HOW TO BE FUNNY: An Extremely Silly Guidebook

A joke book disguised as a how-to book, with a stand-up comic's quick delivery and casual digressions. Stine has readers warm up by matching, completing, and unscrambling one-liners and riddles; then he proceeds with instructions for knocking 'em dead at school, at the dinner table (""If your family doesn't own a tablecloth demand that they buy one. You will never get laughs with placemats no matter how hard you try""), at parties, and ""when you're in big trouble."" Like any proper text this has review questions at the ends of chapters (""What are the two funniest things you can do with spinach in a crowded lunchroom?""), exemplary and cautionary case histories, lots of rules (""Placing strange objects in your soup almost always gets laughs. Attempting to wear your soup is usually less successful""; ""If you must tell elephant or grape jokes, never tell less than thirty at a time""), ploys to be avoided at all costs (buttering your napkin, laughing when you drink so the milk pours out your nose), and an annotated bibliography (authors have names like O. B. Serious). Guess what? It's funny.