“Zizek’s Jokes” by Slavoj Zizek

This book also has contributions from Momus (who wrote an afterword) and Audun Mortensen. I assume the latter two actually put together this collection, but there isn’t a ton of information on that.

The gist of this book is that Zizek is a philosopher, political, and cultural critic. In this book, the editors pulled all of the instances he makes a joke or talks about a joke from his writings. He usually takes the jokes and uses them to illustrate a point, and very frequently he pulls from the same joke in multiple instances. The editors were great at classifying the same jokes together so you aren’t going through the same thing multiple times.

It's hard to classify this book because it can be hard to figure out exactly what Zizek is talking about without seeing the full work and the full context of the joke. But that also isn’t the point of this book, so I don’t want to fixate on that. To be honest, my favorite part was probably the afterword from Momus since that sheds light on how Zizek uses jokes and what his favorite one means. It was nice to get that extended context and analysis to know how to think about these excerpts.

I probably should have known this going in, but a lot of his jokes are pretty raunchy. Which in and of itself is fine, but it can slide really easily into misogyny which is less fun. I don’t know, I should have seen that coming but I also thought this would be more fun lighthearted jokes and not sex jokes all the time.

Anyways as a casual Zizek person (I’ve read some of his stuff, mostly articles and not full books) I found this to be entertaining if at times slightly inscrutable. It’s short and it doesn’t have the really dense sections that no one wants to read. So very little risked and very little rewarded.