Moby Dick

Here's the thing your teachers never told you: Moby Dick is funny. Really.
Call him Ishmael, the wordiest shipmate of all time. There’s no getting around it, our humble narrator is one intensely, tirelessly, sometimes frustratingly verbose dude. Not preachy or pedantic, just helplessly prone to tangents and, for a common sailor, suspiciously well-versed in the classics. In the end though, he’s more than a blabbermouth, or a smartypants, more than a likeable fellow and a trustworthy storyteller. Ishmael is — and here’s the thing your teachers never told you when they dropped this thousand page anvil on your curriculum, knowing you’d hardly make a dent in it — funny. Moby Dick is funny.

I know. I’m as shocked as you are. Lit professors and dry-lipped lecturers have guarded this secret in plain sight for a century and a half plus, dooming hapless students to the notion that Herman Melville’s masterwork was merely some spell-binding if antiquated adventure, or a cautionary tale against the evils of monomaniacal obsession. (We get it: Don’t be an Ahab, going mad in pursuit of your white whale (metaphorically (probably)).) Now, we’re not talking Douglas Adamsian humor (though Melville’s inventive nerdiness shares some DNA with the Hitchhiker’s Guide books), more like the way Bill Bryson might undercut some hail-science story with a sly comment on how little science has actually figured out. It’s like that. Artful, agile, offbeat humor. Stuff that matches the Shakespearean ambition of the work as a whole. Top Three Asides: whale phrenology, whether whales have noses, why it’s okay to call a whale a fish even if you know better. Oh, and then there’s the tangents that seems to come right out of Melville’s stand-up routine, mini-rants on every race, religion and affliction Ishmael lays eyes on. “Better sleep with a sober cannibal than a drunken Christian.” Words to live by.