You can't judge a book by its contents.

I recently reread one (Ten Big Ones by Janet Evanovich, St.  Martin's Press, 2004) of a series of "wacky" novels I like.  I noticed that I laughed at something in nearly every chapter, and I pondered if I could determine the best "line of the chapter" and further pondered if it would tell the story at all.

You can judge for yourself, but I'm not sure my experiment proved my hypothesis.  In some chapters, I was stretching to find a good line.  In others, I thought that other jokes were better than the one I chose, but it took a setup of two or more lines to make the joke work, and my experiment was conducted with just one line per chapter.  Some of what I selected are humorous but not necessarily funny.  I thought of putting the name of the character who said each line in parentheses at the end, but it wouldn't really add anything to your understanding (or not), and you probably can tell, from the type of humor, which are said by the same character, anyway.

Read it through.  Do you think it works?  Do you think I should've gone with the multi-line jokes?  Do you want to read the book?  Do you want to avoid the book?  Do you think I should try this again?  What else do you think?

Chapter 1:  "You don't want to go through your period without Fritos."

Chapter 2:  "You don't even hardly notice his chest hair when he's got that bustier thing on."

Chapter 3:  "You read those adult magazines and they're always talking about sex fantasies, but I say chip fantasies are where it's at."

Chapter 4:  "I could learn how to cook a chicken or a cow or something."

Chapter 5:  "Soon as you stop talking to Mr. Stiffy, he turns into Mr. Softy."

Chapter 6:  "Here these poor creatures travel through space to get to us, all those light years and galaxies away, and then they die from heat stroke in a van."  (Note:  wrong kind of aliens.)

Chapter 7:  "If there's one thing I can't stand, it's a sneaky felon."

Bonus 7:  If you buy chocolate with loose change the calories don't count.

Chapter 8:  The car was about the same size as Sally's bus and took two lanes to make a corner, but the ride was smooth.

Chapter 9:  It seemed to me a breaking-up kiss would have had less tongue.

Chapter 10:  "Then I sort of fell off the wagon and gained all the weight back, but it was still my favorite diet, except for the time I ate two pounds of bacon and threw up."

Chapter 11:  "We had a lady judge who weighed about two hundred pounds and was real sympathetic."

Chapter 12:  Tasteful in an upper-end whorehouse sort of way.

Chapter 13:  "I only get caught when I need dental."

Chapter 14:  "I thought I was gonna lose a thumb this afternoon, but here I am in the middle of cuddle umpkins' pumpkin patch."

Chapter 15:  "I don't know why anybody'd want to smoke weeds, but that's what they said."

Chapter 16:  "My heroes," I said to Sally, "upstaged by a guy in a red dress and heels."