The Book of Jokes

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Overview

Imagine a universe where every joke you’ve ever heard is solid, real, and occasionally dangerous—and all happening, one after the other, to the same small group of people. Detailing a series of filthy and ludicrous episodes in the life of a single family, saddled with a super-eccentric, sexually rapacious father, The Book of Jokes tells the story of the youth and education of a bland young boy doomed to record—in an incongruously serious, autobiographical mode—all the ridiculous incidents befalling his household. With their lives dictated by set ups and punchlines, the boy’s family quickly becomes luridly dysfunctional, and he realizes that the only way to escape his tragicomic fate is by...

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Overview

Imagine a universe where every joke you’ve ever heard is solid, real, and occasionally dangerous—and all happening, one after the other, to the same small group of people. Detailing a series of filthy and ludicrous episodes in the life of a single family, saddled with a super-eccentric, sexually rapacious father, The Book of Jokes tells the story of the youth and education of a bland young boy doomed to record—in an incongruously serious, autobiographical mode—all the ridiculous incidents befalling his household. With their lives dictated by set ups and punchlines, the boy’s family quickly becomes luridly dysfunctional, and he realizes that the only way to escape his tragicomic fate is by trying to take control of the joke-telling himself. Channeling the spirits of Chaucer, Rabelais, Flann O’Brien, and Gian Francesco Poggio Bracciolini, the Vatican secretary who compiled the first known book of jokes in 1451, The Book of Jokes is a happy raspberry in the face of life as we know and tell it.

Editorial Reviews

Publishers Weekly

Known primarily for his avant-garde music, Momus (aka Nick Currie) proves that he is no slouch as fiction writer either, easily translating his iconoclastic vision to prose. The novel is a phantasmagorical ride through dirty jokes that, in Momus's twisted alternate reality, dictate the lives of a very unfortunate family. It's all here: bestiality, incest, rape, murder and combinations thereof, as if related in the locker room of a junior high. There is no clear narrative structure; the action meanders through anecdotes told by the narrator-sometimes a young boy, and sometimes his hugely endowed father-who lives in a glass house and is sometimes imprisoned with a pair known only as the Murderer and the Molester. The humor is dark and absurd and genuinely funny (though not for everyone), and the style is reminiscent of Naked Lunch, with puns and coarse jokes instead of caterpillars and otherworldly creatures. This strong and short novel, despite its uncompromising structure and style, is delightfully crude and never ever dull. (Sept.)

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Melody Maker
One of the UK's greatest and most underrated songwriters . . . ambivalent, challenging, confusing, disturbing.
Rolling Stone
Momus delights in wordplay like few others in contemporary pop, using wit as a formidable weapon against the tyranny of everyday banality.
The New Yorker
He lists Rabelais and Martial among his songwriting influences (with a side of Matthew Barney and Kubrick's "A Clockwork Orange"), and his music-from Brecht to Beck on Moog and simulated harpsichord-is suitably challenging . . . His songs, by the way, are quite dirty, as might be expected of someone who goes in for the Decameron too.

Product Details

  • ISBN-13: 9781564785619
  • Publisher: Dalkey Archive Press
  • Publication date: 9/15/2009
  • Pages: 200
  • Sales rank: 1,093,781
  • Series: British Literature Series
  • Product dimensions: 5.40 (w) x 7.90 (h) x 0.60 (d)

Meet the Author

Momus (aka Nick Currie) was born in Scotland in 1960. The son of a linguist, he began a career as a singer-songwriter in London in the mid-’80s, and has since released twenty albums of songs in styles ranging from chamber pop to exuberant folktronica, as well as working as an artist, and a journalist for Wired, The New York Times, and many other publications.

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