Test prep book is SAT-ire

Talk about worlds colliding: Imagine what would happen if a Hollywood comedy writer started thinking up questions for the SAT.

Silly thought, right? Well, try these:

1. At a Saks Fifth Avenue store, Winona Ryder examines four distinct blouses, five distinct dresses and two distinct handbags. How many different combinations of items can she shoplift if she takes exactly one blouse, two dresses and a handbag?

2. Yo mamma so _______, when you mail her a letter, you need two ZIP Codes. A) diaphanous B) luminous C) ravenous D) grisly E) corpulent (Answers below.)

No, those questions have never appeared, would never appear, could never appear, on the SAT. For starters, Charles Horn would say, they aren’t nearly boring enough. That is why Horn wrote them. An Emmy-nominated comedy writer whose work has appeared in the cartoon series “Robot Chicken” and on “The Tonight Show With Jay Leno,” he saw an unfilled niche in the rapidly expanding and extremely lucrative test prep industry.

“In the real test,” he said, “part of what makes it so hard is that it’s sooo boring.” Students “can’t even get into it, because they have to read it over and over and over again.”

As an antidote, Horn wrote “The Laugh Out Loud Guide” to the SAT, subtitled, “Ace the SAT Exam Without Boring Yourself to Sleep!”

At first blush, the idea of trying to find comedy in the extremely unfunny business of studying for the college entrance exam would appear to be a losing proposition. Horn has a three-word response: Comedy traffic school.

“Research shows that comedy is actually effective in education,” he said in an interview near his Valley Village home. “It increases recall . . . it reduces stress . . . and it actually makes the subjects more interesting.”

3. If Rosie O’Donnell can eat a 20-pound turkey in 12 minutes, how many minutes would it take her, at that rate, to eat a 30-pound ham? A) 8 B) 12 C) 16 D) 18 E) 20

Horn, who described himself as being in his 30s, grew up in Canada, where students didn’t routinely take the SAT. He said he eventually took the graduate school version, the GRE, and wound up earning a doctorate from Princeton before going to work as a software engineer for a small firm in the Silicon Valley.

Beneath the engineer’s facade, a comedy writer was lurking, and a few years ago, he chucked a regular paycheck, moved to L.A. and tried his hand at making people laugh.

The result was the age-old Hollywood success story: Desperate for paying work, he needed a real job. He resorted to tutoring high school students for the SAT.

It was only a matter of time before he wrote a book combining the various threads of his careers.

So is it funny? The Times convened an expert panel: seven Fairfax High School seniors who have all studied for, and taken, the SAT.

Tough crowd.

“It seems like a regular SAT, except it throws in a little kiddie joke,” said Luigi Oliva, 17, after hearing one question selected from the book at random. “Immature,” he concluded.

“They’re funny in a kindergarten way,” said classmate Melissa Umana, 18, “not for people who are taking the SAT.”

Luigi, thumbing through the book, suddenly laughed. “Oh, this is funny,” he said. He was reading:

4. On a scale of 1 to 10, Warren’s hotness can be expressed as a times the square root of b, where a and b are positive integers and a is greater than b. If Warren’s hotness is equal to 2 times the square root of 12, what is the value of a minus b? A) -10 B) -1 C) 0 D) 1 E) 10

The students began to reevaluate. “I wouldn’t mind using the book,” decided Jeanette Becerril, 17, “because even though it’s a little immature, the test is so serious and so stressful that . . . when you use a book like this, it calms you down a little bit.”

Norma Hernandez, 17, spoke up. “I think you’ll remember something like this better than something that’s like everything else,” she said.

Still, the students had quibbles. Once you get past the jokey setups, they concluded, math is math.

But English is another matter. Luigi read aloud an essay that begins: “Ladies and Gentlemen, today we have lost a most righteous and gnarly dude, taken from us way too soon. The Toddmeister is, simply put, the most heinous, [expletive], wicked-cool person on the face of the planet.”

Melissa laughed, but said: “That’s not going to be on the SAT, for sure. This is about some dude who parties. How’s that going to help me?”

Fair enough, Horn said, when told of the students’ reaction. In fact, his book contains a disclaimer that says: “What are the chances that you’ll see a sentence about the Toddmeister on the real SAT exam? Pretty much zero.”

But, Horn adds in the book, the writing portions of the book still give students the opportunity to practice on humorous material -- parts of which do have more challenging vocabulary, and contain common errors that test-takers will be asked to spot. Then, Horn writes, they’ll be ready for the real, “retardedly boring” thing.

For the record, College Board spokeswoman Alana Klein took a pass when asked if she found her company’s test to be “retardedly boring.”

“Do you think it is?” she asked. “I’m not sure I even know what that means.”

She added that the official policy of the College Board is that “the best way to get ready for the SAT is for kids to take a rigorous curriculum in high school . . . and essentially just be a good student. . . . That’s our stance.” They’re sticking to it. The College Board does publish its own test prep manual, which definitely doesn’t include questions like:

5. After a _______ investigation, the inspector _______ that faulty wiring was fo’ shizzle the cause of the fire that burned down Snoop Dogg’s hizzhouse. A) lengthy, realized B) complete, prognosticated C) cursory, ruled D) thorough, determined E) copious, charged

Answers: 1. 80 2. E 3. D 4. D 5. D

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mitchell.landsberg@latimes.com