lol

So, I just read a joke book. But it’s not that kind of joke book, it’s the kind a scholar might write, but it was written by a journalist. Anyhow. Just so you know, it was funny… enough. You can read it in an hour and get a couple laughs, but you may as well just read a joke book.

Apparently joking around isn’t new. Jim Holt's Stop Me if You've Heard This traced certain jokes back through the Middle Ages to way back, which just get revived for contemporary audiences, inserting new figures. His treatise on why people make jokes and what’s funny was no more involved or convincing than my university French professor’s musings. We talked about obsession, philosophy, and humor in my French classes. Holt talked about Freud, philosophy, and humor, which didn’t yield too different of results.

Do we laugh because something’s funny? Well, usually, if it’s not because the left frontal lobe of our brain is being zapped. But there’s plenty of laughing that has nothing to do with humor, even if we say a jolly person is in good humor we don’t need that person to crack jokes to be so. But I’ve laughed out loud in pure shock – in a French class, no less.

One of the bits I particularly appreciated was Holt’s mention of how different people enjoy various styles of humor. I am particularly fond of witticisms, but not so into puns. Even though they’re so close! Somehow, perhaps due to all that American Puritanism, sexual jokes aren’t that amusing to me, in fact I often find I agree with G. Legman that “telling a dirty joke is tantamount to verbal rape.” And that really isn’t funny. The aggressive nature of many put-down jokes makes me feel rather agelastic.

So the irony may be that I think religious jokes are really, really funny. (Even the most outrageous ones that Holt cited, not to mention the innocuous ones I know.) Apparently Freud’s biggest collection of jokes regarded Jews, symbolizing his personal ambivalence, so I guess this opens me up to all kinds of interesting subconscious possibilities. Poppycock!