Back in 1988, my classmate Bill and I were on our way from school in Missouri to internships elsewhere: he in Oklahoma, I in Montana. We and some other guys conconcted this huge move that required a big round trip from Saint Louis to Tulsa to Billings to Great Falls and back to St. Louis. We knew we’d be putting in some serious road time, so we brought along Hitchhiker’s Guide to read aloud during the trip. Our sides ached from laughing so hard. Adam’s humor was so outlandish and inventive that it was all we could to do keep reading and driving through the laughter.

Now, reading the same text 17 years later, I realize that we unknowingly introduced ourselves to Adams in exactly the right way. I was unaware that Hitchhiker’s Guide had first been a radio show, but there’s no doubt that his humor, like Dave Barry’s, is primarily verbal. It stands in contrast to that of someone Carl Hiaasen, whose individual sentences are less funny that the situations they describe. Anyway, Adams’ sentences are funny, and funnier still when you hear them rather than see them.

I have to admit that the humor didn’t play as well during my recent reading. I think that reading it silently robbed it of something. Reading a text aloud helps keep the text coming in a continuous stream; it’s harder to scan the page and get the punchline that occurs a paragraph later. It also allows you to add to the humor with timing and even melody, like when, apparently doomed, the spaceship’s computer starts to sing, “When you walk through the storm …” Maybe it’s just me, but I think that’s way funnier when someone actually sings the text.

So, if you’re in the mood to read a book aloud, perferably to someone else rather than to yourself, this is a great book. If you want to read it silently, it’s still funny, but your guffaws won’t be as deep.