>A smart-ass.

This is what you might call David Rackoff if you were to perform a cursory reading of “Fraud,” his collection of essays.

If you took the chance to read the book more closely, however, you might see an endearing brilliance between the lines of sarcasm.

All of the essays in “Fraud” are humorous, but they deal with an astounding range of subjects, from the Loch Ness monster to Austrian teachers in an exchange program to Rackoff’s journeys in Tokyo.

In “Arise, Ye Wretched of the Earth,” Rackoff recounts his experiences as a teenage socialist living and working in a Jewish commune called a kibbutz. He is forced to reevaluate his ideological stance in lieu of the difficulties of the work and the ostracization he encounters from his fellow commune members.

While at the commune, he works in a chicken coop, shoving chickens into crates for shipment, a job he laments for the poor working conditions. His reaction, though, is hilarious.

“Rather than making you never want to eat a chicken again, it simply makes you angry. It makes you hold a grudge. You’ll eat chicken again, by God, and you’ll chew really, really hard.”

In “Christmas Freud,” Rackoff is hired by a department store in New York to sit in a window and impersonate Sigmund Freud for the Christmas shopping season. The window is fitted as a mock-up of Freud’s study, and Rackoff grows a goatee and wears period clothing.

As his stint as an impersonator progresses, Rackoff begins to take on the role of Freud almost too seriously, seeing patients and performing his own amateur psychoanalyses.

Though sarcastic to the point of being embittered throughout the book, Rackoff takes on an almost sentimental tone in “Hidden People.” He is in Reykjavik, Iceland, doing a story on mythical creatures that live on a rock in the town.

Upon arriving, he is cranky and cynical, but he starts to enjoy the nice people of the town and writes of the folklore and countryside fondly.

The final essay of the book, “I Used to Bank Here, But That Was Long, Long Ago,” Rackoff is his most serious, exploring his bout with lymphatic cancer and the subsequent side effects, most notably sterility.

The author decides to see if he has any sperm left, and if so, to have them frozen in case he decides to have children in the future.

Maintaining his humorous voice, he calls his disease “the dilettante cancer,” and jokes about naming his sperm.

“The average fertile 35-year-old man has many million sperm, a few million of which are motile enough to knock someone up. When I get my results, I find that I have ten … Three are dead in the water … I come up with the idea of naming them. For all the male-of-the-species reproductive good they’ll do me, I consider calling them all Janet. Then I settle on Radcliffe, Barnard, Bryn Mawr, Wellesley, Mount Holyoke, Smith, and Vassar.”

The essay ends with Rackoff pondering whether the usage of humor to deal with such serious events is appropriate, leaving the responsibility of the answer in the hands of the reader.

“Fraud” will make you laugh out loud while making you consider the silliness of your own life.

Though at times the author alludes to bits of cultural knowledge of which to some (myself included) may not be familiar, the jokes that don’t go over your head will make you guffaw hard enough.