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Christmas funny books

Bevis Hillier

Wednesday, 28th November 2007

Stocking fillers

On the surface, you might think that Paul Heiney’s new book, Do Cats Have Belly Buttons? And Answers to 244 Other Questions on the World of Science is a similar kettle of fish to the one I’ve just reviewed. It, too, is full of silly, and often disgusting questions — ‘Do people with sticky-out ears have better balance?’; ‘Why is snot green?’; ‘Can chewing-gum get “tangled up” in your intestine?’; ‘Are the horns on the heads of giraffes lightning conductors?’; ‘Can snails talk to each other?’; ‘Do birds have earwax?’; and ‘If you gave seagulls Alka-Seltzer, would they explode?’ The big difference between the two books is this: while Butler’s and Vincent’s answers are as preposterous as their questions, and are meant to make you laugh, Heiney is intent on giving pukka scientific answers, by no means all rib-tickling. The answer to the title question is: ‘Cats do indeed have a belly button and you’ll find it pretty much in the same place as on humans — just below the rib cage.’ Heiney even attempts a serious answer to ‘What’s the funny-bone?’

Don’t laugh when I tell you, but the funny bone is not a bone at all. It is a nerve which runs through a groove in a bone called the ulna, one of two bones in the lower arm …

Though it’s not exactly a bundle of fun, the book is very ably written — a worthy successor to Heiney’s earlier work, Can Cows Walk Down Stairs? (I’m afraid that — as with the birds and wax query, the eardrum conundrum — that is yet another question to which I was never aching to know the answer.)

Taken together, these two question-and-answer books, as different from each other as ‘upper’ and ‘downer’ pills, stirred a distant memory. After a while I realised what it was: a passage from Dostoevsky’s The Idiot. Yevgeny Pavlovich Radomsky is addressing Prince Myshkin (the ‘Idiot’).

‘Well, you are a strange fellow,’ he said. ‘And really, was your reply a serious one, Prince?’

‘Wasn’t your question a serious one?’ retorted the prince in surprise.

They all began to laugh.

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