Reviews for Funny Thing Happened on the Way to the Cemetery

The average rating for Funny Thing Happened on the Way to the Cemetery based on 2 reviews is 4.5 stars.

Review # 1 was written on 2017-02-09 00:00:00 Stephen Proffitt A ribald collection of recollections, essays, stories and exaggerations from Sri Lanka�s own Baron Munchausen. Whether it is winking at the queen, wrestling with a 20-foot python, sitting out the graveyard shift with a corpse that refuses to stay dead, or transporting a viper inside a plastic bag in a bus full of inquisitive commuters, Muller is up to the task of finding the most hilarious angle in each event and exploiting it to the fullest, providing the reader with a belly ache by the end of every story. The stories cover three periods in his life: his early days in the Ceylon Navy, his life as an itinerant journalist in the wealthy Gulf states of the Middle East, and his later observations of the quirks of his island nation, now renamed Sri Lanka. The naval stories are full of seaman talk with lavish sprinklings of �blue words.� Seaman Muller and his co-sufferers come across as renegades who abhor authority and are therefore in vulnerable positions in the regimented world of the Navy. The Gulf stories read more like essays on his own transient life there as an expatriate journalist, hired to report on altered facts that do not expose skeletons in the political closet. Back home in what has now become Sri Lanka, his observations range from the state of the public transport service, to touts in the tourist industry, to dealing with the government bureaucracy, to the teaching of English by those who can hardly speak it themselves� nightmare scenarios rendered farcical and palatable under Muller�s treatment. He is not afraid to tread into areas normally considered taboo, whether they are about the hypocritical lives of wealthy Arabs, the sacrosanct Buddhist religion in Sri Lanka, or the British Monarchy in the mother country that we once paid homage to. The colonial writer in Muller is evident in some of the antiquated words and phrases that spout from him: cut the mustard, nip and tuck, regaling, elbow grease, gilded the brass�watch items for the modern writer, but ones that give you a cosy feeling and identify strongly with the milieu and period the author is covering. The narration is colloquial�some sentences begin with the verb, similar to the spoken English in the country. Some stories begin with a general statement on the situation in the land with regard to re-incarnation, sex slavery or reptiles, and then dive into Muller�s own experience with them. His flair for capturing the patois English spoken in Sri Lanka is exemplary. My only regret was that some of these stories have been repeated from other collections and novels by the author, all of which I have read, and I wondered whether the publisher was trying to fill a given quota of pages or whether Muller�s vast reservoir of hilarious incidents was running dry. To the first time reader of Carl Muller, this is a great primer on the author who has been mainly responsible for depicting, in a humorous and unflattering manner, the lives of the Ceylon Burghers with his Jam Tree trilogy, and who has captured and frozen a way of life that has all but disappeared in contemporary Sri Lanka.

Review # 2 was written on 2019-04-22 00:00:00 jason manning Hilarious! The title is a true reflection of the content of the book.