Harry Hill's Colossal Compendium by Harry Hill

Harry Hill's Colossal Compendium by Harry Hill
Buy Harry Hill's Colossal Compendium by Harry Hill at Amazon.co.uk or Amazon.com
Category: Children's Non-Fiction
Reviewer: Sam Tyler
Summary: Should I buy a collection of Harry Hill's best jokes and sketches or should I not? There is only one way to find out - FIGHT! Or, there is the second option of checking out this fun compendium for kids.
Buy? Maybe	Borrow? Maybe
Pages: 352	Date: October 2014
Publisher: Faber and Faber
ISBN: 9780571317493
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To get by in life you have to have a system. How do you remember a celebrity’s name? You could compare them to a foodstuff; Liz Hurley/Curly Wurly, Cadburys cream egg/Mystic Meg. If this makes sense to you, you may have come across Harry Hill in his various guises. Harry has been a popular stand-up, a successful TV show host and also has series of books that appeal to kids. These have been mashed up together to create a best of; fans of oddball humour in delirium/Harry Hill's Colossal Compendium.

All comedians appeal to different people, but to say that Harry Hill is a required taste would be being too mild. He has a very peculiar sense of humour, but as ‘TV Burp’ proved, he does appeal to the mainstream audience. What this show also achieved was introducing the character to children and Harry even went on to make a kids TV show, ‘Shark Infested Custard’. The Colossal Compendium is a great stocking filler for any child that has a daft sense of humour who loves Harry's TV work.

The book is split into various different segments such as showbiz. Within these sections you will get a few jokes, some silly bloopers taken from TV/Newspapers and a cartoon of Tim the Tiny Horse, all written and illustrated by Harry. By no means is there a deluge of content here, you are lucky to get one joke per page. That means that although the 352 pages may seem like a mighty tome, it is certainly not a 1000-jokes book (more like 352 of them). Despite their scarcity the jokes are very amusing; surreal and family friendly. However, once again it will depend on the child’s sense of humour whether they like the jokes or not.

The biggest surprise for me came via the smallest character, with the adventures of Tim the Tiny Horse. There are a series of very amusing little stories and illustrations about Tim each written over several pages. These border on Dali levels of surrealism, but are very amusing. As an adult I appreciated the oddness of a minute horse getting a job on TV, but will every child?

With a question of taste so central to whether you will enjoy Colossal Compendium it is best given to a child who is already a fan of joke books, or has read earlier books by Harry Hill. However, this leads to another issue. As a compendium, this book is made up of the best bits of the previous Harry Hill Joke books etc. and many fans will already own these. You could end up buying something that they already own in a different guise. With this in mind, the audience for the book is pretty limited to Harry Hill fans who don’t already own many of the other Harry Hill books. Do you know someone like that?

If this book appeals then try Tim the Tiny Horse by Harry Hill and Horrid Henry's Biggest and Best Ever Joke Book - 3-in-1 by Francesca Simon and Tony Ross

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