Humor in Uniform: ... || A Reader's Digest staple...
Written: Aug 23 '09
Product Rating:
Pros: Short, snappy, easy-to-laugh-at humorous snippets of military life.
Cons: Need to read in short bites. Many quite similar, a few even repeated in book.
The Bottom Line: If you or your dad or mom, or granddad, or friend are ‘military’ ...h3ll, if you have ever seen a John Wayne movie ...you will find a laugh here.
sleeper54's Full Review: Humor in Uniform: Funny True Stories About Life in...
... Every line of work, every profession, has its 'insiders' humor. There are things unique to any job those in the know would find funny, while outsiders would shake their heads and mutter 'What's so funny..?? I don't get it.' Doctors, lawyers, merchants, and chiefs ...all have moments in their lives that would be funny to them but perhaps not to us.
The military is no different. Beyond the job-specific humor, military personnel all share the common burden of frequently leaving home and being put into new and strange environments with new and strange people.
Often the military environment is tasked with providing all the comforts of home: food, a place to live, a place to sleep, medical care, and much more. Just as often, the choice of how to spend your day extends well beyond the normal 8-hour workday. Indeed, that freedom often disappears and you live at the command of others.
All this leads to an environment where the clash of civilian and military culture, language, and customs all contribute to funny incidents and misunderstandings that are familiar, and often funny, to those in and out of the military.
The 2000 US Census found one in eight Americans eighteen and older was a military veteran. 26-some million veterans provides a rich vein to mine stories of 'remember when' from their military days. For over fifty years Reader's Digest has collected and re-told funny stories from military life in their Humor in Uniform feature in each month's magazine.
Humor in Uniform: Funny True Stories About Life in the Military collects over five hundred "anecdotes" and "separate stories of contemporary life in uniform—with its contradictions, its foibles, and its ridiculous mixups and misunderstandings." The books claims all the stories are submitted by military personnel or their families. Some seem a bit apocryphal ( "I'm never standing in line again." sound familiar..?? I would leave the whole joke in a comment ...but it is really not representative of the book. )
But it is obvious from reading story after story that they are honed and 'tightened up' by the edit staff. There is definitely no stumbling around or over the punch-line in these stories.
Rather than being old and tired, many of the stories shared seem up-to-date. There are numerous references to Iraq and Saudi Arabia so you know many have been recently collected.
The book is divided into fifteen sections, each with a clever title: "At the Front", "Oops!", "One Up", "Go Figure", etc.. Each of these is further divided, by more clever titles, but none of them are real helpful for actually finding a topic of interest. It is better to just jump in and start reading. Make sure you bookmark your stopping point, because it may be hard to find when you pick it up next time.
So are the stories funny..?? Well, I am slightly biased by three years of volunteer military service years ago. Other than a few months of training, most of that was like a civilian job, except for wearing a uniform and getting a haircut more often then I would have preferred. So it is not like I am a grizzled war vet or anything...
Even so, I found much of the humor shared here very accessible. Stories about rigid work rules, odd co-workers, misunderstood acronym and jargon, bad food, marital misunderstandings, and many more facets of everyday life are funny to anyone who has experienced them, military or civilian.
The Bottom Line If you like joke collections you will probably appreciate much of the humor found in Humor in Uniform: Funny True Stories About Life in the Military. It is everyday humor with a touch of military seasoning. I suppose if you feel everyone in uniform is a baby-killer you might want to stay away from this one.
I, on the other hand, salute (no pun intended) the Reader's Digest editors when they write: "We applaud these all-too-human people who are able to laugh at themselves while still bravely defending our country."
Representing five decades of humor from the Reader's Digest magazine, a compilation of four hundred hilarious, real-life stories captures the lighter ...More at HotBookSale
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