How to Remember Jokes And 101 Drop-Dead Jokes to Get Started [Paperback]

Philip Van Munching (Author), Elwood H Smith (Illustrator)

Book Description

Publication Date: January 9, 1997

NEVER BE JOKE-DEPRIVED AGAIN

Are you the only golfer at the tee who never has a new joke? Do you try to break the ice at sales calls, but come up empty-handed? Do you try to enliven the dinner party by uncorking a zinger—only to fumble the setup, confuse the action, then blow the punchline? Welcome to Philip Van Munching's quick and accurate method for remembering jokes. Beginning with the importance of using cues, the author shows how you can remember every joke worth retelling—and presents 101 of his favorites to help you master the system.

Editorial Reviews

Book Description

How often does it happen that you hear a good joke, then blow it as you later tell it to a friend? Either you fumble the setup, get tied up in overdescription (the most common mistake in joke-telling), lose your way through the action, or tip off the punchline. Whatever the problem, it boils down to one reason--you forgot the joke. Because jokes seem to defy recall. But not for Philip Van Munching. A former beer executive and ad man who perfected the art of joke-telling to win customers and influence clients, he has a system. Combining a simple, four-step process for remembering jokes with 101 of the best from his repertoire, How To Remember Jokes will turn any reader into a much better joke-teller, and provide the jokes to get started.

About the Author

Philip Van Munching perfected the craft of joke-telling by spending ten years in the business with Van Munching & Company, Inc., importer of Heineken. He is the author of Beer Blast: The Inside Story of the Brewing Industry's Bizarre Battles for Your Money and op-ed pieces for the New York Times and the Chicago Tribune.

Product Details

• Paperback: 133 pages
• Publisher: Workman Publishing Company (January 9, 1997)
• Language: English
• ISBN-10: 0761107347
• ISBN-13: 978-0761107347
• Product Dimensions: 8.1 x 6.1 x 0.4 inches
• Shipping Weight: 7 ounces (View shipping rates and policies)
• Average Customer Review: 1.0 out of 5 stars  See all reviews (2 customer reviews)
• Amazon Best Sellers Rank: #2,171,807 in Books (See Top 100 in Books)

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Customer Reviews

Most Helpful Customer Reviews

0 of 2 people found the following review helpful:

1.0 out of 5 stars This book does not live up to its title, June 13, 2005

By 

W. Jamison "William S. Jamison" (Eagle River, Ak United States) - See all my reviews
(VINE VOICE)    (REAL NAME)   

This review is from: How to Remember Jokes And 101 Drop-Dead Jokes to Get Started (Paperback)

This book does not live up to its title. It starts off by basically suggesting the reason jokes are hard to remember is because people do not work hard enough to remember them. He then starts off by telling a joke that is not worth remembering. Certainly it is not one I can imagine using any place. So if my problem is I do not work hard enough to remember it - by repeating it soon enough, this is clearly one I wish I could forget. It took until the fourth joke to find one worth remembering - that I could tell in polite company at any rate! (The Missing Music). Finally another good one shows up: "The Farmer's House of Sod." But boy I had to weed through a lot of poor jokes to get to that one! OK, "The Hunchback's Replacement" is not too bad. "The Tate Compass" is alright. The rest are pretty bad. Now to remember these.... If you want a joke book with most of the classic bad jokes, this is it.

One point of agreement: people remember stories. But then how to use this in the context of telling jokes? A better way to remember jokes is to think of them as arguments that are fallacious. There are different kinds of fallacies and we can easily remember those. Now you are ready to make your own jokes. Take a fallacious argument and use the form of that argument to make an argument that is clearly meant to be fallacious. For example, a pun is equivocation. Use a word in two different senses in either two premises or a premise and the conclusion of an argument and you have a fallacious equivocal argument. Have the conclusion of an argument have nothing to do with the premises of the argument and you have a non sequitur. Dave Barry uses this fallacy all the time.

3 of 9 people found the following review helpful:

1.0 out of 5 stars JOKES?, February 13, 2000

By 

"nicky27" - See all my reviews

This review is from: How to Remember Jokes And 101 Drop-Dead Jokes to Get Started (Paperback)

I have just finished this book and it made me so upset. Because as you see on the cover of this book Something about JOKES but when I started reading it. I asked myself WHAT!. It didn't funny AT ALL.