According to the press release from the publisher of Stop Me If You’ve Heard This, “there has never been a scholarly understanding of the perplexing and pleasing art” of telling jokes. In fact there have been many, several of them far better than this one. The publisher calls it “an unfailingly brilliant analysis of just what makes them so funny (or not).” Brilliant it ain’t.
You can not easily tell whether a joke is funny just from a text; too much depends on the narrative and theatrical skills of the teller. Jokes are an oral phenomenon and are composed by accretion as they spread by word of mouth. Often they are never written down, perhaps because of fear of censorship or because no one thought them worth preserving. This is why any account of jokes relying only on published sources is defective, and Mr. Holt can not be said to have toiled in a folklore archive, even though he must have known from Alan Dundes what and where they were.
Further, there are no agreed standards allowing one to decide that one joke or type of joke is funny and another is not. Tastes differ between individuals, social classes, eras, and cultures. You can not reduce funniness to questions of structure or cleverness, anymore than you can reduce judgments about paintings just to matters of technique, whatever the academicians may think. Mr. Holt’s distinctions between the funny and the unfunny