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Simon & Schuster
June 2013
On Sale: June 11, 2013
352 pages ISBN: 1476712719 EAN: 9781476712710 Kindle: B00A285QI6 Hardcover / e-Book
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Non-Fiction Memoir
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.
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