We live in an era of shortages. From water to income, there’s dearth of the things we need to make life livable — especially humor. Yes, we’re lucky to have writers like Dave Barry and Nick Hornby to get us through a week or two with a smile on our faces. But once we’ve exhausted the obvious, where do we look next? Are we headed into the next humor shortage?
Fortunately for readers, there’s lots of laughter to be found in places where one least expects it. Humor is not just a genre. It can be a part of any writer’s literary toolkit, and deployed as needed. It’s in the turn of the phrase as much as the pratfall or fart joke.
Probably the last place one might look for a great, funny, even hilarious piece of writing is a book on meditation. Unless you’re hiding under a rock, you’ve been told meditation is good for you, and “good for you” is generally the most effective laugh-killer on the planet. But, if you’re Dean Sluyter, and the book is Natural Meditation: A Guide to Effortless Meditative Practice, you know that laughter requires no practice.
Sluyter (pronounced “slighter”) offers readers solid advice for meditation in prose that’s often funny, and lessons that run toward the risqué. Here’s the only meditation guide where the author demonstrates the “hammock pose.” Sluyter soft-pedals his prose; he doesn’t overplay the humor, but lets it cross the road. Not too much of a surprise for the author of Why the Chicken Crossed the Road and Other Hidden Enlightenment Teachings.
Era-sweeping political memoir is generally the stuff of self-congratulatory puffery. “Import” is inversely proportional to laughter, but in the case of Frank: A Life in Politics from the Great Society to Same-Sex Marriage, humor is a big part of author’s arsenal. Author and former congressman Barney Frank is well-known for his wit, and it’s on full display here, even (perhaps especially) when he’s explicating the inner workings of the sausage machine.