Today has the Dude taking another dip into the sample box, though this time I’m not coming back up with a wine, but with a book about wine.
Or, rather, a book with quips (and cartoons) about wine.
For a book with contents that I sometimes found hilarious, Malcolm Kushner’s Vintage Humor for Wine Lovers at turns made me groan, as in the eye-rolling, are-you-f—king-kidding-me? type of groan.
Turn to a random page in Vintage Humor for Wine Lovers, and you’re likely to find a strange juxtaposition – at least, I did – in which a very funny quip is followed quickly by something that resembles the kind of humor that makes you want to cover the book in Pedigree and feed it to a junkyard dog.
Take, for example, the following excerpts from Vintage Humor for Wine Lovers’s “Toasted” section (of witty wine toasts):
Funny –
“To good friends – if you want one, get a dog”
Not funny –
“To foolishness – it’s more fun than Elliot Ness”
Here’s another one, from the “Q&A About Wine” section:
Funny –
“Q. How do you make a small fortune in the wine business?
A. Start with a large fortune and buy a winery.”
Not funny –
Q. Who invented the first champagne [sic] with no bubbles?
A. Dumb Perignon
(I swear I did not make that last one up).
You’re almost guaranteed to find something amusing in Kushner’s collection, no matter what your sense of humor. And therein lies the rub with Vintage Humor for Wine Lovers.
Assembling diverse (or even totally inconsistent) stylistic pieces in one place hasn’t worked well for anyone since the Beatles, so whether or not you’ll enjoy Vintage Humor for Wine Lovers depends mostly on your tolerance for diverse styles of humor. You’ll definitely find something that will make you chuckle (or laugh out lout) – but you’ll be doing some skipping and page flipping in between those moments.
Cheers!
(images: amazon.com, paraorkut.com)
