The Coolest People in Comedy

This is a short, quick, and easy read.

Most of these anecdotes are probably just OK (humor is hard!), but there should be at least one or two that you will want to tell your friends.

This book contains 250 anecdotes, including these:

• Starting out as a stand-up comedian can be tough. Dallas comedian Sherry Belle remembers getting laughs her first time on stage; unfortunately, the audience was laughing at all the wrong places. For example, she finished a joke, but the audience didn't laugh, so she said, "That was the punch line." That made the audience laugh.

• While working at Darmstadt, Rudolf Bing knew a comedian who was completely bald, but had three wigs with different lengths of hair. The comedian would wear the short-haired wig for a while, then the medium-haired wig. When he finally put on the long-haired wig, he would tell everyone he needed a haircut. Whenever the comedian began to wear the short-haired wig again, everyone complimented him on his haircut.

• Between 1935 and 1940, Buster Keaton was making films in foreign countries. Movies had sound then, so he recorded the movies in various languages, learning a sentence in one language and recording it, and then learning that sentence in another language and recording it, and so on. For one movie, he recorded the dialogue in French and in Spanish, and he did OK. But his German language instructor noticed a problem with his German: "Oh, I understand him very well, only he's speaking with a French-Spanish accent."

• As a boy, W.C. Fields had a unique way of peddling newspapers. He juggled the folded newspapers, and he yelled out teasers about the stories inside the newspapers. However, he ignored regular news stories and instead boosted unusual stories, such as "Bronislaw Gimp acquires license for two-year-old sheepdog. Details on page 26."