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A Memoir
by Andrew Hudgins
Since Andrew Hudgins was a child, he was a compulsive joke teller, so when he sat down to write about jokes, he found that he was writing about himself - what jokes taught him and mistaught him, how they often delighted him but occasionally made him nervous with their delight in chaos and sometimes anger.
Because Hudgins's father, a West Point graduate, served in the US Air Force, his family moved frequently; he learned to relate to other kids by telling jokes and watching how his classmates responded. And jokes opened him up to the serious, taboo subjects that his family didn't talk about openly - religion, race, sex, and death.
Hudgins tells and analyzes the jokes that explore the contradictions in the Baptist religion he was brought up in, the jokes that told him what his parents would not tell him about sex, and the racist jokes that his uncle loved, his father hated, and his mother, caught in the middle, was ambivalent about. This book is both a memoir and a meditation on jokes and how they educated, delighted, and occasionally horrified him as he grew.
BookBrowse Review
"The Joker starts strong, with an inspiring introduction about the leveling power of a good joke, but by the middle, the passages of memoir and off-color kid jokes begin to shade into material I found unpleasant. The book jacket made it clear to expect some offensive and racist jokes, but I wasn't really prepared for this to be the primary thrust of the book. Although I appreciated, intellectually, what Andrew Hudgins was trying to do in analyzing the provenance of racist jokes and locating the origin of the humor in cultural change, I found jokes to be wearing. It's hard to keep reading the n-word, even in the context of an older generation's attempts at humor. Some of the jokes were so upsetting, I wish I had never read them. I expected that the second half of the book would transcend the first by moving past the squirm-inducing material, but it never did. After the racist jokes came the sexist jokes, and for me the book never arrived at a punch line." - Jennifer Wilder
Other Reviews
"Starred Review. An acclaimed poet proves his versatility in his gut-busting memoir on jokes...humorous, cerebral and daringly written." - Kirkus
"[The] book's tail end is at once sweet, funny (maybe even hilarious), and absorbing. The only problem is that readers have to slog through 300 pages to get there." - Publishers Weekly
"The analysis of bad jokes…is a perilous pastime, and Hudgins' overall success at it is remarkable… Hudgins, an acclaimed poet, has an acute ear and is sensitive to the 'porcelain delicacy' of words, as well as to their bite... Pick up this unique book." - Booklist
"This is a writer who has something to say about humor, its mystery and chaos, and what it means to our lives." - John Jeremiah Sullivan
"[Hudgins] is one of the funniest, filthiest, smartest people I have ever met - and this book is a treasure, a golden whoopie cushion, pearled set of chattery teeth." - Benjamin Percy
"The Joker is an absolutely brilliant book, as necessary as it is pleasurable." - Richard Bausch
This information about The Joker was first featured
in "The BookBrowse Review" - BookBrowse's membership magazine, and in our weekly "Publishing This Week" newsletter. Publication information is for the USA, and (unless stated otherwise) represents the first print edition. The reviews are necessarily limited to those that were available to us ahead of publication. If you are the publisher or author and feel that they do not properly reflect the range of media opinion now available, send us a message with the mainstream reviews that you would like to see added.
Any "Author Information" displayed below reflects the author's biography at the time this particular book was published.
Andrew Hudgins has published eight books of poetry and two collections of essays. He currently teaches at Ohio State University and lives in Columbus, Ohio.
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