Jokes and the Unconscious
A Graphic Novel
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- $17.99
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- $17.99
Publisher Description
Heard the one about the dying father? In this savagely brilliant graphic novel by slam poet Daphne Gottlieb (Final Girl) and Hothead Paisan creator Diane DiMassa, a 19-year-old woman named Sasha loses her father to cancer and takes a job in the hospital where he had worked as a doctor. Moving from room to room with her clipboard of forms, Sasha encounters the insane, the suicidal, and the brave — then returns to her office to look up all her friends’ and enemies’ medical records. Taking its title from Freud’s Jokes and their Relation to the Unconscious, Gottlieb and DiMassa’s first collaboration is both moving and darkly funny. Where comedy meets chemo, where mirth meets mortality, Jokes and the Unconscious explores the murky terrain of grief — a shadowland of memory, sexual escape, and morbid snickering.
PUBLISHERS WEEKLY
This excellent graphic novel is a collection of shorts that tells the story of a young woman working at a hospital insurance job which her physician father obtained for her before he died of cancer in that same hospital. Sasha is young, gay, opinionated and has a death-inflected sense of humor that's equal parts cringe and belly-laugh. Gottleib's protagonist tends to hilarity amid deep despondence and even the side characters have dimension and show serious attitude on the page. The art is a bit clumsy, but DiMassa's images Sasha straddling a crocodile to tell a joke, turning into a blank-eyed hermaphroditic space alien to show how numb she is or slipping a tiki idol a drag from her cigarette are so imaginative that it doesn't matter. The book includes adult content, including lesbian sex, but the nudity tends more toward old men in nursing homes exposing themselves by accident. The story scatters a bit at the end, but it's a sad yet deeply funny book that moves from gross to subtle in a heartbeat.
