Here’s a book only a determined specialist will appreciate, for reasons amplified below. First published in Spanish as Humor en Serio in 1996 and reissued as En la Mira a decade later, Samuel Schmidt’s work appears here for the first time in English. Its greatest value is concentrated in the final two of its five chapters, “Political Jokes against Mexican Presidents,” and “Zedillo, Fox, and Calderón,” which contain a rich hoard of jokes, many of them wonderfully ribald, with a commentary that is often helpful in supplying context. The jacket copy and the blurbs assure readers that Schmidt is “Mexico’s leading authority on humor,” and these two sections come closest to justifying such a claim.

The volume’s shortcomings, and they are many, are centered in the translation, which is incompetent at even the most basic syntactic and grammatical level, let alone in matters of clarity and tone. Put into the fractured English of this edition, Schmidt often comes across as either incoherent or bizarrely pompous (or both). What is one to make, for example, of a sentence that opens with: “Refraining from ostentation, we...” (23)? Nothing good, in fact nothing unostentatious, can possibly follow such a start (think “I am extremely modest”). Another sentence, introducing a joke about Miguel de la Madrid, isn’t pompous, but nobody comfortable with English could write it: “Several jokes allude to his alleged cowardice, his boldlessness, and timidity” (157). In the first place, pick one. In the second, “boldlessness”?

At other times it’s the punctuation that goes awry, robbing the sentence of coherence: “The Mexican respects and fears, power, and authority” (80). Confusion of singular and plural undermines this one, although when the grammar is cleaned up, the sentence comes across as claiming that understanding contributes to understanding: “The understanding of political jokes contributes to the interpretation of its hidden political impact” (7).

At times the translation, in a book about humor, manages an unintentional comedy of its own, as in this self-swallowing utterance: “I’ve always liked to tell jokes to entertain my friends even more than usual” (5). Say what? “Always” sets a pretty high bar for “usual.” The grammar and syntax of the following are faultless, but tone is another matter:

“The period of 1940-1970 is considered a favorable economic and political time in Mexico. With the exception of some dramatic events, such as the violent prohibition of strikes, the assassination of peasant leaders, and the repression of social movements, these years are known as the Mexican miracle.” (136)

“With the exception”? Some miracle! This is structurally reminiscent of the “lost dog” joke where a poster offers the missing pet’s imposing list of afflictions as aids to recognition (blind, incontinent, missing hind leg, mange) before closing with “answers to Lucky.”

It’s easy to sympathize with poor Schmidt in all this. He’s the real victim here. The man doubts his own fluency enough to entrust another with his book’s translation and an English-language university press with its publication. Both let him down hard. It’s unfathomable that anyone billing himself as a translator produced this manuscript, or that anyone cashing checks as a copyeditor approved it for publication.

Schmidt’s basic approach is at great remove from folklore’s focus on oral traditions. Centering his attention on the creators of jokes (often from printed sources), he’s less interested in their circulation. In line with this approach he understands jokes as “elitelore” (10), and believes (though with some hesitation) that “there are more political jokes in a democratic system and that that number is drastically reduced in the totalitarian system” (49). My impression, almost thirty years ago in Eastern Europe (especially in Ceau?escu’s Romania), was very different. Schmidt’s bibliography is wide-ranging, but omits several often cited folkloric studies (Elliott Oring’s “Risky Business: Political Jokes Under Repressive Regimes” [2004] is among the most recent), leading to a serious (and self-serving) underestimation of available scholarship.

This volume, in sum, will be useful primarily to scholars with an interest in Mexican political jokes strong enough to fuel a determined slog through the translation’s muddy swamps. Its approaches to humor in general and jokes in particular are both inaccessibly presented and suspect in themselves.

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[Review length: 694 words • Review posted on October 1, 2014]