Customer Reviews

Braude's Treasury of Wit and Humor for All Occasions

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This book is a great source for humor.

Jacob Braude was a Judge of the Circuit Court in Cook County, Illinois for more than 35 years. During that time, he gained a reputation for his reservoir of anecdotes and humorous stories.

The book is divided into topics and the material is easily adaptable. I particularly like the definitions, which I find are a great source for humorous one-liners.

In the modern world of coarse humor, jokes are often expected to be crude and contain expletives or sexual references. However, not all audiences can be exposed to such outbursts and in those circumstances, one must use a joke that is good, clean and will not offend any group in the audience. While the jokes in this book are clean, there are many that will offend people, in particular women.
Many of the jokes are based on dated clichés about women. Some examples are:

Hypochondriac - a woman who always broods over her health, but never catches a remedy.
Eavesdropper - a woman who loves to listen in, but not as much as she loves to talk out.
Adam - the first white slave.

Therefore, while this book is a good source for jokes that can be used in front of an audience, one must be careful to make sure that you take them through at least some kind of data correction filter. While these jokes were considered appropriate forty years ago, many of them have not aged well and are sure to offend some of the audience members.

My very intelligent twelve year old loves this book. She finds it to be very entertaining, but I appreciate the fact that it is also somewhat educational. It is well written (although perhaps a bit dated) and it's funny, but uses a bit of an advanced vocabulary that exposes my daughter to a higher level of words (& concepts) than she generally encounters in today's dumbed down world. I highly recommend this book.