Have you ever been asked a stupid question? Perhaps you are fueling up at a gas station when a stranger asks if your hybrid car runs fully on electric. Or maybe someone at the grocery store asks if the box of Cream of Wheat contains wheat. It is this sort of ridiculousness that Sidney S. Prasad highlights in his outrageous collection, Don’t Ask Dumb Questions! Poking fun at those he deems ‘imbeciles’ and ‘yahoos’, Prasad shares a compilation of questions that range from slightly silly to outright absurd. Moreso than questions you may have actually heard, the book is arranged into ten sections of puns, jabs, and one-liners. Some of the observations take advantage of clever wordplay. “Do untruthful people lie in bed?” Others employ double entendre to draw smiles. The best utilize thoughtful arrangement on the page, harmonizing to make a section or rhetorical humor that is funnier than each individual question could be on its own.
It goes without saying that humor is subjective, but there is no doubt that every reader will find something to laugh at within this book. That being said, the jokes range from witty, hilarious, and observant, to insipid, tasteless, and for some, downright offensive. Jokes that school-aged kids would enjoy are interspersed with raunchy humor, making it tough to gauge the target audience. While there are many topics covered, within a few pages you’ll come across repetitive content, including zipper malfunctions, cordless phone woes, and lines about vegetarians and seafood. While there is humor all around us, sometimes it takes a perceptive individual to point it out, and Prasad shares his lighthearted disposition throughout this outlandish collection. Like an homage to cheesy 80s joke books, the corny digest will elicit laughter, eye-rolls, head-shakes, and exasperated sighs. The comical lines deliver plenty of toilet humor, double entendre, rampant randomness, and, as promised in the title, pointless questions. With more than 1000 ridiculous questions, these jokes will certainly make you reconsider the next question that comes out of your mouth. There are some hits and some misses, but the rapid-fire rhetorical-question book Don’t Ask Dumb Questions is an entertaining way to pass the time.
