Bennett Cerf was one of the founders of the publishing firm Random House. Cerf was known for his compilations of jokes and stories, and for his regular appearances on the panel game show What's My Line?
Read these to my date, who is a grown man and not a child. He did laugh and he did guess some correctly. Personally I was enamored by the illustrations.
This is not the version I read first. I may have seen this edition, but when I was a child my parents had several Bennett Cerf books, and they were NOT 'beginner books'. I learned many classic riddles from those sources, and other standard jokes. I don't know why the search function is not displaying properly. But this one will do, for a start.