Joke Books Research Articles

Johnson, Alex: The book lover’s joke book

Johnson, Alex: The book lover’s joke book

Comic Sections Plus: The Book of Mathematical Jokes, Humour, Wit and Wisdom, by Des MacHale

Comic Sections Plus: The Book of Mathematical Jokes, Humour, Wit and Wisdom, by Des MacHale

Jarrett, Simon, Those They Called Idiots: The Idea of the Disabled Mind from 1700 to the Present Day

Simon Jarrett has written a remarkable history of mental disability in England (with some evidence from France and the United States) from 1700 to the early twenty-first century. His focus in Those They Called Idiots is on both changing conceptualisations of ‘the idiot’, primarily in popular culture and legal discourse, and on the treatment of people considered ‘idiots’ over three centuries. Jarrett notes from the outset the expansion of the categories of mental disability over time and includes categories such as ‘imbecile’, ‘moron’, ‘moral imbecile’, ‘feeble minded’, ‘mental defective’ and the like, in his consideration of those they called ‘idiots’. Those They Called Idiots is divided into three parts, with nine chapters and an introduction. Part one contains three chapters, which focus on the long eighteenth century (1700–1812). In the first two chapters of Part one, Jarrett relies primarily on civil and criminal (‘Old Bailey’) court records (Ch. 1) and cultural artefacts (Ch. 2), such as joke books, slang dictionaries, art and caricature to argue that ‘those they called idiots’ were largely integrated into community and family life, and on some occasions could be considered attractive sexual partners, responsible and reliable workers, and generally harmless. In Chapter 3, Jarrett argues that as England expanded its colonial power throughout the eighteenth century, philosophers, explorers, bureaucrats, settlers and everyday Britons increasingly associated ‘idiot’ and ‘imbecile’ with peoples and cultures that they considered ‘savage’ and ‘barbaric’. A racialised hierarchy of mental ability and ‘cultural achievement’ with the English at the top and ‘savages’ (‘idiots’) at the bottom developed over the course of the eighteenth century. By century’s end, ‘stupidity’ or a perceived lack of mental acuity and cultural achievement and refinement came to be seen as innate and intractable among certain groups of racialised peoples.

At Wit's End: The Deadly Discourse of the Jewish Joke

At Wit's End: The Deadly Discourse of the Jewish Joke

At Wit's End: The Deadly Discourse of the Jewish Joke

At Wit's End: The Deadly Discourse of the Jewish Joke

Something Old, Something New, Something Borrowed, Something Taboo: Interaction and Creativity in Humour.

In this paper we treat humorous situations as a series of events underpinned by topoi, principles of reasoning recognised within a socio-cultural community. We claim that humorous effect in jokes and other discourse is often created by the juxtaposition of topoi evoked. A prerequisite for this is that there is a shift where the interpreter of the discourse updates their information state with regard to a second topos being evoked. This view of humour is consistent with an incremental analysis of dialogue, and we therefore argue that interaction is central both for humour creation and interpretation. We point out some different ways in which topoi are juxtaposed in humorous dialogues as well as in jokes published in social media or in joke books, and take jokes from the coronavirus pandemic as an example because this makes lots of new topoi available and therefore offers the opportunity of creating novel jokes based on the juxtaposition of the new and existing topoi. We explore how the mechanisms of inference in dialogue can be applied to humour through the four elements from our title: old (existing), new (not previously existing), borrowed (associated with a different situation) and taboo (inappropriate in the context).

‘It’s meant to make you laugh’: Wittgenstein’s joke book and Joyce’s Finnegans Wake

ABSTRACT Ludwig Wittgenstein once remarked that a serious and good philosophical book could consist entirely of jokes. James Joyce’s Finnegans Wake is that book. Wittgenstein’s late philosophy, exemplified by Philosophical Investigations, aims to show the complexity of language through the descriptive category of the language-game. Language has no secret nature or essence; instead, there are countless kinds of language-games that construct both common and strange forms of life. The Wake through its series of puns, neologisms, compounds, and riddles shows exactly the play of Wittgensteinian language-games. By exposing the fundamental operations of language in a displayed matrix of new language-games, the Wake fascinates us, and, at the same time, shows us the source of our fascination with language. The Wakean rules of the game are as complex and manifold as the labyrinth of life. The universal key to solving the maze is laughter. When the Wake’s ‘thistlewords in their garden nursery’ are read in the right spirit, by getting the jokes, and laughing at them, the reader learns how language makes the world and is freed from its snares and bewitchment.

The intertextual Jewish joke at the turn of the twentieth century and the poetics of a national renewal

AbstractThe article examines the role of the intertextual Jewish joke at the turn of the twentieth century, in its historical and cultural contexts. The case studies would be Alter Druyanow’s popular anthology,Sefer Habediha Vehahiddud(The Book of Jokes and Witticisms, Frankfurt 1922), and his archived, unpublished collection of sexual jokes. The frequent use of quotations from sacred Jewish texts, characteristic of these collections, is discussed in light of the distinction between sub-genres of the intertextual joke: the allusive joke, the parodic joke, and the satiric joke. While most reflect the folklorist’s ambition to bridge the gap between Hebrew as a holy language and Yiddish as a Jewish vernacular, a deeper examination of the jokes may discover Druyanow’s subversive motivations as a national activist as well. Druyanow and his contemporaries engaged the biblical and rabbinical sources freely, as vessels capable of sanctifying the secular subject matter of the Jewish national revival. Moreover, the unpublished collection exposes satirical elements embodied in the intertextual Jewish joke of the time, potentially threatening the traditional Jewish worldview.

Racism without Hatred? Racist Humor and the Myth of “Colorblindness”

Critical Race scholars contend that the current period of “race relations” is dominated by a “color-blind” racial ideology. Scholars maintain that although individuals continue to hold conventional racial views, today people tend to minimize overt racial discourse and direct racial language in public to avoid the stigma of racism. This essay identifies racist humor as a discourse that challenges such constraints on public racist discourse, often derided as “political correctness,” in ways that reinforce everyday and systemic forms of racism in an ostensibly color-blind society. While humor research generally highlights the “positive” aspects of social humor and celebrates the possibilities of humor to challenge and subvert dominant racial meanings, the “negative” aspects of racist humor are often overlooked, downplayed, or are viewed as extreme and fringe incidents that occur at the periphery of mainstream society. Moreover, race scholars have largely ignored the role of humor as a “serious” site for the reproduction and circulation of racism in society. I contend that in a post-civil-rights and color-blind society, where overt racist discourse became disavowed in public, racist humor allows interlocutors to foster social relations by partaking in the “forbidden fruit” of racist discourse. In this article, I highlight the (re)circulation of racist jokes across three social contexts (in mass market joke books, on the Internet, and in the criminal justice system), to illustrate that racist humor exists not in a bygone past or at the margins of society but is widely practiced and circulated today across various social contexts and institutions in an ostensibly color-blind society.

The National Joker: Abraham Lincoln and the Politics of Satire

The National Joker: Abraham Lincoln and the Politics of Satire

The canonization and censorship of the modern Jewish joke: in Alter Druyanow’s Book of Jokes and Witticisms

ABSTRACTThe article discusses Alter Druyanow’s popular work: The Book of Jokes and Witticisms (Sefer habediha vehahiddud, Frankfurt, 1922) as a turning point in the development of modern Jewish humour. The acceptance of the book is ascribed mainly to its Zionist agenda expressed not only in the formation of its repertoire, but also in the censorship of a large collection of sexual jokes. Following a discussion of Druyanow’s main motives and anthologizing principals, the article includes a first exposure of these jokes, aiming to analyse their social roles. The comparative reading of the jokes in their historical and cultural contexts points at what the Jewish society of that time considered as its “other” – from competing religious groups to other threatening reference groups within this society, such as women and assimilated Jews. In this way, the censored jokes shed light not only on the marginality of the East European Jews and their feelings of inferiority but also on their creative response to them and their ideological horizons.

Home and the World: Editing the “Glorious Ming” in Woodblock-Printed Books of the Sixteenth and Seventeenth Centuries by Yuming He (review)

Reviewed by: Home and the World: Editing the “Glorious Ming” in Woodblock-Printed Books of the Sixteenth and Seventeenth Centuries by Yuming He Wei Shang Home and the World: Editing the “Glorious Ming” in Woodblock-Printed Books of the Sixteenth and Seventeenth Centuries by Yuming He. Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Asia Center, 2013. Pp. xiii + 343. $39.95. Home and the World is a must read for specialists in late Ming culture; it will also appeal to students of literary studies, book history, print culture, the history of reading, and other related scholarly disciplines. Combining these approaches in a productive manner, this book significantly advances our knowledge of the production, transmission, and consumption of various literary and nonliterary texts and genres in sixteenth- and seventeenth-century China. Throughout, Yuming He offers a number of original and solid case studies on selected joke books, poetry and prose anthologies, drama miscellanies, reference books, and guidebooks for actual or imagined practices of the day. Perhaps more to the point, she makes these texts a springboard from which to dive into the unfathomable ocean of commercial print culture, in which readers can explore beneath the tips of the few visible icebergs. Written in a lively style, this book raises many issues for further exploration and discussion and brings to light the amusing peculiarities of texts that were all the rage in the late Ming but have long since faded into obscurity. Home and the World is so rich in content and so swift in pace, as it moves rapidly from one genre to another and from one topic to another, that a short review can hardly do it full justice. The study [End Page 201] mainly focuses on books produced by Fujian publishers during the Wanli reign (1573–1620), including popular encyclopedias and literary miscellanies, the latter of which Wang Zhongmin 王重民 and Zheng Zhenduo 鄭振鐸 have characterized as near equivalents to modern magazines or journals in both content and format (aside from the fact that they were not truly periodicals).1 With a few notable exceptions, the majority of these books fall into the category of pulp publications, with few of the qualities needed to attract the attention of Chinese book connoisseurs and collectors of the time or later eras. Perhaps it is no coincidence that a large number of them did not resurface until the twentieth century—in the case of Luochong lu 臝蟲錄 (Record of naked creatures), just a little over a decade ago—and, more often than not, in Japan or even European countries. Despite the renewed academic interest during recent decades in the book culture of the Ming dynasty, few scholars have gone as far as Yuming He in combining close reading with cultural and historical analysis in one monograph. This approach permits her to track the textual and visual traffic among the texts and to address common issues at stake in them. The author begins with a review of how bibliographical scholars during the Qing dynasty dismissed these late Ming books as the products of baifan zhi xue 稗販之學 (“huckster scholarship,” or “bastardized peddler learning”). These critics denounced the books for their outrageous lack of standards in compilation and editing, prevalent vulgarity, and unabashed commercialism. Such a misguided and misplaced view, Yuming He argues, reflects the inability of Qing scholars to comprehend commercial publishing of the bygone era. Instead of rejecting baifan as no more than dismissive invective, however, she treats it as “a point of departure for examining a historical moment in Chinese book culture that is worthy of exploration and appreciation on its own terms.” As she explains: Where Qing scholars saw slipshod, irresponsible, or even heretical treatment of the textual legacy of the past, others might enjoy irreverent wit, exuberant imagination, clever parody, and textual hybridity. What critics condemned as crass commercialism, others might appreciate as [End Page 202] these books’ ability to vividly evoke their particular cultural moment—as exemplified by the phrases shishang 時尚 (the fashion of these days) or xinxing 新興 (newly in vogue) that so frequently adorn the often lengthy and exuberantly boastful titles of Ming publications. (pp. 4–5) Indeed, commercial publishers’ interest in newness, fashion, and contemporary preferences became a driving force behind the production...

The Irish Joke, Migrant Networks, and the London Irish in the 1680s

This essay analyzes the Irish jokes that circulated in London in the 1680s, paying particular attention to those that emanated from the stage and from the two earliest Irish joke books, Bog Witticisms; or, Dear Joy’s Common-Places (1682) and Teagueland Jests, or Bogg-Witticisms (1690). Like ethnic jokes in general, these Irish jokes sought to stereotype and ridicule the population that they depicted, in this case, the London-Irish. But, as this essay illustrates, these comic representations can also serve as a rich source of information on the cultural, social, and economic life of that population during that period, documenting its resilience and energy as it mapped itself onto the landscape of that city. To recover this information, however, requires a different mode of reading, one that focuses on the “ground,” or background detail of the joke, rather than its “figure,” the material that is on its surface.

Humor and Reading Motivation in Children: Does the Tickling Work?

In spite of employing various reading techniques by teachers to motivate their students, some techniques may be less effective as they tend to repress rather than to motivate reading in children. Educators to some extent could unintentionally deter as opposed to allay the fears of reluctant young readers, consequently hampering the development of their intrinsic motivation for reading. This article sheds light into children’s appreciation of humour and its effect on their reading abilities; children’s reading preferences, and how to motivate them. The benefits and significance of humour socially, and cognitively through the facilitation of playful learning environment , reduction of learning anxiety, and the stimulation of students’ learning motivation, are liable of creating in children the desire for the tickling sensation that accompanies humourous reading materials. An appraisal of global trend of children’s strong preference for funny, riddles and joke books, in conjunction with an overview of the sense of humour, its appreciation and the use of humour as an adaptive mechanism in young readers, are among the noteworthy insights presented for educators to ruminate upon. Normal 0 false false false EN-US X-NONE X-NONE /* Style Definitions */ table.MsoNormalTable {mso-style-name:"Table Normal"; mso-tstyle-rowband-size:0; mso-tstyle-colband-size:0; mso-style-noshow:yes; mso-style-priority:99; mso-style-parent:""; mso-padding-alt:0in 5.4pt 0in 5.4pt; mso-para-margin-top:0in; mso-para-margin-right:0in; mso-para-margin-bottom:10.0pt; mso-para-margin-left:0in; mso-line-height-alt:0pt; mso-pagination:widow-orphan; font-size:11.0pt; font-family:"Calibri","sans-serif"; mso-ascii-font-family:Calibri; mso-ascii-theme-font:minor-latin; mso-hansi-font-family:Calibri; mso-hansi-theme-font:minor-latin;}

The Terms on Which Jews and Muslims Join Western Civilization

The Terms on Which Jews and Muslims Join Western Civilization

Disability Studies and the British Long Eighteenth Century

AbstractDisability studies approaches the British eighteenth century as a period in transition, with the conception of disability as spiritual sign of wonder or warning giving way to an understanding of it as pathology and abnormality. Period‐appropriate terms for disability are ‘deformity,’‘defect,’ and ‘monster,’ which were used for exotic bodily configurations and gender and racial differences: women and non‐Europeans were perceived as defective. John Milton, Alexander Pope, Samuel Johnson, Elizabeth Inchbald, and William Hay have generated interest on account of their disabilities, while Aphra Behn, Eliza Haywood, Mary Wortley Montagu, Sarah Scott, Sarah Fielding, Henry Fielding, John Cleland, Francis Burney, and William Godwin have received attention for disability thematics. Topics of concern include disability and old age, physiognomy in characterization, joke book humor and sensibility, ugliness as aesthetic category, defect in tropes of national identity, deafness and sign language, intellectual disability and Lockean epistemology, the exotic deformed, disfigurement from smallpox as well as political rhetoric associated with the disease, and femininity as monstrosity.

Laughing Through Rereadings: Using Joke Books to Build Fluency

The author explores how the use of joke books can promote fluency in young readers. One young girl's fluency improved measurably, and her engagement and motivation to read the particular kind of text involved played a significant role.يستكشف المؤلف الطريقة التي يستطيع فيها استخدام الكتب التي يوجد فيها نكات لتشجيع المرونة القرائية في القراء الصغار وعلى سبيل المثال تحسنت مرونة بنت في القراءة تحسناً ملحوظاً وبالإضافة إلى ذلك لعب انشغالها وحافزها في قراءة نوع خاص من النصوص دوراً مهماً.本文作者探讨如何利用笑话书提升年轻阅读者的阅读流畅程度。一名小女孩的阅读流畅程度得到显著的改进，而她对阅读笑话这种文本的投入与学习兴趣扮演了重要角色。L'auteur explore comment l'utilisation de livres de blagues peut favoriser la fluidité chez de jeunes lecteurs. La fluidité d'une jeune lectrice s'est développée de façon mesurable, et son investissement et sa motivation pour lire ce type particulier de texte a joué un rôle significatif.На примере работы с ученицей младшего возраста автор исследует, как использование книг с шутками и анекдотами может стимулировать учащихся начальной школы к овладению навыками беглого чтения. Девочка стала не только бегло читать, но и участвовать в уроке с большим вниманием и интересом, что в немалой степени объясняется характером предлагавшихся для чтения текстов.El autor explora cómo el uso de libros de chistes puede ayudar la fluidez de lectores jóvenes. La fluidez de una niña mejoró de forma cuantificable, y su interés y motivación por la lectura de estos textos tuvieron un papel importante en dicho mejoramiento.

The Fifth Annual Tribeca Film Festival

The Fifth Annual Tribeca Film Festival New York City, April 25-May 7, 2006 Some of the best work of the 2006 Tribeca Film Festival (TFF) was in documentaries. A few films made by young directors took inquisitive, non-narcissistic approaches to history, an exciting trend. Freedom's Fury (US, 2006), on the Soviet invasion of Hungary and subsequent hatreds played out in the 1956 Olympic water polo competitions, is made by the sister/brother team The Sibs, produced by Quentin Tarantino and Lucy Liu, and brilliantly edited by Michael Rogers. Concepts of occupation and freedom, so languidly discussed in American politics, are brought bloodily home, subtly paralleling our current war. Billy Corben's Cocaine Cowboys (US, 2006), about the 1980s Miami drug trade, avoids hyping the dealers and poses questions about drug money's economic place-from its revitalization of a dying Miami to its bolstering of Columbia's GOP. TFF Best Documentary Award winner The War Tapes (US, 2006) is compiled by Deborah Scranton from video diaries of National Guardsmen on duty in Iraq in 2004. In it, the soldiers filmed themselves and even mounted cameras on their guns to give the viewer an unprecedented sense of the war's violence, emotions, and exploitation by firms such as Halliburton. Lech Kowalski's unusual East of Paradise (FR, 2005) audaciously compares the suffering endured by his Polish mother during her brutal WWII Soviet experience (her face filmed in a Claude Lanzmann-like close-up) with that of people in New York's impoverished, drugged out East Village in the seventies. The very much-liked Viva Zapatero! (IT, 2005), by Italian comedian Sabina Guzzanti, fearlessly savages Silvio Berlusconi and his grip on the media. Vicky Funari and Sergio De La Torre's Mexican MAQUILAPOLIS (US/MX, 2006), about women factory workers, often single parents, living on poisoned land in minimal housing, uses set tableaus inventively. Dorothy Day: Don't Call Me a Saint (Claudia Larson, US, 2006), an uneven film about Day's founding of the Catholic Worker movement, nonetheless brings Day's name out of obscurity. Ben Lewis' Hammer and Tickle-The Communist Joke Book (FR/CA, 2006), cleverly charts the subversive, survivalist potency of political humor in the USSR MandanHidatsa-Arikara Native American J.Carlos Peinado's Waterbuster (US, 2006) recounts the Garrison Dam project that forced his tribe into a destructive diaspora, but attempts to lay to rest its pain. The frightening but humane Jesus Camp (Heidi Ewing and Rachel Grady, US, 2006), follows children's lessons at a fundamentalist evangelical camp. American Cannibal: The Road to Reality (Perry Grebin and Michael Nigro, US, 2006), covered recent ideas for reality television so bizarre-desert island survivor-type cannibalism-that it seemed a parody. Mary Jordon'syacA Smith and the Destruction of Atlantis (US, 2006) honors Smith's aesthetics with baroque graphics, split screens, and torrid music as it tracks Smith's germinal work, especially Flaming Creatures, and its many profilees, be it Andy Warhol (who called Smith the only artist he would ever imitate) or Jonas Mekas. Its one failing is that it doesn't examine Smith's craftsmanship enough, which is a shame since his framing could rival D.W. Griffith's and his use of color could rival Teinosuke Kinugasa's. …

Editorial

Editorial

Laughter is the Best Medicine

Quality of life is perceived according to individual conception and is best evaluated by the patient rather than by others. It is the condition of one’s being, reflected in the ability to perform everyday activities, as assessed according to physical, psychological, spiritual, and social dimensions. Among oncology patients, the quality of life is reflected in satisfaction with levels of functioning and control of the symptoms of both disease and treatment. 6