You Might Be a Zombie—And Other Bad News
From the Editors of Cracked.com. Plume Books (Penguin Group), 2011. 295 pages.

I blew through You Might Be a Zombie’s 41 chapters and umpteen factoids in a single evening, the way I used to ravish the latest edition of The Guiness Book of World Records when I was 12 or 13. This is indeed the hip cynical grown-up’s equivalent of Ripley’s Believe It or Not, an institution for which You Might Be a Zombie—And Other Bad News has nothing but snickering scorn; while debunking the claim that “Einstein Flunked Math” in the section “Five Ridiculous Lies You Were Taught in History Class,” it is noted that:

The idea that Einstein did badly at school is thought to have originated with a 1935 Ripley’s Believe It Or Not! trivia column, which probably should have been called Believe It Or Not! I Get Paid Either Way, Assholes! The famous trivia “expert” never cited his sources, and the various “facts” he presented throughout his career were mostly things he thought he heard, combined with stuff he pulled directly out of his ass.

That sort of cogent analysis (and I’m not being entirely facetious here) represents the dominant attitude of this book: Trust nobody, and roast them unmercifully for their self-inflating sins.

Inventors steal their ideas (especially from women: one whole section’s devoted to “Four Great Women Buried by Their Boobs”). Historians not only lie, they underplay the best parts of the legends they’re burnishing (“The Four Most Badass Presidents of All Time,” “Five Beloved U.S. Presidents the Modern Media Would Never Let Into the White House”). Storytellers varnish the truth (“Five Movies Based on True Stories [That Are Complete Bullshit]”; “Five Fight Moves That Only Work in Movies”; “Five Hollywood Adaptations That Totally Missed the Point”). And speaking of varnish, the red food coloring on the candy and yogurt you ate today (this book exists excitedly in the “Eek! Right in front of you!” present tense) is a shellac make of yucky bugs “Five Horrifying Food Additives You’ve Probably Eaten Today”). To the collective of Cracked.com humor writers who cranked this book out, grossing you out is as crucial a mission as screwing up your sense of the universe. For every “Five Ways Your Brain is Messing With Your Head” or “Five Psychological Experiments That Prove Humanity is Doomed,” there’s “Six Terrifying Things They Don’t Tell You About Childbirth” or “Six Most Terrifying Foods in the World.”

At times, You Might Be a Zombie makes too much of simple ironies, like that Barry Manilow didn’t write the song “I Write the Songs” and other deceits that are formed only in the minds of the ignorant. Plus there’s always that awkwardness of a book openly embracing harsh language and bad taste yet appearing to be shocked and dismayed by examples of harsh language and bad taste elsewhere (“The Gruesome Origins of Five Popular Fairy Tales”). But even these lapses into literary overkill help set a tone where conspiracy theories (including five that “Nearly Brought Down the U.S. Government,” not to mention :”Five Wacky Misunderstandings That Almost Caused a Nuclear Holocaust”) can be told from fresh perspectives

What You Might Be a Zombie fails to acknowledge—because for marketing reasons it chooses to be a humor book and not a scholarly textbook—is that this ain’t such a bad teaching method. There’s such a consistent tone and fluid writing style to this widespread selection of cultural conundrums that one of the book’s biggest shocks is the number of separate writers who apparently contributed to it. This is the biggest tribute to unified-voice humor writing since the early years of Spy Magazine.
You Might Be a Zombie’s superior and snide attitude is compelling and convincing. The jokes are funny and hold your attention regarding disagreeable subject matter. The disrespect for authority, the snippiness about the reliability of recorded history, the complete distrust of common wisdom, the glee of unlocking key truths which unsettle mountains of accumulated “knowledge”…
It all adds up to a comedy compendium profoundly more consciousness-molding than all those humor books which merely satirize history with line-by-line parodies and puns, like (the nonetheless brilliant) Onion’s “Our Dumb Century” and The Daily Show’s “America: The Book.” What You Might Be a Zombie lacks in graphic-art expertise (though some of the illustrations are very funny), it makes up for with an obsessive need to not just make you laugh, but make you laugh at yourself and at the world around you so hard that the “shocking but utterly true FACTS!” advertised on its cover may shock you into shaking things up a bit.
Such activism will either lead to the reclassification of Cracked.com as a university or think tank, or provide fodder for You Might Be a Zombie’s sequel, depending on how badly you screw up or show your worst attributes.
Either way, score. I felt distinctly unZombie-like after plowing through You Might Be a Zombie and Other Bad News. Oh, I wanted brains. But the book taught me the difference between having them in your head or having them up your ass.