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Celebration of Southern Literature: A Chat with 'The Joker' Himself, Andrew Hudgins

This is part of a series of interviews conducted with writers who will attend the 2015Celebration of Southern Literature April 16-18.  (Previously, WUTC has interviewed Jill McCorkle, Ron Rash and several others.)  More than 40 writers will be at the Celebration, taking part in discussion panels and other events, as well as meeting fans and signing autographs.  The public is invited.  The schedule and ticket information can be found here.

Andrew Hudgins's first book of poetry, Saints and Strangers, was published in 1986 and was nominated for a Pulitzer Prize.  Another one of his poetry collections, The Never-Ending, was a National Book Award finalist.  But he begins his memoir The Joker with the following admission:

Although I’ve been a serious poet, a student of poetry, and a teacher of poetry for forty years, I can’t recite from memory ten consecutive lines of William Butler Yeats, Shakespeare, Emily Dickinson, or even Robert Frost, about whom I’m writing a book. But I can tell you the knock-knock jokes I heard when I was ten, all of them, and every week I still read Doodles, the children’s comic strip in the Sunday paper, just in case it runs a pun or knock-knock joke I don’t know. (“Q: What do you call a cow with two legs? A: Lean beef.”)

Since junior high, I’ve been a joker, a punster, a laugher—someone who will say almost anything for a laugh. I don’t mean the chuckle that greets the mild obligatory jokes that ease the congregation into the sermon or punctuate an after-dinner speech—though I enjoy those too. What I love is raucous gut laughter—the kind that earns angry stares from the tables near you in a restaurant and makes strangers in the mall exchange knowing looks about the prevalence of drug use among nearsighted middle-aged bald men in polo shirts and chinos. Laughing until you are weak, gasping, holding your sides, barely able to stand is like a drug. I have laughed until I have fallen on the floor in public places. I couldn’t have stopped myself if I wanted to, and I didn’t want to.

I love how jokes either work or don’t. You are either a funny man or a fool, and to my anguish I am often a fool. I live uneasily with the fact that my joking sometimes makes others uneasy: uneasiness is the spring of the jack-in-the-box.

   In this interview, Hudgins discusses his compulsive need to tell jokes (even inappropriate ones, at times); how jokes taught him about racism and religion; why he decided, in The Joker, to include offensive jokes he heard while growing up in the South; and more.  Also, he reads "I Saw My Shadow Walking," a poem from his latest collection, A Clown At Midnight.

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