Booknote: Cable on Academe

Carole Cable, Cable on Academe. Austin, TX: University of Texas Press, 1994. ISBN: 0-292-71170-0.

Genre: humor
Subgenre: comics, higher education
Format: paperback
Source: I own this one.

I've had this small book for a while, and I've read it multiple times. I've even featured  in on my reading lists for 2008 and 2012. I checked to see if I  had written a review of this before, and apparently I did a small note on GoodReads, but not a full review, so I am going to write a few lines on it now for the blog.

This is a small collection of comics by Carole Cable. These are basically comics that appeared mainly in The Chronicle of Higher Education. The comics deal with the misadventures, the realities, and absurdities of higher education. Odds are good some old timer professors may have cut out or printed out a strip or two to tape on their office doors. The humor in the comic varies. It does catch how ridiculous and pretentious academia can get at times, which is why I find the book comforting at times. As much as  I love working in academia, its stuffy snobbishness can be irritating to put it mildly. Still, it's gentle humor; we are not talking Scott Adams level of humor. I am still waiting for that kind of humorous look at academia in comics, which would be deserved and welcomed. In the meantime, Cable does OK, although I wonder for how long since  much like an old professor's yellow pad lecture notes, the book and some of its jokes are woefully dated. Still, the book is amusing to look at now and then.

3 out of 5 stars.

This book qualifies for the following 2016 Reading Challenges: