Everand Logo

Welcome to Everand!

  • Discover millions of ebooks, audiobooks, and so much more with a free trial

    Only $11.99/month after trial. Cancel anytime.

    The Joker: A Memoir
    The Joker: A Memoir
    The Joker: A Memoir
    Audiobook11 hours

    The Joker: A Memoir

    Written by Andrew Hudgins

    Narrated by Jeff Cummings

    4/5

    ()

    Switch to ebook

    About this audiobook

    A funny and insightful memoir, called “raw and risky” by The New York Times Book Review, from an award-winning poet who tells the story of his life through the jokes he loves to tell.

    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 mis-taught him, how they often delighted him, but occasionally made him nervous with their delight in chaos and sometimes anger.

    Because Hudgins’s 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 up to him the serious taboo subjects that his family didn’t talk about openly—religion, race, sex, and death. The Joker is then both a memoir and a meditation on jokes and how they educated him, delighted him, and occasionally horrified him as he grew.

    The book received overwhelming praise in hardcover: “The writer’s uncanny recall for the adolescent jokes…helping the young wordsmith determine just how he felt about each of those taboo topics—makes it stand apart…Thoughtful and…amusing” (The Boston Globe); "Hudgins doesn't hold back in [this] rip-roaring memoir that examines how the ancient—and sometimes offensive—art of joke telling affects life, society, religion, and everything in between" (Entertainment Weekly); “If we’re lucky, [The Joker] will stir up an American dialogue about all kinds of fascinating, lurid, confounding, important subjects that reside in the great undertow of jokes” (Garden & Gun).

    LanguageEnglish
    PublisherBrilliance Audio
    Release dateJun 11, 2013
    ISBN9781480524095
    Author

    Andrew Hudgins

    ANDREW HUDGINS is the author of several books of poems, including Saints and Strangers, The Glass Hammer, and Ecstatic in the Poison. A finalist for the National Book Award and the Pulitzer Prize, he is a recipient of Guggenheim and National Endowment for the Arts fellowships as well as the Harper Lee Award. He is a professor emeritus of Ohio State University.

    Related to The Joker

    Related audiobooks

    Personal Memoirs For You

    View More
    View More

    Related podcast episodes

    Related articles

    • Article

      The Tomorrow Man

      Mar 10, 2022

      As a Boston-based psychoanalyst, I have met a number of interesting people. There was Marshall who believed that the world was about to be attacked by alien spores. Carson, who was convinced she had been impregnated by the president of the United Sta

      12 min read

    • Article

      Buyers: Beware

      Feb 14, 2021

      Buyers: Beware
      2 min read

    • Article

      On Imitation

      Feb 15, 2018

      The first time I stole, I was told it was wrong. It was borrowed from a Garfield cartoon—one character says, “Sticks and stones may break my bones, but words will never hurt me,” and then in the next panel, a dictionary falls on his head. I thought i

      6 min read

    • Article

      Goodbye to All That

      Dec 2, 2018

      Goodbye to All That
      10 min read

    • Article

      A Brilliant Visionary of Terrible Decisions: The Millions Interviews Catherine Baab-Muguira

      Oct 6, 2021

      Poe wasn’t some goofy, spooky mystery man spinning 19th-century torture fiction. Instead, all the stories were metaphors for the horrendous pain of living. The post A Brilliant Visionary of Terrible Decisions: The Millions Interviews Catherine Baab-M

      7 min read

    • Article

      After the Massacre

      Oct 7, 2017

      After the Massacre
      10 min read

    • Article

      American Guy

      Jun 28, 2023

      Be Mine By Richard Ford Bloomsbury £18.99 ‘When you're young, your opponent is the future. But when you're not young, your opponent's the past.’ Frank Bascombe came up with that fretful axiom in Independence Day (1995), the second of Richard Ford's n

      3 min read

    • Article

      A Sense Of Mischief

      Nov 20, 2023

      A Sense Of Mischief
      4 min read

    • Article

      Man About Town

      Oct 28, 2021

      AT THE BEGINNING OF THE MONTH, I burst my chains of domestic bondage, Samson-like, and escaped hotfoot to Soho to sip white wine with ruffians to celebrate Dan Jones’s excellent new book, Powers and Thrones. Jones is one of these prolific coves who c

      4 min read

    • Article

      Return Of The Bores

      Mar 9, 2022

      All bores are boring but not all boring people are bores. There are plenty of innocent folk who like nothing more than to share their anxieties about the village fête with you – and they’ll do it for 20 minutes you’ll never get back. Yet these are ju

      3 min read

    Related categories

    Reviews for The Joker

    4/5

    1 rating1 review

    What did you think?

    Tap to rate

    Review must be at least 10 words

    • 4/5
      *I received a free copy of The Joker: A Memoir from Goodreads' First Reads program.This book...is not for the easily offended. Jokes are everywhere, but there is also analysis behind the jokes and humor as a whole. Coming from a dysfunctional family, reading this book made my day!