This book only lacks a knowledgeable introduction by a humorist, top golfer or pro, or cartoonist to make it a five-star offering.To me, the best humor is one that captures the reality of how the viewer perceives life. In the case of The New Yorker Book of Golf Cartoons, every golfer will recognize her- or himself . . . and members of past foursomes.
Unlike most sports cartoons, these wonderful offerings provide both female and male perspectives as players. There's still the battle of the sexes around the missing male golfer, but not all cartoons are sex stereotyped . . . which I liked.
Here are a few of my favorites:
One guru with a long beard to another in front of cave overlooking a canyon as the second guru tees off: "If you're so enlightened, how come you can't lick that slice?" This reminded me of the section about Deepak Chopra in Who's Your Caddy?
With a tree lying between the ball and the pin, the caddy hands a saw to the golfer.
"The Male Biological Clock" shows a golfer thinking: "If I don't learn how to play golf by the time I'm forty-three, I'll never learn."
A golfer is thrashing behind a bush and birds and animals run pell-mell away from him.
"I am the Lady of the Lake, and because thou hast defiled my crystal waters I must hence smite thee. That or penalize thee a stroke. Your call." As you can imagine, most golfers would avoid the one stroke penalty.
Man races out the door carrying clubs says to wife, "Gotta run, sweetheart. By the way, that was one fabulous job you did raising the children."
A woman stands on a widow's walk atop her roof looking through a telescope towards a golf course.
One golfer to another as the second one takes his ball out of the cup, "Bankruptcy doesn't seem to have hurt your putting eye a bit, Pete."
One golfer to another as the second one wrestles with an alligator in a swamp, "Oh, for goodness' sake, forget it, Beasley. Play another one."
A man holds clubs next to a woman who's just finished her swing. The ball drops into the cup after two bounces. She asks, "Like so?" This reminded me of the time I took my mother to play golf for the first time, and she beat me on almost every hole after the first four. She quit the game in disgust that day, complaining that it was just too easy to be interesting.
Two golfers are thrashing through the high grass beyond the green looking for a lost ball. One turns to the other and says, "You know something, Jeff. There is one place we haven't looked." That's exactly what happened to me when I hit my hole-in-one to a blind green.
I could go on, but won't so that you'll have something to look forward to (other than your next round of golf). You can see that the cartoonists have a great sense of the game . . . that can only come from having struggled out on the links themselves.
This book will be a great gift for a parent who is a golfer for either Mother's Day or Father's Day.
Fore!!
