What do you get if you give a whale a cellphone? Moby Dick pics.
I made that one up. Is it funny? I don't think so. Nonetheless, it's a joke. Or what Jesse David Fox, in his compendious, deeply considered, provoking, and rather dizzying new Comedy Book, calls a "joke-joke." A verbal-conceptual circuit, an abstract frivolity. "Jokejokes," Fox writes, "are jokes you find in joke books. They're freestanding, authorless, utilitarian tools to produce laughter." Or if not laughter, then perhaps just a faint tickle in the forebrain, as of a very tiny problem, solved.
Fox, a comedy critic at New York magazine, is explaining joke-jokes to distinguish them from what comedians mean when they say "jokes"-comedy jokes which are bits, stories, ideas, images, moods, themes, words, basically anything that produces the comedy feeling, that does the thing that comedy is supposed to do.
Which is what, exactly? What's comedy for? Ah, well, now we're in it. Comedy is for jabbing us in our pleasure centers. For being nice by being nasty. For puncturing grandiosity. For relieving tension, creating tension, living in tension. It's for making us laugh, but then again-is it?
We are in a moment, comedywise. On the one hand, there's never been more of it-more specials, podcasts, comedy-generated discussions and debate and cultural flare-ups. There's a rhythm and an expertise about comedy criticism right now (Fox's very much included) that reminds me of good jazz writing from the '50s and '60s: savvy, insidery, immersed, excited, with its own developing vocabulary.
Denne historien er fra November 2023-utgaven av The Atlantic.
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Denne historien er fra November 2023-utgaven av The Atlantic.
Start din 7-dagers gratis prøveperiode på Magzter GOLD for å få tilgang til tusenvis av utvalgte premiumhistorier og 9000+ magasiner og aviser.
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Catching the Carjackers - On the road with an elite police unit as it combats a crime wave
On August 7, 2022, Shantise Summers arrived home from a night out with friends around 2:40 a.m. As she walked from her car toward her apartment in Oxon Hill, a Maryland neighborhood just southeast of Washington, D.C., she heard footsteps behind her. She turned and saw two men in ski masks. One put a gun to her face; she could feel the metal pressing against her chin. He demanded her phone, wallet, keys, and Apple Watch. She quickly handed them over, and they drove off in her 2019 Honda Accord.
The Most Remote Place in the World - Point Nemo is Earth's official "middle of nowhere." A lot seems to be going on there.
It’s called the “longest-swim problem”: If you had to drop someone at the place in the ocean farthest from any speck of land—the remotest spot on Earth—where would that place be? The answer, proposed only a few decades ago, is a location in the South Pacific with the coordinates 48 52.5291ᤩS 123 23.5116ᤩW: the “oceanic point of inaccessibility,” to use the formal name. It doesn’t get many visitors. But one morning last year, I met several people who had just come from there.
You Are Going to Die - Oliver Burkeman has become an unlikely self-help guru by reminding everyone of their mortality.
"The average human lifespan," Oliver Burkeman begins his 2021 megabest seller, Four Thousand Weeks: Time Management for Mortals, "is absurdly, terrifyingly, insultingly short." In that relatively brief period, he does not want you to maximize your output at work or optimize your leisure activities for supreme enjoyment. He does not want you to wake up at 5 a.m. or block out your schedule in a strictly labeled timeline.
Washington's Nightmare - Donald Trump is the tyrant the first president feared.
Last November, during a symposium at Mount Vernon on democracy, John Kelly, the retired Marine Corps general who served as Donald Trump's second chief of staff, spoke about George Washington's historic accomplishments— his leadership and victory in the Revolutionary War, his vision of what an American president should be. And then Kelly offered a simple, three-word summary of Washington's most important contribution to the nation he liberated.
The Elite College Students Who Can't Read Books - To read a book in college, it helps to have read a book in high school.
Nicholas Dames has taught Literature Humanities, Columbia University's required greatbooks course, since 1988. He loves the job, but it has changed. Over the past decade, students have become overwhelmed by the reading, College kids have never read everything they're assigned, of course, but this feels different. Dames's students now seem bewildered by the thought of finishing multiple books a semester. His colleagues have noticed the same problem.
What Zoya Sees
Long a fearless critic of Israeli society, since October 7 Zoya Cherkassky-Nnadi has made wrenching portraits of her nation's sufferingand become a target of protest.
Malcolm Gladwell, Meet Mark Zuckerberg
The writer’ insistence on ignoring the web is an even bigger blind spot today than it was when The Tipping Point came out.
Alan Hollinghurst's Lost England
In his new novel, the present isnt much better than the past—and its a lot less sexy.
Scent of a Man
In a new memoir, Al Pacino promises to reveal the person behind the actor. But is he holding something back?
THE RIGHT-WING PLAN TO MAKE EVERYONE AN INFORMANT
In Texas and elsewhere, new laws and policies have encouraged neighbors to report neighbors to the government.
