Modest Proposals: The Official Correspondence of Randy Cohen

Why not add club cars to subways, complete with cocktail franks in tiny buns? Why not make cameras that make people look thinner? Why not legalize prostitution on busses and trains? (It would get crime off the streets!)

Modest Proposals is a collection of zany letters to famous people,with their often zanier replies. Randy Cohen has dedicated himself to the outlandish caper, the outrageous suggestion, the out-and-out crazy scheme–the modest proposal. A great step backward in the history of ideas, Modest Proposals asks why we have never sold frozen yogurt to North Africa, or why dishwashers and laundry machines have never been combined (the GE Pots and Pants Scrubber?), and like Jonathan Swift’s famous suggestion that children be eaten in times of famine, Modest Proposals is guaranteed to shock some people, while giving others a bellyful of laughs

Randy Cohen ls a New York-based humorist whose previous books are Easy Answers to Hard Questions (1979) and Why Didn’t I Think of That (1980). He is a nice person, but a very strange guy.