Customer Reviews

Not So Funny When It Happened: The Best of Travel Humor and Misadventure (Travelers' Tales Guides)

5 star:		(4)
4 star:		(5)
3 star:		(7)
2 star:		(4)
1 star:		(1)

 

 

Not So Funny When It Happened seems like a real winner. Edited by Tim Cahill, who has written a number of good adventure travel books, published by Travelers' Tales, who have the travel anthology down to a fine art, and full of travel humor, which we all know is wonderful. How can this book not be great?

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.

Unfortunately, _Not So Funny_ is really not that humorous. Given the contributing authors (including Dave Barry, Douglas Adams, Anne Lamott, and, of course, Tim Cahill) one would expect this collection to have you rolling in the aisles. But it simply doesn't work. The snippets may have fit very well in their original publications, but the misadventures in _Not So Funny_ are just not surprising or amusing enough as stand-alones.

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.

Normally, I devour almost anything Cahill associates himself with, and that's why I bought _Not So Funny_. It wasn't bad, but it wasn't really that great a value.

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.

... still, I did finish it, which is saying something. I found the first few stories unimpressive, but they seemed to get better as the book progressed. I thought that "The King of the Ferret-Leggers" by Donald Katz was utterly hilarious and quite worth reading the whole book for.

As I travel quite a bit, mostly on business, but occasionally for pleasure, I sometimes enjoy reading travel humor. I am unsure what criteria were used to select the stories in this volume, but largely the results are amusing to hysterical. My favorite, hands down was the Bill Bryson piece titled "What's Cooking?" ("We have a crepe galette of sea chortle and kelp in a rich mal de mer sauce..."), though almost as funny were "A Train, A Frog, and Aliens" by Randy Wayne White, and "Bad Haircuts Around the World" by Doug Lansky. Many of the other pieces were also quite funny, and a few only modestly amusing, though generally sincere. A couple were downright unpleasant, namely editor Tim Cahill's own "Speaking in Tongues" and especially the almost unendurable J. P. Donleavy piece "The Fox Hunt", which was not only distasteful and crude, but not a trifle funny.

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.

How much travel humor have you read? How many works have you read by the authors included in this book? If you answered "a lot" to either of these questions, chances are that more than a couple of these stories will look familiar to you, as they are exerpts from previous publications rather than essays written specifically for this book. For example, the bit by David Sedaris is taken from "Me Talk Pretty One Day," and the Bill Bryson selection is taken from one of his books on America (either "I'm a Stranger Here Myself" or "The Lost Continent," unfortunately my memory fails me.) This is a great place to start for people who haven't read much travel humor. Since it does contain some fresh material, I would also recommend it to well-read fans of travel humor, but would also suggest buying it used rather than paying full price.

Now, on to the actual quality of the content- this book shows once again that good travel writing doesn't always have to come from some crazy adventure, and that simply having a good narrative style can make any situation interesting. Examples of standard situations turned into good stories include: a middle aged woman pondering the local young, pretty girls' reactions to her appearance in her bathing suit (a.k.a. "butthink"), overcoming cultural differences in Vietnam by claiming that a perfectly healthy ex-wife is dead. Of course, there are also stories of the bizarre- like taking a frog on a cross country train and ending up in the new-age alien spotting capital of the USA, where the frog is "saved by aliens" after jumping from a cliff...

I bought this book in the Toronto (Canada) airport, right before I departed for Greece and Turkey. I wanted a travel book that would be interesting and I don't know the travel-writing genre too well. So, I grabbed this; it looked light and amusing. So, as I traveled, I read a couple stories every night. I have to say that there were only a few stories that were amusing.

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.

What a wonderful collection of truly amusing stories!! After reading " The Dentist in Cameroon" I wanted to cancel my own dentist appointment!! "What I Did in the Dollhouse" was over the top and so colorfully written that I almost wet myself!! Travelers' Tales has done it again by providing a rich assortment of humor and misadventures from around the globe.

This book is just what it sounds like - brief stories of travel disasters. The authors range from the usual suspects (travel writers like Bill Bryson) to humorists (Dave Barry) to other well-known authors (Anne Lamott) to a few I'd never heard of but will look into now (Nigel Barlow and Luis Alberto Urrea). The stories were mostly credible and all pretty funny when you got past cringing. I also really like the interpositioning of comics and short shorts. If there's another installment, I'll definitely read it. My only negative comment is that it seemed the funniest pieces were at the front, or maybe one should just read it in small doses.

There are some hilarious, absurd, and painfully funny stories in this collection, including a couple of disgusting ones...I would worry about someone's mental health if they didn't find something to laugh out loud about in this book.