Help me find a Fantasy book from 20 years ago!

Cafe Society
1

I believe I got this around the late 80s.
This is a humorous fantasy hardcover I got from the Fantasy and Science fiction book club.

At the beginning of the book, an adventuring party (including a big dumb barbarian) was exploring these caves or something, and found a life sized statue of a wizard. I believe the statue was reddish brown colored. It was made of an extremely valuable material. The statue turned out to be the petrified mage himself. Of course he was the only one that had the knowledge to save the world. Somehow they got the statue back and fished the barbarian out of the tavern where he was busy spending his share of the sale of the statue. The more intelligent members of the party (one was a woman) spent the rest of the book trying to figure out how to restore the mage to life.

That’s all the info I really have to go on. I know it wasn’t any of the big-name authors like Dave Eddings or Terry Brooks. I do remember this book as being pretty funny (a lot of gags based on how stupid the barbarian was), and the jacket listed a sequel but it was out of print by time I read it, and I was never able to track it down. Long shot, but maybe someone here has read this and remembers it?

2

It rang a bell to me and the first thing I thought of was* Another Day, Another Dungeon* by Greg Costikyan. I looked him up online, scroll down the the blurb on the book. It sounds like what you described, except the statue isn’t a mage but a king.

3

Yep, definitely sounds a lot like it. I may have been mistaken thinking the statue was a mage, but I knew it was someone important.
OOP, but it’s cheap on amazon used, so I’ll give it a shot. Pretty sure this is it though.
The SDMB comes through on an obscure question for me once again! Thanks a ton Wile E!