The best selling humor book of the eighteenth century lands with a thud in the twenty-first. I find the book unfunny, obscure, awkward, and occasionally irritating. It is something of a privilege's to read a book this old and that was once so popular, and I might admire this edition had it been prop

I wish Joe Miller alive today. He surely was the Lewis Black of his time. Some centuries have passed, thus a lot is lost on this tech day and age. Yet there were quite a few passages that if not a giggle , then a short smile from me. I liked this little charm of humor.

This book is almost equal parts laugh-out-loud funny, quite amusing, and simply baffling. I suspect that the latter is due mostly to old turns of phrase and dated references that don't quite hit their mark as punchlines these days. Still, the book is a good way of passing the time on the bus or the

Wildly popular (and frequently ribald) joke book of its day, and more than a hundred years later referred to by Charles Dickens, Jerome K. Jerome, and others with the expectation that the reference was common knowledge. With the passing of time, some of the humor has been lost, or requires too much