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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 himselfβwhat 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 Hudginsβs 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 didnβt talk about openlyβreligion, 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.
 Media BuzzWeekend Edition Saturday - June 8, 2013
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