Fake Science 101 is a fake textbook filled with humorous pseudoscience written by Phil Edwards. I’ve been holding a copy for over a month but couldn’t review it until now because I’m the Slowest Reader Ever™. Also, we wanted to include a gallery of funny pictures from the Fake Science website, which we’ve finally pulled together and included below.
The 272-page textbook is similar to other fake textbooks like Jon Stewart’s America, and it will help you get an A+ in biology if you went to the evangelical Christian high school I graduated from. If you want to use this as a reference for anything expected to be accurate, however, you’ll be seeing the teacher after class to explain why you thought J. Robert Oppenheimer had two extra arms from radiation-related mutation.
The book is slow in spots, but it quickly captured my heart with one thing I never tire of, Uranus jokes:
“It’s key we encourage interest in Uranus for all future scientists out there. Uranus is a great entry point for inquiring minds, and without it there would be a gaping hole in scientific study. As Sir William Herschel, who discovered Uranus, once said, “One thing in our universe deserves intensive study and endless probing, and that is Uranus.”
Yes, I am 12 years old and that is hilarious.
My only gripe with Fake Science 101 is that it is very text-heavy (being a textbook and all), and much of it seemed like hurriedly-penned filler material to bridge the jokes. I often found myself skimming the text to find the next punchline and looking forward to the photo captions, sidebars, and footnotes, where the humor usually lies. The amusing infographics of the Fake Science website are what attracted me to this book, a book which doesn’t include as many of these funny graphics as I had hoped it would.
Speaking of those funny pictures, our 30 favorite infographics from the Fake Science website are compiled below to give you a sense of Phil Edwards’ humor, and Fake Science 101 is available at Amazon.
Juggalos, take note.