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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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Avg. Customer Rating:  7 reviews
Sales Rank: 20084
Media: Hardcover
Number Of Items: 1
Pages: 160
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
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Condition: Minor shelf wear
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Product Description
In the fine tradition of On Bullshit comes this outrageous, uproarious compendium of absurdity, filth, racy paradox, and mature philosophical reflection.
Stop Me If You've Heard This 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—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 2 more reviews...
 No! No! Don't Stop! September 5, 2008
6 out of 7 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.
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.
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?'"
Though short, it packs a punch! September 2, 2008
1 out of 1 found this review helpful
Reading STOP ME IF YOU'VE HEARD THIS: A HISTORY AND
PHILOSOPHY OF JOKES by Jim Holt reminded me of many papers
that my students submit . . there seems to be 142 pages, but after
you subtract a bibliography, credits and an index, you are down
to 126 pages . . . take away another 24 pages for illustrations,
and you're down to 102 pages in a smallish 4.5 x 7 format with
very wide margins.
However, don't be put off by what seems to be a lack
of material . . . what is presented is interesting, as well as fun . . . and
you'll learn perhaps more than you ever wanted to know about such
individuals as Gershon Legman (the encylopedist of the dirty joke), Nat
Schmulowitz (the most prodigious joke collector of all time) and Alan
Dundes (the "joke professor" of Berkeley who saw a sinister side
in elephant jokes).
I kid you not about the latter . . . as the author notes:
* It is no accident that elephant jokes appeared around the beginning
of the civil rights movement, he said. Consider the parallels between
the elephant and the white stereotype of the black: the association
with the jungle, the potential for violence, the idea of unusually large
genitals and corresponding sexual capacity. "You can see this even
in the seemingly most nonsensical jokes," he said. "Why did the
elephant sit on the marshmallow? So he wouldn't fall into the cocoa.
That reflects the white person's fear of blacks moving into his
neighborhood--they're trying to sit on the white oasis in the chocolate,
so to speak. This joke was being told at a time when even liberals felt
anxious about the effects of integration." I confessed to Dundes that
I found his interpretation a tad, well, oversubtle. But he insisted that
there was plenty of anecdotal data in its favor. "When a psychiatrist
friend of mine asked his black secretary if she knew any elephant
jokes, she said, 'Why would we tell them? They're about us.' "
Holt also presents a wide variety of jokes, including these:
* There are jokes about musical instruments, especially the viola,
which seems to be especially despised in the world of classical music.
(Why did the chicken cross the road? To get away from the viola recital.
Or, in a more esoteric vein, How was the canon invented? When two violists
attempted to play in unison.)
* There are short jokes, some with a single-syllable punch line. (What's
brown and sounds like a bell? Dung!) There is even the rare joke
consisting of only two words. ("Pretentious? Moi?").
* But what of the pun, widely and perhaps justly regarded as the lowest
form of humor? (Vladimir Nabokov, when told by a professor of English
that a nun who was auditing one of the professor's classes had complained
that two students in the back of the classroom were "spooning" during
a lecture: "You should have said, 'Sister, you're lucky they weren't
forking.' ") Well, one might say that in wordplay we are enjoying
our superiority to language or reason. But now the superiority theory
has become elastic to the point of meaninglessness.
STOP ME might not be the funniest book you'll ever read; however,
I do believe that with respect to jokes, it will be one of the most
thought-provoking.
 What's so funny? August 28, 2008
2 out of 2 found this review helpful
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?
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.
Where can I get Scrod? August 14, 2008
3 out of 4 found this review helpful
What makes us laugh? Why do certain jokes work? How long have jokes been around? The answers to these and many more questions are contained in this delightful look at the "history" of jokes. It goes almost without saying that one of the very early humorists, Poggio Bracciolini, was a Papal Secretary. Oh, the stories he could tell....and did!
As author Jim Holt proceeds, the book gets funnier and it isn't the compendium of jokes that makes this slender volume so attractive, but it is the different kinds of jokes and our responses to them (which makes up the thrust of his writing) that allows you to pause, think and laugh. "Stop Me If You've Heard This" can be read in one easy sitting and when you're through you hope a sequel might be in order. Or even out of order. I highly recommend it.
 Not much here August 3, 2008
1 out of 4 found this review helpful
I purchased this volume after I read a review in The Week magazine. The book doesn't live up to the review, nor its title. Stop Me is not exactling boring, nor is it especially interesting. It is quite disjointed and really isn't much more than a longish magazine article. If your flight is any longer than 40 minutes, you'll need a second book.
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