DID you hear the one about the rutabaga? No, probably not. Vegetables don’t tend to inspire great jokes. On the contrary, they conjure their very own brand of humorlessness, the tight-lipped officiousness of grim nutritionists that is captured in the phrase “Eat your vegetables.”

Since opening Dirt Candy in the East Village almost four years ago, the chef Amanda Cohen has been waging war on the “eat your vegetables” mind-set, using humor as one of her weapons. Here she is on her restaurant’s Web site on the subject of cabbage: “It’s the wino of the vegetable world: smelly, unloved and looking at it makes you feel sad. A cabbage salad sounds even worse. Cabbage that’s ... raw? It sounds like a plated suicide note.”

Humor is so integral to Ms. Cohen’s work that she may be the only chef in America who could publish her first cookbook in comic-book form and make the decision seem not just sensible but inevitable. Drawn by Ryan Dunlavey with facial expressions that range from mild exasperation to howling rage, Ms. Cohen’s cartoon character delivers bitingly funny monologues about appearing on “Iron Chef” and rolling out pasta dough. Along the way, she and her staff beat the daylights out of a wizard and a fairy who are idiotic enough to suggest that pickles are made by magic.

But Ms. Cohen’s chief weapon in the battle against vegetable scolds is the food she serves at Dirt Candy, a vegetarian restaurant that is thrillingly free of high-minded ideals. Ms. Cohen isn’t necessarily out to save a small planet or prevent heart disease. Her goals are possibly more subversive, and she achieves them with vegetable cookery that is original, clever, visually arresting and, above all, a lot of fun to eat.