Read Ebook {PDF EPUB} The Book of Jokes by Momus Authors for whom joking matters. For such a slim volume, Momus's debut novel The Book of Jokes is fat with disturbing and dirty jokes. No scatological gag is off limits, no sexual more left untouched: it is the kind of book that delights in the depraved, and revels in its recidivism. It's also very funny – assuming, of course, that you don't mind jokes about bestiality, incest and serial killers. Away from the pitilessness of its dark humour, The Book of Jokes does have a serious heart. Momus's characters are bound by the logic of jokes, by the means of situation, set-up and punchline. Therefore they are doomed to make the same mistakes, to repeat the same gags, the same catchphrases over and again. It's a tricksy postmodern conceit of which Flann O'Brien might well have approved – and one that raises questions about the use of jokes in novels. Momus suggests that investigating jokes, picking apart their logic, means that they no longer work. With Peter Skeleton desperate to escape a life being abused by his father, beaten by schoolchildren and watching his bus-driving grandfather kill ever more of his passengers, he takes control of the jokes, subverting them, but also repeating them so they no longer have the desired humorous effect. Which is a problem for all jokes, but especially ones included in novels with literary pretensions. In David Mitchell's Number9Dream, Masanobu Suga claims as his own the apocryphal story of a man calling an IT helpdesk in the middle of a power cut. It reads like, and to all intents and purposes is, a joke, but its power is completely dependent upon whether you've heard it before. If you know the punchline the whole thing is redundant; a tacked-on extra that adds nothing but a wearying sigh as you race to its end. No doubt, when he was writing, this seemed like a good way to introduce a little humour; but this is always a calculated gamble. Lorrie Moore whose long-awaited, and rapturously received novel, A Gate at the Stairs I read directly after Momus's book – gambles more than most writers in this regard. And though her novels and stories are far removed from Momus's postmodern bawdy, they are no less indebted to the importance of jokes. As Adam Mars-Jones highlighted in his piece on Moore's Collected Stories her somewhat wearying habit of always going for a punchline – and A Gate at the Stairs is no exception. Moore appears unable to stop telling jokes: puns, wordplay, simple, childish gags, her prose is stuffed full of them, larded with them, slathered with them. As if you didn't catch them, there are often exclamation marks to point out the humour! And every character is at it. Whether old or young, desperate or content, each one has a witty response to their situation – especially the parents of the central character, Tassie Keltjin, who barely seem to be able to pass the salt without making a wisecrack about it. The comedy is unrelenting, the jokes never-ending and rarely laugh-out-loud funny. And yet, by the end of a novel that alternated between intensely annoying me – Tassie is no more a convincing 20-year-old than Philip Roth is a convincing Paris Hilton impersonator – and utterly captivating me with its stunning writing and acute observations, I had come to realise that, just like Momus's book, the jokes were absolutely vital to the success of this novel. Tassie may not be wholly believable – she is too insightful, too widely knowledgeable yet too dimly aware of her own generation's cultural signposts to be realistic – but the interactions between Moore's characters certainly are. Far from the comedic mouthpieces they initially appeared to be, it soon becomes clear that these characters are joking not for literary effect, but simply because that's what people do – they joke, quip, make light of things, because that's how they make it through the day. Both Moore's and Momus's novels remind us of the power of jokes, of how they dominate conversations, and how they are used to ease people out of difficult moments, awkward situations and strange silences. It's something perhaps that serious fiction often forgets – that people, real people at least, do like a laugh. Flamed into being. I n a black-and-white snapshot taken at the Canongate Demarco Gallery in Edinburgh in 1980, the shamanic German artist Joseph Beuys delivers a lecture-cum-performance entitled "The Jimmy Boyle Days" to an audience of local artists, students and art teachers. Some are rapt, a few suspicious, others flagrantly bored. Most still sport the hair and fashions of the decade just gone by. But one figure stands out in the front row: a fair-haired youth of fey but awkward mien, in austere spectacles, heavy sweater and Doc Martens. He is Nick Currie, a 20-year-old Bowie- obsessed virgin and aspirant fop, a literature student with art-school envy and an urge to ingratiate himself into Scotland's post-punk scene. Within a few years, he will have reinvented himself as the louche and erudite singer Momus, and begun to describe an eccentric orbit of the pop world. Currie's career – if that is what it is – surely ranks among the oddest in pop; the Beuys photograph neatly captures his Zelig-like presence at the edge (or is it the heart?) of the culture. The suspiciously fragile and well-read singer-songwriter of the mid 1980s – schooled on Bowie, Brecht and Brel – was rapidly emboldened, and his lyrics frankly empurpled, by the influence of Serge Gainsbourg. In the 1990s, while others essayed unsubtle variations on his sound and sense, Currie almost gave up poised and sibilant perversion for a brief but lucrative tenure as songwriter to one of Japan's most successful pop stars, Kahimi Karie. His own records subsequently leaped from homemade techno-melancholia to trickster raids on folk, glitch-pop and synthesised "analogue baroque". Somewhere in the hall of mirrors of his current activities – Currie is also an art and design critic, blogger, lecturer, performance artist and, most recently, a novelist – there lounges one of pop's most scurrilous and brittle lyricists, still capable of raising blushes and laughter in the same breath. In a sense, the persona Currie contrived on his early records was born out of exactly the milieu pictured in that 1980 photograph: a self-conscious amalgam of a very British pop-lust, dreams of the continental avant-garde and the new, grey dawn of post-punk. If his records sometimes sounded like the Pet Shop Boys trying to describe Leonard Cohen, the Momus character (as also the fact of Currie's self-invention) was curiously indebted to the bruised and sly romantics of post-punk: Howard Devoto of Magazine, Billy Mackenzie of the Associates, Bid from the Monochrome Set. His first solo album (after a short stint as singer with the Happy Family) was released in 1986 on the impossibly arch and elegantly art-directed label El Records. Circus Maximus is for the most part a skewed reading of certain classical and biblical themes. The urgent, whispering Currie professes himself a masochistic St Sebastian ("preferring the ache to the aspirin") and sings of "The Rape of Lucretia" like a Morrissey who had not stopped at an enthusiasm for Oscar Wilde but mined the whole decadent tradition: Pater, Swinburne, Huysmans. Circus Maximus is an audacious debut, but still somehow a projection of the scholarly, retiring Nick Currie rather than the divinely scornful monster that is Momus. (The name is not only derived from the Greek god of satire and censure; there is also a Herr Momus in Kafka's The Castle .) An EP followed, on which the spirit of Brel pressed harder on Currie's delivery and lyrics. In "Three Wars", he recasts adolescence, middle age and decrepitude as scenes from the 20th century's great wars: "The first war begins with the testicles descending, / And desire assassinating the child that you once were." A second album, The Poison Boyfriend , was released in 1987. In "Flame Into Being", Currie flaunts his reading (in this case, John Berger and DH Lawrence) in a hymn to radical self-invention: "I'm in love with everyone who knows it's hard to build a way of seeing, / Who knows that nevertheless that's the only way to flame into being." It was on his 1988 album Tender Pervert , however, that Currie put the finishing touches to the Momus mask. A sort of ravaged innocence is the theme of several of its songs, their images shamelessly compiled from fragments of The Picture of Dorian Gray , André Gide's The Immoralist and Ian Buruma's A Japanese Mirror: Heroes and Villains of Japanese Culture . But even the least worldly of his characters evince a strain of gleeful cruelty, while icy parodies of contemporary chart pop (Prince, Pet Shop Boys) threaten to overwhelm the album's more delicate acoustic arrangements. Lyrically, Tender Pervert is conjured out of a world that is part fin-de-siècle exquisite, part 1980s mundane. As a satirist, Momus skewers precisely the Britain of the Thatcher years, with its Aids-panicked homophobia and left-wing musicians' feeble stabs at a cultural alternative. "Love on Ice" reimagines Torvill and Dean as gay martyrs. "I Was a Maoist Intellectual in the Music Industry" is the doleful memoir of a failed musical revolutionary: "My downfall came from being three things the working classes hated: / Agitated, organised and over-educated." But obvious satire was only one of the strings to Momus's faux-gilt bow; the more beguiling songs were those that conjured a world of decadence and near-depravity in which his frail protagonists were at once victims and perpetrators. The narrator of "In the Sanatorium" keeps his beloved institutionalised and enfeebled: "Half in love with easeful death / I cloud the mirror with your breath / Half in love with this disease / That keeps you close to me." "The Homosexual", meanwhile, concerns a heterosexual serial seducer who pretends that he is harmlessly gay: "I love women, but I take them by surprise / Pretending absolute indifference to their breasts and thighs." None of which should suggest that the early Momus records are merely eloquent and ironical, though a deliberate slightness and detachment is assuredly as much part of their allure as Currie's lyrical deviousness. At the same time, he clearly craved mainstream success, and for a time seemed as though he might achieve it with a series of singles – notably "The Hairstyle of the Devil", a radio hit in 1989 – that set his dandified wordplay against dance beats modelled on (or even sampled from) the Pet Shop Boys. Indeed, for a time Momus seemed to become a sort of para-Pet Shop Boys, replacing Neil Tennant's deadpan narratives of love and loss with lurid fantasias based on JG Ballard's Crash and paintings by Balthus. Momus records of the late 1980s and early 1990s sound as though they might have been huge hits, catapulting Currie from relative obscurity to the kind of outright adoration that, among the indie icons of that era, only Morrissey attracted. In truth, though, Momus was the anti-Morrissey. They may have shared some literary tastes and a morbid aggrandising of their own animosities towards the cultural mainstream, but Currie could never perform outright sincerity in the way that Morrissey could; in the end, he was too smart and too ambiguous. Still, by the mid-1990s, it seemed that Currie's faith in his own inauthenticity might have paid off, at least in terms of influence. Acts such as the Divine Comedy, Babybird and Belle and Sebastian all owed him much, though they rarely attained his metaphysical wit or risked his psychosexual complexity. Only Pulp, in the svelte, imperial phase that surrounded their 1995 album Different Class , came close. By that time, Currie had more or less abandoned the pose of haggard and lustful aesthete for a no less self-conscious (but lyrically much simpler) sci-fi aesthetic. Albums such as Voyager and Timelord saw him contriving a homemade digital sound that matched his tales of extraterrestrial ennui: the dandy Des Esseintes stranded at Tranquility Base. He himself seemed happily adrift under the new 1990s micromarketing regime, content to treat his cult status as a digital cottage industry. (He wrote rather presciently in 1991 that in the future everybody would be famous for 15 people.) By the end of the decade he had left London for Paris, then Tokyo and New York, before settling in recent years in Berlin. He has never stopped recording and performing – a new album, Joemus , a collaboration with the young Scottish musician Joe Howe, was released late last year – though lately his extra-musical activities have been more visible than his albums. For more than a decade, Momus has been a tireless and provocative presence on the internet; he was one of the first pop performers to blog with anything like articulacy, never mind elegance and wit. His essays and blog posts, which now appear daily, have covered everything from his own medical catastrophe (he lost the sight in one eye in the late 1990s) to the cultural motif of the Pierrot, the end of postmodernism to the aesthetics of tiling in Athens. If he tends (and intends) to infuriate with his consistent cultural opportunism – a long-standing erotic fascination with Japan invariably angers interlocutors on his blog – he is also a commentator of rare imagination and insight, even when one suspects his opinions are as changeable as his eccentric attire. For some time, his eyepatch and charity-shop get-up have been a familiar sight at the edges of the art world: he writes for several art magazines and has performed the role of "unreliable tour guide" at the Whitney Museum and elsewhere. What Currie has not been until now is a writer of books; his first, The Book of Scotlands , was published this summer. It's a typically playful volume: a numbered list of possible parallel nations, devised, he has said, in the hope of influencing the culture of a future independent Scotland. There is Scotland 166: "The Scotland in which four hundred years of profound influence from Calvin is replaced by four hundred years of profound influence from Calvino". And Scotland 870: "The Scotland in which every schoolchild can recite by heart the tabletalk of RD Laing". There is the Scotland (689) to which Alan Lomax and Alfred Kinsey travelled in 1954, intending "to compile data on Scottish masturbation". If The Book of Scotlands reads at times like a knowing amalgam of Calvino, Donald Barthelme and Georges Perec, it is also not wholly removed from the whimsical world of Ivor Cutler; one can quite imagine a future in which Momus grows older and odder and more essential in the same way. The second Momus book is out next month. The Book of Jokes is notionally a novel, in which one Sebastian Skeleton is forced to tell stories to a murderer and a molester who will otherwise set upon him. This Arabian Nights structure soon ramifies into a pattern of overlapping and invariably obscene tales: there is much violence, blasphemy and sex with innocent fowl. The Book of Jokes is perhaps not what enthusiasts of Tender Pervert might have imagined the neurasthenic troubadour might produce as he neared the age of 50: his youthful persona presaged either a turn to more rarefied literary pursuits or a slow and lurid decline in the Gainsbourg manner. But Currie's has so far been both a more mercurial and less evanescent career than one could have predicted. Having escaped fame on others' terms more than once, he seems singularly well placed to bend the mainstream to his frail, lewd, egomaniacal and tender visions. Joemus is available on Cherry Red. The Book of Jokes is published by Dalkey Archive. Momus will perform at Carousel: The Songs of Jacques Brel on 22 October at the Barbican, London. The Book of Jokes by Momus. Huw Nesbitt delves into the dark humour in the latest piece by writer, artist and musician Momus. According to British cultural critic Jonathan Meades, there exists an "Iron Curtain of Irony" in the United Kingdom that charts its course from Liverpool to just south of Grimsby. North of this division, he maintains, the idea of speaking against yourself — of saying the opposite of what you mean — is about as popular as Sydney Cooke. Of course, this statement is but another searing irony. What Meades is describing here (in form and substance) is one of the dominant modes of British humour; his delineation of an imaginary fault line in comic tastes used conversely to describe its shared nature through the deployment of the idiom itself — sarky British patter. Put bluntly, he's just taking the piss, folks, and in time-honoured fashion too. And Meades makes a good point here, because this fictional division is no more real than the idea that there's a totality of what constitutes humour. We may indeed share certain sensibilities when it comes to having a laugh, but in sharing them such totality becomes impossible, since ownership is never total. This too follows the very trajectory of aural gags; of dirty jokes told by old men in public houses that everyone knows the punchlines to but concede to hearing anew nonetheless. Humour, like fiction, is a landscape wrought by the friction of familiarly imagined subjects and imaginary settings. It may seem plausible, for example, that the chicken crossed the road. But for what purpose? And ultimately, why the fuck is the conclusion funny at all? These things are never fully explained. Comedy therefore occupies a truly opaque space, where its object is revealed at the end but never quite reasoned. It's a territory where delivery and timing rule supreme, and a site that Momus (also known as the Scottish musician Nick Currie) explores in The Book of Jokes , until very little is left uncharted. Or so it would seem. Confluence and ambiguity are all prevalent in this, Currie's second novel, narrated at turns by a paedophilic father called Sebastian Skeleton and his abused son, Peter. Here, the imaginary and the imagined conspire against the reader through its form, which is essentially a series of standard skits distorted into the original framework of a novel. This too, however becomes uncertain due to the similarity of the father and son's narrative purpose. On the one hand, the former is doomed to retrace his offence by agreeing to escape from prison with two men simply called the Molester and the Murderer, who form a glib pact to enact the crimes that they were incarcerated for, and so vindicate their original prison sentences, of which they believe themselves to be innocent. In the latter, Peter is condemned to recount his father's criminal perversion using jokes, which he explains away as some sort of grim psychiatrist's coping mechanism, based on the spiritual principle of Dharma. But is that really the purpose of humour? This is the question Momus raises and his answers are stark; or rather, obscene. To take a leaf from the stand up comic's handbook, there exists an unwritten rule in the trade that jokes about kiddy fiddlers are out of bounds. Yet this is exactly what Momus is gunning for here, and social transgression couldn't be further from his game. What this book is satirising is this duplicity of, on the one hand, maintaining that by making light of the world's ills we are able to understand them and find them less terrible and, on the other, telling us that certain things can never be laughed at, no matter how unreal we make them. But make no mistake — The Book of Jokes is not mere tatty pornography. Its target here is authority, not your own personal sense of decency. It is a piece of moral philosophising that takes aim at hypocrisy and fires at will with the deftness of Flann O'Brien's tongue and B.S. Johnson's imagination. In his 2005 documentary, Grizzly Man , Werner Herzog essentially suggested that the powerful should not avert their gaze, and Currie certainly does nothing of the sort here. If that upsets you, then you should probably avoid reading this tome and take to living underneath a rock. What's more, it's impressive that after nearly three decades of languishing in relative obscurity, Momus — an artist once better known for aping Brel, Bowie and Gainsbourg — has come to the forefront and written not just one of the most entertaining books of the last twelve months, but two; the other being The Book of Scotlands . Funny, then, that the only publishers interested in printing his work are American. And to think, we all thought the Yanks didn't understand sarcasm — more fool us. The Book of Jokes by Momus is published by Dalkey Archive Press and is available now. The Book of Jokes. Known primarily for his avant-garde music, Momus (aka Nick Currie) proves that he is no slouch as fiction writer either, easily translating his iconoclastic vision to prose. The novel is a phantasmagorical ride through dirty jokes that, in Momus’s twisted alternate reality, dictate the lives of a very unfortunate family. It’s all here: bestiality, incest, rape, murder and combinations thereof, as if related in the locker room of a junior high. There is no clear narrative structure; the action meanders through anecdotes told by the narrator—sometimes a young boy, and sometimes his hugely endowed father—who lives in a glass house and is sometimes imprisoned with a pair known only as the Murderer and the Molester. The humor is dark and absurd and genuinely funny (though not for everyone), and the style is reminiscent of Naked Lunch , with puns and coarse jokes instead of caterpillars and otherworldly creatures. This strong and short novel, despite its uncompromising structure and style, is delightfully crude and never ever dull. (Sept.) Vaguely Borgesian. My name is Sebastian Skeleton. This is my prison diary. In the exercise yard today I heard two men arguing about whether it’s possible for two men to be each other’s uncles. “Of course it is,” said one (a child molester). “No it isn’t,” said the other (a murderer). “Look, it’s possible for a man to have an uncle, right?” said the Molester. “Of course it is, I’m not disputing that,” answered the Murderer. “Then all I have to prove to you is that a man could have an uncle who was also his nephew.” “And how could that be?” the Murderer demanded. “Because he would be an uncle via one union, and a nephew via another.” The murderer, who wasn’t very bright, was quiet for a while as he tried to work out in his head whether this was possible or not. “I need a piece of paper,” he said. (p. 5) Jokes are often elaborate constructions, requiring a proper amount of buildup before its punchline is delivered. Jokes can be cruel, capricious creations, constructions that are designed to devastate one’s self-importance or to deflate another’s self-esteem. And yet we laugh, often at the harshest jokes of all, those involving life’s foibles. There is something fascinating about those jokes, where we can simultaneously feel close and distant to the object of those jokes. In his first novel, Scottish writer Momus explores those various facets of jokes in The Book of Jokes . Starring a family doomed to live their lives via all of the jokes that have ever been told. Remember a joke about pigfuckers? Guess what, the narrator and his family have lived it. Or how about the jokes involving a Murderer and a Molester in prison? Well, if you want to know the punchline to that one, you have to read The Book of Jokes to find out. The Book of Jokes is by its very nature a very atypical novel. There is barely anything that could be called a coherent plot; it is, on both the surface and deeper within, a story predicated on jokes and how such jokes are played out. There is a natural choppiness to this narrative, as the short, punchy chapters set up and execute various jokes. Sometimes the narrator is a son on the receiving end of a rapacious father’s hunger. Other times, there are some darkly humorous tales revolving around Scots, sheep, goats, incest, and cheesemaking. I have to confess that it is very difficult to review The Book of Jokes based on traditional criteria of plot (there is one, but it is contained within a concluding punchline), characterization (the characters are playing out roles in elaborate jokes, more or less), or theme (the joke’s the thing, and Hamlet would certainly agree). Perhaps this book is best judged by how well Momus executes these elaborate jokes. In that regard, The Book of Jokes mostly delivers. Although there are a few occasions where the setup or punchlines fall flat, for the most part, the jokes, cruel and mostly harmless alike, are delivered succinctly and with a proper amount of buildup and execution. The recurring characters/punching bags serve to give a sense of continuity to these jokes, with the end result of some jokes building upon previously-executed jokes. For those who enjoy humor, especially if it’s humor at the expense of others, The Book of Jokes will be just the tonic for them.