Don't bend over in the garden, granny, you know them taters got eyes Book

"There's nothing inherently dirty about sex, but if you try real hard and use your imagination you can overcome that quite easily."

If you weren't around during a very specific point in American history (the late 80's, when Reaganomics was the rage and "Full House" was the raunchiest thing on TV) and in a specific place (the South), you've probably never heard of, nor would you care to hear of Lewis Grizzard. Erma Bombeck with a penis, the proto-shoggoth version of Jeff Foxworthy, Grizzard (rhymes with "his yard," not "blizzard") wrote about a dozen comedic books between 1984 and 1993, mostly about living in the South and not understanding these dad-blasted kids today. If you remember him at all, it's probably for having some of the most ridiculous book titles to ever grace the shelves at Woolworth's: Shoot Low Boys, They're Riding Shetland Ponies, Elvis is Dead and I Don't Feel So Good Myself, and of course Don't Bend Over in the Garden, Granny, you Know Them Taters Got Eyes. When I was ten years old, I thought he was the funniest motherfucker on the planet.

And to be honest, I did chuckle and guffaw a few times re-reading Don't Bend Over in the Garden..., though mostly from nostalgia rather than anything in the book being actually funny. This was Grizzard's "sex" book, the one I remember most clearly from childhood, probably because it had "dirty jokes" in it. In truth, the book is so PG-rated these days it transforms the reader into a bizarre time-traveling cultural scavenger, the way i'd imagine it might feel to discover a collection of daguerrotypes of frontierswomen's ankles. It waffles between hilariously dated cultural jokes (Tammy Faye Baker is a big target of Grizzard's ire, as is surprisingly Jerry Falwell), dirty jokes torn right out of your bestselling bathroom reader, like Big John and his "big business," three inches long (measured from the floor, of course); and weird personal anecdotes about Grizzard and his wives.

Don't Bend Over is frequently paleolithic in its social outlook (Diane Keaton is ugly and has a 'smart mouth'! Women like to engage in foreplay with men and then not have sex with them!), but also surprisingly progressive at times for something written during the height of the "family values" boom. On anti-sex preachers like Jerry Falwell, Grizzard writes:

"The only people who say 'fornicating' are people who spit on you when they talk and started branding people with scarlet letters when witch hunts went out of style."

and on the subject of banning pornography:

"Give the book burners one little victory like Falwell over Flynt and those people can get absolutely red-eyed with determinatino to see everything but the Bible, 'Reader's Digest' and 'Guns and Ammo' flushed down the toilet.

So it's not all bad. And very, very occasionally, it manages to be a bit more than a late-80s cultural artifact and get a little funny. I'm not going to recommend this, or any of Grizzard's work to anybody, but if you grew up with these books it might not be a terrible idea to pick one up, just for nostalgia's sake.