I still recall a brilliant book on corporal punishment and its history ("The History of Torture") that was soooo dry that you could almost here the author's typewriter spilling sand onto the pages. What made it brilliant was the writing was so dry and the subject matter gory and horrific (but informative) that literally everyone I loaned the book to found themselves laughing at parts. His descriptions of botched executions and so on was so dry and awful that it just had a great quality of dark humour about it.