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| What I'd Say to the Martians: And Other Veiled Threats | 
 enlarge | Author: Jack Handey
Publisher: Hyperion
Category: Book
List Price: $14.95
Buy New: $8.58
You Save: $6.37 (43%)
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Avg. Customer Rating:  (12 reviews)
Sales Rank: 40543
Media: Hardcover
Reading Level: Ages 9-12
Number Of Items: 1
Pages: 192
Shipping Weight (lbs): 0.1
Dimensions (in): 7.6 x 5 x 0.9
ISBN: 1401322662
Dewey Decimal Number: 817
EAN: 9781401322663
ASIN: 1401322662
Publication Date: April 8, 2008
Release Date: April 8, 2008
Availability: Usually ships in 1-2 business days
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| Editorial Reviews:
Book Description
Jack Handey is one of America's favorite humorists, from his New Yorker pieces to his Deep Thoughts books and Saturday Night Live sketches. Now, in What I'd Say to the Martians, Handey regales readers with his incredible wit and wacky musings.
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| Customer Reviews: Read 7 more reviews...
 Full of Funny! July 2, 2008
If you're a fan of Jack Handey's work this is NOT to be missed. I bought this because of Handy's work with "Deep Thoughts" on Saturday Night Live after hearing a selected reading on the radio. Every page is laugh-out-loud funny. Top-rate absurdist humor. I love it!
 What I'd Say To The Martians June 25, 2008
Reading Jack Handey is a lot like picking up something that smells really weird and awful and then offering it to someone else and saying,"here,smell this". You just can't keep that kind of thing to yourself.
Some of the passages are a bit too long (kind of like Deep Thoughts meets Faulkner),but that's a small nit to pick with this otherwise excellent companion to Handey's previous works.
You're probably going to finish a segment,think something to yourself like,"this is really sick",and then make a copy and take it to work the next day so you can stick it under someone's nose and say,"here,read this".
I cried. June 23, 2008
That's how funny this book is -- it made me laugh so hard that I cried. Not everyone will have the reaction that I did, but man, even if you laugh half as hard as I did, you'll have a good time. I've read a good third of these essays in the New Yorker as they came out, but it's lovely to read them in one sitting and have common threads pop up (funny cowboy dance, his so-called friend Don, etc.).
Laugh out loud hilarious June 16, 2008
I heard Jack Handey reading the title piece on the radio while I drove home and couldn't stop laughing. It was more of a distraction than talking on a cell phone while driving. I apologize to anyone I may have offended with my driving.
So, I bought the book to read it safely on my plane ride home from NYC. I laughed out loud there, too. I apologize to anyone who was on the plane with me during that flight.
Handey has such a clear voice, and a definite style, I could hear him in my head. His work is deceptively simple; many folks think they could probably write like him. But, I suspect that is it rather difficult to seem so off-the-cuff funny and to set up each joke so expertly.
He is best known for his Deep Thoughts of which several are included in the book. But his longer pieces are really hysterical. The title piece is my all-time favorite.
The only drawback is that the book is rather short, so I blew through it before we hit Indiana, so I was forced to read People Magazine. What do I care about "The Hills"? Good grief. I'd rather re-read the book, of which I probably will do again and again.
How To Avoid Paying Your Bills June 10, 2008
Growing up, I was always told by friends and ne'er-do-wells that "Jack Handey" was a pseudonym for the entire cast of SNL. No one person, I was told, could come up with those hilarious bon mots known as Deep Thoughts. Apparantly, this is a lie that Handey himself perpetrated, so as to better avoid his creditors.
If you read this book from the first page to the last, as I have since been taught to do, you will no doubt realize that what is at work is the twisted mind of one absurd individual. Ever since my senior thesis (entitled "Modern Meaning is Found in Absurdity," and based almost entirely on Monty Python sketches), I have found this style of humor to be the most endearing and relevant, at least to the Whack-A-Mole version of life that I "live."
The short, stabbing silliness of Deep Thoughts, however, is (mostly) replaced by a multitude of off-beat and stubbornly trivial essays. I'd list my favorites, but that would be a long list, one that would be boring to everyone, even myself, since typing has grown wearisome ever since I lost my fingernail clippers. Jack Handey himself might enjoy reading such a list, but he seems far too self-involved to care about me and my lists.
His persona of selfish ludicrousness can get monotonous. A few of the essays are so silly, they sound like they were made up on the spot by someone who was held at gunpoint by a six year-old and told to be funny. (This, I imagine, may not be far from the truth.) For instance, the title essay relies on the same gag in every sentence: mindless violence (emphasis on the "mindless"), which is okay for Moe and Larry and Curly (and, to a lesser extent, Shemp and Curly Joe), but which becomes repetitive when you're reading. Also, there are several reprints of his Deep Thoughts and Fuzzy Memories. Although they are why I am a fan of Handey, they are not why I bought the book. It's like turning on The Simpsons and, d'oh!, another clip show.
However, the bulk of the essays (especially "How Things Even Out," "Thank You for Stopping," Animals All Around Us," "Glug-Glug-Glug," and so on and so forth and ad infinitum) have just the right touch of both "funny" and "pick up the pace." His running gags are particularly a treat (his nemesis, "Don," and his "funny cowboy dance" are top on that list). His style of writing in these essays reminds me very much of John Swartzwelder's mixed with a dash of Stephen Colbert. That makes it sound like I'm insinuating that Handey is something of a plagiarist, which is not necessarily true. Not necessarily. At the very least, I'm saying he's funny. Unless you don't like The Simpsons or Stephen Colbert, in which case, I'm baffled as to why you're considering buying this book.
Buy it anyway. And in case you are one of his creditors, I am not Jack Handey.
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