"Wisecracks!" Revamps Proverbs with a Humourous Twist

"Love is blind, but neighbors aren't."

"Better mate than never."

"A fool and his money are soon popular."

"If at first you don't succeed, you're average."

These slightly skewed versions of familiar proverbs don't exactly reflect universal laws of behavior. Rather, they are examples of proverb parodies -- sometimes called fractured or anti-proverbs -- created by adding contradictory comments to the original axiom.

Wolfgang Mieder, deemed by Smithsonian magazine as "the world's top proverb expert," has gathered more than 150 sapient maxims and juxtaposed each with several fractured and humorous variations in his new book, "Wisecracks! Fractured Proverbs."

"Readers will encounter many familiar sayings as well as many new ones," says Mieder, professor and chair of German and Russian at the University of Vermont, Proverbs, he says, "reflect our human ability for endless creativity with language--an inclination that produces sayings that are sometimes wise, and other times just wisecracks."

Mieder, whose personal proverb library holds more than 5,000 volumes, collected the often humorous proverb variations from a wide variety of contemporary sources, ranging from newspaper headlines, speeches and advertisements to graffiti and cartoons. The book, illustrated by Elayne Sears, is the 10th in a series by Mieder published by the New England Press. It will be available on April 1: just in time for April Fool's Day.