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

by Jim Holt

Book Overview

From the best-selling author of Why Does the World Exist? comes this outrageous, uproarious compendium of absurdity, filth, racy paradox, and gratuitous offensiveness--just the kind of mature philosophical reflection readers have come to expect from the ever-entertaining Jim Holt. Indeed, Stop Me If You've
Heard This is the first book to trace the evolution of the joke all the way from the standup comics of ancient Athens to the comedy-club Seinfelds...

• Format: Paperback
• Language: English
• ISBN: 0871407205
• ISBN13: 9780871407207
• Release Date: October 2013
• Publisher: Liveright Publishing Corporation
• Length: 160 Pages
• Weight: 0.25 lbs.
• Dimensions: 0.5" x 4.5" x 6.5"

Customer Reviews

No! No! Don't Stop!

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

Though short, it packs a punch!

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 the

Where can I get Scrod?

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.

Kalamazoo!

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.)

Stop Me? No way! Here's how to get started on understanding jokes

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. Thi