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.