Research Catalog

Title

The joker : a memoir / Andrew Hudgins.

Author

Hudgins, Andrew.

Publication

New York : Simon & Schuster, 2013.

Items in the Library & Off-site

Details

Description

xxi, 325 pages; 24 cm

Summary

"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"--

Subject

• American wit and humor
• BIOGRAPHY & AUTOBIOGRAPHY / Personal Memoirs
• HUMOR / Form / Essays
• Hudgins, Andrew
• Poets, American > 20th century > Biography

Bibliography (note)

• Includes bibliographical references and index.

Processing Action (note)

• committed to retain

Contents

Introduction: Where the Naughty Boys and Girls Live -- 1. Catch It and Paint It Green -- 2. Hide in the Grass and Make a Noise like a Peanut -- 3. Gladly, the Cross-Eyed Bear -- 4. What Did the Devil Ever Do for You? -- 5. Everybody Out of the Pool -- 6. A Quart Low -- 7. Where's the Edge? -- 8. The Perilous Needs of the Joke Teller -- 9. Never Lose Your Head Over a Piece of Tail -- 10. I Just Want to Make Sure He Knows I'm a Bull -- 11. Morning, Ladies! -- 12. We Might as Well Leave Now, Fanny -- 13. You Two Just Crack Each Other Up -- Postscript -- Acknowledgments.

ISBN

• 9781476712710 (hardback)
• 1476712719 (hardback)
• 9781476712734 (ebook) (canceled/invalid)
• 1476712735 (ebk.) (canceled/invalid)
• 9781476712727 (pbk.) (canceled/invalid)
• 1476712727 (pbk.) (canceled/invalid)

LCCN

^^2013009292

Owning Institutions

Harvard Library