... and I just found the use of language funny. Sentences like "The spaceship hung in the air in exactly the same way that bricks don't" really made me laugh. Also the combination of serious and silly was a new one to me at the time (I was about eleven when I read it) and it really hit home.

Humor is beyond personal though. No amount of explanation is going to persuade anyone that something is funny if they don't think so.

I will probably get slated, but the film is the best for me. Good choices in the casting. And instead of the book, it actually flows better as a storyline.

As an 8 year old THHGTTG was the first "grown-up" book I read.
I have loved all things DA since.

He invented the Internet, really. And Google. He saw all that coming, way before many other people.

A little electronic book I can carry in my pocket, with instant access to a vast store of information, you say? That's a neat idea...

Not only is the technology of the titular book, with its one million pages, out-moded (anyone with an internet enabled phone will say, 'What? Only a million?') but I don't think we relate to Arthur Dent any more.
He was a particular type of fusty, tea-loving, never-comfortable-in-his-own-skin Englishman of a type which doesn't seem to be as common any more. I suppose the David Mitchell character in Peep Show is a closish equivalent, but I doubt he's be flattered by the comaparison, and that makes all the difference. No-one aspires to be like Dent, even if that's the character whom they most closely resemble.
This is a bit opf a ramble - but I know what I mean, even if nobody else is any the wiser.

I found it hilarious when I was 10, but I don't find it funny at all any more. I seem to remember the sequels being increasingly poor as well.

The recent film was shite as well

and that goes for Blake's 7, Battlestar Galactica, Red Dwarf, in fact any sci-fi or fantasy series you care to mention.

That said, I do like Doctor Who, but only the ones set on Earth.

kicks 'The Wire's' arse

how much of a "go" you gave it did you not find anything to enjoy in your hours consuming DNA's work?

but that's just me. I prefer the original radio series best of all, but think his best novels were the two Dirk Gently books he wrote. The Hitchhiker novels were mostly about commericial expediency, while the DG books felt like something different.

I don't mind if others don't 'get it', whatever that might mean. And it's perfectly OK to say so. I, for instance, never managed to plough my way through Tolkien. All the trolls, elves, orcs and hobbits didn't engage me at all. And, as beautifully made as Peter Jackson's movies certainly are, they haven't encourged me to go back to the source texts at all.

I wonder if THHGTTG killed off all radio sci fi comedy for years as nothing could live up to it?

I was very happy to discover the sci fi comedies "Nebulous" and "The Spaceship" on Radio 4/7 last year. Alas they're not being played at the moment, but there is a fan site from which a couple of episodes can be downloaded at fairly low quality:

http://nebulouscity.com/index.html

Casts include Mark Gatiss and James Fleet. The scripts have some wonderful sci fi concepts and are very witty.

It might be schoolboy humour, but it's the best possible kind.
This is the most profound line in all schoolboy humour literature:

It is an important and popular fact that things are not always what they seem. For instance, on the planet Earth, man had always assumed that he was more intelligent than dolphins because he had achieved so much - the wheel, New York, wars and so on - whilst all the dolphins had ever done was muck about in the water having a good time. But conversely, the dolphins had always believed that they were far more intelligent than man - for precisely the same reasons.

Some people have said that HHGTTG now feels old-fashioned, but obsolescence and the speed of change in technology are themselves central themes. It doesn't take much to update and appreciate the "still think digital watches are a pretty neat idea" line. And it seems appropriate that the Guide itself contains a measly million entries and soon becomes mostly useless.
In the Guardian on Saturday a writer pointed to the many post-colonial aspects - including Arthur Dent's affronted stance when learning of just how puny his place in the universe is.
Here's another great line dealing with the meaninglessness of grand pomposity in a vast, complex and baffling universe:

For thousands more years the mighty ships tore across the empty wastes of space and finally dived screaming on to the first planet they came across - which happened to be the Earth - where due to a terrible miscalculation of scale the entire battle fleet was accidentally swallowed by a small dog.

If you've heard the radio series, watched the TV series and seen the film and still don't like it, I wouldn't bother with it any more.
Unless you want to try the screensaver?
http://www.bbc.co.uk/cult/hitchhikers/screensaver.shtml

http://www.clivebanks.co.uk/THHGTTG/THHGTTGradio6.htm

(start at "Scene 6. Int. B Ark. Bridge" and the subsequent scene). As it happens I was prompted by BBC4s recent repeat of the Omnibus on Adams to rip the the whole 1988 CD release as Lossless onto my iPod/Bose headphones kit and have have been enjoying it greatly-probably last heard it in full c. 1980 as I had some tapes from the radio.

A few things struck me:

1. It's undeniably uneven, and apparently a lot was written semi-collectively under deadline pressure, with some parts due to John Lloyd. Bywater remarked in the BBC4 prog, re Adams' subsequent career as a novelist that there was no one more ill-suited to being on his own staring at a blank sheet of paper than DA.

2. The sound world is brilliant, and possibly remains his/their greatest achievement. The use of his/their musical tastes, particularly synthesiser music (Floyd, Tomita, etc) and the Eagles' Journey of the Sorceror,and great radio voices like Stephen Moore, Richard Vernon and Peter Jones, all lift it well above what it might have been.

In fact, like much 70s BBC sound, and the best classical and jazz recordings, it seems to me so good as to make the CD/LP debate entirely redundant, the CD carrier seems to me quite adequate to do justice to a good recording IF someone cares enough and has the time to do the transfer *properly* ... [though I accept voices, effects and background music may be more forgiving than foreground]

3. The bits that seemed profound to me as a teen, like the Man in the Shack who runs the universe, are less impressive nearly 30 years on (he was after all in his mid 20s)-but much of the satire on mankind's follies is if anything, prescient, c.f. the b-ark, man's relationship to technology, and the complaints dept of the Sirius Cybernetics Corp.

After all this was c 78 when the BBC now wants us to believe we all wore orange and couldn't envisage technology more comlicated than a Sinclair Cambridge or a record player ;-).

But one man's meat is another man's gravy, as my brother one memorably wrote, and your mileage may vary ...

for either his intelligence or his themes (he's more regarded as "ooh funny robots, a man in a dressing gown, sci-fi and people with funny names"?)

much of what's been said above is true (the Dirk Gently books are better as books for instance, a young man's view on the meaning of life more than 30 years ago may not ring true these days, perhaps) ... but the central idea ('what's it all about then?') is still a valid question and seems all the more urgent after three decades of property bubbles, consumerism, and a national education strategy that seems geared to creating B Ark fodder for UK plc ... anyway, veering back to the point:

1. man created immortal gods because we needed them ... but when we didn't need them anymore they were discarded although they didn't go away, they just became derelicts who would gather around the gothic shell of the old St Pancras (before it became a shiny Eurostar terminal)

2. Schrodinger's Cat as a real experiment, and a woman who asks a detective to search for the missing back half of her cat [a real pity that never got finished]

3. an old lady looks out of an aircraft over london, sees two people making love in the clouds, and smiles at the idea that everything she ever thought she knew was wrong

4. the man who knows the meaning of life but laughs himself to death before he can tell anyone what it is (roughly speaking)

just because these ideas were wrapped up in comedy doesn't invalidate them as issues to explore ... [construction of that sentence last pants was, mmmm]

OR this is a writer who had some grasp of the implication of quantum physics and thereby deserves respect for his creations (moreso in my mind than yet more hampstead-lit navel gazing)...

from Terry Jones, who captures the moment when DNA realised quite what he had created:

http://entertainment.timesonline.co.uk/tol/arts_and_entertainment/tv_and...

A year later Douglas was coming to dinner at my home in Camberwell. The other guests arrived around 7.30pm and we waited for Douglas. Eventually he arrived — at 9.30pm. He looked shell-shocked.

“What’s the matter, Doug?” I said. (It was only shortly before he died in 2001 that I discovered I was the only person who called him “Doug”.) “On the way here, I dropped in at Forbidden Planet to sign a few copies of the book of The Hitchhiker’s Guide to the Galaxy. They said it would take half an hour ... But there were a thousand people waiting to have their books signed!”

It was the first intimation Douglas had of the phenomenon he had created.

I have the books. I've read them. I like them. Douglas Adams was an inspired and comic writer and thinker. Huge concepts illustrated by minute farces.

But I still think the original radio series format was the best version by far. The sound of it all. The way the comic ideas existed inside your own mind. The vocal performances were key. Peter Jones delivery as The Book was a vast part of its appeal. It's been mentioned before but whilst Adams plot, prose and gags remain funny the acting talent used to deploy them was vital. Valetine Dyall as the keeper of the Total Perspective Vortex - listen to that again. It's brilliant radio. John le Mesurier in the second series. Sinister yet very funny.

Radio gave these fantastic ideas the free-est rein. It was written for that medium and it was sublime.

I thought the TV version was bloody useless. Because you could see it, and 'it' was a shonky attempt to realise Adams gargantuan sense of scale. The radio series allowed you to imagine in any way you chose.

if you were born in '58 you just missed them all by a whisker.