BiblioVault - Books about Humor -

Academic Tribes

Hazard Adams

University of Illinois Press, 1988

In The Academic Tribes, an English professor who has survived stints as a dean and a vice-chancellor "takes a gentle, satiric sideswipe at academia, its foibles, follies, and myths" (ALA Booklist). Hazard Adams' parody of anthropological analysis describes the principles and antinomies of academic politics, campus stereotypes, the various tribes divided by discipline, the agonies accompanying each stage on the way to full professorship, and, of course, the power struggle between faculties and academic administrators. This first paperback edition also includes a new preface looking back at the decade since the book's original publication and an appendix that adds three relevant essays.

[more]

Ace Reid and the Cowpokes Cartoons

By Ace Reid

University of Texas Press, 1999

Winner, Mitchell A. Wilder Award for Publication Design, Texas Association of Museums

Folks across the West know a cowpoke named Jake. A good-hearted guy, he's always up to his eyebrows in debt or drought or prickly pears looking for them dad-blamed ole wild cows. In fact, he's so real a fella that it's hard to believe that Ace Reid made him up.

This book brings together 139 of Ace Reid's popular "Cowpokes" cartoons, reproduced in large format to show the artistry and attention to detail that characterized Reid's work. Grouped around themes such as work, weather, bankers, and friends, they reveal the distinctive "you might as well laugh as cry" sense of humor that ranch folks draw on to get through hard work and hard times.

In the foreword, Washington Post cartoonist Pat Oliphant offers an appreciation of Reid's "Cowpokes" cartoons, noting that "Ace's work has a magic of its own, and it owes nothing to anyone else." Reid's longtime friend Elmer Kelton recounts Ace's life and career in the introduction, describing how a shy boy who grew up on ranch work transformed himself into an artist-entrepreneur who never met a stranger and who made ranch work the subject of his real love, cartooning. This collector's volume belongs on the shelf of everyone who loves the "Cowpokes" cartoons, knows a fella like Jake, or enjoys the dry wit of the American cowboy.

[more]

And Quiet Flows the Vodka

or When Pushkin Comes to Shove: The Curmudgeon's Guide to Russian Literature with the Devil's Dictionary of Received Ideas

Alicia Chudo

Northwestern University Press, 2000

Russia has fascinated outsiders for centuries, and according to Alicia Chudo, it is high time this borscht stopped. In this hilarious send up of Russian literature and history, Chudo takes no prisoners as she examines Russia's great tradition of unreadable geniuses, revolutionaries who can't hit the broad side of a tsar, and Soviets who like their vodka but love their tractors.

Written in the tradition of 1066 and All That, The Pooh Perplex, and The Classics Redefined, And Quiet Flows the Vodka will, with any luck, be the final word on the ghastly first two millennia of Russian literature, history, and culture.

[more]

Antisatire

In Defense of Women, against Francesco Buoninsegni

Arcangela Tarabotti

Iter Press, 2020

Arcangela Tarabotti (1604–1652), Venetian nun and polemicist, was known for her protest against forced monachization and her advocacy for the education of women and their participation in public life. She responded to Francesco Buoninsegni’s Against the Vanities of Women (1638) with the Antisatire (1644), a defense of women’s fashions and a denunciation of men, but also a strong condemnation of men’s treatment of women and of the subordination of women in society. Both Buoninsegni and Tarabotti write with the exaggeration and absurd arguments typical of Menippean satire; they flaunt their knowledge of ancient and contemporary literature in a prose interspersed with poetry and replete with the astonishing Baroque conceits that delighted their contemporaries.

The Other Voice in Early Modern Women: The Toronto Series volume 70

[more]

Are You Really a Genius?

Timeless Tests for the Irritatingly Intelligent

Robert A. Streeter and Robert G. Hoehn

Bodleian Library Publishing, 2015

“If a hen and a half lays an egg and a half in a day and a half, how many eggs will seven hens lay in six days?”

“By rearranging the letters in the word ‘plea,’ make three new words.”

“Which is heavier, milk or cream?”

If you think you know the answers to these questions, you may be a genius! Before the Mensa admissions test or the awarding of MacArthur “Genius Grants,” self-described geniuses Robert A. Streeter and Robert G. Hoehn set out in the 1930s on a mission to find more men and women of above-average intelligence. Central to this undertaking were tests filled with fiendishly difficult brainteasers, tortuous trick questions, and complex calculations that could be administered to the unsuspecting.

Are You Really a Genius? collects a series of Streeter and Hoehn’s tests into a quirky quiz book. Throughout the tests are timeless favorites, as well as many charmingly old-fashioned scenarios reflecting simpler times past. For those struggling to reach the correct answers, a final three-point “brain twister” offers a chance for redemption. And for those not quite up to the challenge, a “moron’s morgue” may help improve one’s intellectual standing. Using the answer key found at the back of the book, each test can be carefully scored to determine the exact level of genius attained.

Think you’re in the company of the “rare Craneo-Bulgis species?” In the words of the authors, “sneak up on your friends and spring the questions on the following pages.”

Still wondering about the answers to the questions at the top?

1) 28 eggs

2) leap, peal, and pale

3) milk, because cream comes to the surface

[more]

As Ding Saw Herbert Hoover

Jay N. Darling

University of Iowa Press, 1996

Ding Darling was a Pulitzer Prize-winning editorial cartoonist whose work appeared daily on the front page of the Des Moines Register between 1906 and 1949 and also was syndicated in 135 newspapers across the country. A brief encounter with Herbert Hoover during World War I was the beginning of a friendship that lasted until Ding’s death in 1962. After Hoover’s election as president, Ding’s relationship changed somewhat from one of strictly a friend to one of an unofficial advisor. On at least three occasions, the Darlings were overnight guests at the White House. Although their friendship deepened after the years of the presidency, Ding did not agree with Hoover on everything. In As “Ding” Saw Herbert Hoover, Ding interprets the career of Hoover as food administrator, cabinet member, candidate, and president in 57 cartoons, personal recollections, and a running commentary of the times as told in the day-by-day headlines.

[more]

Away Happens

Phil Crossman

University Press of New England, 2005

“Several years ago it was revealed to me that creative nonfiction was a legitimate literary genre,” writes Phil Crossman. “It was the most liberating experience of my life. All these years I thought I’d been simply lying.” Crossman is a humorist in the Mark Twain mold: wry, satiric, and keenly aware of the shortcomings of human beings, but with a leavening of self-deprecation and underlying sympathy. Though rooted in a regional consciousness (coastal Maine), his humor succeeds in making the local universal. Away Happens considers daily life on an island in Penobscot Bay that supports both a tight-knit local community and a larger seasonal population. Whether he is recounting a debate that happened at the Lions Club over who counts as a “local” or describing his adventures getting the Thanksgiving turkey into the oven, ruminating on how the ferry schedule shapes island life or recalling a local crime spree, Crossman is funny, unsentimental, and authentically Maine. “There are only two places, Here, this island off the coast of Maine, and Away. Here, this place, is a small place and Away, everywhere else, is a big place, but make no mistake about it, Here is Here and Away is not. 1276 people live Here. Billions more live Away than live Here, although increasingly, during the summer, it seems otherwise.” —From the Book

[more]