Comedians Only Care About Comedy

I made that one up. Is it funny? I don’t think so. Nonetheless, it’s a joke. Or what Jesse David Fox, in his compendious, deeply considered, provoking, and rather dizzying new Comedy Book, calls a “joke-joke.” A verbal-conceptual circuit, an abstract frivolity. “Joke-jokes,” Fox writes, “are jokes you find in joke books. They’re freestanding, authorless, utilitarian tools to produce laughter.” Or if not laughter, then perhaps just a faint tickle in the forebrain, as of a very tiny problem, solved.