How ‘Truly Tasteless Jokes’ Became a Mainstream Hit

Willa Paskin: “The earliest joke book scholars know of is the Philogelos, which stands for laughter lover. It was written in ancient Greek and likely comes from the 4th or 5th century AD. The most extraordinary thing about it is just that it survived. There were likely hundreds of joke books compiled in ancient times, but they were lost because no one thought jokes were important. The Philogelos contains plenty of jokes, 45 of which you can read here, that don’t translate (a bunch have to do with lettuce, which was apparently considered an aphrodisiac) but it also contains an ancient version—I’m paraphrasing here—of the joke where one guy tells another he slept with his wife, and the husband replies, ‘I have to sleep with her, what’s your excuse?’”

WP: ”Joke books faded out in the Dark Ages, but were revived during the Renaissance and then became really popular throughout Europe; even Shakespeare refers to them. One of the most famous is a series of unrelated English books with a similar title: Joe Millers Jests. The jokes in the books were so reliably bad, a ‘Joe Miller’ became shorthand for a corny joke. You can read them in this version, available via Project Gutenberg.”

WP: “Jumping ahead a few centuries and a continent, I got interested in the relationship between offensive jokes and stand up comedy. In the 1950s, there was a whole new generation of stand up comics—Mort Sahl, Jonathan Winters, Lenny Bruce, Nichols & May—who despite having distinct styles, got lumped together as ‘sickniks,’ thanks to this article from Time magazine. The term referred to their so-called ‘sick comedy,’ which, in hindsight, seems to have been deemed sick because it commented on the real world.”

WP: “The king of the ‘sickniks’ was Lenny Bruce, who was famously arrested in 1961 on obscenity charges. In 1959 though, he appeared on Hugh Hefner’s Playboy Penthouse, a surprisingly classy affair, in which Bruce talks with Hefner about the sicknik moniker and obscenity, and cracks some jokes too.”

WP: “Starting in the mid 1960s, the rigid obscenity laws started to fall. One of the cases involved Louis Malle’s foreign film The Lovers, which had originally been banned, but in 1964, the courts deemed it could be shown in the United States. You can see the classy trailer for it on YouTube; it’s pretty funny to think not so long ago, this was not allowed in theaters.”

WP: “11 years after Lenny Bruce was arrested for including a controversial word in his act, and half a dozen after obscenity laws relax, the world had completely changed. Here’s George Carlin’s famous bit, from 1972, about the seven dirty words you can’t say on television.”

WP: “By the 1980s, the Truly Tasteless Jokes books arrived. I was really interested in trying to think not only about how these books look now—Bad!—but it how they looked then. And this New York Times piece from 1983, which ran on the front page, is pretty great for that: It’s a trend piece about ethnic jokes books (i.e. books with stereotypical ethnic and racist jokes) in which some people excoriate them, while others excuse them: ‘Any books that sell this well have to appeal to everyone,’ one bookseller tells the Times.”

WP: “In 1985 there was a straight to VHS special that was also called Truly Tasteless Jokes. It packaged some existing comedians’ sets and intercut them with patter from Andrew Dice Clay. Some of the sets are not so offensive, some of them, really are, but this one, from the comedian Marsha Warfield—who also appeared on the sitcom Night Court—is mostly just raunchy.”

WP: “The Truly Tasteless Jokes books were written, collected really, by ‘Blanche Knott’—but that’s a pen name. The author’s real name is Ashton Applewhite, and she wrote this piece coming out as Blanche for Harper’s in 2012.”

WP: “The comedians and filmmakers Jeff Cerulli and Matt Ritter made a documentary called Tasteless about Truly Tasteless Jokes, which they both first encountered as kids. They spoke to a number of comedians to think about the book and offensive jokes, and how our understanding of them has changed over time.”

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