It seems amusing, at first glance.

But U.S. Navy Pirate Combat Skills is a one-note joke, a thick volume that quickly wears out its potential for humor.

I mean, the idea is clever: What if the U.S. Navy produced an instruction manual for modern sailors combatting old-school pirates? How would 21st-century fighting techniques work against someone wielding a cutlass and a hook-hand?

Well, putting aside for the moment that there are actual pirates still terrorizing the seas, far more deadly today than they were in the 17th and 18th centuries ... it's pretty obvious that a modern navy destroyer and a trained crew of sailors would make pretty quick work against a small wooden sloop filled with drunken swordsmen.

Like I said, it's a funny idea, but once you get past that joke, there's little humor in the book itself. Pirate Combat Skills is written in a dry, academic tone, much like you'd imagine an actual military guidebook to be, but with words like "scurvy dog" and "swashbuckler" scattered throughout the text, supposedly because that's hilarious.

Consider this excerpt from an eight-step plan to clear a room. This, which is step 4, is the only one of the steps to make any attempt to be funny.

Once the squeeze signal reaches the Number One man, he knows everyone behind him is fully ready and standing by to enter and clear the room of privateers. The Number One man then makes eye contact with the Breacher. The Number One man nods his head three times and the door is breached. The two-man team enters the room, shouting "Avast, me hearties!" or "Shiver me timbers!" in an effort to confuse any swashbucklers who may be inside.

Unfortunately, it's not actually funny, and readers must wade through a lot of dry text to get there.

The book seems to assume that scattering illustrations by David Cole Wheeler -- ink sketches showing a clean-cut Navy man fighting a stereotypical pirate -- is sufficient to carry the joke. It's not. Like the concept itself, it gets old quickly.

Also, the author seems to believe that words like "pirate," "buccaneer" and "freebooter," which are roughly synonymous, mean the same thing as "privateer." They're not the same thing at all.

The book purports to be produced by the Department of the Navy as an "official U.S. Navy field manual," and it's produced by the same team that published U.S. Army manuals for fighting zombies and sniping werewolves. Any notion that it's an actual product of the Navy is dispelled by the forward, written by retired Admiral I.I. Scuttle, commander of the Fighting 44th Anti-Pirate Assault Unit.

This might have been good as a brochure, or a short, heavily illustrated booklet, but at more than 250 pages, it's cumbersome and dull. I was bored less than 30 pages in, and I gave up before making it to page 65.