Reading Jokes

You go to libraries and find jokes that they’re still using today.¹

—Johnny Carson

I time my jokes . . . in fact this is the tenth time for most of them.²

—Bob Hope

Most of my comedy is in the spaces.³

—Stewart Lee

The Joke Archive

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 example: we define timing as the secret of all jokes and also claim that jokes require a so-called comic distance. We dismiss some jokes as dated and define comedy itself as tragedy plus time.⁴ Professional comics used to begin by saying something like “a funny thing happened on the way here”; and when a joke fails, it is common to excuse it by saying “you had to be there.” Perhaps the oldest recorded story about laughter is that of Thales and the Thracian woman who scoffed when this first of Western philosophers stumbled into a ditch while contemplating the stars. This event, like slipping on a banana peel, could be laughable, or could take place at all, only because of the predicament of corporeal and spatial embodiment, the simple fact that life unfolds only spatially and temporally, step by step and moment by moment. When you stop to think about it, comedy’s whole relationship to time and space is strange. Some jokes seem almost impervious to distance and history—for example, the Philogelos, a Greek text from the third century CE, contains jokes strikingly similar to those told by professional comics in the twenty-first century. Yet some jokes, like dreams, seem to fade from memory just barely after the moment of their utterance, as fleeting as a burst of laughter.

Jacques Derrida refers to the play of time and space that makes possible all meaning and experience with the neologism différance, a French pun that combines the senses of two English verbs pertaining to space and time: “to differ” and “to defer.” In one early text Derrida defines différance as “the becoming-time of space and the becoming-space of time” (Derrida 1982, 8). This formula, however enigmatic it may sound, at one level does no more than respond to everyday experience as we commonly understand it. Without too violent a reduction and to get to the main point more quickly, let me dare to boil down Derrida’s argument to two crucial observations: (1) you have to be somewhere, but you can’t be in two places at once; and (2) we live only in time, but we can never be in any moment of “now.” Each moment or instant of time presents itself only to vanish forever, which means it can be perceived at all only if it leaves a mark or trace of some kind. This is how time “becomes” space, because its passing can be observed only as it traces itself spatially. Correspondingly, to move from place to place takes time; and even to be still requires the motion of blood in the veins, of neural impulses in the body, and so forth, all of which also require some passage of time, however small. This is how space “becomes” time. One might also name the play or economy of différance simply as “spacing,” a word that can also be used for time and that denotes a being never grounded and fixed but rather spaced or even spaced-out (a phrase whose inadvertent humor in this context I willingly embrace).⁵ I’ll suggest here that jokes illuminate, in a strange and vivid way, this movement of temporalization and spacing, this play of différance; and that the thought known as deconstruction correspondingly provides a distinctively useful approach, not only to jokes but to what is otherwise called comedy, humor, or the laughable.

But what is a joke? What is my object? To begin with, is there...