Stop Me If You've Heard This: A History and Philosophy of Jokes | 
 enlarge | Author: Jim Holt
Publisher: W. W. Norton
Category: Book
List Price: $15.95
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Rating:  9 reviews
Sales Rank: 27139
Format: Illustrated
Media: Hardcover
Edition: illustrated edition
Pages: 160
Number Of Items: 1
Shipping Weight (lbs): 0.5
Dimensions (in): 6.8 x 4.7 x 0.7
ISBN: 0393066738
Dewey Decimal Number: 809.7
EAN: 9780393066739
ASIN: 0393066738
Publication Date: July 14, 2008
Availability: Usually ships in 1-2 business days
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Product Description
BIn the fine tradition of IOn Bullshit/I comes this outrageous, uproarious compendium of absurdity, filth, racy paradox, and mature philosophical reflection./BBRBRStop Me If You've Heard This/I is the first book to trace the evolution of the joke from the stand-up comics of ancient Athens to the comedy-club Seinfelds of today. Cropping up en route are such unforgettable figures as Poggio, a Renaissance papal secretary and sexual adventurer; and Gershon Legman, the FBI-hounded psychoanalyst of dirty jokes. Having explored humor's history in part one, Jim Holt then delves into philosophy in part two. Jewish jokes; Wall Street jokes; jokes about rednecks and atheists, bulimics and politicians; jokes that you missed if you didn't go to a Catholic girls' school; jokes about language and logic itself#151;all become fodder for the grand theories of Aristotle, Kant, Freud, and Wittgenstein. A heady mix of the high and the low, of the ribald and the profound, this handsomely illustrated volume demands to be read by anyone who has ever peered into the abyss and asked: What's so funny?
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| Customer Reviews: Read 4 more reviews...
 Facile, at best January 5, 2009
Peking Duck (Beijing, China)
I'm surprised. I've enjoyed some of Holt's columns in a number of magazines, despite his fondness for four-syllable words, but this book was a dud. The jokes themselves are lame, and it sounds forced and contrived, as though the author's heat wasn't in it. A real disappointment. br / br /On an ethical note: I am dumbfounded by the testimonial quotes under "Editorial Reviews" above, where the excerpt from the NY Times says, "Fast-moving, idiosyncratic...a stocking-stuffer." Please google the actual review and see what was really said: br / br /"In the end, Holt seems less interested in getting to the bottom of his subject than he is in getting to the end of his assignment. "Slight" would be too weighty a word for this soap bubble of a book. Even after being plumped out with illustrations, it barely qualifies as a stocking stuffer." br / br /Quite a difference, no? I've been writing reviews on Amazon for years, and am shocked they'd allow this kind of manipulation.
 not really a book November 21, 2008
A Listener
0 out of 3 found this review helpful
Since this is 100 small (4" X 6" including margins) pages of text, it's an essay pretending to be a book. The illustrations are cheap and put in to pad the page count. As an essay, I'd give it a B-. There were about 5 jokes which were humorous, so that's about $3 a joke. The real joke was on me.
 No! No! Don't Stop! September 5, 2008
R. Hardy (Columbus, Mississippi USA)
4 out of 5 found this review helpful
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. br / br /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 explanation of a joke is not funny, it never helps us appreciate the joke more (and often less), and it seldom seems like a good explanation. br / br /As with so many philosophical issues these days, perhaps only because of our current fashions of research, humor may simply come down to the neurological. Using an electric probe to try to find the cause of a patient's seizures, doctors stimulated a part of her left frontal lobe, eliciting a laugh. It happened over and over, and it was not just a mere physical reflex. She really did find things funny, whether she was looking at the operating team, or at a picture of a horse they showed her. Put a little current to the "L-spot" of the brain, and everything becomes a joke. There is little risk that neurosurgical procedures are going to impair the activities of joke-tellers, however; telling a joke is a simpler way of getting a laugh than doing brain probes, and anyway, whatever the purpose of jokes is, it probably cannot be accomplished in such an electromechanical way. Like many things, jokes are probably best appreciated for themselves and not for any thinking that they might inspire. Holt's little volume will inspire some thinking, but it also contains more than its share of good (along with some bad) jokes, including one that he has traced back in different forms which people have been laughing at for fifteen centuries. And he even includes a personal favorite of mine, a meta-joke: "A priest, a rabbi and a minister walk into a bar. The bartender says, `What is this, a joke?'" br /
Though short, it packs a punch! September 2, 2008
Blaine Greenfield (Belle Meade, NJ)
1 out of 1 found this review helpful
Reading STOP ME IF YOU'VE HEARD THIS: A HISTORY AND br /PHILOSOPHY OF JOKES by Jim Holt reminded me of many papers br /that my students submit . . there seems to be 142 pages, but after br /you subtract a bibliography, credits and an index, you are down br /to 126 pages . . . take away another 24 pages for illustrations, br /and you're down to 102 pages in a smallish 4.5 x 7 format with br /very wide margins. br / br /However, don't be put off by what seems to be a lack br /of material . . . what is presented is interesting, as well as fun . . . and br /you'll learn perhaps more than you ever wanted to know about such br /individuals as Gershon Legman (the encylopedist of the dirty joke), Nat br /Schmulowitz (the most prodigious joke collector of all time) and Alan br /Dundes (the "joke professor" of Berkeley who saw a sinister side br /in elephant jokes). br / br /I kid you not about the latter . . . as the author notes: br / br /* It is no accident that elephant jokes appeared around the beginning br /of the civil rights movement, he said. Consider the parallels between br /the elephant and the white stereotype of the black: the association br /with the jungle, the potential for violence, the idea of unusually large br /genitals and corresponding sexual capacity. "You can see this even br /in the seemingly most nonsensical jokes," he said. "Why did the br /elephant sit on the marshmallow? So he wouldn't fall into the cocoa. br /That reflects the white person's fear of blacks moving into his br /neighborhood--they're trying to sit on the white oasis in the chocolate, br /so to speak. This joke was being told at a time when even liberals felt br /anxious about the effects of integration." I confessed to Dundes that br /I found his interpretation a tad, well, oversubtle. But he insisted that br /there was plenty of anecdotal data in its favor. "When a psychiatrist br /friend of mine asked his black secretary if she knew any elephant br /jokes, she said, 'Why would we tell them? They're about us.' " br / br /Holt also presents a wide variety of jokes, including these: br / br /* There are jokes about musical instruments, especially the viola, br /which seems to be especially despised in the world of classical music. br /(Why did the chicken cross the road? To get away from the viola recital. br /Or, in a more esoteric vein, How was the canon invented? When two violists br /attempted to play in unison.) br / br /* There are short jokes, some with a single-syllable punch line. (What's br /brown and sounds like a bell? Dung!) There is even the rare joke br /consisting of only two words. ("Pretentious? Moi?"). br / br /* But what of the pun, widely and perhaps justly regarded as the lowest br /form of humor? (Vladimir Nabokov, when told by a professor of English br /that a nun who was auditing one of the professor's classes had complained br /that two students in the back of the classroom were "spooning" during br /a lecture: "You should have said, 'Sister, you're lucky they weren't br /forking.' ") Well, one might say that in wordplay we are enjoying br /our superiority to language or reason. But now the superiority theory br /has become elastic to the point of meaninglessness. br / br /STOP ME might not be the funniest book you'll ever read; however, br /I do believe that with respect to jokes, it will be one of the most br /thought-provoking. br / br /
What's so funny? August 28, 2008
Kaeli Vandertulip (Irving, TX USA)
2 out of 2 found this review helpful
br /This is the question that Holt aims to answer in his short, witty, and pithy book. He traces the history of jokes-when we started telling them, when they were recorded, and how they have evolved (and devolved) over time. He focuses mostly on dirty jokes-jokes about sex, bodily functions, racism, and sexism-namely because at a certain level, all jokes are dirty and tasteless, and that's why we love them. He also examines WHY things are funny from philosophical, psychological, and physiological perspectives. Do we laugh at a joke because it is unexpected, because it allows us to acknowledge the darker sides of our psyche, or because a certain section of our brain is suddenly stimulated? br / br / br / br /Holt is a clever writer and provides lots of sample jokes to show what he's trying to explain. However, this book is just too darn short. He could have easily doubled the length of the book to just get into everything. This book gives a few biographies of influential people in the history and study of jokes, but doesn't delve into the theories nearly deeply enough. I was constantly disappointed that he didn't spend more time on each topic. But this just shows how good a read the book is-he leaves the reader wanting more. br / br /
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