Real Ponies Dont Go Oink! by Patrick F. McManus

Real Ponies Dont Go Oink! Reviews

• 
  Samuel Pettit

  It was good!
• 
  Linda Hart

  Very funny collection of essays, some of which brought tears of laughter rolling down my cheeks
• 
  Regina

  I love everything Pat McManus writes! So funny!
• 
  Nicole

  Delightful read. Chuckled through most of it.
• 
  Susan

  This, and the many other Patrick McMannus books not listed here make the best campfire read-aloud's around.
• 
  Nathan Albright

  After I made some kind of humorous story involving a poorly done concrete job, a friend of mine found this book, which features a similar story.  For the most part, the author and I have diametrically opposed approaches to humor.  My own sense of humor tends to be rather dry, often understated and highly sardonic, full of wit and subtlety, and the author is more about over the top humor that is wildly improbable and not particularly witty or subtle at all.  Even if it's not my sense of humor, though, this book, like others of its kind, is enjoyable to read [1].  The author is suitably self-effacing, seemingly the sort of person who does not care if people are laughing at him as long as they are laughing.  It's not a sense of humor I think is comfortable to know in person, but in reading a book, it certainly can make for a pleasant book to read as long as you do the appropriate discounting for the obvious exaggeration that the author engages in on a regular basis.  Unsurprisingly, this book was a bestseller, because many people enjoy laughing and don't like to think too hard about it.
  
  This book of about 200 pages long is full of a host of interesting stories that show the appeal of rural life to its audience.  We have stories about families and stepfamilies, stories about trips gone wrong and relationships that struggle, and the author generally presents himself as somewhat clueless but well-meaning.  There are stories about do-it-yourself disasters, encounters with wild and domesticated animals and aliens and ghosts, stories about hunting and fishing, and the like.  The author is at his funniest when he talks about things that at least have a high degree of plausibility, like his odd sense of humor and his school hijinks.  Many of the stories take place with the author as a child, and some of them have a bit of underlying issues where he and some guy named Rancid as well as some of his friends find themselves involved in adventures alone.  There is a distinct absence of womenfolk here apart from an old girlfriend that throws up in a carnival ride, a woman engaged in belly dancing when they run out of money to watch, and teachers of one kind or another, as well as the author's wife Bun.
  
  The author has published a wide variety of books and there are probably many similarities between them.  The odds are high that these books bring a smile and a laugh to many people who enjoy laughing at the author for being such an incompetent person in so many areas of life.  I have always found it a bit of a shabby trick for people who are obviously very intelligent to play dumb because that is the expectation that people have of those from rural areas of the country, or for people to play up their foibles and incompetence so that people laugh at them.  Perhaps those who are class clowns or mascots find a great deal of comfort in the goodwill they gain by making a fool out of themselves, but that is not a way of behavior that I personally understand or like to practice to a great degree.  Life is full of humor, and at the base of these stories there are surely at least some real life nuggets of information, but the absurdity of life is something that I do not think needs to be exaggerated for comic effect, as is obviously done here.
  
  [1] See, for example:
  
  
  https://edgeinducedcohesion.blog/2017...
  
  
  https://edgeinducedcohesion.blog/2017...
  
  
  https://edgeinducedcohesion.blog/2017...
  
  
  https://edgeinducedcohesion.blog/2017...
  
  
  https://edgeinducedcohesion.blog/2017...
  
  
  https://edgeinducedcohesion.blog/2017...
  
  
  https://edgeinducedcohesion.blog/2017...
• 
  Sarah Piper

  Patrick McManus just cracks me up ... this is one of the best books so far. The stories are more varying, not as much "hunting and fishing" as things that happen when you're hunting and fishing (or just being a young boy). I was laughing out loud.
• 
  Jennice Mckillop

  Fun book. Collection of short stories, some from His childhood & they just make U laugh out loud.
  Good for “relief” reading especially after reading some heavy books that mostly details man’s inhumanity.
  Nice.
• 
  Jody

  It was so fun finding a McManus book that I hadn't read 100 times before. I made the mistake of reading half of this book in a public spot, and I'm sure I made a spectacle of myself by shaking with surprised giggles. McManus is one of my favorite humorist writers.
• 
  Paul

  This book is a collection of funny stories. It's a quick read if you are just reading it. I would suggest keeping it in your car or purse for those times when you have 5-10 minutes to kill like the doctor's office or the oil change place. It's way better than using social media.
  
• 
  Arlene Adkins-Zell

  Each short tale is hilarious, this is a wholesome and fun book.
• 
  KK

  Super Funny! I loved it!
• 
  Travis Mathews

  A laugh riot! McManus is a hoot & I Highly recommend anything he has written!
• 
  Jeremiah Small

  Collection of comedic short stories
• 
  Melody

  Read by Norman Dietz - NOT translated by…
• 
  RalleyRagnarok

  A riot and a good telling of Idaho living back in the day.
• 
  Silas

  very funny
• 
  James Boyce

  This is a hilarious collection. Some of the best stories in this collection are Strange meets Matilda Jean, The Piano Lesson, and A Good Deed goes Wrong.
• 
  James Piss

  oinkus......
  
  
  
  
  
  
  
  
  
  
  
  pigs
• 
  Bryan457

  Controlling My Life - 3 stars, McmManus attempts some time management.
  
  Strange Meets Matilda Jean - 4 stars, the degenerate family dog, strange, meets a cat.
  
  Tough Guys Don't Bird - 3 stars, the joys of bird watching, when the critters move in and drive you nuts.
  
  A Good Deed Goes Wrong - 5 stars, Patrick and Eddie create a bobsled run and do a good deed for Rancid Crabtree, engineering another traumatic run-in between Rancid and old Mrs. Swisher.
  
  The Fishing Box - 3 stars, ramblings about a fisherman's catch all junk box.
  
  Social Skills - 4 stars, teaching the neighbor, Finley, the fine points of asking farmers for permission to hunt their land.
  
  The Clown - 4 stars, reminiscence about 7th grade math class, the fierce teacher, and the class clown.
  
  A Good Night's Sleep - 4 stars, McManus and friends descend on a high class hotel in all their redneck glory.
  
  A Brief History of Giving (1942-89) - 3 stars, the fine points of gift giving for the socially clueless male.
  
  Pouring My Own - 3 stars, McManus pours concrete.
  
  Teenagers From Hell - 4 stars, Retch and Patrick borrow Mr. Sweeney's car, cabin and boat.
  
  Secret Places - 4 stars, Crazy Eddie and Patrick run a scientific experiment in their secret hiding place. I just about choked laughing.
  
  Puttering - 3 stars, ramblings about what it means to putter.
  
  Search and - Uh - Rescue - 3 stars, cousin Buck saves a man lost in a snowstorm - sort of, and becomes a hero.
  
  The Bust - 2 stars, one of his weird hard boiled cop parodies involving detective Joe Kelley and a criminal bird watcher.
  
  Real Ponies Don't Go Oink! - 4 stars, Patrick, Crazy Eddie and his father get involved with an ornery black horse.
  
  Blood Sausage - 3 stars, Patrick's stepfather Hank enlists the family in making Blood Sausage, and Patrick uses it to engage in some mischief aimed at his grandmother and her boyfriend.
  
  Crash Dive! - 3 stars, Patrick and Eddie build and test a submarine.
  
  My Abduction by Creatures From Space, for What It's Worth - 2 stars, finally an alien abduction account that is totally beyond question.
  
  Phantom of the Woods - 3 stars, game warden Sneed keeps Rancid honest.
  
  The Piano Lesson - 2 stars, Patrick takes piano lessons.
  
  Zumbo and the Misty Mountain Ghosts - 2 stars, a simple ghost story.
  
  The Road Hunter - 3 stars, cousin Buck engages in low down road hunting and Patrick nearly gets caught in the divine/cosmic retribution.
  
  Why Is It? - 3 stars, a long list of comedian style "why is it that" observations.
  
  The Late Great Fourth - 3 stars, nostalgia of the dangers of Fourth of July celebrations past.
  
  Camping In - 3 stars, Patrick and Retch go on a camping trip and get involved with a Sasquatch and some bikers.
• 
  Tim

  Several years ago I picked up a four-volume set of Mr. McManus’s work, this being the first read. Mr. McManus is a now-retired writer of outdoor humor, having contributed to “Outdoor Life” and other such magazines. Mostly it’s the adventures of a nature-loving klutz and his (fictional) friends, most of which date from his childhood, with names like Rancid Crabtree and Crazy Muldoon. These guys manage to get into all kinds of scrapes and situations, mostly by blindly leading each other into them. A major player is the narrator’s wife Bun, a long-suffering, patient woman who has known these goofballs far too long.
  
  Case in point: The narrator reads an article on controlling his life, with the advice being making a list of what you want to accomplish. Well, after receiving cynical support from Bun, he can’t find a pencil to make the list with, so he goes to the store to buy a pencil and on the way he bumps into Retch, and they end up at the ubiquitous Kelly’s Bar and Grill, where they have a discussion over beer and pool with other patrons about controlling their lives; they end up looking at boats and trying to fix one, ending up doing nothing productive.
  
  My favorites of these 26 stories are one describing a “fishing box,” which is where one throws those items from the tackle box which may be of little or no use, but which one does not wish to throw away; eventually, one must get another box…And the other is called “Camping In,” in which the “hero” is a pickup truck camper (Wife Bun’s attitude is that “She says she likes a little something extra between her and the hard, cold ground, preferably several floors of a luxury hotel.” Of course, the narrator tells a brief history of his recent tent-camping experience, the conclusion of which is that he himself may be getting too old for sleeping on the ground in winter. Nonetheless, there are descriptions of freedom, relative comfort, Sasquatch (you can smell ‘im), bears and remembering when you took the camper off and put it onto a framework.
  
  I enjoyed this book, light, humorous reading, especially if you’ve done any outdoor activities. Looking forward to reading the other three.
  
• 
  Marco den Ouden

  A number of years ago we were visiting my in-laws and, having run out of reading material, I picked up this little book my father-in-law Jim had left on a side table. I started reading it and couldn't put it down. It had me in stitches. Pat McManus is a humorist who writes frequently for Outdoor Life, Field and Stream and other outdoorsy magazines. Many of his stories concern his childhood in rural Idaho. The stories are peppered with colorful characters like his friend Crazy Eddie Muldoon and a cantankerous old woodsman named Rancid Crabtree. Occasionally he'll have a story about his adult life, mainly about his failed efforts at hunting and fishing and the barbs from his long-suffering wife Bun. He is often accompanied in his adult adventures by his friend Retch Sweeney.
  
  After I read this book, I went out and read pretty well every other collection I could get my hands on.
  
  The childhood tales are a delight. Crazy Eddie is always concocting some hare-brained scheme and the old woodsman is always proffering advice that doesn't always turn out very well.
  
  McManus is one of my three favorite humorists (the others being Stuart McLean and P.J. O'Rourke).
• 
  Marfita

  There are two gut-wrenchingly funny stories in this book: "A Good Deed Gone Wrong," which I can't even think about without laughing, so I'm not going into it now, and "Zumbo and the Misty Mountain Ghosts." I love McManus's stuff. Some of the stories are funnier than others, but most of them make me laugh out loud. McManus, like Wodehouse, will set up a slapstick scene and then turn it around, or turn it inside out, and then walk you through each angle of the pratfall or of the flying pie, milking it for all it's worth.
  I had people coming out to look at me to find out why I was laughing so uncontrollably. My husband has walked through the house and come out to the porch to see what was so damn funny.
  And I don't even like huntin' and fishin' stories! I hope this man's a millionaire. He deserves it.