After reading — and immensely enjoying — Tom Hodgkinson’s How To Be Idle: A Loafer’s Manifesto, I’m left confused and annoyed about the book’s classification as “humor.” Sure, it’s funny, but not like the joke books and sitcom tie-ins I found it shelved with in the store. It’s funny because it points out as absurd the stupid assumptions we take for granted as inescapable, inevitable “facts” of our lives; it’s funny because it’s radical in a lighthearted way. The cynic in me thinks the strange categorization must be a conspiracy by Big Publishing and Big Work to defang the book, lest we all stop going to work and stay home reading and idling instead.