Frequent New Yorker contributor Jim Holt explores the history of the joke book—collections of jokes go all the way back to ancient Greece—and it's a pleasant-enough tale. As it turns out, the story is not that unusual... or funny. We learn that the Philogelos, the first joke book, was lost in the Dark Ages, and that dirty joke books had to be smuggled into modern-day America through the back door of academia in the 1950s, as subjects of serious study. But Holt never explains exactly why any of this matters.

The second half of the book is supposed to be a philosophical inquiry into what makes jokes work, but Holt is too timid to actually stick to any single theory. Neurology is discussed, as are Oscar Wilde, Boswell and Johnson, and Ronald Reagan. But the publisher's idea that this book should be shelved in the philosophy section is a stretch, as is the thought of this mirthless little thing mixing with the humor books. There's only one original laugh anywhere in this tiny volume, and that's the caption to a photo of Garry Shandling. Even then, the joke is just simply not that funny. If you're going to write about a funny subject, you'd better be funny yourself—remember the bone-dry (and therefore useless) biography of Groucho Marx by Stefan Kanfer from 2001.

Stop Me If You've Heard This is the newest in an explosion of skinny, pocket-size books that claim to be about philosophy, like On Bullshit and On Truth. But it's really nothing more than a good magazine article. At 126 pages, with two-dozen full-page illustrations, and each page unable to hold more than a modest-size paragraph, it's pretty obvious who the $16 joke is on.