I considered NOT reviewing this little volume since it’s just not the kind of humor that tickles my funny bone. Humor is strange and hard to write, I think. Not all of us laugh at the same things, and we’re not always in the mood for the same kind of humor. It must be very difficult to try to be funny for a living, as a comedian or a writer. And I’m not sure exactly why the books in this series don’t make me laugh.

Now, I can do absurd as well as the next guy. I have laughed out loud at the absurdity and wit of Christopher Healy’s Hero’s Guide series. And the third book in that series, which I just read a couple of weeks ago, was as funny to me as the first one. When I read the first book in M.T. Anderson’s Pals in Peril series, The Clue of the Linoleum Lederhosen, I described it as “a pastiche of all those series you read when you were a kid back in the fifties and the sixties, if you were a kid back in the fifties and the sixties: Nancy Drew, the Hardy Boys, Danny Dunn, the Bobbsey Twins, cowboy series that I never read.” I also opined then that the joke was getting old by the end of the book.

Well, it’s still the same joke, and it’s still old. Plus, Mr. Anderson decided to add in a sad little story in the footnotes about a boy named Busby who lived during WW II and read the Jasper Dash, Boy Technonaut books that form the basis for the main story. Busby has a sad life with his dad being injured in the war, and it’s not funny at all. The contrast is jarring.

I just didn’t find Pals in Peril very humorous. If you liked The Clue of the Linoleum Lederhosen, He Laughed With his Other Mouths is more of the same. If not, skip.

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This book is also nominated for a Cybil Award, but the views expressed here are strictly my own and do not reflect or determine the judging panel’s opinions.