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 audiobook is both a memoir and a meditation on jokes and how they educated, delighted, and occasionally horrified him as he grew.
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“His often-bawdy material probes depths far beneath the jokes themselves, providing opportunities to examine his life through a humorous lens…Humorous, cerebral, and daringly written.”
— Kirkus Reviews (starred review)
“This is a writer who has something to say about humor, its mystery and chaos, and what it means to our lives.”
— John Jeremiah Sullivan, New York Times bestselling author of Pulphead“The Joker is an absolutely brilliant book, as necessary as it is pleasurable.”
— Richard Bausch, author of Thanksgiving Night“[Hudgins] is one of the funniest, filthiest, smartest people I have ever met—and this book is a treasure, a golden whoopie cushion, a pearled set of chattery teeth.”
— Benjamin Percy, author of Red MoonBe the first to write a review about this audiobook!
Andrew Hudgins has published several books of poetry and collections of essays. He currently teaches at Ohio State University and lives in Columbus, Ohio.
Jeff Cummings, as an audiobook narrator, has won both an Earphones Award and the prestigious Audie Award in 2015 for Best Narration in Science and Technology. He is also a twenty-year veteran of the stage, having worked at many regional theaters across the country, from A Contemporary Theatre in Seattle and the Alliance Theatre in Atlanta to the Utah Shakespeare Festival in Cedar City and the International Mystery Writers’ Festival in Owensboro, Kentucky. He also spent seven seasons with the Oregon Shakespeare Festival.