The Encyclopedia of Stupidity

Rating:
Summary: Stupid is as Stupid does
Review: I heard about this book a few years ago from some friends in Amsterdam who read it in the original Dutch and couldn't stop talking about it. Now I finally understand what they were laughing about.

I first realized I was interested in the nature of stupidity after reading a few editions of the Darwin Awards, the silly Internet mailings that detailed the adventures of people who died in stupid ways, or, as the creators of the awards put it, "improve our gene pool ... by removing themselves from it." But while The Encyclopedia of Stupidity honors that style (it even includes a brief discussion of the Darwin Awards), it goes beyond that.

In sum: if it's not impossible to be clever about stupidity, then that's exactly what author Matthijs van Boxsel manages to do.

On the most obvious level, this substantial volume is a simple collection of trivia, anecdotes, and ruminations. But as you read through example after example drawn from everything between myth and history to popular culture and dark humor, it becomes clear that there is a sort of "theory of stupidity" that binds the whole thing together.

Mr. van Boxsel at one point frames stupidity as "unwitting self-destruction, the ability to act against one's best wishes." In other words, the book seems to be telling us, the trait the book disects is not a lack of intelligence but a very human kind of flawed or mistaken intelligence, the darkness that makes the light true intelligence visible.

The book is more funny than serious, though there are bits of both styles on its pages. And like any encyclopedia, it is more fun to just open up to a random page and read what is there than it is to read from cover to cover. Enjoy.