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By and large this is an entertaining travelogue, and I recommend it. It is particularly good for a short plane trip, as it will take about two or three hours to read. Parts are genius, but just know that other parts are occasionally a bit of a drag.
Some selections didn't even seem particularly travel oriented, such as the one about infiltrating a fundamentalist Christian sect. And the one about the fox hunt was, I suppose, fairly representative of it's well-known author, J.P. Donleavy. But it was still very dense, overwritten and straining for humorousness. And it also didn't seem to have much of anything to do with travel.
Apart from just been dull, uninteresting and unfunny, the worst thing about this book were the little inserts, or sidebars, that were included on every other page. A number of them were, in fact, quotes from the TV show "Saturday Night Live"?!?!?! They were the little phony "thought for the day" things by "Jack Handey". For example: "I hope if dogs ever take over the world and they choose a king, they don't just go by size, because I bet there are some Chihauhuas with some good ideas"?!?! What is this only marginally clever re-cycled TV crud doing in a travel book?
Good thing I got this out of a library and didn't actually have to pay real money for it, or I would have really been unhappy.
The Good Ones:
How I Killed Off MY Ex-Wife <- How a lie spiraled into crazy proportions...
Benuvenuto in Italia! <- a confused traveler arrives in Italy and has an "encounter" with some Government officials.
The Dentist in Cameroon <- This is definitely more on the "misadventure," side of things... An African dentist acts like a mechanic.
Called on the Carpet in Marrakech <- Opening line: "Somebody with more experience in these things than I once warned that every glass of 'free' mint tea you drink in a Moroccan carpet shop ends up costing you $600." The best salesmen in the world are not American used car salesmen; these Moroccans may just have the title.
A Past Life <- An interesting encounter in India. Reincarnation and theft come together in an amusing combination.
My thoughts about the book are that it did not really live up to its title. However, it is light reading that one needs after a long day of hiking up ancient sites. From somebody that doesn't know travel writing too well, I think there are probably better books out there.
Secondly, the pieces are not very funny. Some of them are one or two pages long, much too short for readers to empathize with the characters, and empathy is an important component of humor. Not to mention, Cahill chose the most unfunny incident in Bill Bryson's A Walk in the Woods for this collection. He had so much good material to choose from, solely in Bryson's works, and chose so poorly. It's a real shame.
Unrelated cartoons and quotations make the collection seem amateurish and don't add to the humor. In fact, these additions only distract and distance the reader from the characters in the stories.
There were only three truly humorous, well-written pieces in this collection: Elliot Neal Hester's "Hold Onto Your Lunch," about an airline steward dealing with an airsick passenger, David Sedaris' "Jesus Shaves," about talking theology in a foreign tongue, and Cara Tabachnick's "The Reluctant Chef and Her Rainbow Special," about a vegetarian dish and a new age festival gone horribly wrong.
The travel humor collection is such a great concept, it could be an annual series, but not with Cahill as editor.
I read this book while on an extremely long flight to South Africa. As such, it was bearable, but the stories shared by my co-passengers were considerably more appealing. Stick to Cahill's earlier works and avoid this haphazard assortment.
Reviewer Ivy, below, summed up my sentiments pretty well with some really well-penned observations. While most of the big adventure travel names are here, most of the really interesting stories seem to have already shown up someplace else. Most of these are pretty short, so I suppose it'd be good before-bed or throne room reading, but I just didn't find most of them compelling.
If you don't have elevated expectations brought on by reading a lot of Cahill's stuff (as I do), you may enjoy it more than I did.
It might have something to do with the limited material available. There isn't, relatively speaking, a lot of travel humor published, and much of it is written by just a few very talented authors. Not So Funny does contain all the big names, but at one story apiece, they don't come close to filling up the book. For the rest of the content, Cahill has to go to less known and unknown authors, or to those who don't usually write misadventure travel essays. Unfortunately, Travelers' Tales has been down this road very recently, with There's No Toilet Paper on the Road Less Traveled; in other words, the best unknown stuff has already been used. That leaves Not So Funny with a lot of marginal articles, plus a few good ones.
An additional caveat: if you like humor, you've probably read the big names - Bill Bryson, Tim Cahill, David Sedaris, Douglas Adams, Anne Lamott, Dave Barry - in this collection already. And the essays included in Not So Funny aren't among their least-known works by any means.
In short, while I liked the concept behind this book, the reality of it leaves much to be desired. It is, however, worth reading once or twice, especially for the devoted travel writing fan.
What the scientists have in their briefcases is terrifying.
-- Nikita Khruschev
If your happiness depends on what somebody else does, I guess you do
have a problem.
-- Richard Bach, "Illusions"
