JOKES A man walks into a pub with a roll of asphalt underneath his arm and says: 'A pint of lager please barman and one for the road.' A horse walks into a bar and the bartender asks: 'Why the long...

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The nine Army buddies came to this Panhandle town months ago to bury one of their best friends, killed by a roadside bomb while they were serving together in Iraq. They made a pact to return here as a way to honor their pal, and...

A humor editor who published books of jokes by Jay Leno and other comedians without their permission has apologized and agreed to pay hundreds of thousands of dollars in damages.Judy Brown and her publishers has settled the federal copyright infringement lawsuit filed on behalf of...

Twenty years ago, when the Critical Quarterly and I were young, and Milan Kundera was writing The Joke and wondering, no doubt, whether he would be allowed to publish it, it's very unlikely that I would have been asked, or, if asked, agreed, to write a critical article about a Czech novelist. The defiant, I-Like-It-Here provincialism of the Movement, the jealous guarding of the English Great Tradition by Leavis and his disciples, and the New Criticism's focus on stylistic nuance in literary te...

A follower of the tradition of the multiperspective novel in modern Czech fiction, Kundera made a substantial contribution to the development of its devices and functions. The story of The Joke is conveyed by four Ich-narrators. The chief narrator, Ludvík Jahn, is the main protagonist of the novel. Three secondary narrators, Helena, Jaroslav, and Kostka, all have (or had) a close relationship to Ludvík: Helena as his 'victim', Jaroslav as his old classmate, Kostka as his friend a...

[Philip Roth is credited with bringing Kundera's works to the attention of the English-speaking public. The essay from which this excerpt is taken was originally published as the introduction to Kundera's Laughable Loves, 1974.] I would think that … [Milan Kundera] would prefer to find a readership in the West that was not drawn to his fiction because he is a writer who is oppressed by a Communist regime, especially since Kundera's political novel. The Joke, happens to represent ...