Laughing as you leaf through

Dictionaries may not be amusing, but they are at least useful. Comic dictionaries aren't useful, but they're rarely amusing, either. Rather, they're the lazy writer's best friend - a flat-packed cash cow just perfect for that last-minute stocking-filler market.

In alphabetical order, then, we have Stephen Bayley's atrocious A Dictionary of Idiocy (Gibson Square, £9.99), in which we are treated to the great man's musings on beauty ("the central issue in aesthetics"), leather ("animal skin prepared for use by tanning"), and the Japanese ("very different from you and me"). It's simply not funny, even when he's trying really hard (pessimists are "people who live with optimists").

Things cheer up once you get to the appendix - a translation of Flaubert's loopy 1850 Dictionnaire des Idèes Rećues ("Bread: One does not know what impurities there are in bread"). But Flaubert fans shouldn't be tempted.

They'd be better off with the elegant new reprint of Ambrose Bierce's fearsome The Devil's Dictionary (Bloomsbury, £9.99), complete with some great, splattery inks by Ralph Steadman and a rather moving intro by Angus Calder. It's the only one of these dictionaries to really deserve the title (or publication), and it's almost comprehensive enough to be used properly. Bierce, by the way, lists pessimism as "a philosophy forced upon the convictions of the observer by the disheartening prevalence of the optimist with his scarecrow hope and his unsightly smile".

Which gives you a idea of where Stephen Bayley gets his inspiration from. I'm Leaving You Simon, You Disgust Me: A Dictionary of Received Ideas (Weidenfeld & Nicholson, £9.99) is an ambitious A-Z of north London waffle by William Donaldson, author of Brewer's Rogues, Villains and Eccentrics. He's aiming for Posy Simmonds territory, and nearly gets there - dreaming up a cast of Islington insufferables to illustrate his definitions is a good wheeze. But, again, it's just not funny enough, and the endless cross-referencing - "Boycott, Geoff. see Get, What You See Is What You" - quickly becomes tedious.

One thing to be said for The Idler Book of Crap Towns: The 50 Worst Places to live in the UK (Boxtree, £10) is that it's brave enough just to list its entries, instead of alphabetising them. And they can be amusing - Bexhill-on-Sea is "the human equivalent of an elephant's graveyard [that] smells of ammonia and cats". But so, apparently, are Hythe, Morecombe, Bridgwater, Alresford, Horsham, Aldeburgh and Hayling Island, which rather dilutes the joke. Some of the photos are amusingly bleak, but on the whole, it's almost impossible to take Crap Towns unseriously. With every turn of the page, your hackles rise higher. Hastings isn't that bad! Liverpool can be lovely! A nice idea, disappointingly done.

Much more inventive is Historic Framley (Penguin, £12.99), the follow-up to last year's splendid spoof local rag, The Framley Examiner. Historic Framley has not just the usual spot-on mock ads and badly tracked recipes, but also guides to Framley's local relics, potted histories of the surrounding villages (Molford St Gavin and Crëme) and even a questionnaire for children to fill in once they've trawled round the museum: "Did you walk straight past the museum's boring collection of 'flints'? Can anybody smell anything 'burning'? Have you tried working for a tinpot little local newspaper for an absolute pittance whilst watching numbly as your 'will to live' is slowly eroded?"

More of the same, Americanstyle, in the 14th volume of the reliably brilliant The Onion: Ad Nauseam (Boxtree, £12.99), but the top choice this year has to be Alan Partridge: Every Ruddy Word (Penguin, £16.99). The sheer size of this script anthology makes it worth having, even if you've hoarded the tapes. There are some nice extras, too, like Alan's Green Room Rules, and some snaps from the dark days of his Toblerone addiction ("A terrible bleak empty period about which I can now laugh"). Back of the net!