You call that a breakfast?

Adam Phillips

Jokes: Philosophical Thoughts on Joking Matters by Ted Cohen
Chicago, 99 pp, £10.50, November 1999, ISBN 0 226 11230 6

As there’s nothing you can do to a joke to make it funny, except tell it well, the telling of jokes can be a testing time for everyone involved. And once they’ve been told we rarely have conversations about whether or not they have worked. Good art makes us think and talk and write; good jokes just amuse us. Either we get them or we don’t; and when jokes are interpreted they begin to sound like bad jokes. In fact, when it comes to jokes, explanation and understanding are at odds with each other. If you get the joke you can explain it, but explaining a joke rarely makes anyone happy (you couldn’t have a book called ‘The Best Jokes Explained’). So the idea of someone being serious about jokes – wanting something from jokes besides what is patently on offer – is not, in the ordinary way of things, very enticing.

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Vol. 22 No. 4 · 17 February 2000 » Adam Phillips » You call that a breakfast? (print version)
Pages 14-15 | 3814 words

Letters

From Stephen Sedley

I thought you'd be inundated with letters correcting the psychiatrist joke which Adam Phillips quotes from Ted Cohen's book (LRB, 17 February). In Cohen's version, you remember, the patient has phoned the shrink about a dream in which he has committed every sex-crime in the Freudian calendar: 'I rang you as soon as I'd had breakfast.' 'What did you have?' 'Just coffee and toast.' 'You call that a breakfast?' The point, however, is that the patient has phoned the shrink and said: 'I dreamt you were my mother.'

Stephen Sedley
London WC1

From Alan Saunders

I suspect a certain crossing of wires in Stephen Sedley's correction of the psychiatrist joke as quoted by Adam Phillips from Ted Cohen's book (Letters, 30 March). The Cohen version – patient confesses to innumerable sex crimes, psychiatrist is concerned only with what he had for breakfast – is clearly a variant of the 'Apart from that, Mrs Lincoln, how did you enjoy the play?' gag. Sedley's is the version I know, but he underplays the subtle point that the mother in question is Jewish and that the psychiatrist's reply isn't 'You call that a breakfast?', but the much funnier 'That you call a breakfast?' Rhythm matters in jokes.

Alan Saunders
Sydney

From Stephen Sedley

The point, pace Alan Saunders (Letters, 13 April), is that the shrink is Jewish. But to give him the punchline 'That you call a breakfast' is to make him a Yiddish speaker. That's where the syntax comes from. It's not, or not just, a question of rhythm. As a Yiddish speaker, however, he'd be more likely to say: 'This' – dus – 'you call a breakfast.'

Stephen Sedley
London WC1