Snortage Down Under.

One of the funniest books I have ever read, was a travel book.
Go figure!
It was Bill Bryson’s In A Sunburned Country. A sort of literary travelogue account of his trip to Australia.
One of my goals in life is to be able to learn to write of everday events in as humorous a way as Bryson does.
There is a passage very early in the book, which I found so hilarious when I first read it, that I want to reproduce it here. In it, Bryson describes the first time he had ever been to Sydney Australia. It was a previous book tour, and he was being chauffered by a sales rep from his local publisher, the man’s wife and two little girls riding along in the back seat. What follows here is classic Brysonism......

At some unfortunate point, quite early on, jet lag asserted itself and I slumped helplessly into a coma.
I am not, I regret to say, a discreet and fetching sleeper. Most people when they nod off look as if they could do with a blanket; I look as if I could do with medical attention. I sleep as if injected with a powerful experimental muscle relaxant. My legs fall open in a grotesque come-hither manner; my knuckles brush the floor. Whatever is inside – tongue, uvula, moist bubbles of intestinal air – decides to leak out. From time to time, like one of those nodding-duck toys, my head tips forward to empty a quart or so of viscous drool onto my lap, then falls back to begin loading again with a noise like a toilet cistern filling. And I snore, hugely and helplessly, like a cartoon character, with rubbery flapping lips and prolonged steam-valve exhalations. For long periods I grow unnaturally still, in a way that inclines onlookers to exchange glances and lean forward in concern, then dramatically I stiffen and, after a tantalizing pause, begin to bounce and jostle in a series of whole-body spasms of the sort that bring to mind an electric chair when the switch is thrown. Then I shriek once or twice in a piercing and effeminate manner and wake up to find that all motion within five hundred feet has stopped and all children under eight are clutching their mothers’ hems. It is a terrible burden to bear.
I have no idea how long I slept in that car other than that it was not a short while. All I know is that when I came to, there was a certain heavy silence in the car – the kind of silence that would close over you if you found yourself driving around your own city conveying a slumped and twitching heap from one unperceived landmark to another.
I looked around dumbly, not certain for the moment who these people were, cleared my throat, and pulled myself to a more upright position.
“We were wondering if you might like some lunch,” my guide said quietly when he saw that I had abandoned for the moment the private ambition to flood his car with saliva.
“That would be very nice,” I replied in a small, abject voice, discovering in the same instant, with a customary inward horror, that while I had dozed a four-hundred-pound fly had evidently been sick over me. In an attempt to distract attention from my unnatural moist sheen and at the same time reestablish my interest in the tour, I added more brightly, “Is this still Neutral Bay?”
There was a small involuntary snort of the sort you make when a drink goes down the wrong way. And then with a certain strained precision: “No, this is Dover Heights. Neutral Bay was” – a micro-second’s pause, just to aerate the point – “some time ago.”
“Ah.” I made a grave face, as if trying to figure out how we had managed between us to mislay such a chunk of time.
“Quite some time ago, in fact.”
“Ah.”
We drove the rest of the way to lunch in silence.
________

Maybe it’s just me.
Maybe I should be sent to the looney bin (wherever that is).
But the first time I read that little vignette I was sitting in the mega-bookstore, and I started laughing so hard that when it was time to breathe again....... I snorted!
[Several people looked up from their books, like startled deer.]
And then I cried. From laughing, like.
I am not exaggerating to say that I nearly feel off my chair in a heap of residual snortage.
Bryson is always sure to include moments of snortage and tears for his readers.
I recently read an interview with him where he describes an upcoming book which he claims is deliberately humorous from start to finish. Not a dang thing serious about it.
It is healthy to laugh like this sometimes.
Anything Bryson.
Highly recommended summertime reading, from yours truly.