Category: Humor

I saw this book on the shelf at the local Price Cutter and was intrigued. A small press book, local, and it was a collection of jokes and cartoons. What was not to love?

Well, it’s a collection of common jokes, not particularly Branson-y or Ozark-y. Additionally, they are old jokes, coming from the days before Orben’s Current Comedy. I recognized many of them, thought maybe one was worthy of tweeting, and generally was disappointed with the collection.

Still, I admire the pluck and the drive to get the book out there.

This book, like Real Men Don’t Eat Quiche, is an early 80s mocking snapshot of a demographic. In this case, it’s mocking the young urban professional, the Manhattanite two-career couple with eyes on improving themselves.

The craziest thing about it is you could substitute casual attire for the pinstripe suit, a DVR or Slingbox for the VCR, an iPod for the Walkman, and add some comic book allusions and come up with the modern urban geek (MUG, I just made that up but you can use it). Some of these books really prove how little has changed since the 80s. It’s just we have the Internet now.

Coupled with my reading of Real Men Don’t Eat Quiche, this really seems to support my assertion that culture has flattened in the last 30 years. You can read this and recognize the stereotypes and even the more common flourishes.

As with Real Men Don’t Eat Quiche, the book is amusing in spots and obviously filler in other spots. Not as good as Real Men Don’t Eat Quiche, but longer.

It must be books as historical documents week here at MfBJN. This particular entry is a Heathcliff collection of cartoons from the newspaper (in those days, I would have been reading him in the Milwaukee Journal Green Sheet).

This book, unlike Sweet Savage Heathcliff, does not focus on his love for Sonja, so I got my wish. Unfortunately, the book hits the same tropes of what Heathcliff does. It’s mostly a one-panel cartoon, so hoping for the sophistication of Calvin and Hobbes is probably foolish. But some bits are amusing enough to spend an hour or so flipping through this book.

Plus, it counts as one entry on the annual books read list just as much as War and Peace would.

It’s been over a decade since I listened to the sequel to this book, Real Men Don’t Bond, as an audiobook during my hour-plus commuting days. I thought highly enough of the audiobook sequel that I went ahead and bought the original when I found it at a book fair.

As a document from 1982, it’s quite the historical document. Portions of it are amusing, and parts of it are not. Its uneven nature stems from the very, dare I say it, bloggishness? A couple longer pieces obviously appeared in magazines, but some of the shorter riffs are just lists to put something on the pages in between the covers of the book.

Masculine readers can take some chuckles from the work if they can tell themselves he means it. Sometimes, the humor does seem defensive of masculinity, but other parts of it build ridiculous straw real men for the cosmopolitan (ca. 1982) set to mock.

Fortunately, the book is short. As I said, some funny bits, but some not so funny at all. But it’s a historical document, too, a peek not only at the image but also the lens that produced it.