The joker

the long version

"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 ... This book is both a memoir and a meditation on jokes and how they educated, delighted, and occasionally horrified him as he grew"--