Work Humor

What do ice cream and Sadie Montgomery have in common? They're both ice cold, but one taste is never enough. I wanted to be friends - I would have even settled for her seeing me as anything but a nerd - but there was no getting through. So just like any hard-headed, red-blooded man out there, I made up my mind. I'd make my coworker fall for me.

Can jokes win a hostile room, a hopeless argument, or even an election? You bet they can, according to Cicero, and he knew what he was talking about. One of Rome's greatest politicians, speakers, and lawyers, Cicero was also reputedly one of antiquity's funniest people. After he was elected commander-in-chief and head of state, his enemies even started calling him "the stand-up Consul". How to Tell a Joke provides a lively new translation of Cicero's essential writing on humor alongside that of the later Roman orator and educator Quintilian.

What’s a white knight to do when his princess is causing utter havoc, leading in mass murder? Go to the famous Black Sorcerer of Grimslock for help, apparently. What’s a black sorcerer to do when the white knight comes to him for help? Keep him, naturally.

If you've ever worked in customer service (or any job, really), you know that everyone else—the customer, the boss, the company—is always right, and never the employee. Well, lucky for you, the "Angry Retail Guy" is more furious—and funnier—than ever in this hilariously unhinged guide to all the things we wish we could say out loud at work . . . without getting fired. In The Customer Is Always Wrong, you'll laugh (and maybe cry) at this rant-filled, illustrated attack on all the frustrating things that suck about work.

Comedy is king. From multimillion-dollar TV specials to sold-out stand-up shows and TikTok stardom, comedy has never been more popular, democratized, or influential. Comedians have become organizing forces across culture—as trusted as politicians and as fawned-over as celebrities—yet comedy as an art form has gone under-considered throughout its history, even as it has ascended as a cultural force.

Step-by-Step to Stand-Up Comedy, written and narrated by Greg Dean, is a comprehensive guide for people who are funny, want to be funnier, or have dreams of being a stand-up comedian. This first-of-its-kind audiobook demystifies the craft of comedy by breaking it down to the fundamental skills used by professional funny people. Dean lays out these skills in simple-to-understand lessons that are easy to practice and master.

Want to impress your buddies at school? Need to think of something fun to do at Thanksgiving or Christmas? Want to learn a bunch of random facts about history, science, and the paranormal? If you answered yes to any or all of those questions, then pick up Interesting Stories for Curious Kids: A Fascinating Collection of the Most Interesting, Unbelievable, and Craziest Stories on Earth! This book is the coolest collection of interesting facts about a whole bunch of several different topics.

As part of the legendary comedy team known as Nichols and May, May revolutionized sketch comedy before striking out on her own to make history as the third woman to be admitted into the Directors Guild of America when she wrote, directed, and starred in 1971’s A New Leaf. Throughout the 1970s and ‘80s, May was one of Hollywood’s top screenwriters and script doctors and one of the only women directing within the studio system. After a box-office bomb, May never directed a feature again, though she continued to write films.

Join professional comedy writer Joel Morris on a hilarious journey into the hidden world of shared laughter, where he reveals the mechanisms that make jokes work and what comedy can teach us about ourselves. Offering astute analysis of everything from stand-up to slapstick and sitcom to spoof, Morris examines comedic patterns, rhythms, and dynamics to uncover the algorithms that secretly underpin comedy.

"Why do conservatives hate comedy? Why is there no right-wing Jon Stewart?" These sorts of questions launch a million tweets, a thousand op-eds, and more than a few scholarly analyses. That's Not Funny argues that it is both an intellectual and politically strategic mistake to assume that comedy has a liberal bias. Matt Sienkiewicz and Nick Marx take listeners—particularly self-described liberals—on a tour of contemporary conservative comedy and the "right-wing comedy complex."

In this hysterical, astute book, HR industry expert Jim Dunn explores how humor can improve our professional environments and personal development by exploring questions like: How is humor a superpower for fostering collaborative environments? Are funny employees more effective? How can laughter turn crisis into connection and opportunity? How can instituting a culture of levity shape team dynamics and improve job satisfaction?

Finn Foley has a lunchbox, and when he opens it, weird things come out...like a seven-foot-tall robot and a strange, blinking device that glues itself to his chest. The lunchbox also opens wormholes—shortcuts through space—that take Finn to the farthest corners of the galaxy. Sounds awesome, right?

Widowed Samantha Arias hasn’t spoken to Holly Dunfee in forever. It’s for the best. Samantha prefers to avoid conflict. The blisteringly honest Holly craves it. What they still have in common puts them both back on speed dial: a mutual love for Katie, their best friend of twenty-five years, now hospitalized with cancer and needing one little errand from her old college roomies. It’s simple: travel cross-country together, steal her loathsome ex-husband’s VW camper, find Katie’s diabetic Great Pyrenees at a Utah pound, and drive him back home to Wisconsin.

Penguin presents the unabridged, downloadable audiobook edition of Peace Work, written and read by Spike Milligan. "I had not informed my parents of my return. I wanted it to be a lovely surprise; it was for me - they were away...." The seventh and last volume of Spike Milligan's memoirs sees our hero returning from war and Italy...but to what? Aside from shooting large, inaccurate guns at Germans, all he has done for five long years is blow a trumpet....

Called “our finest black-humorist” by The Atlantic Monthly, Kurt Vonnegut was one of the most influential writers of the 20th century. Now his first and last works come together for the first time in print, in a collection aptly titled after his famous phrase, We Are What We Pretend To Be.

Peter Cunningham has been looking for inspiration for his novel - that is, when he isn’t teaching at the local women’s prison, walking his dog, getting high, and wondering whether it’s time to tie the knot with his college girlfriend. When Peter meets Leslie, a sexual adventurer taking a break from her fiancé, he gets a glimpse of what he wishes and imagines himself to be: a writer of talent and nerve. Over the course of a Virginia summer, their charged, increasingly intimate friendship opens the door to difficult questions about love and literary ambition.

Follow the clerk's adventures through vast government offices as he struggles to make a name for himself on a secret mission for the director. The clerk promised his betrothed he would build a life for them in the city when he moved away from his parents' farm, so he refuses to let any absurd situation prevent him from doing his job so well that he'll be promoted to senior clerk.

Power Distribution Units (PDUs) – you mean power strips, right? That's what I thought when I was first introduced to this product. Boy oh boy was I wrong! Yes, the PDUs that are manufactured to be sold to the owners and operators of data centers do bear some similarities to the simple power strips that we all use at home. But we are really talking about two very different products here.

Chris Doelle has always been a fan of lame, corny jokes and has become known as quite the jokester online. His hashtag #lamejokesrule has grown into an online phenomenon prompting the release of this book. His first joke book, Lame Jokes Rule: Volume I, was a big success, and after only a little prodding, Chris created this book, volume II.

Eat your heart out, Nostradamus! There's a new soothsayer in town and his name is Scott Adams. The ruthless ridiculer of corporate idiocy, together with Dilbert, Dogbert, and the twits in management, turns his eagle eye on everything from new work-avoiding technology to sex with aliens. He predicts that (finally!) we'll learn to harness the most abundant resource in the universe: stupidity.