My Uncle Oswald is a sex farce that satirizes one of the modern developments in eugenics. There is a sperm bank in the United States that gathers semen from men who are supposedly geniuses — Nobel Prize winners and famous scientists — for the purpose of selling it to women who want to breed geniuses of their own. Dahl takes this idea, puts it in the mind of Oswald Hendryks Cornelius in the 1920s, and then shows it to be absurd. With the help of a fast-acting aphrodisiac and a scientist who has invented a way of freezing bull semen for the insemination of cows, Oswald and Yasmin Howcomely wander around Europe gathering semen from artists, writers, scientists, and royalty. The whole idea of a genius sperm bank is ridiculed, reducing human mating to the level of breeding cattle. In fact, as Oswald himself notes, the...