Paul Murphy's ' Eric Wobble Finds A Time Machine ' is an exercise in controlled humour anarchy. Here's a free sample from Eric meets Beethoven [generous or what!] : "I didn't have many interests as a child," began Beethoven, "so I became close to music, my father helped, he made me sleep in a double bass case, he was a cruel man, the double bass was still in it. I always knew that he preferred my brother, which was proved when he got the piano. Oh, I'll never forget that day, mother came rushing in and said to my father, 'Ernst,' which really cheesed him off because his name was Leonard, 'Ernst,' she said, 'It's young Ludwig [they could only afford one name for the both of us], he's got the piano.' 'Send for the doctor, woman,' my father cried. 'I can't, the doctor's a man.' 'Well send for one of those too.' 'Which two?' Eventually this witty marital banter was sorted out, and my father soon recovered consciousness.

The doctor arrived and quickly cured my brother of the piano, but by then I'd been infected myself, alas there was no money left now for medical treatment for me, only enough for whiskey and pizzas. I was bed-ridden for weeks, what good riding a bed over me was supposed to do I don't know, but the family seemed to enjoy it. For a while it looked as though I was going to get better, 'We'll soon see about that,' said my father, and doubled the dose, he'd promised first refusal on me to a man called Frankenstein. I lay in bed, groaning and writhing, and that was just due to thinking about Lili Pleasurespot, the local pin-up girl, I found out years later that it's actually quite painful having a pin up there. My condition worsened rapidly, sometimes sooner. 'Is there anything we can do to make you more comfortable son?' my sympathetic mother caringly used to ask, in regular postcards from their holidays. 'Well, you could feed me,' I'd write back. 'Oh, you tease,' she'd say.

They took me to the Vienna Hospital for Musical Instruments, in a horse-drawn carriage, and a terrible drawing it was as well. I was checked in under an assumed name, 'Not Long For This World'. I was rushed immediately to the operating room but I said 'Listen, I can't operate on anyone now, I'm growing a piano.' They were very understanding, and let me go back to bed after a quick burst of 'We'll Meet Again' played on my gonads. One by one, the finest, most caring Doctors in all the land would completely ignore me. I lay there, in the solitary confinement wing of the Adolphus Bratwurst Memorial Hospital (Condemned), suffering from severe piano and severer flatulence, it was a worry that the two would combine and turn me into a pianola." There's over 200 pages like that, folks. Well, the words are different on each one.

But the pages all look like that. [NB this is a PG book, but it's better read WNPG]. - - - "I tried to homage every comedy source I could," says the author, " and mix it all together in a new soup. So, have Goon surrealism end with ' Carry On ' double-entendres; Python absurdity coalesce with '' Allo 'Allo ' farce; music hall-type skits with modern-day political satire in them; and basic children's jokes re-worked with outrageous one-liners. I couldn't even begin to list all the influences, but if you're an aficionado you'll see tips of the hat to Milligan, Pete and Dud, Newhart, Talbot Rothwell, Groucho, 'Airplane', Sellers and many many more. Eric himself is half-Hancock (thankfully the first syllable half), filtered through Chauncey from 'Being There'. The 'revisit-history-for-laughs' idea is as old as history itself - it's a little-known fact that the cave paintings at Lascaux are a comic strip depicting caveman Ar-Okk mistaking a male wildebeest for a cow and trying to milk it [probably] - but it hasn't been done quite this way before.".