[In the following review of Tooth Imprints on a Corn Dog, Lord criticizes Leyner's tendency to write self-referential and self-promotional fiction.]

I first encountered Mark Leyner's name in the Mystery Quote contest on Echo, a computer bulletin board. In the competition players guess the author of unidentified texts, and wrongly attributed to Mr. Leyner were some wildly dissimilar bits of prose: excerpts from Gore Vidal's spoof of Christianity, Live From Golgotha; the film maker Derek Jarman's thoughts on Caravaggio; and a hard-boiled detective story from Bill Pronzini's collection Son of Gun in Cheek in which a woman is killed by having the air sucked from her lungs with a vacuum cleaner.

Even more startling is how plausible these guesses were. Mr. Leyner's first three books—I Smell Esther Williams, My Cousin, My Gastroenterologist and Et Tu, Babe—are not conventional narratives. Often scatological, rarely predictable, they most closely resemble the long, loopy yet occasionally brilliant monologues of the psychiatric patient Sylvia Frumkin, which Susan Sheehan first recorded 12 years ago in "Is There No Place on Earth for Me?" and reprised in the recent anniversary issue of The New Yorker.

Perhaps because they were originally published in various magazines, many of the pieces in Mr. Leyner's latest book, Tooth Imprints on a Corn Dog, are more accessible. Many also seem to have been written according to this formula: To achieve humor, insert outrageous nouns into a traditional story.

The recipe produces sentences such as this: "Several friends and I hiked to the old hydroelectric plant on the outskirts of town; we cut our fingers and pledged never to use any word associated with French deconstructionism, including 'liminal,' 'endo-colonization' and 'simulacrum.'" And this: "When I'm not crisscrossing the globe, honing my connoisseurship of the physical arts—an avocation that has taken me from the fighting-cockroach parlors of Rangoon and wet T-shirt contests at Khmer Rouge ruby mines to the self-service drive-through liposuction emporia of Boca Raton and Easter Brunch with a self-mortification cult in Montclair, New Jersey—I bodybuild."

Readers may immediately recognize Mr. Leyner's literary precedent—the formula used in Mad Libs, a party game popular with generations of junior high school students.

When Mr. Leyner's satire works, it works well. He is brilliant at inventing facetious products to make a political point. Commenting on the sad shape of the post-cold-war defense industry, he concocts a "Swords Into Plowshares" clothing line that features boxer shorts made by Martin Marietta. And he exposes the sleaziness of classroom advertising by removing its subtlety—inserting actual brand names into passages from Shakespeare's Antony and Cleopatra.

Mr. Leyner's mature comedy, however, is often upstaged by his not-so-mature fixation on potty jokes. I also wish he would write more about the world and less about himself. His self-mockery looks troublingly like self-promotion, especially when—for the third or fourth time—he mentions his well-known agent.

To a degree, Mr. Leyner's songs of himself are tongue-in-cheek. He flirts with being a poseur: "I'll play the elegant, mordantly witty belletrist whose writing combines the delicacy and voluptousness of poetry with the rigor of science and the vivacity of jai alai." Yet even he seems to know that there is such a thing as too much self-indulgence. How else to explain this insight in his essay on a sperm bank? "As a writer," Mr. Leyner observes, "the notion of being paid to masturbate does not seem odd to me in the least."