STEPHEN KING TALKS ABOUT TIM SAMPLE

....."I've had to travel a lot over the last fifteen or twenty years of my life, and because I like comedy, I've had a chance to sample regional humor and regional humorists in much the same way gourmets sample various regional dishes. I've heard everyone from the southern good old boys to the Swedish 'Yoopers' of Michigan's upper peninsula. I think Maine's Tim Sample is probably the best of them, and this fine funny album does nothing but confirm the judgement. Too often, all regional humor amounts to are the same jokes ( usually about some grouchy farmer's privy ) told in different accents and set in different locales, or anecdotes whose appeal is so narrow that those outside a very small region--the Ozarks or the Smokey or perhaps Tornado Alley in Arkansas--are all totally mystified. Like some wines, this sort of humor does not travel well.

.....Tim Sample, however, is different. He's funny if you come from Augusta, Maine; he's just as funny if you come from Augusta, Georgia. Like Mark Twain--who started, believe it or not, as a regional humorist himself--Sample's humor is sweet on the tongue...but kicks like a spirited mule going down. And, like Twain, his stories of Maine life and Maine people don't show that we are different from you, but rather that we are all the same.

.....He also has the great humorist's gift of telling stories within stories; he doesn't tell jokes but creates cunning nests of chinese boxes. Anyone can tell a tale about how a city fella mistook unc's horse for a hornless cow, but it takes Tim Sample to inject a rap about how Japanese cars sound ( sorta like one cylinder of a '77 Buick Electra ) into the middle of the story.

.....Humor doesn't bear over-analysis, so I'm going to call a halt right here. This is a funny, funny set--I think that says it all. If you've ever leaped happily from your motel bed on the first day of your vacation and rushed to the window to drink in the view and saw only another motel room facing yours across the courtyard, you'll relate to Tim Sample's wry, comic view of life.

.....Bon Appetit ...or, as we say in Maine, 'Dig in Chummy!'"