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Funny Letters from Famous People
In this humorous collection of celebrity wit, acclaimed broadcaster and humorist Charles Osgood offers witticisms penned by luminaries ranging from Abraham Lincoln to Andy Rooney.
Known for his clever commentary and witty radio-show rhymes, Charles Osgood here selects and introduces a collection of hilarious correspondence from some of our best-loved politicians, authors, and stars of the stage and screen. Funny Letters from Famous People delivers rib-tickling communications from the likes of Benjamin Franklin, Abraham Lincoln, Oscar Wilde, George Bernard Shaw, Flannery O’Connor, S. J. Perelman, Groucho Marx, Bob Hope, John Cheever and dozens more.
Providing an entertaining look at celebrated lives, Osgood lets us glimpse Mark Twain squabbling with the gas company, Dwight D. Eisenhower kvetching to Mamie about Patton, and radio personality Fred Allen desperately seeking logic from his insurance carrier in one of comedy’s most amusing epistles.
Sprinkled throughout with Osgood’s own humorous quips, Funny Letters from Famous People is a delightful compendium of clever letter writing at its side-splitting best.
Known for his clever commentary and witty radio-show rhymes, Charles Osgood here selects and introduces a collection of hilarious correspondence from some of our best-loved politicians, authors, and stars of the stage and screen. Funny Letters from Famous People delivers rib-tickling communications from the likes of Benjamin Franklin, Abraham Lincoln, Oscar Wilde, George Bernard Shaw, Flannery O’Connor, S. J. Perelman, Groucho Marx, Bob Hope, John Cheever and dozens more.
Providing an entertaining look at celebrated lives, Osgood lets us glimpse Mark Twain squabbling with the gas company, Dwight D. Eisenhower kvetching to Mamie about Patton, and radio personality Fred Allen desperately seeking logic from his insurance carrier in one of comedy’s most amusing epistles.
Sprinkled throughout with Osgood’s own humorous quips, Funny Letters from Famous People is a delightful compendium of clever letter writing at its side-splitting best.
- GenresNonfictionHumorHistory
240 pages, Hardcover
First published January 1, 2003
22 people are currently reading
235 people want to read
About the author
Charles Osgood
40 books11 followersCharles Osgood (born Charles Osgood Wood, III on January 8, 1933) is a radio and television commentator in the United States. His daily program, The Osgood File, has been broadcast on the CBS Radio Network since 1971. Osgood hosts CBS News Sunday Morning. He is also known for being the voice of the narrator of Horton Hears a Who!, an animated film released in 2008, based on the book of the same name by Dr. Seuss.
Source: Wikipedia.
Source: Wikipedia.
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Displaying 1 - 30 of 33 reviews
January 10, 2024
Wonderful
June 16, 2015
I read most of the presidents, and then just flipped through the rest and read the ones I was interested in. Fun fact, there were only two (2) letters from women. One was hilarious, a scientist's wife killing 58 monster bugs in their cabin, and I forget the other. It was short. Both were short! Smells of sexism.
Also, Beethoven was apparently hilarious (excerpt from the book):
Ludwig van Beethoven had very little—if any-control over his temper, which swung wildly in all directions. Here are two brief missives that Beethoven wrote on consecutive days to pianist/composer Johann Nepomuk in 1799. First:
Never come near me again! You are a faithless cur,
and may the hangman take all faithless curs.
Beethoven
The very next day:
My dearest Nazerl,
You are an honest fellow and I now perceive you were
right; so come to see me this afternoon; Schuppanzigh
will be here too, and the pair of us will scold you,
cuff you, and shake you to your heart's content.
A warm embrace from
Your Beethoven
Also known as Little Dumpling
Also, Beethoven was apparently hilarious (excerpt from the book):
Ludwig van Beethoven had very little—if any-control over his temper, which swung wildly in all directions. Here are two brief missives that Beethoven wrote on consecutive days to pianist/composer Johann Nepomuk in 1799. First:
Never come near me again! You are a faithless cur,
and may the hangman take all faithless curs.
Beethoven
The very next day:
My dearest Nazerl,
You are an honest fellow and I now perceive you were
right; so come to see me this afternoon; Schuppanzigh
will be here too, and the pair of us will scold you,
cuff you, and shake you to your heart's content.
A warm embrace from
Your Beethoven
Also known as Little Dumpling
July 3, 2025
Now that I work at the Post Office, I found it the best time to read this book. Throughout the book, Osgood offers letters written by famous people. The majority are funny! I found myself laughing out loud to a lot, especially Abraham Lincoln. This was a quick, fun read. Some letters were boring and/or I didn't understand them.
June 18, 2017
I was honestly quite surprised to see the low overall rating of this book here on GR (currently it's averaging a 2.97/5 star rating). I looked at some of the reviews, and I guess I can understand why.
This book is a collection of letters from famous people - just as the title suggests. There is quite a variety here, including famous people such as Beethoven, Benjamin Franklin, Julia Child, Oscar Wilde, Groucho Marx, Charles Dickens, etc. In order to understand the subtle humor in letters written pre-20th c., you do have to have a decent grasp of the English language and how the usage has shifted over the past 4 centuries. As someone who has read classics since I was 12 years old or so, and as someone who enjoys linguistics and history, this book was not difficult to understand at all. Some of the older letters were ones that I would not really be able to comprehend were I to have read them when I was excessively tired... however, they were still funny.
Also, honestly, this is the kind of book that makes me almost laugh out loud. Other humor books that I have read recently may make me smile but are generally suited to a more crass sense of humor than what I tend to enjoy. (Don't get me wrong, I can crack dirty jokes with the rest of them, but do I want to read a book full of sexual jokes? No thanks. Not my type.) I guess another way to put it would be that the humor in this book is calmer and... gentler? than I have seen in most other books. Yay for the vagaries of history.
Definitely do recommend. Funny Letters From Famous People is an excellent book to pick up, set down, pick up again due to the short nature of the letters/excerpts. Subtle humor, but not in a mawkish sense nor an overly crass manner. I may see about getting myself a hard copy at some point, which should speak for itself regarding how much I enjoyed this little collection.
This book is a collection of letters from famous people - just as the title suggests. There is quite a variety here, including famous people such as Beethoven, Benjamin Franklin, Julia Child, Oscar Wilde, Groucho Marx, Charles Dickens, etc. In order to understand the subtle humor in letters written pre-20th c., you do have to have a decent grasp of the English language and how the usage has shifted over the past 4 centuries. As someone who has read classics since I was 12 years old or so, and as someone who enjoys linguistics and history, this book was not difficult to understand at all. Some of the older letters were ones that I would not really be able to comprehend were I to have read them when I was excessively tired... however, they were still funny.
Also, honestly, this is the kind of book that makes me almost laugh out loud. Other humor books that I have read recently may make me smile but are generally suited to a more crass sense of humor than what I tend to enjoy. (Don't get me wrong, I can crack dirty jokes with the rest of them, but do I want to read a book full of sexual jokes? No thanks. Not my type.) I guess another way to put it would be that the humor in this book is calmer and... gentler? than I have seen in most other books. Yay for the vagaries of history.
Definitely do recommend. Funny Letters From Famous People is an excellent book to pick up, set down, pick up again due to the short nature of the letters/excerpts. Subtle humor, but not in a mawkish sense nor an overly crass manner. I may see about getting myself a hard copy at some point, which should speak for itself regarding how much I enjoyed this little collection.
April 26, 2024
1.5 ⭐️
There were only a handful of really funny letters, and this book just kind of dragged on.
When you find yourself reading JUST to get the book over with, it's not a good book.
I appreciate this book, I just don't like it.
Here are a couple of parts that were neat and made me smile:
🩵DOROTHY PARKER sent the following telegram to a friend who had just had a baby after enduring a long, widely publicized pregnancy:
Good work, Mary. We all knew you had it in you.
🩵WHEN THE CELEBRATED HUMORIST Robert Benchley visited Venice, Italy, for the first time, he immediately dispatched a telegram to a friend. It has since become a classic:
STREETS FULL OF WATER. PLEASE ADVISE.
ROBERT BENCHLEY
🩵Faulkner once served as postmaster at the University of Mississippi. He decided to quit his job and tersely explained his reason for doing so in the following letter to the Postmaster General in Washington:
As long as I live under the capitalist system, I expect to have my life influenced by the demands of moneyed people. But I will be damned if I propose to be at the beck and call of every itinerant scoundrel who has two cents to invest in a postage stamp. This, sir, is my resignation.
William Faulkner
🩵ABRAHAM LINCOLN RESPONDING TO A REQUEST FOR
"A SENTIMENT" ALONG WITH HIS AUTOGRAPH:
Dear Madam:
When you ask from a stranger that which is of interest only to yourself, always enclose a stamp. There's your sentiment, and here's your autograph.
🩵GEORGE BERNARD SHAW INVITING SIR WINSTON CHURCHILL TO AN OPENING NIGHT PERFORMANCE OF ONE OF HIS PLAYS:
Have reserved two tickets for my first night. Come and bring a friend, if you have one.
CHURCHILL REPLIED:
Impossible to come first night. Will come second night, if you have one.
🩵Here Rooney turns his curmudgeonly attention to "celebrity cookbooks." His own explanatory headnote precedes the letter:
Anyone whose name is known to more than ten people gets frequent requests from people assembling what they call "a celebrity cookbook." Years ago I got one from a columnist for the New York Times, Enid Nemy, whose work I had read and admired. She said she was putting together a book of favorite potato recipes of well-known people and would like a contribution from me.
In a moment of pique, I put down an
outrageously impractical recipe for "Baked Potato Ice Cream" and sent it to her with a note:
Dear Enid,
When dinner is over and I disappear into the kitchen my guests invariably start chatting incoherently in anxious anticipation of what I've prepared for dessert. (Do I have the genre so far?)
Although I hesitate to select one potato recipe as my best I must say that I get a great many favorable comments on my potato ice cream. Don't serve this to guests who are calorie conscious.
Take four large Idaho potatoes. Peel them, setting the peels aside. Cut the potatoes longwise into half-inch slices. Discard the rounded top and bottom slices. Place the stack of slices, which now have a flat surface, on the cutting board and slice them again, producing long fingers of potato. Turn these parallel to the edge of the cutting board and slice them once more into small cubes. In six cups of water, to which you have added a cup and a quarter of sugar, simmer the potato cubes until the water evaporates and one of the cubes adheres to a single chopstick. Place cooked potatoes in blender with two cups of heavy cream and a dash of paprika for color and blend until well... blended. My mother, who taught me how to make this, used to serve it to us as a treat when we were good. Pour the potato mixture into a divided ice cube tray and place in freezer. If you have a microwave freezer, all the better. When mixture begins to thicken, but before it hardens, insert one toothpick in each and continue freezing. Mixtures should be of such consistency that the toothpick stands upright. When toothpick no longer pulls out easily or turns blue, the potato ice cream cubes are ready. Plan on three cubes per guest and serve with a bowl of rich chocolate sauce for dipping.
After dinner, throw out the potato peels.
🩵Imagine Rooney's sheer incredulity when Nemy's editor called him six weeks later to ask him in all seriousness how many people this preposterous recipe would serve. The publisher included the recipe in Nemy's book, and when Nemy found out the recipe was a parody, she was so furious that she stopped speaking to Rooney.
A woman named Susan Parris, assembling her own celebrity cookbook to benefit her son's school, heard about the potato ice cream fiasco and chastised Rooney in a letter.
His reply:
Mrs. Susan Connolly Parris
Trenton, New Jersey Dear Mrs. Parris,
There's a great deal of idiocy about celebrity in America and I have no desire to contribute to it. Enid Nemy is a big girl now and if she undertook to collect a cookbook she should, at the very least, have known enough about food to recognize a joke when she read one.
I don't think any responsible publisher would issue a cookbook without having kitchen-tested the recipes.
There are two possibilities:
1. They tested my recipe for Baked Potato Ice Cream and found it to be delicious.
2. They knew it was a joke and thought it would be fun to have in a book that no one would take seriously anyway.
As for your own celebrity cookbook, making an effort may relieve a helpless feeling you have but I suspect the proceeds will amount to less than [what] a few well-directed requests from rich friends would net for your son's school.
Sorry we disagree. It's my opinion celebrity cookbooks are nonsense and should be treated as such.
There were only a handful of really funny letters, and this book just kind of dragged on.
When you find yourself reading JUST to get the book over with, it's not a good book.
I appreciate this book, I just don't like it.
Here are a couple of parts that were neat and made me smile:
🩵DOROTHY PARKER sent the following telegram to a friend who had just had a baby after enduring a long, widely publicized pregnancy:
Good work, Mary. We all knew you had it in you.
🩵WHEN THE CELEBRATED HUMORIST Robert Benchley visited Venice, Italy, for the first time, he immediately dispatched a telegram to a friend. It has since become a classic:
STREETS FULL OF WATER. PLEASE ADVISE.
ROBERT BENCHLEY
🩵Faulkner once served as postmaster at the University of Mississippi. He decided to quit his job and tersely explained his reason for doing so in the following letter to the Postmaster General in Washington:
As long as I live under the capitalist system, I expect to have my life influenced by the demands of moneyed people. But I will be damned if I propose to be at the beck and call of every itinerant scoundrel who has two cents to invest in a postage stamp. This, sir, is my resignation.
William Faulkner
🩵ABRAHAM LINCOLN RESPONDING TO A REQUEST FOR
"A SENTIMENT" ALONG WITH HIS AUTOGRAPH:
Dear Madam:
When you ask from a stranger that which is of interest only to yourself, always enclose a stamp. There's your sentiment, and here's your autograph.
🩵GEORGE BERNARD SHAW INVITING SIR WINSTON CHURCHILL TO AN OPENING NIGHT PERFORMANCE OF ONE OF HIS PLAYS:
Have reserved two tickets for my first night. Come and bring a friend, if you have one.
CHURCHILL REPLIED:
Impossible to come first night. Will come second night, if you have one.
🩵Here Rooney turns his curmudgeonly attention to "celebrity cookbooks." His own explanatory headnote precedes the letter:
Anyone whose name is known to more than ten people gets frequent requests from people assembling what they call "a celebrity cookbook." Years ago I got one from a columnist for the New York Times, Enid Nemy, whose work I had read and admired. She said she was putting together a book of favorite potato recipes of well-known people and would like a contribution from me.
In a moment of pique, I put down an
outrageously impractical recipe for "Baked Potato Ice Cream" and sent it to her with a note:
Dear Enid,
When dinner is over and I disappear into the kitchen my guests invariably start chatting incoherently in anxious anticipation of what I've prepared for dessert. (Do I have the genre so far?)
Although I hesitate to select one potato recipe as my best I must say that I get a great many favorable comments on my potato ice cream. Don't serve this to guests who are calorie conscious.
Take four large Idaho potatoes. Peel them, setting the peels aside. Cut the potatoes longwise into half-inch slices. Discard the rounded top and bottom slices. Place the stack of slices, which now have a flat surface, on the cutting board and slice them again, producing long fingers of potato. Turn these parallel to the edge of the cutting board and slice them once more into small cubes. In six cups of water, to which you have added a cup and a quarter of sugar, simmer the potato cubes until the water evaporates and one of the cubes adheres to a single chopstick. Place cooked potatoes in blender with two cups of heavy cream and a dash of paprika for color and blend until well... blended. My mother, who taught me how to make this, used to serve it to us as a treat when we were good. Pour the potato mixture into a divided ice cube tray and place in freezer. If you have a microwave freezer, all the better. When mixture begins to thicken, but before it hardens, insert one toothpick in each and continue freezing. Mixtures should be of such consistency that the toothpick stands upright. When toothpick no longer pulls out easily or turns blue, the potato ice cream cubes are ready. Plan on three cubes per guest and serve with a bowl of rich chocolate sauce for dipping.
After dinner, throw out the potato peels.
🩵Imagine Rooney's sheer incredulity when Nemy's editor called him six weeks later to ask him in all seriousness how many people this preposterous recipe would serve. The publisher included the recipe in Nemy's book, and when Nemy found out the recipe was a parody, she was so furious that she stopped speaking to Rooney.
A woman named Susan Parris, assembling her own celebrity cookbook to benefit her son's school, heard about the potato ice cream fiasco and chastised Rooney in a letter.
His reply:
Mrs. Susan Connolly Parris
Trenton, New Jersey Dear Mrs. Parris,
There's a great deal of idiocy about celebrity in America and I have no desire to contribute to it. Enid Nemy is a big girl now and if she undertook to collect a cookbook she should, at the very least, have known enough about food to recognize a joke when she read one.
I don't think any responsible publisher would issue a cookbook without having kitchen-tested the recipes.
There are two possibilities:
1. They tested my recipe for Baked Potato Ice Cream and found it to be delicious.
2. They knew it was a joke and thought it would be fun to have in a book that no one would take seriously anyway.
As for your own celebrity cookbook, making an effort may relieve a helpless feeling you have but I suspect the proceeds will amount to less than [what] a few well-directed requests from rich friends would net for your son's school.
Sorry we disagree. It's my opinion celebrity cookbooks are nonsense and should be treated as such.
June 12, 2018
"Mildly Amusing Letters & etc." might have been a more appropriate title for this book. Some of them are truly laugh-out-loud amusing (Benjamin Franklin's 'Model of a Letter of Recommendation of a Person You Are Unacquainted With," Herbert Hoover's commiseration with a young correspondent about having to eat spinach at a White House lunch, Gustave Flaubert's brushoff of a persistent female, GBShaw's exchange of messages with Winston Churchill, Illinois Governor Adlai Stevenson's veto of a cat bill, etc.), but most of them simply bring a smile to the lips...if that. (Even some of the 'funny people's [Groucho Marx, Fred Allen]' letters aren't all that hilarious.) Not a complete waste of time, to be sure, but, in the long run, perhaps more appropriate selections might have been made.
October 15, 2017
Good for a couple of chortles out loud. Apparently, only four women have written funny letters worthy of inclusion (among the 74 people featured here). This is almost as hard to believe as how incredibly hilarious many former US presidents were. Herbert Hoover's musings that it is unfortunate horses weren't built more like centipedes for smoother conveyance about made me fall off my chair.
Picked up at random looking for a light beach read.
Picked up at random looking for a light beach read.
January 15, 2022
I have been a fan of Charles Osgood for many years. In fact, we share a birthday (Jan. 8th).
This book was not exactly what I was expecting, thus the 2 star rating. I have read other books by this author and, perhaps, that I why my expectations were higher. Other works of his were much better, in my opinion.
This book was not exactly what I was expecting, thus the 2 star rating. I have read other books by this author and, perhaps, that I why my expectations were higher. Other works of his were much better, in my opinion.
January 28, 2022
This is book entertaining enough, but it's not spectacular. Osgood divides the letters into chapters according to their authors' sphere of society, politics, entertainment, etc. Some are quite funny, while others are mean humor. Some were wisely never sent. It's a quick and enjoyable read, and it has a good variety of letter authors.
July 17, 2020
It's not my favorite of Osgood's books. Some of the letters are funny, but about half didn't strike me as funny at all--particularly the older ones. I'd say it could have been half as long. I'd give it 2.5 stars if that were available.
December 13, 2022
Timeless humor is elusive whether you are famous or not. And although little of this has aged well it is fun to consider the spirit in which these letters were written. Lincoln and Grant were both hilarious.
April 21, 2022
Marginally interesting. The editor extracted parts of letters written by notable people. Some of them were semi-funny, but not as funny as I had hoped for.
December 31, 2022
A good look into historical communication with amusing stories and laughs along the way. Understand the picking through and skipping of letters but enjoyed the break up and inclusion of a variety.
February 1, 2024
While I did appreciate many of these letters I never laughed out loud or anything like that. It is a different humor over hundred's of years but they were still interesting.
February 5, 2024
Entertaining little book. Thanks, Tom Tutor!
May 28, 2024
I was disappointed with this one. The few that I read were not funny. Some were interesting, though. That’s why the book received two stars instead of one star.
April 5, 2020
This book has been sitting on my shelf for 15 years. I'm glad I finally got to it. Although tedious through parts the wit found in the pages actually made me chuckle a handful of times and that cant count for less than 4 stars.
April 27, 2014
I found this book to be absolutely delightful. It was a great pick-up-put-down-pick-back-up kind of book. Hopping up in a few minutes to do laundry? Have a little time in your minivan while the kids finish up at practice? Find yourself in the waiting room at the dentist? Then you have time to read a few pages of this book and brighten your day simultaneously. Two birds!
Osgood collected a whole bunch of witty missives from a variety of people and—this is the best part—edited out most of the boring stuff, providing just the humorous gems for our enjoyment. Many of the excerpts are less than a page long, some only a few lines. He sets them up with background info when necessary, but mostly stays out of the way and lets the writers’ work shine. And adult ADD sufferers the world over said in unison, “Finally, a book that even we can read!”
In reading reviews of this book, it seemed the most common complaint was that it “wasn’t that funny.” I suspect the people who felt this way went in expecting to laugh out loud, possibly shoot milk out their noses. This isn’t that kind of book, and it’s not that kind of humor. If you want fart jokes and toilet humor, well, Mark Twain and JFK will probably feel like a letdown. Instead, I recommend you read this book expecting to occasionally smile or quietly chuckle. (I was going to say titter, because I think that’s the best description of what I did while reading it, but after making a big self-righteous stink about how I’m above juvenile humor, I thought it might smack of hypocrisy.)
Ultimately, this book made me nostalgic for a day when people actually took the time to write more than 140 characters meant for the eyes of only one person. Compared to the Twitter feeds of today’s celebrities, these off-the-cuff notes read like Shakespearean sonnets. The elaborate syntax! The flowery diction! Yes, it suffices to say that as a culture, we’re definitely getting stupider. Do your part to prevent intellectual erosion by reading this book today.
More book recommendations by me at www.readingwithhippos.com
Osgood collected a whole bunch of witty missives from a variety of people and—this is the best part—edited out most of the boring stuff, providing just the humorous gems for our enjoyment. Many of the excerpts are less than a page long, some only a few lines. He sets them up with background info when necessary, but mostly stays out of the way and lets the writers’ work shine. And adult ADD sufferers the world over said in unison, “Finally, a book that even we can read!”
In reading reviews of this book, it seemed the most common complaint was that it “wasn’t that funny.” I suspect the people who felt this way went in expecting to laugh out loud, possibly shoot milk out their noses. This isn’t that kind of book, and it’s not that kind of humor. If you want fart jokes and toilet humor, well, Mark Twain and JFK will probably feel like a letdown. Instead, I recommend you read this book expecting to occasionally smile or quietly chuckle. (I was going to say titter, because I think that’s the best description of what I did while reading it, but after making a big self-righteous stink about how I’m above juvenile humor, I thought it might smack of hypocrisy.)
Ultimately, this book made me nostalgic for a day when people actually took the time to write more than 140 characters meant for the eyes of only one person. Compared to the Twitter feeds of today’s celebrities, these off-the-cuff notes read like Shakespearean sonnets. The elaborate syntax! The flowery diction! Yes, it suffices to say that as a culture, we’re definitely getting stupider. Do your part to prevent intellectual erosion by reading this book today.
More book recommendations by me at www.readingwithhippos.com
September 13, 2016
I'd rate this a solid 2.5 stars but will mark it 2 stars for GR.
This was mildly enjoyable, but it wasn't the funny I was looking for, so I was disappointed. The stories were clever, I guess, but they were mostly written by people dozens (or even a couple hundred) years ago, so I didn't quite get the "jokes." Someone who reads classics or who is interested in history would enjoy this much more than I did. I applaud Osgood for the time it must have taken to collect all of these letters, but it was wasted on me, I'm afraid. I guess I like a much more raucous humor rather than the educated humor these presented. But they were quick and easy to read, set up in an organized manner, and the writers were clearly introduced (in case you didn't recognize the names).
That being said, there were a couple of laugh-out-louds in the bunch.
Harry Truman wrote, "All the President is, is a glorified public relations man who spends his time flattering, kissing, and kicking people to get them to do what they are supposed to do anyway."
Truman also made me laugh when he "announced his intention to streamline the government severely by getting rid of what he felt were some unnecessary government bureaus....a woman wrote to tell him that she was building a new house and needed furniture. Would he mind sending on a few of the discarded bureaus? Truman wrote back that he had disposed of the bureaus already, but that if she were interested, he had a 'second-hand, no-damned-good cabinet I'd like to get rid of.'"
George Bernard Shaw (playwright) cabled the following invitation to Sir Winston Churchill: "Have reserved two tickets for my first night. Come and bring a friend, if you have one."
But Churchill was certainly no less witty. His reply: "Impossible to come first night. Will come second night, if you have one."
This was mildly enjoyable, but it wasn't the funny I was looking for, so I was disappointed. The stories were clever, I guess, but they were mostly written by people dozens (or even a couple hundred) years ago, so I didn't quite get the "jokes." Someone who reads classics or who is interested in history would enjoy this much more than I did. I applaud Osgood for the time it must have taken to collect all of these letters, but it was wasted on me, I'm afraid. I guess I like a much more raucous humor rather than the educated humor these presented. But they were quick and easy to read, set up in an organized manner, and the writers were clearly introduced (in case you didn't recognize the names).
That being said, there were a couple of laugh-out-louds in the bunch.
Harry Truman wrote, "All the President is, is a glorified public relations man who spends his time flattering, kissing, and kicking people to get them to do what they are supposed to do anyway."
Truman also made me laugh when he "announced his intention to streamline the government severely by getting rid of what he felt were some unnecessary government bureaus....a woman wrote to tell him that she was building a new house and needed furniture. Would he mind sending on a few of the discarded bureaus? Truman wrote back that he had disposed of the bureaus already, but that if she were interested, he had a 'second-hand, no-damned-good cabinet I'd like to get rid of.'"
George Bernard Shaw (playwright) cabled the following invitation to Sir Winston Churchill: "Have reserved two tickets for my first night. Come and bring a friend, if you have one."
But Churchill was certainly no less witty. His reply: "Impossible to come first night. Will come second night, if you have one."
March 31, 2011
This book is simply a collection of letters written by many different famous people, from Mozart to Carl Sandburg to Isaac Asimov to Andy Rooney and lots more. The variety is great but some letters are so hard to understand that you really have to be able to understand the word usage of the time to get the subtle humor.
The letters can be very short of a few words to a couple of pages depending on the person. If you enjoy reading letters other people have written to find out more about how they were like then this is certainly a book for you to read and enjoy. Great for reading during long travels or right before bed.
The letters can be very short of a few words to a couple of pages depending on the person. If you enjoy reading letters other people have written to find out more about how they were like then this is certainly a book for you to read and enjoy. Great for reading during long travels or right before bed.
December 10, 2014
This was my book for the 800's for the year - now I've completed my challenge! Yippee!
Fun letters from people of the past. Might not appeal to anyone younger than me, though. Or they wouldn't have any knowledge of who the people are, why they were/are famous. Had to read several sections out loud to my husband, laughing all the time.
Last letter was from Julia Child with a recipe for a healthy life:
Small helpings,
no seconds,
eat a little bit of everything,
no snacking,
have a good time,
and pick your grandparents!
Nice reminder for this time of year!
Fun letters from people of the past. Might not appeal to anyone younger than me, though. Or they wouldn't have any knowledge of who the people are, why they were/are famous. Had to read several sections out loud to my husband, laughing all the time.
Last letter was from Julia Child with a recipe for a healthy life:
Small helpings,
no seconds,
eat a little bit of everything,
no snacking,
have a good time,
and pick your grandparents!
Nice reminder for this time of year!
August 2, 2016
I don't care what your political leanings, the letter from George H.W. Bush to Barbara imploring her to "watch how Mike and Kitty do it" and incorporate more displays of public affection "for good television" during his campaign is hilarious. "I am practicing the loving look and the creeping hand." I had to put down my drink so I didn't choke.
It would appear that he's not the only president who had a sense of humor. George Washington and Abraham Lincoln, too. And Winston Churchill! This is good stuff. I especially like Harry Truman's ranting tomes. A fun quick read.
It would appear that he's not the only president who had a sense of humor. George Washington and Abraham Lincoln, too. And Winston Churchill! This is good stuff. I especially like Harry Truman's ranting tomes. A fun quick read.
November 4, 2013
Just what the title says: funny (or at least mildly amusing) letters (or excerpts) by, from and to famous (or nearly so or used to be so) people.
I enjoyed the letters by Groucho Marx the best - what a shame he's not as well known now.
Recommended for: those who lament the death of good old-fashioned letter writing and people who enjoy reading those who were known for their wit.
I enjoyed the letters by Groucho Marx the best - what a shame he's not as well known now.
Recommended for: those who lament the death of good old-fashioned letter writing and people who enjoy reading those who were known for their wit.
September 26, 2008
Not the laugh riot I hoped for. You might enjoy Charles Osgood on Sunday Morning, but that doesn't mean you'll like this book. He managed to find utterly unfunny writing from some of the funniest writers in the world. What a shame.
September 17, 2008
I was hoping that as the titled indicated, there would be funny letters. Not so. It would be more appropriately titled, "Funny Excerpts...."
March 10, 2009
Short little book of entertaining letters. Pretty good collection, for what it is.
July 24, 2010
Parts of this book are laugh-out-loud funny. Charles Osgood looked at compilations of letters by famous people and chose the best ones. I really enjoyed this book.
May 4, 2011
False advertising.
While a handful of letters in here were truly delightful, the majority of them were written by people too in love with their own words.
Ugh.
While a handful of letters in here were truly delightful, the majority of them were written by people too in love with their own words.
Ugh.
August 26, 2012
A Twitter-style look at history: Hard to say what i liked best- Giggling at Lincoln's responses to his detractors? old-timey off color humor? Love letters with SAT words? I loved this little book.
December 8, 2013
I couldn't get into this. Many authors were unfamiliar to me and therefore not that appealing to me. Also, the selections and the reasoning were not very compelling to me.
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