Evelyn Waugh's send-up of the newspaper business, and where in other novels he could be bitterly satirical, here he's wildly farcical and broadly comical. William Boot, a nature writer for the DAILY BEAST, ("Feather-footed through the plashy fen passes the questing vole" is given as an example of his "high-class style" of writing), is mistaken for the novelist John Boot and is sent to the African country of Ishmaelia. Here he encounters other journalists, many of them American, who are all looking for the scoop that will make them famous. Boot meets and falls in love with a woman named Kachen, and immediately the naïve Boot is in over his head romantically. But it's she who slips Boot the news about a planned coup d'etat, and the simple-minded journalist scoops everyone and eventually comes home a hero. Of course the wrong Boot (John) is given knighthood and the book ends, after additional mistaken identities are made, with everything being righted and Boot (William) going back to writing his innocuous nature articles, none the worse (or better) for wear. Waugh's humor is bright and airy, very reminiscent of P.G. Wodehouse, who is actually alluded to at one point in the story. Lots and lots of laughs from beginning to end.

Funny, but only in a clever way, not in a ha-ha way.

I laugh out loud while reading Mark Twain, Douglas Adams, Carl Hiaasen and Paul Theroux.

This just made me smile thinly and sardonically.

Not that there is anything wrong with that...