanitiser to form strong preferences, she believes consumers should no longer have to tolerate every hastily formulated version.
She is equally unimpressed by television programmes reproducing lockdown life. Since audiences are already experiencing a pandemic, she reasons that entertainment ought to offer some escape rather than continually reminding people of their confinement.
The section ends with QR-code check-ins. Flanagan appreciates people complying with the requirement but asks them to scan the code and move aside before completing the remaining details. Even during an emergency, she believes, nobody should create an unnecessary queue simply because they have forgotten that other people are waiting.
Shopping, Retail, and Café Etiquette
Flanagan’s consumer rules begin with the proposition that people already own more specialised equipment than they need. Cheese does not require an elaborate collection of dedicated knives. A reasonably capable ordinary knife can perform most of the necessary work.
Avocados provide an exception to her suspicion of unnecessary purchases. Because their ripeness is notoriously difficult to judge, she recommends buying a spare when a meal depends on them. What begins as sensible risk management becomes another joke about people entrusted with grocery shopping.
Her longest consumer complaint concerns single-purpose kitchen appliances. She is sceptical of sous-vide equipment, dehydrators, air fryers, ice-cream makers, and egg poachers, regarding many of them as expensive substitutes for basic cooking skills or appliances people already possess.
A sous-vide machine, in her deliberately unflattering description, seems like an extravagant way to produce slowly cooked meat. A dehydrator strikes her as unnecessary when an oven can perform a similar task, while an air fryer appears enormous in relation to the amount of food its basket holds. Ice-cream makers represent a needless commitment to producing everything from scratch, and egg poachers seem especially pointless when ordinary techniques can already produce satisfactory eggs.
The individual judgments are disputable, particularly because specialised appliances can be useful under different circumstances. The comic target is the belief that every kitchen problem deserves its own large, expensive solution.
Retailers receive criticism for different reasons. Flanagan describes entering what appeared to be a sophisticated cocktail bar before realising that the establishment was a barber shop. The confusion illustrates her irritation with businesses whose fashionable design makes their actual purpose difficult to identify.
Kmart’s decision to place registers in the middle of its stores becomes another offence. Flanagan suspects that forcing customers to move farther through the shop encourages additional purchases, comparing the arrangement with supermarkets that place everyday essentials toward the back. Whether or not her explanation establishes the company’s actual motives, it captures a familiar shopper’s suspicion of retail design.
She also dislikes the pressure to turn every hobby into a business. Friends who admire homemade pet treats, candles, or other small creations may immediately suggest selling them, launching a brand, or appearing on a business programme. Flanagan questions why someone cannot simply enjoy making something without having to monetise the activity.
Café etiquette produces some of the book’s most recognisable examples. A toasted sandwich containing lettuce should have the lettuce removed before heating, then replaced afterward. Otherwise, the customer receives an unappealing combination of hot filling and wilted leaves. Flanagan acknowledges that the complaint originated with her mother, allowing family irritation to enter the official rulebook.
Baristas are permitted to chat provided they continue making coffee. A customer waiting in a long queue should not have to endure unnecessary delays because the person preparing drinks repeatedly stops working to continue a conversation.
Large takeaway orders produce a related complaint. Someone may join a short queue expecting a quick coffee, only to discover that the customer ahead is ordering drinks for an entire workplace. Flanagan consequently proposes restricting the number of takeaway coffees per customer during busy periods.
Restaurants are instructed not to place diners at neighbouring tables when much of the establishment remains empty. She rejects the argument that staff must seat customers within a particular service section if doing so unnecessarily compromises comfort.
Vegetarian meals deserve more thought than another stuffed mushroom or large piece of inadequately prepared vegetable. Salad leaves should arrive properly dressed rather than requiring customers to solve the problem themselves. Customers, meanwhile, should end or suspend telephone conversations when placing an order.
The rules alternate between consumer entitlement and consumer responsibility. Flanagan expects businesses to provide thoughtful service, but she also expects customers to recognise that their own behaviour can make employees’ work more difficult and inconvenience everyone behind them.
Clear Communication and the Words That Irritate Her
The communication chapters address the small ways people become dishonest, obscure, or inconsiderate while believing they are simply exchanging information.
Flanagan begins with delayed responses to messages. She distrusts elaborate explanations claiming that a text has only just appeared or that an email was mysteriously discovered in a junk folder weeks after it arrived. These excuses may sometimes be true, but she would prefer a straightforward apology for the delayed reply.
Text-message abbreviations receive similar scrutiny. Familiar expressions may save time without confusing anybody, but obscure shortened words often require more effort to decipher than the sender would have spent typing them properly. For Flanagan, communication should reduce the recipient’s workload rather than transfer it from the writer.
Her rule about bereavement is notably compassionate. People sometimes avoid contacting someone who has suffered a death because they fear saying the wrong thing or interrupting their grief. Flanagan argues that a brief, thoughtful message is preferable to silence, provided the sender does not expect an immediate response.
The advice is practical and restrained. The bereaved person does not need an elaborate performance of sympathy or another social obligation; they need to know that someone has remembered them.
Electronic greeting cards inspire much less generosity. Flanagan considers them impersonal and frequently less meaningful than an ordinary message written directly to the recipient. She also objects to people treating forgotten birthdays as evidence of deliberate disrespect. Adults have complicated lives, and failing to remember every birthday does not necessarily indicate a lack of affection.
She describes her mother’s role in reminding family members about approaching birthdays, illustrating the unseen work required to maintain everyone’s expectations. The underlying complaint is that birthdays can become another occasion for imposing emotional obligations on people who have no intention of causing offence.
Children’s party invitations occupy a chapter of their own. Flanagan recalls childhood parties at which parents simply dropped their children off and collected them later. Contemporary parties, in her account, frequently assume that parents will remain, socialise, and be entertained alongside their children.
Her proposed solution is specificity. Invitations should clearly explain whether parents are expected to stay, what arrangements have been made, and when children should be collected. Such clarity prevents the awkwardness of arriving for what one imagined was a brief drop-off and discovering an unexpected afternoon commitment.
The language rules begin with expressions Flanagan believes are grammatically or stylistically irritating. She objects to people describing competitive activities using verse as a verb and to athletes being described as having medalled rather than won medals. Her complaints are about contemporary usage, however, not proof that the expressions lack legitimacy in every variety of English.
Business jargon receives particularly harsh treatment. Flanagan dislikes being asked to speak to a subject instead of speaking about it, and she mocks people who discuss the optics of a situation rather than simply saying that something looks bad.
She extends the criticism to interior-design language in which a lamp becomes a piece and a room becomes a space. Such expressions suggest to her that speakers are trying to sound more sophisticated than the subject deserves.
Inflated praise presents a related problem. When routine transactions are described as amazing, fantastic, or absolutely wonderful, the words lose much of their expressive force. Flanagan is irritated by the enthusiasm of customer-service conversations in which providing one’s name apparently constitutes an extraordinary achievement.
Self-description is another danger. People who announce that they are exceptionally intelligent, creative, sexually accomplished, or empathetic risk producing the opposite impression. She similarly doubts the conversational value of declaring oneself a clean freak, an obsessive foodie, or someone considering giving up sugar.
Teenagers, meanwhile, should not constantly face predictable questions about school subjects, parties, closed curtains, or mysterious bedroom smells. The joke depends on recognising how tedious adult curiosity can seem to someone who has heard the same questions repeatedly.
Flanagan finishes with objections to hubby, American expressions entering Australian speech, and the different effects she perceives in ass and arse. She considers the American form of the final pair softer and more amusing in certain contexts, despite disliking other Americanisms.
That exception reveals the subjectivity of the entire language section. Flanagan is not consistently defending linguistic tradition. She is describing how particular words sound to her, what associations they create, and why certain fashionable expressions irritate her more than others.
Masks, Courtesy, and Public Conflict
The pandemic section devoted to masks is more openly concerned with collective responsibility than most of the earlier rules. Flanagan supports wearing masks under the public-health circumstances of the time and rejects the idea that their inconvenience justifies disregard for other people.
She explains their purpose through the familiar image of respiratory droplets travelling from the mouth and nose. Her insistence that masks cover both features responds to people who wear them below the nose or otherwise fail to use them as intended.
The practical premise is consistent with the importance of proper coverage and fit described in the World Health Organization’s guidance on mask use. The book’s arguments nevertheless belong to the specific pandemic circumstances in which Flanagan was writing, rather than constituting a timeless statement about when masks should be required.
Less serious rules address the unpleasant experience of discovering one’s own bad breath inside a face covering. Flanagan recommends brushing one’s teeth before wearing a mask, partly to avoid wondering whether other people have endured that smell for years.
She also rejects the assumption that everyone must turn masks into cheerful fashion accessories. A plain disposable mask is sufficient; wearing one does not need to become an opportunity for personal expression.
Another rule encourages readers to notice minor advantages. Masks can provide warmth in cold weather and make encounters with close talkers less unpleasant. These observations do not cancel the discomfort, but they give Flanagan fresh comic material within a situation otherwise dominated by complaints.
The section becomes sharper when it addresses confrontations with retail employees. Flanagan objects to customers arguing with shop workers about mask requirements that those employees did not establish. Anyone opposing government rules should direct their objections toward the relevant authorities instead of intimidating people whose jobs involve implementing them.
She also recognises that some individuals may have legitimate reasons for exemption. Her request is that exemption procedures be handled politely, even when repeatedly explaining one’s situation has become tiresome.
This combination is significant. Flanagan can be uncompromising about compliance while recognising that not every disagreement or exception deserves hostility. Her principal concern is the unfairness of transferring frustration onto workers and strangers who have little power over the rules themselves.
Food: Eating, Cooking, Christmas, and Picnics
Flanagan’s food rules begin with table manners and rapidly expand into objections to cooking trends, holiday traditions, and internet recipes. They reveal how easily personal preferences can be converted into mock social obligations.
Eating a banana while making eye contact with another person is discouraged because of the unintended sexual associations. Chewing while speaking on the telephone is another offence: the person listening receives an amplified version of every unpleasant mouth sound.
Diners should lift food toward their mouths rather than bend down toward the plate. When food arrives dangerously hot, they should stop eating until it cools instead of continuing to burn themselves and making exaggerated attempts to soothe the pain.
Cinema snacks produce a final complaint about eating noises. Flanagan recalls the pleasure of returning to the movies after pandemic restrictions, only to rediscover how distracting the rustling of packaging and relentless crunching of potato chips can be.
The cooking section concerns the difference between food and its fashionable substitutes. Spiralised vegetables may resemble pasta, but Flanagan refuses to accept zucchini strips or carrot ribbons as adequate replacements for the real thing. Cauliflower can be a perfectly good vegetable without pretending to be rice or pizza dough.
Her objection is directed at the marketing of substitutions as equivalent experiences. She is willing to enjoy cauliflower on its own terms, preferably roasted and seasoned, but does not believe changing its shape transforms it into another food.
Leftover pizza offers a rare straightforward cooking tip. Rather than reheating it in a microwave, Flanagan recommends warming the slices in a covered frying pan, allowing the base to regain some crispness while the toppings heat through.
Food fusion receives less encouragement. She is suspicious of the suggestion that familiar ingredients become extraordinary when inserted into tacos or steamed buns, or accompanied by fashionable additions such as kimchi. Her jokes about these combinations reflect personal taste rather than a serious argument against culinary experimentation.
Medjool dates also disappoint her when presented as substitutes for dessert. Likewise, she refuses to accept green tea as an equivalent to a biscuit or cake. Dukkah, despite its attractive combination of spices, nuts, and seeds, receives a particularly unflattering assessment because she dislikes the gritty experience of eating it with bread and oil.
The unnumbered Christmas essay provides one of the clearest statements of the book’s resistance to unnecessary obligation. Flanagan argues that Australian families should stop treating turkey, prawns, and an entire ham as compulsory elements of Christmas lunch.
Turkey may be too large for the oven or the family. Prawns can involve expensive purchases and inconvenient queues, while the pressure to buy a complete ham may be more a triumph of seasonal marketing than a response to anyone’s appetite.
Families should prepare food they actually enjoy eating, she argues, rather than reproducing an elaborate traditional menu out of obligation. Her insistence that potatoes must appear in some form then deliberately undermines the freedom she has just granted, demonstrating how quickly her personal preferences become new commandments.
Recipe websites come next. Flanagan distrusts two-ingredient cake recipes that promise remarkable results from combinations that seem unlikely to produce satisfying cakes. She also objects to dishes prepared in mugs or served inside hollowed-out bread loaves when ordinary plates and bowls would be more appropriate.
The enormous number of cheesecake variations leaves her similarly unimpressed. She doubts that every new combination represents a meaningful culinary discovery, and she considers red velvet cake an especially successful example of appearance and naming creating expectations that the flavour cannot satisfy.
The food material ends with picnics. What should be a simple outdoor meal of sandwiches has, in Flanagan’s experience, become an elaborate logistical operation involving platters, expensive delicacies, salads, cutlery, and food that is difficult to transport or eat while sitting on the ground.
Her preference is for convenience suited to the occasion. A picnic should be enjoyable because people can eat comfortably outdoors, not because they have successfully reproduced a complicated restaurant meal on a blanket.
Podcasts, Reality TV, and the Performing Arts
Entertainment occupies a substantial portion of the book, and Flanagan’s position changes across its chapters. She begins as an irritated consumer of media before discussing the pressures faced by people who create and perform it.
Her podcast rules start with the simplest possible requirement: a programme should have an idea. The fact that microphones and recording software are widely available does not automatically make every conversation worth distributing to strangers.
Flanagan recommends reasonable episode lengths and objects to excessively long introductions. Podcast hosts should not spend large portions of an episode explaining why they failed to release an earlier instalment or apologising for minor production delays. Audiences have other things to listen to and generally do not need such elaborate reassurance.
True-crime podcasts provoke a more substantial complaint. Flanagan dislikes investigations released as episodic mysteries when their creators apparently have no satisfactory account of where the investigation is going. She describes the frustration of discovering several episodes into a series that the programme has begun wandering through tangents instead of developing its case.
The criticism raises a genuine storytelling question. Suspense works differently when the investigator knows the conclusion and when the investigation itself remains unresolved. Flanagan wants producers to respect the audience’s investment rather than relying indefinitely on the promise that a revelation may eventually arrive.
Celebrity interview podcasts receive qualified criticism. She recognises that established performers such as Dax Shepard and Wil Anderson can sustain entertaining conversations, but questions whether every celebrity needs to launch a programme featuring interviews with other celebrities.
The intimacy of podcasts also concerns her. Early guests could speak more freely than they might during a formal publicity interview, but websites increasingly mine relaxed conversations for sensational headlines. Flanagan believes this changes the conditions that made the format attractive in the first place.
She then contradicts her own enthusiasm for prescribing podcast rules. Since many programmes are available free of charge and their creators may receive little compensation, listeners have limited grounds for demanding that everything meet their personal standards.
A final podcast-related rule concerns friends who make telephone calls while driving and abruptly end the conversation when they reach their destination. Flanagan objects to being treated like audio entertainment that can be switched off when the journey finishes. A conversation, unlike a podcast, involves another person with their own time and expectations.
Reality television provides another collection of offences. Flanagan dislikes programmes that repeatedly recap events from only minutes earlier, apparently assuming that audiences cannot remember what happened before an advertising break. The complaint concerns both wasted time and the artificial stretching of limited material.
Cosmetic fillers receive an unkind rule directed at participants who alter their appearance immediately before filming. She also rejects the familiar defence that producers or editors made a participant appear badly behaved. While editing can influence the presentation of events, she argues that it cannot entirely explain genuinely unpleasant conduct.
Dating television attracts a further suggestion: the central participant in The Bachelor should reserve romantic intimacy until making a final choice. Flanagan considers the programme’s repeated kissing and romantic encounters less convincing as a search for lasting love than as a deliberately sensational spectacle.
These rules show her attention to entertainment’s conventions, but they also reveal how readily she shifts from criticising television construction to judging participants’ bodies and personal conduct.
The tone changes in her unnumbered reflection on the arts industry. Flanagan acknowledges that people sometimes dismiss artistic work as something less substantial than ordinary employment. During the pandemic, however, audiences depended heavily on films, television, music, and other entertainment while many performers themselves were unable to work.
She explicitly avoids equating artists with frontline healthcare workers. Her point is narrower: the entertainment consumed during lockdown depends on people whose livelihoods deserve recognition.
At the time of writing, Flanagan’s own live performances had been repeatedly postponed. She thanks ticket holders who continued supporting the shows despite uncertain dates, and her confidence that the performances would eventually happen is deliberately mixed with anxiety.
The accompanying rules about friends attending performances are informed by this experience. After a disappointing show, a performer may appreciate encouragement rather than a friend’s awkward attempt to avoid giving an opinion. Flanagan openly permits reassuring white lies when brutal honesty would accomplish nothing useful.
Complimentary tickets create an obligation of their own. Friends receiving free admission should promptly thank the performer, regardless of whether they enjoyed the production. The gratitude acknowledges the generosity of the invitation rather than certifying the artistic quality of the show.
A final rule describes the unpleasantness of performing comedy through Zoom. Flanagan appreciates organisations that hired comedians for virtual staff events during lockdown, particularly when live work had become scarce. Nevertheless, a remote performance lacks the immediate responses that make ordinary stand-up possible.
Without an audience laughing together in a room, the performer cannot reliably judge the rhythm, volume, or success of a joke. The same technology that allowed performances to continue also removed much of the interaction on which comedy depends.
This personal experience gives the entertainment chapters a quality absent from some of the more casual complaints. Flanagan remains a demanding audience member, but she also recognises that the people producing entertainment work under practical, financial, and emotional constraints that audiences do not always see.
Zoom Meetings as a New Etiquette Problem
The book’s third special pandemic section addresses a technology that became unavoidable for many workers and families. Flanagan approaches Zoom meetings as a necessary adaptation whose inconveniences multiplied once people began using video calls for situations that had previously required nothing more than an email or telephone conversation.
Her first recommendation is to question whether every interaction genuinely needs a video meeting. An ordinary telephone call can convey information efficiently, while an email may eliminate the need for a conversation altogether. Video meetings impose additional obligations involving appearance, surroundings, attention, and the management of shared screens.
Meetings scheduled before 9:30 in the morning are also unacceptable to her, although her reasoning involves an exaggerated account of the difficulty of commuting between rooms at home. She similarly rejects corporate expressions about jumping onto calls, circling back, and speaking to particular subjects, extending the language complaints from earlier chapters.
Recording meetings seems pointless to her because she cannot imagine anyone voluntarily revisiting an ordinary workplace discussion months later. This is an example of a joke whose universal formulation is stronger than the argument beneath it: recordings can serve practical purposes, but she is satirising the inflated importance attached to routine conversations.
Someone who calls a meeting should also run it. Flanagan dislikes gatherings in which participants arrive, greet one another, and then wait awkwardly because nobody has established an agenda or taken responsibility for moving the conversation forward.
Appearance introduces another set of complications. Elaborate headsets make participants look like aircraft pilots, while poorly positioned webcams provide unwanted views of ceilings, nostrils, and the undersides of faces. A laptop placed at a sensible height can solve many of these problems without expensive equipment.
Domestic backgrounds should be reasonably tidy, but not excessively styled. Flanagan is distracted by piles of laundry, clutter, and mysterious objects appearing behind speakers. Yet she is equally suspicious of carefully arranged awards, decorative plants, and other possessions apparently positioned to impress colleagues.
The ideal background is therefore another expression of her contradictory authority: she expects people to make an effort, but considers too much effort an offence.
Attempting jokes during a video meeting is especially risky. Poor sound quality and delayed reactions can force a speaker to repeat a supposedly amusing remark until its comic effect disappears. As a comedian accustomed to live feedback, Flanagan understands how badly humour can suffer when timing breaks down.
Meeting duration should be limited, preferably to an hour, because people have ordinary physical needs and restricted attention. Participants should be able to take necessary breaks, while remembering to switch off their cameras and microphones before leaving their seats.
The mute button becomes an essential tool. Flanagan recommends using it to prevent unwanted sounds from interrupting other participants, though she also jokes about its usefulness for concealing unrelated activities from colleagues.
Social Zoom calls require planning as well. The initial excitement of seeing distant friends or relatives can quickly disappear once everyone has exchanged greetings and exhausted the obvious conversation topics. A little structure can make these virtual gatherings more enjoyable.
Taken together, the rules expose a peculiar tension of remote communication. Technology creates access to people who cannot share a physical space, but it can also generate unnecessary meetings, new expectations about appearance, and additional opportunities for social embarrassment. Flanagan wants the benefits without pretending that the experience is always pleasant.
Social Plans, Dogs, Greetings, and Intimacy
The final ordinary section of the book returns to familiar interactions between friends, relatives, strangers, and romantic partners. Its principal concern is uncertainty about expectations, although Flanagan’s preferences occasionally become more intimate and arbitrary.
Arranging a catch-up should not require an endless exchange of indecisive messages. Flanagan dislikes people who continually insist that any restaurant, date, or activity will suit them, because such apparent flexibility leaves somebody else responsible for making every decision.
Her alternative is to propose something definite. A suggestion gives the other person an actual option to accept, reject, or modify, reducing the unnecessary labour of planning.
Restaurant seating becomes another matter of justice. Whoever arrives first should have the comfortable upholstered seat against the wall, while late arrivals must accept less desirable chairs. The arbitrary penalty turns punctuality into a minor competitive achievement.
Flanagan praises her friend Julia Zemiro for proposing social engagements with clearly defined limits, such as meeting for one sensible drink. This removes uncertainty about whether an invitation implies a lengthy evening, an elaborate meal, or several hours of drinking.
She is equally enthusiastic about cancelling plans promptly. Many people welcome an unexpected free evening, and an honest cancellation may be kinder than dragging out uncertainty or inventing complicated excuses. Her generosity toward cancellation contrasts amusingly with her earlier impatience toward Millennials taking time away from work.
Dogs bring more domestic observations. Flanagan dislikes birthday hats and elaborate costumes imposed on pets, which she imagines must find the experience undignified. She makes exceptions for particularly amusing outfits, confirming once again that her supposed principles can be overruled by personal entertainment.
Her next dog-related rule is more genuinely altruistic. Dog owners should occasionally collect an old piece of dog waste left by somebody else’s pet. The task is unpleasant, but it prevents another person from stepping in it and improves the shared environment.
A telephone conversation with her sister supplies a third rule. While walking her dogs, Flanagan suddenly announced that she had to leave because a dog was defecating. Since she had not explained that she was out with the animals, her sister misunderstood the situation. The episode demonstrates how a missing piece of context can transform an ordinary remark into something alarmingly strange.
Meeting and greeting become especially complicated during the pandemic. Flanagan considers elbow bumps an awkward solution to the problem of avoiding handshakes, embraces, and kisses. The gesture seems to require a strange little performance rather than offering a dignified greeting.
She proposes a simpler raised-hand gesture that communicates friendliness without physical contact. Looking beyond the pandemic, she suggests that people should announce their intended greeting before moving toward someone, allowing the other person to prepare for a kiss, hug, or handshake.
This addresses a real social difficulty. Different people have different expectations about physical affection, and embarrassment often arises when those expectations collide without warning.
Goodbyes can be similarly awkward. Flanagan recommends finding out which direction everyone is walking before completing the farewell rituals. Otherwise, people may exchange elaborate goodbyes outside a restaurant and then discover that they are heading along the same street.
Reunions with old acquaintances create another problem. Someone who approaches a former schoolmate by demanding to know whether they are remembered creates unnecessary pressure. Flanagan believes people should introduce themselves clearly rather than turning recognition into an uncomfortable test.
A related rule asks married women reconnecting with people from school to mention the surnames by which they were originally known. The advice is meant to make recognition easier, although its assumptions about marriage and names reflect a conventional social setting rather than everyone’s circumstances.
The final group, deliberately titled Sexy Taimes, enters the territory of appearance and sexual relationships. Flanagan discourages men from developing their muscles to the point that their necks appear to disappear. Her complaint is a comic preference about appearance, not meaningful health or training guidance.
She also resists the pressure to make sex increasingly adventurous. The idea that familiar intimacy must constantly be enhanced with elaborate experiments seems unnecessary to her, and she compares human expectations with the comparatively straightforward behaviour she imagines in other animals.
Sexual endurance receives equally exaggerated treatment. Flanagan uses the difference between shorter races and marathons to argue that exceptionally prolonged intercourse is not automatically more pleasurable. The joke challenges a performance-oriented understanding of sexual success, but its conclusions remain expressions of preference rather than universal rules.
The final instruction is to avoid telling an angry woman to calm down. Flanagan recognises that such a command generally intensifies irritation instead of resolving the disagreement. She suggests a gentler invitation to discuss the problem, replacing an instruction that dismisses someone’s emotions with an opportunity for conversation.
The section illustrates how far the book’s conception of etiquette can stretch. Planning a meeting, introducing an old acquaintance, cleaning up after a dog, and negotiating intimacy have little in common as activities, but each presents an occasion when one person’s preferences can collide with another person’s comfort.
Corporate Pandemic Messaging and the Unnumbered Finale
The final pandemic section directs Flanagan’s irritation toward organisations and public figures whose responses to the crisis appear detached from ordinary experience.
Large corporations receive the first attack. Flanagan objects to advertising campaigns that insist everyone is experiencing the pandemic together. She is particularly sceptical when banks and other powerful businesses adopt warm, reassuring language despite having very different financial circumstances from the people they address.
Her argument is not that solidarity is inherently undesirable. Rather, she questions whether a company whose relationship with its customers is primarily commercial can convincingly present itself as an intimate partner in their suffering.
Retailers’ supposedly personal messages create the same problem. Flanagan recalls receiving emails from companies whose executives appeared eager to establish friendly relationships with her. Messages from Woolworths and West Elm become examples of businesses attempting to turn marketing communications into expressions of personal concern.
She is uncomfortable with the artificial intimacy. A retailer may provide useful information or reliable service without pretending that its chief executive is a close friend.
Celebrities are treated with similar suspicion. Flanagan warns wealthy public figures against encouraging everyone to relax and enjoy lockdown. Someone with substantial savings, a comfortable home, and no immediate threat to their income experiences enforced isolation very differently from a person unable to work or pay ordinary expenses.
The distinction concerns privilege and perspective. Advice that sounds comforting when delivered from a secure position may seem absurdly insensitive to people whose circumstances offer them few opportunities to enjoy the interruption.
The final numbered rule refers to Gal Gadot’s celebrity rendition of John Lennon’s Imagine. Flanagan acknowledges that the intentions behind the performance may have been generous, but regards the spectacle of wealthy celebrities singing into their phones as a poor response to widespread anxiety and hardship.
The contrast with her earlier reflection on the arts industry is important. Flanagan believes entertainment can help people endure difficult circumstances, yet recognises that not every public performance of concern succeeds in doing so.
After rule 645, the book abandons its official numbering. Flanagan introduces three strong suggestions that she considers too peculiar even for her established system.
The first concerns mattresses dumped in back alleys. She wonders how people manage to sleep on objects that appear so filthy and damaged by the time they are discarded. The suggestion is to replace such mattresses long before they acquire their alarming final appearance.
The second proposes avoiding Uber Eats before noon. Flanagan admits that her objection to delivery services is irrationally strong, but also raises concerns about food quality, the difficult working conditions of delivery riders, and the financial share received by restaurants. She prefers collecting food or ordering directly from establishments with their own delivery arrangements, and finds the delivery of something as simple as breakfast particularly excessive.
Her third suggestion discourages expensive boxes of assorted chocolates. She imagines recipients sampling one unfamiliar filling after another, discarding half-eaten pieces, and eventually being left with an unattractive collection of rejected sweets. A familiar chocolate bar, she argues, may be a more satisfying gift.
These suggestions reveal how aware Flanagan is of the limits of her authority. She can no longer pretend that every objection qualifies as a generally defensible rule, so she relaxes the format while continuing to indulge her preferences.
The book ends with one suggestion that she explicitly calls stupid: mandatory vasectomies for men at fifty. She imagines that imposing a reproductive deadline on men might force them to think differently about relationships and parenthood, given that women’s reproductive opportunities are subject to biological limits that men do not experience in the same way.
The proposal is intentionally outrageous, and Flanagan makes clear that she expects readers to object. It also raises obvious questions about bodily autonomy and reproductive freedom that a real policy discussion could not dismiss.
As a closing joke, however, it performs a particular function. After hundreds of instructions delivered with exaggerated certainty, Flanagan offers a final proposal that openly advertises its own absurdity. The rulebook ends by acknowledging how ridiculous its authoritarian premise can become.
The Courtesy Behind the Complaints
Flanagan’s rules appear miscellaneous because their immediate subjects vary so widely. Yet many share a recognisable expectation: people should notice when their own behaviour creates unnecessary problems for somebody else.
The café customer who orders drinks for an entire workplace changes the waiting time for everyone behind them. The person conducting a conversation while ordering food divides their attention in a way that makes the transaction harder for the employee. A retailer who seats diners too close together when other tables are available disregards the comfort of paying customers.
Flanagan describes these situations from the perspective of someone required to endure the consequences. Her frustration is less about the activities themselves than about how casually their inconveniences are imposed on strangers.
The dog-waste rule makes this concern particularly clear. Collecting another owner’s abandoned mess offers no personal reward beyond the knowledge that somebody else will avoid an unpleasant experience. It is an unusually direct expression of responsibility for a shared environment.
Communication problems introduce a less visible form of inconvenience. An unclear party invitation forces parents to guess what is expected of them. Indecisive social planning leaves one person responsible for organising everything. An obscure abbreviation requires the recipient to work out what the sender could easily have written.
Even seemingly minor linguistic choices can therefore become questions about who must make the effort necessary for an interaction to succeed.
The condolence rule demonstrates the same concern from a more compassionate direction. People who are grieving should not have to manage other people’s embarrassment or reassure them that contact is acceptable. A thoughtful message, offered without the expectation of a reply, recognises another person’s circumstances rather than demanding attention for the sender.
The pandemic rules give this idea greater urgency. Hoarding deprives other shoppers of essential goods, arguments over masks burden retail workers, and failure to move away from a QR-code station creates unnecessary delays. In each case, individual behaviour has consequences beyond the person making the decision.
Her objections to corporate advertising also arise from a perceived failure to consider someone else’s situation. A financially secure institution may find comforting language convenient, but customers experiencing genuine insecurity may hear that language as insincere or patronising.
These observations amount to a recurring ethic of ordinary reciprocity. People should consider the effects of their actions, communicate clearly, and avoid transferring avoidable inconveniences to others.
Flanagan does not present this as a systematic moral theory, however, and many rules have little connection to it. Disliking red velvet cake or bedroom armchairs does not establish that someone else is behaving irresponsibly. The strongest interpretation of the collection must therefore accommodate both its moments of genuine social awareness and its many expressions of arbitrary irritation.
When Personal Taste Becomes a Universal Rule
The governing comic device of More Rules for Life is the conversion of individual preference into supposed universal authority. Flanagan encounters something she dislikes and declares that it should never happen again, treating her own reaction as sufficient evidence for a rule.
Sometimes the resulting command is persuasive. People generally benefit from clear invitations, functional holiday accommodation, sensible meeting agendas, and consideration for service workers. In these instances, Flanagan’s exaggeration gives force to expectations that many readers may already share.
Other judgments are far less defensible. Large spectacles, air fryers, particular desserts, and unusual interior furnishings do not become social offences merely because Flanagan finds them unattractive or unnecessary. Readers who enjoy those things have no obligation to accept her preferences.
The book’s humour depends on keeping this distinction unstable. Flanagan speaks with similar conviction whether discussing public courtesy or the absurdity of a fashionable kitchen appliance. The absence of proportionality becomes a joke about her own temperament.
That method can be engaging because she rarely pretends to be detached. Her impatience is unmistakably personal, and her willingness to use family members, friends, and herself as comic material often softens the severity of her judgments.
The generational chapters reveal the limits of this approach. Stereotypes about older people’s technology skills, Millennials’ workplace attitudes, or Gen Z’s online habits create recognisable comic types, but the examples cannot demonstrate that those characteristics are widespread. Their entertainment value depends on identification and exaggeration rather than representative evidence.
Her treatment of pronouns is similarly open to disagreement. A request for patience toward people making sincere mistakes can be reasonable, but it does not fully address situations involving repeated or deliberate disrespect. The book’s brief treatment gives the comic narrator the final word without examining those differences.
Rules about physical appearance and sexual behaviour can also move uncomfortably close to ridicule directed at individuals rather than identifiable inconveniences. The discussion of cosmetic fillers, muscular bodies, and supposedly excessive sexual activity is less convincing as social criticism because the author’s personal preferences do not establish what other people should look like or enjoy.
There is an additional tension in her standards of responsibility. Flanagan discourages Millennials from taking time away from work for inconvenient personal circumstances, yet enthusiastically supports cancelling social plans when somebody would prefer a quiet evening. The difference is understandable because employment and friendship involve different obligations, but her categorical style leaves little room for those distinctions.
Language provides perhaps the clearest example of her selective authority. She criticises imported American expressions while acknowledging that she sometimes prefers an American word because it sounds funnier. The inconsistency does not destroy the joke; it demonstrates that sound, association, and personal taste are more important to her than a consistent linguistic principle.
The opening disclaimer gives readers permission to disagree with all these positions. Flanagan does not claim to be writing an academic argument or a binding social code. Yet the fact that the rules are jokes does not mean every social assumption within them is equally perceptive or harmless.
The fairest approach is to recognise both qualities. Her exaggeration can reveal the absurdity of everyday behaviour, but it can also reveal the limitations of a narrator who assumes that the world’s diversity of preferences should be organised around her own.
The Pandemic’s Changes to Flanagan’s Comedy
COVID-19 changes the circumstances of More Rules for Life in ways that extend beyond providing new subjects. Before the pandemic, many of Flanagan’s irritations concern situations people encounter voluntarily: restaurants, holidays, parties, television, and shopping. Lockdowns and public-health restrictions force people to negotiate unfamiliar obligations under conditions they cannot easily escape.
The first pandemic section concerns anxiety and scarcity. Hoarding, supermarket fights, and the rush toward new household hobbies expose different reactions to disruption. Flanagan remains impatient with foolish behaviour, but the consequences of that behaviour are potentially more serious than those of an irritating fashion choice.
The mask rules shift the focus toward public responsibility. Questions about individual comfort now intersect with the obligations of protecting others and treating workers respectfully. Flanagan’s usual impatience becomes a defence of cooperation, even while she continues joking about breath, clothing, and embarrassing public conduct.
Zoom etiquette introduces a different problem. Technologies adopted because physical interaction is restricted become new sources of inconvenience, professional awkwardness, and lost spontaneity. Her experiences performing comedy through video calls demonstrate that the disruption affects the work itself, not merely the audience’s viewing preferences.
The final pandemic section makes inequalities of circumstance more explicit. Corporate declarations of shared hardship and celebrities celebrating their domestic downtime are objectionable because people do not possess equal financial security, living conditions, or freedom from worry.
At the same time, the arts-industry reflection introduces a level of personal vulnerability largely absent from the smaller everyday complaints. Flanagan can be grateful for employment opportunities and anxious about postponed performances while continuing to mock the technology that makes remote entertainment possible.
These changes give the sequel a more specific identity than a random continuation of miscellaneous rules might have possessed. The pandemic passages reveal Flanagan responding to a society suddenly required to renegotiate ordinary behaviour.
They also make parts of the book historically specific. The anxiety surrounding QR check-ins, early Zoom routines, lockdown entertainment, and celebrity isolation messages belongs particularly to the period in which the book was written. The material remains intelligible as social comedy, but some jokes now depend more heavily on remembering their circumstances.
Why the Numbered Rules Are Funny
Flanagan’s comic persona is an exaggerated authority figure who appears convinced that the correct solution to every irritation is another rule. The numbering gives her observations the appearance of an organised legal or administrative system, even though the subjects frequently have no relationship beyond having annoyed her.
That discrepancy is fundamental to the humour. A rule about transparent yoga pants can sit within the same supposedly authoritative code as advice concerning workplace absences or pandemic mask requirements. The format grants identical seriousness to matters of entirely different importance.
The rules often begin with a simple, direct instruction. Flanagan then explains the offence, enlarges the consequences, and introduces an unexpected comparison that makes the situation appear more ridiculous than it originally seemed.
The complaint about oversized televisions becomes more entertaining when she imagines viewers physically struggling to see the screen. The rule about elaborate video-conferencing headsets transforms ordinary office workers into would-be pilots. A suggestion about old mattresses becomes an image of discarded furniture so filthy that it seems associated with a criminal investigation.
These comparisons are effective because they give minor irritations a concrete visual form. Readers do not need specialised knowledge to understand why someone sitting through a Zoom call with a ceiling-filling camera angle might become annoyed.
Personal anecdotes make the comedy more distinctive. The misunderstanding involving Flanagan’s sister and the dog-walking telephone call provides a small narrative with a setup, missing information, and an embarrassing revelation. The joke becomes clearer once the reader understands what each participant believed was happening.
Her mother’s contribution to the toasted-lettuce rule works differently. By admitting that a family member insisted on including a particular complaint, Flanagan allows the supposedly independent rulebook to become a collaborative archive of grievances.
She also uses sudden shifts in register. A genuinely considerate recommendation about contacting grieving people appears near complaints about electronic greeting cards and birthday expectations. Concern for people struggling during lockdown appears alongside jokes about sourdough and badly formulated sanitiser.
These changes prevent the comic narrator from becoming entirely one-dimensional. Her irritation can be affectionate, practical, self-serving, compassionate, or deliberately unreasonable depending on the situation.
The Australian colloquial voice is another important feature. Flanagan writes with the informality and conversational exaggeration associated with her stand-up comedy, using familiar expressions, blunt judgments, and deliberately ungainly images. Her jokes often depend on how an expression sounds as much as on its literal meaning.
The rule about using ass rather than arse, for example, is explicitly concerned with the different comic effects she hears in the words. It shows a performer thinking about language as material that can produce particular responses from an audience.
Structure also shapes the reading experience. Short rules deliver quick observations, while longer entries allow Flanagan to build increasingly elaborate scenarios. The variation gives the collection flexibility, though the same complaint-and-exaggeration method inevitably becomes recognisable after repeated use.
The specially marked pandemic sections interrupt the ordinary thematic sequence without abandoning that method. Their visual and organisational separation allows a distinctive historical subject to recur while the rest of the book continues examining familiar social life.
Finally, the unnumbered suggestions acknowledge the artificiality of the system. Flanagan admits that some of her preferences cannot reasonably be promoted even to the status of her imaginary rules. The final vasectomy proposal carries this admission to its absurd extreme, exposing the authoritarian instinct on which the collection has been playing all along.
How Well the Sequel Works
More Rules for Life succeeds most clearly as an extension of Flanagan’s observational comedy. Its pleasure comes from encountering an irritation that readers recognise but may never have considered worth describing, then watching her treat it as a matter requiring immediate legislative intervention.
The writing is especially effective when an ordinary annoyance has precise details. Misleading Airbnb photographs, inefficient coffee queues, badly positioned webcams, and confusing social invitations are immediately imaginable. Flanagan understands that minor frustrations become funnier when their physical or social mechanics are described accurately.
Her best anecdotes go beyond identification. The misunderstanding involving her sister, the absurdity of elaborate podcast introductions, and the problems of performing comedy remotely provide situations that develop rather than merely announce a preference. They have enough movement to sustain attention beyond the initial rule.
The generational chapters offer another strength. By placing Generation X first and beginning with its disappointed ambitions, Flanagan establishes herself as someone willing to ridicule her own position before criticising younger and older people. That self-implication makes the broader collection of complaints easier to accept.
Her comic voice is consistent throughout. Readers familiar with her performances will recognise the rhythm of mounting impatience, the insistence on apparently obvious solutions, and the unexpected comparisons that transform small matters into elaborate absurdities.
The sequel also benefits from the pandemic material. It gives the book a set of circumstances that the original volume could not have addressed in the same way and provides more substantial reasons for discussing public behaviour.
The rules about masks and supermarket conduct concern shared responsibilities rather than personal taste. The arts-industry passage reveals how professional uncertainty affects someone whose work depends on live audiences. The corporate and celebrity chapters identify a meaningful distinction between expressions of solidarity and actual equality of circumstances.
These moments demonstrate that Flanagan’s observational comedy can accommodate more than petty irritation. She can recognise kindness, acknowledge vulnerability, and become sharply critical when powerful organisations present themselves as more sympathetic than their conduct may justify.
Yet the book’s principal limitation is built into its format. Another 157 rules inevitably involve repetition, particularly when several can be reduced to the proposition that someone should stop behaving in a way Flanagan finds annoying.
The strongest rules provide an incident, a distinctive image, or a surprising explanation. Weaker entries depend largely on agreement. If readers already dislike a particular fashion, food, or expression, the rule may seem amusing; if they do not, the entry sometimes offers little beyond the author’s stated disapproval.
This creates unevenness between subjects. The extended appliance complaint contains memorable exaggerations and recognisable consumer behaviour, but the basic objection can become repetitive. Similarly, several food rules rely on dismissing trends without developing the observation much further.
The generational material is engaging but often reductive. Flanagan’s confidence creates humour, yet assumptions about Millennials’ work habits, older people’s technological incompetence, or young people’s ambitions are too sweeping to carry much explanatory weight.
The jokes work best when the reader interprets them as recognisable family caricatures. They become less persuasive if treated as accurate accounts of how particular age groups behave.
Some criticism is also directed at choices that do not obviously inconvenience anyone. Appearance, exercise habits, sexual preferences, and linguistic variations are not inherently appropriate subjects for correction simply because an observer dislikes them.
The opening disclaimer helps establish the correct comic context, but it does not guarantee that every joke will be equally successful. The book occasionally relies on the authority of its narrator to produce amusement where a more developed comic situation might have been stronger.
Its treatment of the pandemic has a similar mixture of strengths and weaknesses. The time-specific references give the book immediacy, but some now require readers to remember the atmosphere surrounding particular restrictions or entertainment trends. A joke about excessive QR-code procedures may remain understandable without feeling as urgent as it did when those procedures were routine.
The Zoom material has aged somewhat differently. Even without lockdowns, the problems of unnecessary video meetings, poor camera placement, passive participants, and excessive corporate jargon remain recognisable. Flanagan’s complaints capture difficulties that have outlasted the circumstances in which they became commonplace.
The closing corporate and celebrity rules retain force because their central concern is wider than COVID-19. Powerful people and institutions can misjudge how their reassuring messages sound to audiences whose circumstances are less secure. Flanagan identifies that failure without requiring an elaborate theory of inequality.
The book is less successful if evaluated as a serious guide to etiquette or personal development. It has no coherent method, no systematic examination of conflicting social expectations, and little interest in qualifying its universal statements. But these omissions are largely consequences of its comic purpose rather than failures to deliver a promised educational system.
A more appropriate standard is whether the jokes remain lively, surprising, and recognisably human. On that measure, the collection performs well, although it would be difficult to argue that every entry is equally memorable.
Compared with the original premise of 488 Rules for Life, the continuation offers familiarity rather than reinvention. It preserves the numbered format, the personal authority, and the pleasure of watching minor grievances become exaggerated public commandments. Readers seeking a fundamentally different comic approach will not find one.
What makes the sequel worthwhile is the combination of additional observations and its pandemic setting. Flanagan’s established method meets situations that are less easily dismissed as mere personal eccentricities, allowing her to apply the same comic voice to questions of public responsibility and economic privilege.
The most revealing moments are those when she admits that her rules are unreasonable or recognises that another person’s needs matter more than her own irritation. Her advice about contacting the grieving, supporting performers, respecting retail workers, and cleaning up after somebody else’s dog provides a counterweight to the more arbitrary commands.
The final suggestions are consequently an appropriate ending. By conceding that some preferences are too ridiculous even for her own rulebook, Flanagan reminds readers that the authority has always been part of the performance.
The overall result is an entertaining but uneven sequel whose strongest material depends on accurate observations and a distinctive comic voice rather than the novelty of its format. It rewards readers who enjoy the narrator’s temperament while making fewer concessions to those who find her judgments excessively narrow or harsh.
What Has Aged, and Who Should Read It
Several years after publication, More Rules for Life offers two different experiences. Much of its everyday etiquette remains familiar, while its pandemic sections capture the anxieties, habits, and public arguments of a specific period.
Complaints about unclear invitations, inconvenient service arrangements, unnecessarily long meetings, and inconsiderate communication are unlikely to become incomprehensible. Their details may change as technology and social customs evolve, but the situations remain recognisable.
Other references are more closely tied to 2021. Lockdown-specific entertainment, early pandemic advertising, QR-code procedures, and celebrity responses to isolation make the book feel like a record of a particular cultural moment. That quality can be interesting in its own right, even when the immediate annoyance has faded.
The ideal reader is someone who appreciates observational stand-up comedy, exaggerated social criticism, and strong opinions presented with deliberate theatrical certainty. Existing admirers of Kitty Flanagan are especially likely to enjoy the familiar voice, while readers of 488 Rules for Life will recognise the format immediately.
The collection is less suitable for anyone seeking a rigorous account of social behaviour, a dependable system of personal improvement, or consistently gentle humour. Readers who dislike generational stereotypes or jokes about appearance and sexuality may also find particular passages less entertaining.
Its most defensible recommendation is as a comic companion to the original book, rather than a necessary replacement for it. The sequel preserves what made the premise attractive and adds a historical setting that gives several chapters a different kind of significance.
More Rules for Life demonstrates how a comedian can turn the smallest frustrations of daily life into an elaborate performance of certainty. Flanagan’s rules are sometimes sensible, sometimes unfair, and occasionally absurd enough to expose the limitations of making rules in the first place.
The book is most enjoyable when readers understand that contradiction and participate in the joke without surrendering their judgment. Agreement makes some entries immediately satisfying, while disagreement can make the narrator’s extravagance equally funny. Beneath the complaints, the recurring concern with consideration for others gives the collection more coherence than its miscellaneous subjects initially suggest.
Flanagan does not provide a reliable code for organising society, and she never seriously needs to. Her achievement is to make ordinary behaviour worth noticing, then give those observations enough comic force to turn passing irritation into entertainment. The result is a recognisably personal, often very funny sequel whose portrait of pandemic-era life adds both a distinctive strength and a reminder of the moment in which it was written.
Last Updated on October 17, 2026 by Aseem Gupta