Humor and Aging by Nahemow, Lucille et al., eds.
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1.0 out of 5 stars
disappointing,
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This review is from: Humor and Aging (Paperback)
I was originally excited to see that a book had been written on humor and aging, but became less and less excited the further along I made it in the book. The first couple of chapters are solid, but the middle ones start to get a little sloppy and this regression continues until the end. Most of the last third of the book has very short chapters (<10 pages), and many of these "chapters" are just poorly written qualitative articles that were probably not accepted in peer reviewed journals... not even in 1986.There's also a very weird chapter near the end that focuses almost entirely on the ritual clowns of the Hopi Indians. This was somewhat interesting, but also confusing/disturbing as the authors of this particular chapter spend a page or two talking about how these Hopi clowns used to drink piss, eat feces, bang old women and little kids, pull each others' dicks, and murder dogs all to get a laugh or somehow "show the other Hopis what NOT to do"... very weird chapter indeed. I was wondering how this all had anything to do with humor and AGING, but then the authors mention the treatment of Hopi elders at the very end of the chapter: The Hopis resent their elders and treat them like crap because they remind everyone else of death (as do sick people). In fact, it is perfectly natural for the Hopis to let their own elder parents beg tourists for food scraps or even starve to death before helping them out themselves. Terrific. Now we're talking humor and aging? The last chapter is also pretty weird, but because it was left unfinished, not because it resembles an ethnographic report of Native American rituals. One of the two authors unfortunately died in the middle of writing the chapter; but instead of finishing the rest of the chapter, the surviving author basically just says "Welp, my co-author died and I don't know exactly where he was going with this chapter so THE END". This made for a very unfulfilling ending to a book that never really found its groove to begin with. One other aspect of this book that was profoundly unappealing were many contributors' reliance on Freud's psychoanalytic theories. Read the book and you'll find some weird mentions of humor somehow playing a role in peoples' subconscious thoughts about banging their their parents and/or children. Perhaps a more apt title for this volume would have been "Humor, Aging, and Other Sick Stuff You'd Rather Not Think About".
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