Confederacy of a Dunce - books and me: Humor

Friday, March 31, 2006

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An ongoing series about my love of books.

As I don't recall at all, I started reading at a very early age (surely quite impaired by my terrible vision, as I didn't have glasses yet). There were stacks and stacks of books of all sorts in our house (a TV-free zone, although I vaguely remember an unused TV hanging around in the basement), and I know I was an avid reader from the beginning. The first book I actually remember reading today was Go, Dog, Go!. I thought it was hysterically funny to see the pictures of wild dogs wearing hip duds and driving fast cars towards some sort of dog-only Woodstock-in-a-giant-tree really kept my interest, and I always wished I could some day go to a similar party in a tree.

I also really liked to read my father's Pogo books, although for some reason I failed to recognize any of the references to the Nixon administration, or to any other historical figures for that matter. To me they were just some unusual comics about a group of rural, swamp-dwelling animals who got into various comic antics as they floated around the swamp in flat-bottomed boats (e.g. the poor alligator who was always suspected of eating other characters. Sometimes justly as I vaguely recall).

I was also a fan of joke books from a very young age, and ran into certain problems as I was keen to pass on these jokes even when I didn't quite understand what they were about. One of the few examples I can remember falls into this category, and is also an excellent indicator of the historical period I'm talking about (it's also just as funny today as it was then!):
Q: What's giant, purple and swims in the ocean?
A: Moby Grape!
I think I also caused some inadvertent household controversy when I came across a really unusual and funny joke book the likes of which I'd never seen before. It definitely belonged to my father (a fan of subtle, intelligent humor of all sorts). I can still clearly remember the one I proudly told to my mother:
"Mommy, mommy, can we go for a ride?"
"Shut up, your iron lung won't fit in the Volkswagen."
For some reason, she didn't think it was very funny. And the next time I went to the high shelf to look for the joke book, it had disappeared. Must have gotten lost or something. In my teenage years I amassed quite a collection of sick joke books (mostly in the "Truly Tasteless Jokes" series), but they had a similarly unfortunate tendency to evaporate into thin air, even when stashed in fairly secure hiding places.

Unfortunately, my joke-book-reading tendencies were to a large extent inspired by reading various fictional tales of comedically-blessed, precocious children who always managed to have a giant circle of friends and were constantly the center of attention with their wise-cracking antics. I usually found myself in very diffferent circumstances, and drew the unfortunate conclusion that I just hadn't yet found the right jokes to draw the crowds. So (with the aid of a healthy "humor" section in the public library), I worked my way through the various genres without success. Knock-knock jokes just didn't sit well with anyone (thank goodness I didn't completely remember the one from the above-mentioned disappearing joke book: "Knock, knock"; "Who's there?"; "Nazis"; "Nazis who?"; [and the punchline was something to do with Anne Frank. I'm sure that would have gone down a treat with the under-10 audience]), nor did riddles, cross jokes (there are more than 90,000 Google hits for "what do you get when you cross a * with a")), light bulb jokes (would you believe 295,000 Google hits for "how many * does it take to change a light bulb"?!), puns, funny headlines, shaggy dog stories, and don't even get me started on limericks (Very underappreciated by elementary school teachers, I should say. Especially if they feature islands south of Cape Cod).

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Friday, March 31, 2006 1:25:14 PM (GMT Standard Time, UTC+00:00)