Roanoke Times
                 Copyright (c) 1995, Landmark Communications, Inc.

DATE: SUNDAY, December 25, 1994                   TAG: 9501060018
SECTION: BOOKS                    PAGE: F-6   EDITION: METRO 
SOURCE: MIKE MAYO BOOK PAGE EDITOR
DATELINE:                                 LENGTH: Short

SOUTHERN HUMOR FROM TWAIN TO IVINS

All too often, humor anthologies are respectful volumes filled with older, more traditional works that won't offend anyone.

That's definitely not the case with "Roy Blount's Book of Southern Humor." It's rude, profane, irreverent and laugh-out-loud funny. The selections range from fairly restrained academic pieces (Katherine Anne Porter's grimly polite account of her introduction to Ernest Hemingway by Sylvia Beach) to song lyrics (Kinky Friedman's "The Ballad of Charles Whitman"). A decent amount of respect is paid to previous generations with such contributors as Mark Twain, Harry Golden, H.L. Mencken, A.J. Leibling and Robert Penn Warren. But Blount seems more interested in writers who are still hard at work - Bailey White, Lee Smith, Vertamae Smart-Grosvenor, Molly Ivins, Ishmael Reed, Dave Barry, Sarah Gilbert.

At first, some of his choices may seem a little odd, but Hunter Thompson is a Southerner (from Kentucky) and though Garrison Keillor isn't, he writes about the South with enthusiasm and authority.

My own favorites are George Garrett's "A Dickey Story," Dan Jenkins' "Fort Worth Golf," Molly Ivins' "Tough as Bob War and Other Stuff." (You'll have to read Blount's introduction to that piece to learn about the three most overrated things in the world.) Finally and perhaps best of all is the wonderful section from Florence King's "Confessions of a Failed Southern Lady" in which she finds bizarre humor in the most unlikely subject imaginable.