Read Anywhere and on Any Device!

Subscribe to Read | $0.00

Join today and start reading your favorite books for Free!

Create Free Account

The Joker: A Memoir

3.1/5 ( ratings)

From an award-winning poet and compulsive joke teller, a memoir about the jokes that educated him about history, religion, and family—delighting him, and often horrifying him, as he grew into adulthood.

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.

Language: English

Pages: 352

Format: Hardcover

Publisher: Simon Schuster

Release: June 11, 2013

ISBN: 1476712719

ISBN 13: 9781476712710

The Joker: A Memoir

3.1/5 ( ratings)

From an award-winning poet and compulsive joke teller, a memoir about the jokes that educated him about history, religion, and family—delighting him, and often horrifying him, as he grew into adulthood.

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.

Language: English

Pages: 352

Format: Hardcover

Publisher: Simon Schuster

Release: June 11, 2013

ISBN: 1476712719

ISBN 13: 9781476712710

More books from Andrew Hudgins

Shut Up You're Fine: Instructive Poetry for Very, Very Bad Children

3.1/5 ( ratings)

After the Lost War: A Narrative

4.1/5 ( ratings)

Ecstatic in the Poison

4.1/5 ( ratings)

Babylon in a Jar: Poems

The Glass Hammer: A Southern Childhood

3.9/5 ( ratings)

American Rendering: New and Selected Poems

The Never-Ending

4.4/5 ( ratings)

A Clown at Midnight: Poems

The Kenyon Review Spring 2011

3.6/5 ( ratings)

Saints and Strangers

3.6/5 ( ratings)

Diary of a Poem (Poets On Poetry)

3.6/5 ( ratings)

Seriously Funny: Poems about Love, Death, Religion, Art, Politics, Sex, and Everything Else

3.6/5 ( ratings)

The Waltz He Was Born For: An Introduction to the Writing of Walt McDonald

3.6/5 ( ratings)

Selected Poems

3.6/5 ( ratings)

Rate this book!

Write a review?