Don't Stand Too Close to a Naked Man

Allen is best known as the lead actor in the TV comedy series Home Improvement. Here his approach is mostly humorous with a few serious essays. It quickly becomes clear that he honed his talents in venues frequented by the 18-30 age cohort, for he concentrates on the differences between men and women in such areas as sex, clothes, hobbies, friends and reactions to the environment. Some of the selections are entertaining, like the one about changing his original surname, Dick. Others, like ``More Power,'' about tools, are markedly less so. The humor is a strange amalgam of the callow and the sophisticated and the result is only intermittently funny, and then only mildly so. 500,000 first printing; first serial to TV Guide and Playboy. (Oct.)