by Andrew Hudgins, The Portland Oregonian, August 25, 2013
Every joker, Andrew Hudgins acknowledges, ought to take heed of Goethe’s observation that “Nothing shows a man’s character more than what he laughs at.” Nonetheless, Hudgins (a poet who teaches at Ohio State University) maintains that by telling jokes, including dead baby and Helen Keller jokes, and crude and cruel jokes about sex, religion and race, you can laugh at fate and the fragility of human existence, pretend to rise above them, and “strengthen your mind against your own vanishing.”