Twisted: Tales from the Wacky Side »

Bob Fenster is a freelance writer and the author of Duh!, They Did What!?, Well, Duh!, The Duh Awards, and Laugh Off, as well as three novels, two puzzle books, and one play. His writing has appeared in the Washington Post, the Wall Street Journal, Reader's Digest, the San Francisco Chronicle, Games, and Playbill. He lives with his wife and three sons in Santa Cruz, Calif., when he's not touring with his one-man show, "The Stupid History of the Human Race."

Filled with tales of outlandish human endeavors, Twisted will have you shaking your head and laughing out loud. For example, the 18th-century lawyer Hugh Brackenridge had a unique response when challenged to a duel: "If you want to try your pistols, take some object, a tree or a barn door, about my dimensions. If you hit that, send me word; and I shall acknowledge that if I had been in the same place, you might also have hit me."

Celebrating the crazy things people do and their strange accomplishments in all fields of human activity, Twisted covers a wide range of subjects such as history, the arts, pop culture, sports, and science. The book also investigates entertaining oddities of nature, such as fish that change sex in polluted rivers.

Enjoy these other hilarious Twisted tales:

When he was a guest on the Tonight Show, movie star Tom Hanks and host Jay Leno chatted about uncomfortable moments in public restrooms. "Do you ever want to ask the guy next to you to leave so you can go?" Leno asked. "No," Hanks said. "I usually say, 'Come here. I want to show you something.'"

"It often happens that I wake at night and begin to think about a serious problem and decide I must tell the Pope about it," Pope John XXII reported. "Then I wake up completely and remember I am the Pope."