It may be necessary to avoid copyright-infringement lawsuits, but parodies always run into trouble when the word "Parody!" gets slapped all over everything. When you're making fun of the contents and visual appearance of a book, or a magazine, or a TV show, or just about anything, the last thing you need is for the reader to be tipped off by a giant announcement that says, in effect, "Prepare for wackiness!" But even if Life For Real Dummies—a parody of all those For Dummies handbooks—didn't have the word "Parody!" emblazoned across its cover, it'd still be pretty feeble. For starters, though the book tweaks the iconography and dummy-speak of the best-selling books, it's in a conceptual quagmire: Telling people how to talk, watch television and use the phone may be cute for a two-page magazine gag, but it wears thin before the end of the book's first six-page chapter. Take out the one big joke (the explanation of simple day-to-day activities as if they were alien tasks) and you're left with lots and lots of unspeakably lame ones, stuffed in to fill out a sketchy concept.