DON'T MAKE ME LAUGH!

DON'T MAKE ME LAUGH!

The New Windmill Book of Humorous Stories

Edited by David Kitchen

I own quite a number of Heinemann under their New Windmills series. Back in the mid 1990s, the local Times bookstore had brought this series in and that was when I had time to visit the bookstore almost every week and always buy something. The price of each hardcover book was only about RM14 then. *gasp* So cheap!

*Image taken from internet

This is one of my favourite books because it has short stories by Anne Fine, Paul Jennings and Vivien Alcock, writers whom I like. Not all the stories in the collection are funny...... well, to me at least because they didn't even make me smile let alone laugh. Here's the list of all the stories and those in RED are the ones I tend to read every time I re-visit this book. 

Licked by Paul Jennings

You Don't Look Very Poorly by Anne Fine

SWALK by Sam McBratney

Uninvited Ghosts by Penelope Lively

The Harry Hastings Method by Warner Law

A Ghost of One's Own by Ursula Moray Williams

Dog's Dinner by Lynne Hackles

Cuts by Russell Hoban

Wunderpants by Paul Jennings

Tama Gotcher by Robert Dawson

The Dolls by Ian McEwan

A Prawn in the Game by Elaine Sishton

QUERTYUIOP by Vivien Alcock

William Darling by Anne Fine

The Bakerloo Flea by Micheal Rosen

The Stowaways by Roger McGough

I especially like the one titled William Darling. That's not his real name. That's what his very old dad calls him, even in front of the boys at school. *yikes!* It's bearable at primary school because William is one of the big boys but come September it will be at a new school where woe betide him if anyone were to find out his dad calls him "Darling". So William devises means to stop dad but its hard because dad is old and doesn't really understand how important it is to William. Well, mum saves the day eventually. I found this story hilarious because of the way it was written plus I am sure everyone of us knows a person like William's dad. 

"Then he turned round and pressed a brand-new, shiny ten-pence piece into my hand. (He often does this. He's so old that he thinks ten pence is a fortune. It's one of the worst things about marrying someone a lot older than yourself, Mum says. You spend a fiver and they think you're wicked.)"

"Dont lose it," he warned me. 

"Don't lose it! I get ten of them every week for pocket money. He must know that. But he's in the habit of keeping shiny coins he comes across in a special pocket in his waistcoat, ready to press them on the deserving, and he's too old to bother to change. So I held my tongue."

Here's another one except. 

"He nearly had a stroke last year when the girl in Woolies paused in the act of snipping the elastic thread Mum was buying and asked how many centimeters there were in a metre. Mum pretends it was the girl's shocking mathematics that so upset him. But I know better. I know it was the fact that, until then, he hadn't realized yards, feet and inches have gone."

You can still get this book online (both used and new) from websites like www.amazon.com, www.abebooks.com and www.booktopia.com.au