Laugh Your A** Off: A Steady Diet Of Rib-Tickling Belly Busters, by Jack Kresimer

I have to admit that my ribs were only barely tickled and my belly never busted over the course of reading this book. This is not (entirely) the fault of either the reader or the writer. I have a sense of humor, but it tends towards the witty, and there are a few jokes here that certainly got me to chuckle and laugh, and they were among the wittier jokes here. One of the jokes that I read in this book was one I had used slightly differently as a blonde joke [1], and any book that contains jokes I have known and occasionally used since childhood is not all bad. Still, my own sense of humor is more about witty wordplay, understatement, and longer extended bits whose delivery and timing provide the comedy, and this book is more of the sort of joke book that barely (if at all) moves beyond the dad jokes material. This does not make it inherently bad, it must be admitted, just that the book is a mixed bag for me, with some longer jokes that I found more appealing and a lot of short jokes that I found to be pretty stupid. With a large variety of material, though, at least some of this book ought to be appealing to many readers.

This book is a bit more than 120 pages and it is divided into several unnamed chapters. The first chapter consists of “drinks,” under the label of “A man walks into a bar…” where the jokes are about as one would expect accordingly. This is followed by a section of “appetizers,” namely one-line calorie burners with the label “A waist is a terrible thing to mind…” This chapter is mercifully short, but perhaps the weakest chapter of the entire book then follows with a chapter labeled as soup, with the title, “Waiter, there’s a fly…” which are the most tedious and repetitive jokes to be found in the entire volume. Most of the book consists of “entrees” which are labeled as “the main course,” and this section includes some genuinely funny jokes that I appreciated, some of which took a bit of time to develop, which spoke highly of at least the effort that went into creating or, more likely, gathering, this material. The last chapter, labeled as “dessert,” consists of after dinner jokes that point out that “stressed spelled backwards is desserts.” These jokes also include some genuinely funny material, including a wife who is not distracted by her husband’s injuries by his mention that a woman named Gertude drove him to the hospital. One thing to note is that this book includes a great many jokes at the bottom of the pages that are clever one-liners as well, often more clever than the jokes on the main part of the page, so it would pay not to ignore the footnotes here.

This is not a book I happen to own, but it was around my computers when I was done working and reading other material and it was a short book, and that is all I need personally to find something appealing enough to read for myself. As one can gather from my many thousands of reviews, my own standards for a book are not overwhelmingly high for me to gain at least some enjoyment from a book. This is a book that gives some enjoyment–the author is known in general for writing bathroom humor and this book is at least a step up from that in that the material is generally filled with jokes about food. Food is not exactly the funniest subject, but it is a pretty relatable area of humor, joking about the uselessness of diets, the appeal of food, the futility of trying to control one’s appetites for many people, and so on. If joking mostly about food (along with occasional jokes about drinking and related subjects), is something that is appealing for you, whether in short form or slightly longer form (up to a solid paragraph or so in length), this book will be good enough to smile at and chuckle at a little from time to time, at the very least, and that is by no means worthless.

[1] Two blonds were in the woods and they saw a set of tracks. One claimed they were deer tracks, the other claimed that they were bear tracks. They were both wrong; they were train tracks. That joke appears in a sightly different form here.