MORE INFORMATION THAN YOU REQUIRE
By John Hodgman. Riverhead Books. 368 pp. $27.50
****

Like many nerdy people with nothing better to do at midnight but watch The Daily Show, I fell in love with John Hodgman during his first guest appearance opposite Jon Stewart, plugging his first compendium of fake trivia, The Areas of My Expertise. Clad in a jacket the colour of a Graham cracker, wearing cheap glasses and a cheaper haircut, Hodgman provided an absolutely deadpan account of the “Great Hobo Wars” of 1932, when the vast hobo army briefly occupied the White House and installed one of their own, Hobo Joe Junkpan, as Secretary of the Treasury. According to Hodgman, American currency from that time bore Hobo Joe’s signature — “which is really just a picture of a bird wearing a hat.”

Following that appearance, North American comedy fans came down with an acute case of Hodgmania: the tubby comic became a regular contributor to The Daily Show, giving similarly nonsensical but authoritative-sounding primers on everything from lice to hurricanes, and achieved pop culture immortality starring in a long-running series of commercials for Macintosh computers (in which, paradoxically, his bumbling “PC” character came off as much more likable than the product the ads were actually selling).

Hodgman devotes a chapter in his new book More Information Than You Require to outlining his top priorities for his newly acquired enormous wealth. (They include building a dolphin sanctuary, “no more computers turning evil,” and financing a feature-film version of the TV series The Adventures of Brisco County, Jr.) But money doesn’t seem to have changed Hodgman; he’s still the same (possibly insane) nerd he ever was, obsessively compiling lists of the nine American presidents who had hooks for hands, ranking the various poker hands (according to Hodgman, a royal flush is the same as a straight flush, “only the cards are made of velvet”), and providing instructions on how to foretell the future with a pig’s spleen, complete with a helpful “twelve-month spleencast.” Along the way, we also get accounts of William S. Burroughs’ 1973 appearance on Match Game, a list of the seven portals into the hollow earth, and the news that “A baby that is born with teeth will be a financial success ... EVEN WHILE HE IS STILL A BABY.”

Reading 350 pages of this stuff does get a little exhausting — especially since the book is so full of footnotes, sidebars, and tables that a Dr. Bronner’s soap wrapper looks readable by comparison. My stamina flagged a little during the 50-page section about the mole-men whom Hodgman claims live at the centre of the Earth (complete with a list of 700 notable mole-men throughout history and their occupations), but I suppose the chapter’s ridiculous length is part of the joke.

And in a time when books by popular comedians typically consist of barely more than 200 wide-margined pages more padded out than a Ralph Klein political science essay, you’ve got to give Hodgman credit for packing extra jokes into every available bit of white space. He can’t even leave the inside of the dust jacket blank — not when it’s the perfect place to put his “Taxonomy of Complete World Knowledge.” (Local readers will appreciate his list of “The Eleven Provinces of Canada,” including Quebec, Before Christ, and “The Mysterious Floating Plateau of Hohoq, aka ‘Ar,’ aka ‘Prince Edward Island.’”)

Have I quoted enough of the punchlines for you yet? (And have I mentioned how hard I laughed at how he illustrates an entry on Aaron Burr with a picture of Chewbacca, and an item about Martin Van Buren with a photo of Doctor Who?) Believe me: there’s thousands more where those came from. More Information Than You Require contains more jokes than most humans can comprehend.