Final Reading Post

For my last reading post of the semester I decided to go back and talk about one of my favorite books from this semester. If you had asked at the beginning of the class to predict my favorite book of the course I would have immediately said The 50 Funniest American Writers. Surprisingly the excerpt we read from only joking may have been my favorite and judging from the final presentations I think the rest of the class enjoyed it as well.

The reading refreshed my memory of all the theories of humor we had learned earlier in the semester but in a much more painless and humorous manner than Morreall. The theories of humor were one of the most interesting aspects of the entire class and provided a great base for everything we would look at for the rest of the semester. It was just difficult to get remain interested in the topic while reading Morreall. Only Joking was amusing and informative, exactly what I expected from a book about humor.

Only Joking also reinforced one of the other main points I learned during the semester, that the quickest way to kill a joke is by explaining why it’s funny. The authors of Only Joking pointed this out several times and would even warn the reader before they were going to dissect a joke and inevitably kill its humor. Most of the jokes they dissected were actually pretty funny but after reading about the same joke for several pages I was over it. My favorite part of the book was the jokes located at the bottom of every page. They were almost all hilarious and best of all I did not have to read an obvious explanation of why they were funny. These rare moments in the readings where a joke was left untouched and allowed to speak for itself provided the most genuine humor. While Morreall was still educational, I think it was more entertaining to read about the theories of humor as explained by two comedians.