BETTY'S BOOK REVIEWS

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HUMOR

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More of the Best of the Journal of Irreproducible Results: Sex as a Heap of Malfunctioning Rubble (and Further Improbabilities) edited by Mark Abrahams is a collection of spoof scientific articles with titles like "Multivariate Analysis of Spaghetti Stains", "Messages Found Encoded in the Digits of Pi" and "Buttock-Dimpling in Middle-Aged Women: A Cross-Cultural Study." Kind of esoteric, I suppose, but anybody who's ever had to read a scientific article should at least get a chuckle or two. Though I must say that I was a bit disappointed, since I found this volume on the whole much less amusing than the first Best of the Journal of Irreproducible Results. There was a lot of stuff in this one that I didn't find all that humous. C+

Fugitive from the Cubicle Police: A Dilbert Book by Scott Adams. Two things have happened in the past few months: management has suddenly become a bit more, shall we say, obtrusive in my job... and Dilbert has suddenly gotten a lot funnier. The two are almost certainly related: Dilbert captures the managerial idiocies of the modern workplace so well it's almost scary. This collection had me laughing out loud in several places... and had at least one of my co-workers asking to borrow it. A

Dave Barry's Bad Habits by Dave Barry. I've had to stop reading Dave Barry books in public places, because I simply cannot make it through them without laughing out loud, sometimes until tears come to my eyes. Well, this one didn't quite manage to evoke the tears, but I certainly got my share of laughs out of it. This particular collection dates from 1985, so we get Barry musing on such then-topical issues as the Cold War and the proliferation of the third prong on electrical appliance plugs.. Trust me, though: it's still funny in 1997. A

One Last Little Peek by Berkeley Breathed consists of two parts. The first half of the book is a collection of the final Outland cartoons. It's interesting to see how Outland ended up being so completely indistinguishable from Bloom County: same characters, same type of humor... Although these weren't nearly as good as Bloom County at its height, it was good to visit one last time with Opus, Bill the Cat and all the rest of the gang. In his preface, Breathed explains why he decided to stop drawing the strip, and I think I agree with him. It was good, but it wasn't as good as it used to be, and it may well have been better to finish it off when he did rather than to let it slowly slide downhill. Still, I'll miss those guys... The second half of the book contains a few selected Bloom County and Outland cartoons, with comments by Breathed, often about how he was contacted by a famous person depicted in the strip. Most of these are nothing particularly special (though the commentary is interesting), but the one strip that he says "prompted more mail and requests for reprints than any other... [and] also cost me half a dozen major newspapers" is just about the most hilarous thing I've ever seen. B+

Politically Correct Bedtime Stories/Once Upon a More Enlightened Time by James Finn Garner. Humorously PC versions of traditional fairy tales. Some of these are really pretty funny. The 22 of them included in the two-in-one book version I have, though, are almost too much, as they start getting repetitive-feeling after a while. Though maybe I shouldn't have read them all in a lump... B

Binky's Guide to Love by Matt Groening (more commonly known as "that guy who does The Simpsons") is a compiliation of some of Groening's Life in Hell strips with the general theme of love and relationships (in case you couldn't tell that from the title). Very funny in (mostly) a very bitter sort of way. Read it when you're feeling good about your own relationship (or lack thereof) so you can laugh at all the losers out there. Otherwise it may be almost as depressing as it is funny. A-

A Light in the Attic by Shel Silverstein is a collection of humorous poems and line drawings. I loved Silverstein's stuff when I was a kid, and unlike so many children's books, this one also gave me great pleasure on adult re-reading. Many of these poems are just silly fun, but some of them are quite insightful, and others are most delightfully twisted (like the one about the baby-sitter who thought she was supposed to sit on the baby). If I ever have kids, this is a book I'll definitely read to 'em. A

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