The Joker
A Memoir
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3.0 • 1 Rating
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- $11.99
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- $11.99
Publisher Description
This edition includes a packet of Andrew Hudgins's favorite jokes, plus original commentary by the author.
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.
PUBLISHERS WEEKLY
Hudgins, a self-proclaimed withdrawn military brat and bookworm, discovered humor early in his life and has clung to it. His mom, he recalls, was his best first audience as he slowly learned the intricacies of humor and its vastly different iterations bad church jokes, racial humor, sexual humor, and eventually racial-sexual humor. Hudgins examines adolescent humor which, despite his efforts, is generally best left to the adolescents and rarely stands up well to scrutiny. Throughout most of this memoir, Hudgins's stories about his childhood and associated forms of humor fall flat, such as his intimate story about rediscovering his laugh in the midst of heartbreak. Any of this would be more meaningful if Hudgins was a famous comedian or comic writer, but he's just an average guy recalling personal stories that are likely funny to him though don't translate to strangers. Hudgins is at his very best, however, when he writes about his current wife's humor preferences, and 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.
