Mountain Man Dance Moves
The McSweeney's Book of Lists
by McSweeney's
Vintage

If the essence of McSweeney's could be distilled into one slim, unicorn-bedecked paperback volume, that volume would exactly resemble Mountain Man Dance Moves: The McSweeney's Book of Lists. Though not every piece on McSweeney's comes in list format, the list-style piece may most perfectly capture the site's spirit.

And although the lists in this volume range from "Bad Names For Murder Mysteries" to "Tasks I'm Not Too Embarassed To Have My Helper Monkey Perform," they all seem to share a similar spirit, united by three invisible rules of fun-making:

1. Create a clever premise.

2. Make the premise itself the title of your piece.

3. Let the piece off-handedly, dryly, inversely or in a comically pro forma manner walk through the motions of your premise, which has already been explicitly spelled out.

Here's one classic example, plucked from pages of Mountain Man Dance Moves:

Clocks Ranked According To The Ease With Which One Can Tell Time From Them (Easiest To Hardest)
By Allie Oestreich

Digital

Not Digital

The act of reducing the magic of McSweeney's to something as bloodless as a three-part formula shouldn't be taken as criticism. After all, works such as To Kill a Mockingbird and Gulliver's Travels were created by authors following rules such as these:

1. Make detailed social and/or political and/or cultural observations.

2. Create characters with various qualities that lend themselves to projecting said observations in a story-like format.

3. Weave together characters, setting and storyline in a way conducive to being read and discussed.

Voila. Moby Dick. Harder than it looks.

Anyone who's ever tried to write humor — or even to merely locate a book that's fairly consistently packed with items that could even charitably be described as funny — knows that it's very difficult to frame and block things in a precise manner. Words must be used like scalpels, syllables must be counted and rationed, theasaurii must be consulted. "Why You Should Not Rely On A Unicorn To Manage Your Investment Portfolio" is a much more fertile ground for comedy than "Why Unicorns Are Bad With Money," even though the two ideas contain a lot of overlap.

Mountain Man Dance Moves is not the most important book of 2006, but it might be one of the most precisely written, and is almost certainly the most energy efficient in terms of its gallons of ink-to-gales of laughter ratio.

The book also contains a number of helpful illustrations of German cities, accompanied by advice for prospective tourists. They appear to be circa 1924.

— James Norton (jim@flakmag.com)