Reading Jokes
Scott Cutler Shershow
University of California, Davis
You go to libraries and find jokes that they’re still using today.
—Johnny Carson
I time my jokes ... in fact this is the tenth time for most of them.
—Bob Hope
Most of my comedy is in the spaces.
—Stewart Lee
T HE J OKE A RCHIVE
The idea that drives this study whispers its secret through many common
phrases and stories, in which the joke, and even comedy itself, seem always to
be placing and spacing themselves in time, or putting into play, as their very
condition of possibility, strange economies of retrospect and repetition. For
CR: The New Centennial Review, Vol. 21, No. 2, 2021, pp. 000–000. ISSN 1532-687X.
© 2021 Michigan State University Press. All rights reserved.
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