How to Tell Your Friends from the Apes

An amusing, if somewhat dated, book of animal humor. (I say dated because this pre-dates the time that Piltdown Man was recognized as a fake, and includes it as a serious contender in human origins). The book reminds a person that there was a time that someone could be regarded as a humorist without swearing, leering, or making any more than the mildest of sexual innuendos. It is intelligent humor, but much of what is here would probably fall flat for most of today's audiences. Best target audience would be those who can roar out loud at James Thurber, rather than scratching their head and going "huh?" A quick read, with a bunch of enjoyable one-liners. My favorite? The average sparrow is boring. Unfortunately, all sparrows are average.

Extraordinarily funny collection of absurd descriptions of hominids and other animals.Lightly peppered with facts, the appeal of this lies in the delightfully silly misrepresentation, distortions, and non sequiteurs.

Extraordinarily funny collection of absurd descriptions of hominids and other animals.Lightly peppered with facts, the appeal of this lies in the delightfully silly misrepresentation, distortions, and non sequiteurs.

This is a book of snippets about birds and monkeys, plus mammals and even a few primitive people. Cuppy was a notorious bird hater, so you can imagine how hilariously he deals with them. It must have done him good to write this one! This is certainly not his best book, but contains many quotable lines. For example, "All modern men are descended from a wormlike creature, but it shows more on some people." Or, "It is a good thing to keep out of the Arctic if you look like a seal." The illustrations are not as high quality as those of his other books, but are appropriately bizarre. With Cuppy you really can't go wrong. Another very funny book, but not recommended for oversensitive bird lovers.

Disappointing. There are occasional good bits ("Persons who raise tiger cubs in their homes are sometimes known as missing persons.") but for the overwhelmingly most part it contrives to be silly without being funny.

It takes the form of a lot short pieces, each about one or a few mammals or birds, all with spoof footnotes. The first section covers some extinct (or imaginary) near-human animals and Modern Man ("There are about 2,000,000,000 Modern Men or too many." — this was written some time ago.) Then he covers a few other primates, then rather a lot of birds (which he thinks are generally too noisy), then back to mammals.

As some consolation, the edition I read, Sutton Publishing 2007, is well made and clearly printed.

Ancient humor.