More deeply ridiculous thinking from Jack Handey

(And Other Veiled Threats)

By Jack Handey

Hyperion. 170 pp. $14.95

Reviewed by Don Steinberg

Humor can be a funny thing.

Take, for example,

What I'd Say to the Martians (and Other Veiled Threats)

, by Jack Handey. It's a completely hilarious little book, a throwback to the kind of offbeat compilations of essays, non sequiturs and notes that Woody Allen published in the 1970s. But it's the sort of humor that's difficult to convey out of context.

Take, for instance:

"Mom always told me I could be whatever I wanted to be when I grew up, 'within reason.' When I asked her what she meant by 'within reason,' she said 'You ask a lot of questions for a garbage man.' "

Is that line funny here on paper? Or only amid a chapter full of Handey's other "Fuzzy Memories" that includes:

"When I was seven, I told my friend Timmy Barker that I would give him a million dollars if he would eat an earthworm. He ate the worm, but I never gave him the million dollars, As of last week, all I had given him was $9,840."

Handey's "Fuzzy Memories" and "Deep Thoughts" were regular segments during the 1990s on

Saturday Night Live

, where as a writer Handey also created Toonces, the Cat Who Could Drive a Car (off a cliff, with Steve Martin and Victoria Jackson as passengers).

In recent years, some of the funniest "Shouts and Murmurs" humor columns in the New Yorker have been by Handey, including "Lowering My Standards," "Ideas for Paintings," and "What I'd Say to the Martians," whose title has been stolen for this anthology of Handey's greatest hits.

The highbrow magazine hasn't made Handey's writing any more serious or conventional, and it's a funniness that's hard to explain. Its silliness is similar to early Allen and occasionally like the more cosmic side of Dave Barry. But where Allen was the neurotic intellectual who couldn't get a date and Barry feeds off popular trends, Handey is like the fifth-grader who has been daydreaming about a world that exists only in his own head - and has it all figured out.

(And, save for one bad word in the title essay, this book is appropriate and funny for active-minded kids.)

I crack up at the "Little Tiny Stories" in this book, two- or three-sentence narratives, such as:

"Lost World.

"A world ruled by dinosaurs? It didn't make any sense! I could understand a world where dinosaurs had some say, but not rule."

And Handey's longer essays pile goofy upon goofy. In "Lowering My Standards," he considers whether his standards are too high.

"Why, for instance, do I always have to be the first one to show up at a party and the last one to leave?" he writes. "Why does it have to be me who ends up asking how much someone paid for something?"

But Handey isn't making the usual grown-up comedy argument, exposing our foibles so we chuckle at them. Traditional humor takes a known situation and mocks it. Much of Handey's humor comes from getting the premise wrong to begin with. In "Hitchhikers," he points out: "Everyone hits a few hitchhikers a year, whether you realize it or not." In "Scary Skeleton," which is about how to make your skeleton appear extra scary after you die, he writes, "Scariness can actually protect your skeleton. Something like half of all skeletons are eventually dug up and sold. Some go to medical schools, or are taken apart and used as musical instruments."

Is it ridiculous? Yes. Pointless. Completely. Funny? Absolutely. But it's all about context.

As Handey himself writes, "It takes a big man to cry. But it takes an even bigger man to laugh at that man."