How to Be Funny

by R.L. Stine, Jovial Bob Stine

Chapters on being funny in different settings and with different objects and short pieces on funny situations make up a manual for being funny and a spoof of self-help manuals

Genres: Humor

72 pages, Hardcover

First published January 1, 1978

About the author

Robert Lawrence Stine known as R. L. Stine and Jovial Bob Stine, is an American novelist and writer, well known for targeting younger audiences. Stine, who is often called the Stephen King of children's literature, is the author of dozens of popular horror fiction novellas, including the books in the Goosebumps, Rotten School, Mostly Ghostly, The Nightmare Room and Fear Street series.

R. L. Stine began his writing career when he was nine years old, and today he has achieved the position of the bestselling children's author in history. In the early 1990s, Stine was catapulted to fame when he wrote the unprecedented, bestselling Goosebumps® series, which sold more than 250 million copies and became a worldwide multimedia phenomenon. His other major series, Fear Street, has over 80 million copies sold.

Stine has received numerous awards of recognition, including several Nickelodeon Kids' Choice Awards and Disney Adventures Kids' Choice Awards, and he has been selected by kids as one of their favorite authors in the NEA's Read Across America program. He lives in New York, NY.

http://us.macmillan.com/itsthefirstda...

Reviews

[Manybooks · Rating 3 out of 5]

How to Be Funny (originally penned in 1978 by R.L. Stine, but that on the book cover the author is listed as being one Jovial Bob Stine) is basically a how-to joke book (and is presented with a stand-up comedian's quick delivery and many casual asides, in other words lots and lots of strange and at times also some chuckles inducing digressions).

Now in How to Be Funny, Stine has his young readers (probably from around the ages of seven to ten or so) warm up by matching, completing and unscrambling one-liners and riddles (most of which I personally have found neither funny nor in any way pleasurable) and he then proceeds with detailed (and supposedly humour filled) instructions regarding how to be funny, how to be a clown at school, at the dinner table, at parties, when you are in trouble etc. But while I guess for the right audience (and for the right age group, especially for boys) How to Be Funny and the instructions and the suggestions R.L. Stine gives and provides could really hit the proverbial sweet spot or more apt the proverbial funny bone, sorry, but both my inner child and even more so adult I find almost all of the suggestions Stine shows and presents in How to Be Funny not all that humorous and that the ideas for the dinner table are rude and often disgustingly offensive (well, at least I find this to be the case and that I also rather firmly stand by said assessment and said perceptions).

Therefore, I really cannot and will not consider more than a two star rating for How to Be Funny, but to also admit that what I have not enjoyed regarding R.L. Stine's instructions regarding being funny might in fact be precisely what other readers and in particular many children would find hilarious and right up their alley so to speak. Thus with this in mind (and also because I do appreciate that Stine includes a bibliography in How to Be Funny), I will albeit more than a trifle grudgingly up my rating for How to Be Funny from two to three stars (although for me personally, I really really really have not at all enjoyed How to be Funny and consider the vast majority of R.L. Stine's humour not funny at all, but tedious and often just weirdly disgusting and celebrating bad behaviour, and that my three star rating is indeed hugely, hugely generous). And no, I also do not think that I would want to recommend How to Be Funny Either, since especially Stine's suggestions for being funny at parties and while seated at the family dinner table, they do rather massively make me cringe.

[Beth Dean · Rating 5 out of 5]

I found this old book at at used bookstore when I was a kid and loved it. I remember even taking it to my grandparents’ homes during summer visits so I could reread. The RL Stine of my childhood was a comedian.