Reviews for American Humor

The average rating for American Humor based on 2 reviews is 4 stars.

Review # 1 was written on 2017-12-25 00:00:00 Monnier Franck The humor felt more than twenty years out of date. As I read Cohen's examples of jokes, I kept thinking about how they might sound in my mouth and whom I could even tell them to, in 2018, as an Asian-American. They would sound strange. Almost certainly offensive. One of Cohen's arguments validated, I suppose: yep, context matters. Autobiographically speaking, I loved jokes as a kid. Joke-books and sitcoms taught me how to interpret the world around me and how to make friends. Cohen asks the right questions about how jokes matter. I'm not satisfied with his answers. How do they work? (build camaraderie) Do they necessarily trade in and promote stereotypes? (usually not, b/c jokes are fictional and not taken seriously) Can a joke be funny but immoral? (yes, and: it's fine to tell folks not to tell jokes because they're hurtful, but hurtfulness can be judged independently) It's interesting to me how this particular scholarly analysis of humor takes the mid-20th c ethnic joke as its ideal type (vs. the pun, hyperbole, cosmic absurdity, deflating human pompousness, variations on all of which Cohen comments on in passing). What Cohen's 'jokes' are ultimately 'about,' in my reading, is a kind of processing of the violence of American ethnic segregation, of which an urban Jewish American intellectual's experience can serve as metonym. I think that could be why Cohen ends contemplating the offensiveness of a joke about young urban black men and the hopefulness of a joke about the Chicago Police Department, as related by a CPD officer. I want to be generous in my reading, but this was probably disturbing then and is even more disturbing today. ("I don't think that's very funny. Or probative," I hear myself, suddenly a humorless PC scold addressing the book.) I enjoyed the culture of courageous, free-speech absolutism at Chicago while I was there. But it's not without tremendous blind spots. In my judgement, Cohen is correct in identifying jokes as a special genre of fiction. The next step, for him, is to say, well then, because they are products of poesis abstracted from the real world, we can aestheticize them and contemplate them cooly. The next step for me, I think, would be to acknowledge that fiction has its uses in the real world, including composing it, reshaping it. Are jokes drugs? tools? weapons? Who tells them to whom and what happens as a result? I wish I had read this book twenty years earlier so I could have gone pestering Cohen about it!

Review # 2 was written on 2013-02-16 00:00:00 Sixto Orzales Absolutely one of the best books I have ever read about jokes and it hits on a surprising aspect, that of intimacy between those who "get" the joke. A very studied author, but not pretentious or esoteric at all. A lover and student of jokes with some unique and interesting perspectives. He has some killer jokes too, veering toward the religious/ Jewish side a bit. Wonderful and honest examination of ethic jokes and is it ok for jokes to offend and upset and disturb us? This is a guy I would like to hang out with and have a few drinks and listen and tell some jokes. Lord, how I love a good joke and so does Ted Cohen!