This book of cartoons parodies the Ripley's Believe It Or Not! single-panel strips that have become a space-filling newspaper tradition, and this much must be said: Dennis' renderings briliantly capture the strangely detatched and gloomy feel of the originals. The problem with Don't You Believe It! is that it just isn't funny. It's easy enough to make fun of Ripley's, but the source of humor here seems to be that blatantly impossible things are being claimed as truth. For example, picture a Ripley's-esque pencil sketch of a frog with the caption, "One out of six crows is actually not a crow." Eric Metaxas, who once edited the humor newspaper at Yale, would himself seem to be proof of the unbelievable—that the Ivy League can't tell you the difference between "funny" and "plain silly."