The Last Laugh brings together a collection of Barber's short, comic and insightful essays, many of them based on quirky or unusual items from the day's news. On topics ranging from why the stock market is like Playboy magazine to the mating habits of mynah birds to why rug shampoo makes a great shark repellant or to what the poet T.S. Eliot might have thought of Toronto's megacity merger, Barber turns a jocular and sometimes jaundiced journalist's...