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The Joker: A Memoir by Andrew Hudgins (review)

First and foremost, Andrew Hudgins is a poet. His long poem, “After the Lost War” (1989), was instrumental in re-establishing the narrative form in postmodern American poetry, and several of his collections have won prestigious awards. Hudgins is a funny poet, though in his poetic humor, as in his memoir, the humor is dark, wry, and scathing. His collection Shut Up, You’re Fine: Instructive Poetry for Very, Very Bad Children (2009) exemplifies this approach, and A Clown at Midnight (2013), published simultaneously with The Joker, shows Hudgins at some of his darkest, though funniest moments. Even if you didn’t know that Hudgins is a poet, you would realize quickly that the book you are reading—this story of a life telling jokes to anyone who would listen—is not an academic study of humor. The prose is poetic and deeply aware of the close connection between the language of the joke and the language of the poem. For Hudgins, “the tension in jokes [provides] the friction to wordplay’s lubrication.” Jokes, like poems, “illuminate how we think” and underscore “the often irresolvable contradictions our lives are built on” (xxi). He examines the contradictions at the heart of his complex identity as an entertainer, a joker, a performance artist in a book that is honest, brave, funny, and at times, very sad. Humor often victimizes someone, and frequently it is the comedian, the jokester, the fool, who is the brunt of the joke. From the time he told his first joke at the age of 12 or 13, he was unable to stop telling jokes. He couldn’t control himself. His book tries to understand why (and how). At the same time, Hudgins’s memoir is a learned study of comedy and humor. He locates his analysis in a rich tradition of scholarship from Aristotle to Koestler, including St. Augustine, Bacon, Hobbes, Lamb, Twain, Nietzsche, Freud, Bergson, and Chesterton. Hudgins enjoys, particularly, “Goethe’s chilling judgment that ‘nothing shows a man’s character more than