"The Joker - A Memoir," by Andrew Hudgins - NYTimes.com Have you heard the one about the poet who couldn't stop telling jokes, no matter how hoary, juvenile or offensive? Well, you're about to, because it's the subject of "The Joker," Andrew Hudgins's raw and risky account of a "need to laugh" that can seem "peculiar, immature and even socially corrosive to those who do not share it." As a memoir, the book is an odd duck in the pond of joke lit, which is populated mostly by psychologists like Freud, folklorists like Gershon Legman and cultural journalists like Jim Holt. Hudgins's method is straightforward: in chapters that read like free-standing essays, he confesses his love for a certain vein of inappropriate humor, furnishes several examples and ruminates on their therapeutic value in helping him to overcome some affliction (emotional, social, filial). The first chapter is a wonderful evocation of how he came to comedy as a child. At first, he did not understand jokes at all ("I was a single-minded little literalist"), but when he realized that "you could play with words, just as you played with marbles, yo-yos, kites and Matchbox cars," and that "jokes were toys made of words," it was off to the races. A military brat, Hudgins moved around a lot, and was often lonely. Pranks helped him make friends and displaced some of the discomfort of his home life, dominated by discipline and depression. His parents were grief-stricken at having lost a daughter before Hudgins was born: "Her death in a car accident, my mother at the wheel, was a wound too raw for words to touch. By their silence my parents tried to protect me and my brothers from knowing about death. Instead, we learned sorrow and fear. As he anatomizes his favorite gags, he finds a finer grain. "I learned to think about religion, race and sex through the complex and often unattractive medium of jokes," he writes. Jokes that take on taboos and poke fun at Helen Keller and dead babies, say, are a way of coming to terms with our limits and frailty; those about religion push back against the hypocrisy of the community. The one-liners he recounts can be familiar to the point of numbness - even classic ones about Helen Keller are marginally less funny the thousandth time - but he compensates by being especially good on the theatrics of jesting, particularly how people look while telling or listening to jokes. Midway through, the book takes a turn. Hudgins recalls a family gathering at which an uncle told a racist joke about a white man refusing to perform CPR on a black man. Hudgins's father is mortified and packs the family into the car, but his mother is amused. Hudgins himself is more circumspect. He grew up primarily in the American South, where there has never been a shortage of rhetoric about supposed differences between the races, much of it unspeakably venomous. Is a joke that wraps the truncheon of prejudice in a kind of pleasure any different? It's an excellent question, and as a result, the racist-joke portion carries over to a second chapter, and a third, and a fourth. Hudgins draws vivid portraits of his beloved grandmother, who was an unregenerate bigot, and his mother, whose racism was "a more evolved species." He describes how racist jokes were the glue in relationships with friends or lovers. Of his mother's fondness for such humor, he writes, "Because they are almost the only jokes I remember my mother telling, I cherish these jokes with guilty affection." There's even a disconcerting scene featuring Condoleezza Rice, then a star academic and the future provost at Stanford, who shows up at a party on campus and, upon overhearing a series of off-color jokes (or are they on-color?), contributes some of her own. One of the first riddles Hudgins heard as a boy was: "What's black and white and red all over?" There are multiple answers, each of which challenges his single-minded literalism: first a newspaper, then an embarrassed zebra. This book might be a third answer. Ben Greenman's latest books are "The Slippage" and, with Ahmir Thompson (better known as Questlove), "Mo" Meta Blues."