When people think of textbooks, they usually don’t think anything particularly positive. It’s usually something along the lines of how they don’t want to buy one, don’t want to read one or wish they got more than $11.40 for one when they finally got it out of their lives (although we generally think so lowly of textbooks that none of us are above taking the $11.40).

This is why “America: The Book” is so insanely funny. The book, which was created by comedian Jon Stewart and the rest of the writers on Comedy Central’s “The Daily Show,” can attribute much of its humor from the fact that its humor is delivered in the form of a parody of a textbook, and specifically, a middle school social studies textbook.

“The Daily Show with Jon Stewart” is currently one of the funniest shows on television, but the concept of a fake news show done for the sake of comedy isn‘t exactly original. Not only has the premise been done over and over again for the past 20 years by a certain weekly sketch-comedy show, but “The Daily Show” itself existed for two years before Stewart ever had anything to do with it.

This is much of the reason why “America: The Book” is so uproariously hilarious. Jon Stewart and the rest of the people responsible for “The Daily Show” apply their unique and bizarre senses of humor to a truly unique and bizarre format.

Almost everybody can relate to school textbooks, and many college students, usually those still in general education courses, are still reading textbooks written in the same format as those we all read up until high school.

“America: The Book” launches into the textbook parody as immediate as the book’s inside cover, which is emblazoned with the unevenly stamped “This book is property of” mark where students were supposed to record their name and the condition of the book (something that anybody who wasn’t home schooled should probably be familiar with).

The layout of the entire book is eerily reminiscent of a 12-year-old’s civics textbook. Everything about “America: The Book” seems so realistic that one imagines that its writers pored over children’s history textbooks for days just to make sure they got it right.

There are sidebars, graphics, pull-out sections and even textbook-style classroom activities and discussion questions at the end of each chapter, such as, “What form of government would you like to see after our democracy finally eats itself, then shits itself out, and then re-eats its own self-shit in 2007? Express your answers in tears.”

Written like brief, related-but-unrelated material in textbook chapters (think “A brief biography of Johann Gutenberg,“ or something), articles written by “The Daily Show” correspondents as sidebars in chapters, such as Samantha Bee’s perpetually apologetic descriptions of the Canadian system.

“I’m sorry if my abrupt conclusion has created any layout problems for this chapter,” Bee abruptly ends one such article with. The same article has an entire paragraph that is nothing but the phrase “I’m sorry.”

And, as such, this inspired format is filled with the trademark weird-ass humor that “The Daily Show” is known for. Yeah, the book is off-beat, but it isn’t so bizarre that it would alienate any readers. For example, the book has an intro written by Thomas Jefferson where he writes of Ben Franklin, “If crack existed in our day, that boozed-up snuff machine would weigh 80 pounds and live outside the Port Authority.”

That might seem somewhat crass, and if you’re somebody who’s easily offended (or has a weak stomach), then your perception of “America: The Book” as being crass isn’t exactly helped by material like a classroom activity that somehow manages to depict frighteningly realistic pictures of “the supreme court justices” naked.

However the book isn’t gratuitous with the profanity and the nudity. Like comedy shows on HBO that have the ability to drop F-bombs at every opportunity but opt not to (such as “Mr. Show”), “America: The Book” recognizes that profanity is both potentially hilarious and potentially a very weak comedic crutch.

As such, the writers realize that obscene words are only funny if you precede one page of foul material with 10 pages of clean material. “America: The Book” isn’t a dirty book; it’s a book with some dirty words.

Although “America” is, for the most part, objectively critical to both sides of the political spectrum, it would be foolish to say that the writers do not possess a liberal bias. But it is not a bias that hinders the actual humor; the book’s primary function is to be funny, not set forth a political agenda. So even if you’re a staunch conservative you should find the book funny, assuming you have a sense of humor to begin with.

The fact that “America” is not completely impartial should be considered a credit to its hilarity. How unbearably dry and stale is it when someone tries to write political satire without, at least in some capacity, siding with one particular ideology?

When you do that, you wind up with awful sketches on sketch-comedy shows about Monica Lewinsky and jokes by Jay Leno about George W. Bush’s troubles with pretzels. Those don’t exactly satirically cut to the quick, and they’re far from clever.

Even if you don’t agree with some of the views in “America: The Book,” there is still plenty of comedic gold that makes it worth the purchase. Are you really going to let your political beliefs prevent you from enjoying the book’s illustrated chart of historical campaign memorabilia, which includes such nuggets as a Calvin Coolidge “Silent Cal” ball gag, a Walter Mondale Cabbage Patch doll and a William Howard Taft commemorative dollop of sour cream?

You shouldn’t.