## Annotated Amazon Review of MJ4MF

The paperback version of Math Jokes 4 Mathy Folks was released on August 9, 2010. During its first three years on Amazon, it received 17 reviews, with an average rating of 4.76. Recently, however, an unimpressed reviewer gave it just 2 stars:

This reminds me. If you’ve read MJ4MF and liked it, please post a review on Amazon. (If you disliked it, please post your review on MySpace.)

But I digress. Back to my point. The disparaging review that appeared on Amazon contained just 21 words:

jokes are not very funny – seems like they were stretching it to find enough jokes to fill a book to sell

To fully understand this review, I offer the following annotations.

jokes are not very funny

“I wouldn’t know humor if it bit me. I often travel to Branson, MO, to see Yakov Smirnoff perform live, and I think that Carrot Top’s performance on Star Search is the funniest moment ever.”

seems like they

“I’m unaware that the author is a single person,” or possibly, “I’m not familiar with rules of English grammar.”

were stretching it

“I don’t understand common English idioms. A friend pointed out that the correct phrase is just ‘were stretching’ without the ‘it.’ Oops.”

to find enough jokes

“I failed to realize that the book contains 400+ math jokes, yet a Google search for ‘math jokes’ returns 2,830,000 results. Simple percentages show how selective the author has been. I also hadn’t visited this blog before posting my review; I now see that a significant number of jokes not in the book have appeared on this blog, so clearly the author did not exhaust the supply.”

to fill a book to sell

“The author is a money-hungry swine who would sell his grandmother’s secret recipe for Hungarian pierogi for 50 bucks.”

Sadly, this last claim is mostly true. But my grandmother’s pierogi were divine, and the recipe is worth far more than \$50. Kindly submit your bid in the Comments.

But I’m not bitter. I don’t care that this review reduces my average rating by 0.15 stars or that it single-handedly drops the book to #19 when someone searches for ‘math jokes’ on Amazon and sorts by “Avg. Customer Review.”

Instead, I prefer to remember the MJ4MF review written by Caregiver x 2, who said:

This morning I gave this book to my son, he didn’t put it down for a long time. He was laughing and flipping the pages as fast as he could. And he was on his summer break!

She is wise beyond her years, and I appreciate that she took the time to share her insightful comments with the world.

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• 1. xander  |  November 25, 2013 at 7:24 pm

I’ll start the bidding at $50 \times ln(\frac{1}{pi})$ dollars!

• 2. venneblock  |  November 27, 2013 at 4:43 pm

Sorry, Xander… too rich for my blood!🙂

The Math Jokes 4 Mathy Folks blog is an online extension to the book Math Jokes 4 Mathy Folks. The blog contains jokes submitted by readers, new jokes discovered by the author, details about speaking appearances and workshops, and other random bits of information that might be interesting to the strange folks who like math jokes.

## MJ4MF (offline version)

Math Jokes 4 Mathy Folks is available from Amazon, Borders, Barnes & Noble, NCTM, Robert D. Reed Publishers, and other purveyors of exceptional literature.