Gut-busting hilarious read! Ross is a wordsmith, and the pictures he paints are marvelous, putting the reader right there in the classroom with the angelic KAPLAN, the frustrated but curious teacher Mr. Parkhill, and the rest of the class, split in loyalty.
Funny funny funny. Our English language certainly is hard to learn, and the ways it is pointed out are priceless. I like re-reading this book, and I don't think I will ever get tired of it.

Adorable good fun and hilarious wordplay galore. Hyman Kaplan is a pip, up there with the great comic characters, Auntie Mame, Amelia Bedelia, and others.

Jewish dialect humour at its best, I guess one must be a quite fluent English speaker to appreciate all the puns in full. Makes you guess how good is your own prononciation, so maybe not for insecure ESL speakers :'))

All in all, I've loved the book, I found it tremendously funny.

Knížka, kterou miluju přibližně od roku 1999 a jejíž hrdina mi věnoval doživotní nick pro internet. Slovní humor a krásná hra s češtinou v překladů pánů Eisnera (první vydání) a Přidala (druhé vydání).

This was mildly amusing. I think, had I read it when it came out, or even when I was younger, I would have found it much more entertaining. As it is, it works much better as a newspaper article, which is how it originally came out, rather than as a book. The premise, that the beleaguered English teacher is trying to teach English to new American citizens and what a job he has of it with their crazy ways of speaking English and their hilarious mistakes, isn't really that funny any more. At least not the way it is written here. And the star of the show, Hyman Kaplan, who is supposed to redeem everything because we can't help but fall in love with him etc. Well, I didn't really fall in love with him I'm afraid. I wish I had. The first essay was mildly amusing and then I got quite bored. Thankfully it was short.

One of my favorite books

I read this book many times as a kid, borrowing it repeatedly from my public library. For some reason it tickled my funny bone. Funnily enough, eventually I became a teacher of English as a second language classes for adults, just like the class in this book. I never had a student quite as hilarious and exasperating as Hyman Kaplan, though many came close. H*Y*M*A*N K*A*P*L*A*N forever!

First published as a collection in 1937, Rosten's vignettes depict the antics of one particular immigrant student in an adult education night class intended to help foreigners better assimilate to American culture. The humor of the book invariably relies on stereotyping its cast of characters in a way that would have felt warm and light-hearted in the years before the second World War, and Rosten's puns work well with the premise, even if the jokes rely entirely on the suspension of disbelief.

Rosten's book was incredibly well-received throughout the 1930s and 1940s--the original stories, published in 1935, were immediately published by The New Yorker--and Kaplan was popular enough to warrant two further bodies of fiction from Rosten. So popular was Rosten's book, in fact, that it was "drafted" as the first title listed in the American Services Edition paperbacks shipped to GI's during WWII.

The book, however, is demonstrably a remnant of its time. Read now by the wrong audience, it could easily be misinterpreted as something anti-semitic, even though the context of the book's content should demonstrate that no such meaning would ever have been intended, and these sorts of misreadings would be inconceivable during its heyday. Rosten's stories are certainly problematic to modern sensibilities, but I tend to think that they're as much an indictment of the systematic pressure on immigrants to assimilate as it is a favorable political positioning of the practice. Rosten seems to value the cultural background of his protagonists as much as he also sympathizes with their seeming need to become more naturalized citizens of the United States. As the United States marched further toward war, and especially with the rise of anti-semitism in Europe and the closure of America's borders to Jews abroad, the ability of certain immigrants to become more functionally invisible would have been of sincere value--and while Rosten doesn't tackle the subject with any sense of genuine philosophical complexity, he assuredly understood what he was doing with his humor at the time, and thereafter.

I also don't find the book as offensive given that Rosten's style of humor has been a hallmark of many great comedic characters since, including Peter Sellers' (and Steve Martin's) Inspector Clouseau. It may be my postmodern brain that makes such connections, but I couldn't help but feel as though I was reading a lost Pink Panther bit more than once throughout the book.

It's worth a read for those looking for explorations of 20th century immigrant literature, but otherwise, I think it's fine to skip it.

ASE A-1

Adorable and consistently laugh-out-loud funny. This book is an instant classic for me!!