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Funny / Philip K. Dick

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  • Dick was an incredibly funny writer when he wanted to be, usually in a vein of Black Comedy, but sometimes straight-up hilarious. In "The War With The Fnools", the Fnools are trying to invade Earth and they can disguise themselves immaculately as humans, except that they're only two feet tall. This makes them easy to spot, and the humans have no difficulty in doing so, but then a Fnool smokes a cigarette — and the entire race of Fnools instantly grows two feet taller. Sure enough, it's not long before a Fnool tastes liquor, and then all the Fnools are six feet tall. It doesn't take long for the humans to figure out that every time the Fnools sample human vices, they grow by two feet, and now they're indistinguishable from humans. The human commander of the Earth forces then remembers that he's left his buxom secretary, with whom he's having an affair, on her own in an underground bunker. They rush to the bunker and the secretary runs outside in a state of partial undress, distressed because she thought her boss had just visited her. Then an eight-foot-tall Fnool comes out of the bunker.
  • In "The Eyes Have It", the narrator claims to have found evidence of an invasion by an alien race that pass themselves off as humans, but can remove their body parts at will: The "evidence" in question is a discarded paperback romance novel, and the narrator is just being Literal-Minded about hackneyed cliches like "his eyes slowly roved about the room" or "Julia had given her heart to the young man".

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