Customer Reviews

Stop Me If You've Heard This: A History and Philosophy of Jokes

5 star:		(5)
4 star:		(5)
3 star:		(1)
2 star:		(1)
1 star:		(1)

 

 

This is an erudite and clever book, hence the five stars. I'd expect nothing less from author Jim Holt, whose work I've enjoyed immensely before. But as much as I liked Stop Me If You've Heard This, my enjoyment was, of necessity, short-lived.

At less than 7-by-5 inches in size, this is a smallish book. It's also a slender one. If you subtract the index, credits, and bibliography, it has 126 pages of material. Now subtract the 24 illustrations and you're down to 102 pages of text.

At this point, one notices the book's colossal margins, and how humankind's entire "history of jokes" is covered in 41 pages. In fact, this section is as much about joke collectors throughout the ages as the jokes themselves.

But all is forgiven in the book's second half ("Philosophy"), wherein Holt really shines. In addition to providing a variety of jokes types, there are also a number of worthy theories regarding their origins, classifications, and ramifications. In short, this is the part of the book where you'll laugh.

To sum up, while I anticipated a hardcover book, what I got was a bound copy of two essays. These were, respectively, good and most excellent. But imagining a bookstore shopper paying this book's list price of $15.95 makes me a little uneasy. While I was happy to avail myself of the on-line discount, perhaps the publisher could have taken this book's price point more... seriously?

*Finally, as to "Kalamazoo!", it is Holt's submission for the shortest joke in the world. (You'll have to read his explanation on pp. 79-80.)

This is the question that Holt aims to answer in his short, witty, and pithy book. He traces the history of jokes-when we started telling them, when they were recorded, and how they have evolved (and devolved) over time. He focuses mostly on dirty jokes-jokes about sex, bodily functions, racism, and sexism-namely because at a certain level, all jokes are dirty and tasteless, and that's why we love them. He also examines WHY things are funny from philosophical, psychological, and physiological perspectives. Do we laugh at a joke because it is unexpected, because it allows us to acknowledge the darker sides of our psyche, or because a certain section of our brain is suddenly stimulated?



Holt is a clever writer and provides lots of sample jokes to show what he's trying to explain. However, this book is just too darn short. He could have easily doubled the length of the book to just get into everything. This book gives a few biographies of influential people in the history and study of jokes, but doesn't delve into the theories nearly deeply enough. I was constantly disappointed that he didn't spend more time on each topic. But this just shows how good a read the book is-he leaves the reader wanting more.

What makes us laugh? Why do certain jokes work? How long have jokes been around? The answers to these and many more questions are contained in this delightful look at the "history" of jokes. It goes almost without saying that one of the very early humorists, Poggio Bracciolini, was a Papal Secretary. Oh, the stories he could tell....and did!

As author Jim Holt proceeds, the book gets funnier and it isn't the compendium of jokes that makes this slender volume so attractive, but it is the different kinds of jokes and our responses to them (which makes up the thrust of his writing) that allows you to pause, think and laugh. "Stop Me If You've Heard This" can be read in one easy sitting and when you're through you hope a sequel might be in order. Or even out of order. I highly recommend it.

This book is a good read for any serious :-) amateur philosopher. I cannot speak for real philosophers but my favourite one recommended it in is his blog.

I think this book has a good balance of jokes and interesting insights about humour. Its brevity can be seen both as an advantage and as a disadvantage. It took me two and a half hours to read the book because I am a slow reader and because could not resist sharing some of the jokes with my wife, who was sitting nearby marking exams. I liked some of the jokes and I think she liked them too.

This book also gave me a couple of reasons to start collecting jokes. My poor wife is now terrified.

Now comes my boring philosophical comment, so you can stop reading here. Knowledge (immaterial possession of things), Love (willing the good of the other as other), Ethics (discernment of what is best), Religion (hunger for the Infinite), Gaming (enjoyment of rules), Art (expressiveness, skill and imagination combined) and Humour (read the book :-)) are all distinctive features of human beings. Any of these features alone sets us apart and all of them can help us a little in enjoying and understanding human beings.

Books about what makes us laugh have the reputation of not being particularly funny. At least this one has some jokes and the virtue of shortness. A good introduction to the history and philosophy of jokes.

Stop me is an interesting, light, entertaining read for those interested in more than simply laughing but some of the history of the jokes we tell today. Their origins can be traced back many centuries and Holt does an excellent job in the telling.

One joke after another would get stale. The author breaks it up just about right. A joke then a little discussion about where jokes come from and various theories about jokes and then another joke. And before you know it you will be on page 126. The end. Too soon to get bored if you read fairly quickly. And you should have gained at least a few chuckles and possibly also a new insight or two into the meaning of humor.

Reading STOP ME IF YOU'VE HEARD THIS: A HISTORY AND
PHILOSOPHY OF JOKES by Jim Holt reminded me of many papers
that my students submit . . there seems to be 142 pages, but after
you subtract a bibliography, credits and an index, you are down
to 126 pages . . . take away another 24 pages for illustrations,
and you're down to 102 pages in a smallish 4.5 x 7 format with
very wide margins.

However, don't be put off by what seems to be a lack
of material . . . what is presented is interesting, as well as fun . . . and
you'll learn perhaps more than you ever wanted to know about such
individuals as Gershon Legman (the encylopedist of the dirty joke), Nat
Schmulowitz (the most prodigious joke collector of all time) and Alan
Dundes (the "joke professor" of Berkeley who saw a sinister side
in elephant jokes).

I kid you not about the latter . . . as the author notes:

* It is no accident that elephant jokes appeared around the beginning
of the civil rights movement, he said. Consider the parallels between
the elephant and the white stereotype of the black: the association
with the jungle, the potential for violence, the idea of unusually large
genitals and corresponding sexual capacity. "You can see this even
in the seemingly most nonsensical jokes," he said. "Why did the
elephant sit on the marshmallow? So he wouldn't fall into the cocoa.
That reflects the white person's fear of blacks moving into his
neighborhood--they're trying to sit on the white oasis in the chocolate,
so to speak. This joke was being told at a time when even liberals felt
anxious about the effects of integration." I confessed to Dundes that
I found his interpretation a tad, well, oversubtle. But he insisted that
there was plenty of anecdotal data in its favor. "When a psychiatrist
friend of mine asked his black secretary if she knew any elephant
jokes, she said, 'Why would we tell them? They're about us.' "

Holt also presents a wide variety of jokes, including these:

* There are jokes about musical instruments, especially the viola,
which seems to be especially despised in the world of classical music.
(Why did the chicken cross the road? To get away from the viola recital.
Or, in a more esoteric vein, How was the canon invented? When two violists
attempted to play in unison.)

* There are short jokes, some with a single-syllable punch line. (What's
brown and sounds like a bell? Dung!) There is even the rare joke
consisting of only two words. ("Pretentious? Moi?").

* But what of the pun, widely and perhaps justly regarded as the lowest
form of humor? (Vladimir Nabokov, when told by a professor of English
that a nun who was auditing one of the professor's classes had complained
that two students in the back of the classroom were "spooning" during
a lecture: "You should have said, 'Sister, you're lucky they weren't
forking.' ") Well, one might say that in wordplay we are enjoying
our superiority to language or reason. But now the superiority theory
has become elastic to the point of meaninglessness.

STOP ME might not be the funniest book you'll ever read; however,
I do believe that with respect to jokes, it will be one of the most
thought-provoking.

Jim Holt, a columnist and contributor to the _New Yorker_, collects jokes, and the shortest among them is two words: "Pretentious? Moi?" It is fitting that he has included it in his book _Stop Me If You've Heard This: A History and Philosophy of Jokes_ (Norton), for his own book is tiny, and despite its brevity, it succeeds in delivering its intended history and philosophy just as well as the two-word joke delivers a smile. It might seem strange that jokes should be a subject for philosophical enquiries, but consider how central they are to the human condition. Sit down at a dinner party, and a good deal of the conversation will be directed at putting together strings of words that will elicit laughter from the hearers. Another reason jokes ought to be considered food for philosophical thought is that philosophers through history have indeed speculated about them, and have come up with answers about why jokes are funny, but none of the answers is complete or completely satisfying. Another reason to study the history and philosophy of jokes is that when one does so, one necessarily gets to read lots of jokes, and Holt's little volume does contain plenty of good ones.

The book is divided into two parts, necessarily "History" and "Philosophy". There were jokebooks of the ancients, since Plautus refers to their existence in his comic plays, but only one has come down to us, the _Philolegos_ ("laughter lover") from the fourth or fifth century C.E. The jokes in it are peopled with stock characters like the miser, the drunk, and the sex-starved woman. "How shall I cut your hair?" a talkative barber asks a customer. "In silence!" comes the retort. Holt writes admiringly of the more contemporary work of joke collector Gershon Legman, who claimed to have invented the slogan "Make Love, Not War" and who obtained books for Alfred Kinsey's collection. The admiration is muted, however: "Reading through Legman's vast compilation of dirty jokes is a punishing experience, like being trapped in the men's room of a Greyhound bus station in the 1950s." Philosophy, of course, seems to begin with the Greeks; Plato said that the proper objects of laughter are vice and folly, both well illustrated in jokes here. Immanuel Kant explained that incongruity was what led to laughter, but the philosopher Henri Bergson said that laughs came from a feeling of superiority; watch a man slip on a banana peel, and you laugh because you, yourself, would never, ever exhibit such gracelessness. Freud famously proposed that a joke allows laughter to release inhibited thoughts and feelings of sex and aggression. That sounds good, but Holt notes that if Freud is right, the ones "who laugh hardest at lewd jokes should be the ones who are the most sexually repressed. This seems to be backwards. No general explanation of why we laugh at jokes seems to work in all cases, and the problem may be that trying to understand the funniness of specific jokes is just not funny. The explanation of a joke is not funny, it never helps us appreciate the joke more (and often less), and it seldom seems like a good explanation.

As with so many philosophical issues these days, perhaps only because of our current fashions of research, humor may simply come down to the neurological. Using an electric probe to try to find the cause of a patient's seizures, doctors stimulated a part of her left frontal lobe, eliciting a laugh. It happened over and over, and it was not just a mere physical reflex. She really did find things funny, whether she was looking at the operating team, or at a picture of a horse they showed her. Put a little current to the "L-spot" of the brain, and everything becomes a joke. There is little risk that neurosurgical procedures are going to impair the activities of joke-tellers, however; telling a joke is a simpler way of getting a laugh than doing brain probes, and anyway, whatever the purpose of jokes is, it probably cannot be accomplished in such an electromechanical way. Like many things, jokes are probably best appreciated for themselves and not for any thinking that they might inspire. Holt's little volume will inspire some thinking, but it also contains more than its share of good (along with some bad) jokes, including one that he has traced back in different forms which people have been laughing at for fifteen centuries. And he even includes a personal favorite of mine, a meta-joke: "A priest, a rabbi and a minister walk into a bar. The bartender says, `What is this, a joke?'"

The joke begins with the title which offers a "philosophy of jokes" -- surely "philosophy" suggests seriousness -- does this presume a reader should not laugh in order to understand laughter?

But, seriously folks . . . This is a thoughtful, well-rounded and appropiately funny book. Let's start with one relevant fact: In America today, the mood of the country is available from only one source - - the comic monologues introducing the late night shows on television. If you don't like jokes, you don't know nuttin'.

Think, for a moment, about the lack of jokes about Barack Obama; try and think of any joke that would not draw a charge of racial insensitivity. The only jokes about McCain relate to his age; not about his fierce temper, lack of economic experience, trophy second wife and her beer business, or any perceived or invented weakness.

"Jokes are meant to be understood; indeed this is crucial to their success," Holt writes, citing Sigmund Freud. To be understood, they must be brief and to the point like a good advertising slogan; on this basis a good joke can be critical or supportive of a person, policy, preference or attitude.

For example, during World War II, it was a capital offence to criticize Der Fuhrer. So, Berliners would say, "Just think, in 1941 it took a week on the trains to go from the Western Front to the Eastern Front. Now, in just four years, thanks to the brilliance of our leader, we can go from the Western Front to the Eastern Front on the subway."

Presumably, people were not shot for such praise. It's the folks without a sense of humour who are losers, which is why Berliners could joke despite their plight. Even if defeated, they weren't losers. Granted, as Holt points out, one Berlin comic who named his horse 'Adolf' was shot. The lesson is obvious; if you're gonna be funny, be smart.

Jewish jokes seem to mean 'if we can laugh at ourselves, then we're not dangerous.' Bush jokes? They produce a laugh, not a punch in the face. A good joke challenges an idea, situation or person without provoking a fight.

But, seriously folks . . .

This is a good book. In other words, "Don't stop me if you've heard this . . ." Tell me, and not only will I get a laugh but I'll also have something to think about. Maybe, inspired by this book, someone will even come up with a joke about Obama.

Now, that would really be funny. Let's see now: "Eight years ago, Democrats had a candidate who was as dour as an iceberg. This year, they've come up with one who's as confident as the Titanic." Or is it better said, "... as cold as an iceberg ... as hot as the Titanic". How about "...as hot as an iceberg ... as cold as the Titanic." Therein lies the essence of good humour -- finding perfect words at the precise moment to overturn a pretentious idea.

There are some wonderfully funny examples here, mixed with philosophy and other deep thoughts. Someone's sure to come up with a better Obama joke. This book is a great place to start.