This tedious collection of 60 cartoons and almost 700 brief jokes, each of which has some relation to computers, is an offense against both computing and humor. The target reader would seem to be a somewhat retarded male high school sophomore or a computer salesman who is stuck in an airport and bored out of his skull. A computer-wise adult would find fewer than a dozen of the jokes funny; these dozen old and well-worn friends are packaged in bad company. Wilde, the principal perpetrator, has already committed and sold ten million copies of a series of 40 joke books on less arcane subjects. I understand his motivation but I do not understand why Wozniak has sullied his reputation by associating himself and his mother with such a dog’s breakfast.

At least 200 of the entries are hoary general-purpose jokes, some surely known to the ancient Greeks, which have been turned into computer jokes by making the locale “a computer convention,” substituting “computer” for “Delphic oracle,” or naming the participants as “computer programmers” or “computer salesmen.” Another 200 are low-quality one-liners suitable to Las Vegas stand-up comedians, often involving childish riddles such as “What do you get when you cross . . . ?,” “How many As does it take to do B?,” and “What did the alpha say to its beta?” Many are puns or plays on computing words, of which “chips” is a favorite. Many depend on sexual puns, double meanings, innuendo, or male adolescent sex fantasies; the author includes a few scatological references. The book is more suggestive than the Reader’s Digest but less so than Playboy, while the explicit language goes beyond the Bible but falls short of Updike or tee shirts. Fortunately, there are no knock-knocks, Pat-and-Mikes, or jokes that start “An Irishman, a Scotchman, and a Jew were . . . ,” but some of them come close. The book shows its age by devoting an entire chapter to the outmoded subject of computer dating.

Wilde and Wozniak’s book is far inferior to the best in the field, Jack Moshman’s out-of-print collection of humorous bits from Datamation [1]. Like most collections of jokes, japes, and funny stuff, I can recommend this book only as a source of giggles for adolescents or as a mine of material to sprinkle over speeches. At any rate, it will appeal only to those who have underdeveloped or primitive senses of humor.