800 Shakespeare in Jest (with Indira Ghose) | My Last Book with Nicholson Baker

Summary

Podcast Summary: The History of Literature – Episode 800

Title: Shakespeare in Jest (with Indira Ghose) | My Last Book with Nicholson Baker
Date: May 11, 2026
Host: Jacke Wilson
Guests: Indira Ghose (Professor, University of Fribourg), Nicholson Baker (author)

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Episode Overview

This milestone 800th episode takes a deep dive into Shakespeare’s humor with Indira Ghose, author of Shakespeare in Jest. Rather than simply explaining Shakespeare’s jokes, the discussion explores how the structures and purposes of his humor resonate—even when the jokes themselves might not easily translate for modern audiences. The episode further delves into how wit, satire, dark comedy, and the famous “wise fool” archetype traverse time from Elizabethan England to contemporary culture. At the end, author Nicholson Baker joins to share a profoundly personal answer to “What do you want your last book to be?”

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Key Discussion Points & Insights

1. The Problem with Explaining Jokes (03:00–05:00)

• Jacke Wilson asserts the futility of merely “explaining” Shakespeare’s jokes to modern audiences:

  "If you’re explaining a joke, you’re losing. But that doesn’t mean we can’t appreciate Shakespeare’s humor in a different way, in a more thoughtful way." (06:15)

• The approach is not to force laughter, but to understand humor’s mechanics and lasting impact.

2. Categories and Structures of Humor (08:00–10:00)

• Slapstick & Timeless Humor:

  • Classic slapstick—like slipping on a banana peel—has a universality, although it might lose freshness with expectation or repetition.

• Enduring Archetypes:

  • The undermining of the powerful by the witty servant; flirtatious, witty exchanges between men and women; banter that reveals deeper truths.

3. Shakespeare and the Evolution of Comedy (11:06–12:23)

• Indira Ghose:

  • The “mechanisms” of laughter persist from Roman jokes to Shakespeare and into today’s late-night television and stand-up.
  • Shakespeare’s legacy influenced modern comedy—his "wise fools" paved the way for the detached, ironic observers in our culture.

• Quote:

  "Stand-up comedy, I find, you can really trace back to the clowns and fools in Shakespeare's theater." (12:54, Indira Ghose)

4. The Iconic "Wise Fool" (13:51–15:28)

• Shakespeare’s “fools” were licensed to speak truth to power:

  "They were court jesters...allowed to make jokes when no one else was...to sort of instill sanity into the powerful. But Shakespeare hones that into a fine art..." (14:33, Indira Ghose)

• The link between these figures and modern satirists (e.g., late-night hosts).

5. Witty Women and the Battle of the Sexes (15:28–18:28)

• The “skirmish of wit” between men and women:

  • Beatrice and Benedick in Much Ado About Nothing as paradigm: competition and flirtation.
  • This dynamic persists in rom-coms and screwball comedies.

• Jacke:

  "It almost is like a built in plot...as time goes by, you start to realize, no, these two belong together. Nobody else could participate at this level of their wit." (16:57)

6. Humor as Defense Mechanism & Social Commentary (18:28–24:43)

• Witty women defy oppressive norms (chaste, silent, obedient):

  • Banter as resistance and self-defense (e.g., Beatrice’s wordplay on being “too cursed”).

• Indira Ghose:

  "There's a sort of an undercurrent that underpins the humor of the witty women, that they are defending themselves against stereotypes and sort of expectations of society." (19:32)

• Jest books and witty women:

  • The tradition of joke books (100 Merry Tales, 1526) featured women who routinely outwitted men; “by this ye may see that a woman's answer is never to seek”.

7. Jokes as Philosophical Critique (24:43–29:16)

• Sample jest from 100 Merry Tales (24:43–27:58):

  • The “souls dancing on a fingernail” story illustrates layered targets of satire: not just the “rustic” audience member but the theologians’ own abstruse debates.
  • The “moral” is tongue-in-cheek, showing early modern jokes’ sophistication.

• Cultivation and appreciation of wit spanned the elite, e.g., Thomas More and Erasmus.

8. Modern Examples & Stories about Shakespeare (31:43–33:39)

• Two of Jacke’s favorite Shakespeare-related stories:
  • Christopher Guest gifting Michael McKean Shakespeare’s works with a tongue-in-cheek inscription:

    “This is that writer I was telling you about. Chris.” (32:29)

  • The actor playing Hamlet, heckled during “To be or not to be,” retorts:

    “Hey, I didn’t write this shit, okay?” (33:13)

  • Both underscore the mythic stature and intimidating shadow Shakespeare casts on subsequent artists.

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9. Shakespeare’s Dark Humor (35:29–39:38)

• Once controversial (e.g., Voltaire and Coleridge criticized mixing comedy and tragedy), Shakespeare’s use of grim absurdity now resonates, especially since the 20th-century Theatre of the Absurd (e.g., Beckett).

• Notable quote:

  “As flies to wanton boys are we to the gods. They kill us for their sport.” (from King Lear, cited at 36:32)

• Such humor is seen as both nihilistic and life-affirming:

  “That’s the kind of humor that you do find in things like...Fargo or Pulp Fiction...in a meaningless world, that’s all we have to cope with terror and despair is to laugh.” (36:59, Indira Ghose)

10. Humor and Ethics (40:47–44:29)

• Historical suspicion of laughter:

  • Plato viewed laughter as inherently derisive.
  • Church fathers saw laughter as sinful, suited to the afterlife rather than the present.

• Today’s debates on “punching up/down” in comedy parallel ancient anxieties, but Ghose maintains:

  “Humor is about making fun of everything, whether up or down... It’s a flash of imagination that lightens up our world. But morality doesn’t really play a role.” (44:29, Indira Ghose)

11. Political Incorrectness & Coded Humor (46:22–47:34)

• Shakespeare’s jokes about nationalities, etc., use ambiguity and deniability:

  “When they were coded political jokes, they covered their tracks. And Shakespeare was particularly good at that...It was characters saying these things and these characters who were known to make jokes about everything anyway.” (46:43–47:13)

12. Renaissance Humanists and Humor’s Rehabilitation (47:34–51:55)

• Figures like Thomas More and Erasmus collected and celebrated wit, marrying piety with humor, paving the way for laughter’s philosophical acceptance.

• Rediscovered Aristotle’s tolerance for mixing pleasure and virtue.

13. Aristotle’s Lost Book on Comedy (51:51–54:48)

• Though Poetics on comedy is lost, Aristotle’s extant remarks shaped the tradition:

  • Laughter as a unique human function.
  • Comedy focuses not on pain/crime but folly and ignorance.
  • Shakespeare often broke these classical rules, infusing humor even into crime and darkness.

• Medieval tradition: laughter can “mock the devil”—an ancient validation of dark or irreverent humor.

14. The "Problem" of Shakespeare's Puns (54:48–57:38)

• Dr. Johnson and others criticized Shakespeare’s penchant for puns, but Ghose defends it:

  “This was a society that was in love with language...It’s just difficult for us to catch today. But that doesn’t mean at the time it was...spoiling the plot or whatever.” (55:53–57:38)

• Modern audiences struggle mostly due to language change—Shakespeare’s wordplay delighted his contemporaries.

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Notable Quotes

• Ghose:

  "Nothing has a shorter shelf life than humor. I mean, even jokes of the last generation we don't find funny anymore, do we?" (11:13)

• Wilson, on the myth of timeless laughter:

  "A pompous man is undermined by the witty remark of his servant. That's pretty timeless...banter between men and women...that's pretty timeless." (07:23)

• Ghose (on Jewish jokes):

  "...the very same joke could be using a stereotype about Jews to make fun of the idiots who fall for that kind of humor." (42:14)

• Ghose, on the function of laughter:

  "It's a moment of stepping outside your world and seeing things in an as-if world...a flash of imagination that lightens up our world." (44:59)

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Timestamps of Important Segments

• 03:00 – 06:30: Why explaining jokes fails; approach to Shakespeare’s humor
• 11:06 – 15:28: Discussion of “wise fools” and mechanisms of timeless humor
• 15:28 – 18:28: “Battle of the Sexes” – Beatrice/Benedick and witty women
• 24:43 – 29:16: “100 Merry Tales” and jest books; humor as social critique
• 31:43 – 33:39: Shakespeare anecdotes from Michael McKean/Christopher Guest and Hamlet performance
• 35:29 – 39:38: Shakespeare’s dark humor and its modern echoes
• 40:47 – 44:29: Ethics, mockery, and historic suspicion of laughter
• 51:51 – 54:48: Aristotle, lost Comedy, and medieval laughter
• 59:06 – 66:29: “My Last Book” – Nicholson Baker interview segment

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Memorable Moments (with Timestamps)

1. Michael McKean's Gifted Shakespeare Book

   “This is that writer I was telling you about.” – Christopher Guest (32:29)

2. Hamlet Actor Breaking Character

   “Hey, I didn’t write this shit, okay?” (33:13)

3. Dark Humor in Hamlet

   “He’s at supper not where he eats, but where he’s eaten…there’s this huge convocation of worms who are munching their way through him.” (38:11, Indira Ghose on Hamlet)

4. Nicholson Baker’s “My Last Book” Response

   “It’s actually, I’m looking at it right now. It’s on a shelf in my office, clipped together all the emails printed out…It’s a book that she wrote.” (60:38)

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Nicholson Baker: "My Last Book" (59:06–66:29)

A moving and intimate discussion where Baker reveals that he would choose a collection of personal emails written by his wife as his last book—unpublished and deeply meaningful—rather than a famous classic. Jacke shares a similar sentiment about a book made from emails to his children, reflecting on the personal over the canonical.

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Conclusion

Episode 800 offers a rich, multilayered exploration of not just Shakespearean humor, but the very nature of laughter, wit, and satire across generations. Ghose and Wilson dissect why some forms of humor endure, how subversion and social commentary are built into comedic traditions, and why the sharp, witty banter and dark comedy of Shakespeare’s plays still speak to us. Baker's poignant appearance closes the episode on a note of literary intimacy, reminding listeners that the most precious books may be those closest to the heart.

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Recommended For:
Anyone interested in Shakespeare, comedy theory, literature’s cultural influence, or the personal significance of books and storytelling.

Listen If You Like: Thoughtful, in-depth literary history, witty banter, and personal stories that underscore why literature matters.

Transcript

[Jack Wilson]

The History of Literature Podcast is a member of the podglomerate Network and Lit Hub Radio.

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[Jack Wilson]

Hello. Today on the podcast it's episode 800. We talk to the delightful Indira Ghosh about the humor in Shakespeare and what it means. I share two of my favorite Shakespeare jokes or humorous anecdotes. And we have a my last book with Nicholson Baker. That's all coming up today on the history of literature. Okay, here we go. Thank you for joining me. Welcome to the podcast. I'm Jack Wilson. Episode 800 I knew I wanted it to be special. That's a big round number. And the episode is going to be special. But let me tell you what it's not. This is not an episode where we say, hey guys, guess what? Shakespeare is actually funny. Trust us. Here are 10 of his jokes. Now let me explain them all so you can see just how funny they are. We have something similar coming up where we wrestle with Jonathan Swift's satire. You can imagine saying, oh boy, this satire of his is really biting. He really lets so and so have it. But First, a quick 10 minutes on Irish English relations in the early 18th century so you'll understand the satire. Oh, and and I should tell you about some Socioeconomic legislation that was being considered. We're getting to the satire soon, I promise. And I guess you kind of have to know about these three politicians first. Let me explain who they were. You see what I mean? The you had to be there approach. Maybe for satire, that's worth. That works. Maybe it's worth diving into the history so we understand it. But for humor, it's hard to say that the juice is worth the squeeze. It's all a long way of saying, basically, the common expression among comedians. If you're explaining a joke, you're losing. But that doesn't mean we can't appreciate Shakespeare's humor in a different way, in a more thoughtful way. And that's what this book is about. Here's a quote from the book Shakespeare in Jest, written by today's guest. This book argues that even if today we mightn't find many of Shakespeare's jokes funny, taking a closer look at his humor helps us understand how comedy works in contemporary life. That's what I love. That's what I love about literature and about this approach to literature. We know people did find these gags funny. We might need them explained. But we're not trying to learn enough about the context in order to laugh as if we're Elizabethans watching a play. We're analyzing the underlying structures of humor, the types of humor that we probably recognize. Some are obvious. A man slips on a banana peel, that's probably timeless for a laugh. Slapstick humor. Put that in a play in 1200 or 1600 or 2000, in 2026, someone will probably laugh if it's done well. It would be interesting to know if there was a society that did not laugh at an unexpected prat fall. Although I guess even as I say that, I should say we might not laugh at someone slipping on a banana peel if it's in a play, because it might seem too expected. We. We say, oh, we saw him drop that banana pail. We knew it was coming, but we would laugh in real life, I can tell you that much. I did see that happen once, and it was very funny. Both because the guy did the splits, no pun intended, and it looked awkward, but also because my friend immediately recognized what happened. And he doubled over and he couldn't talk and he finally squeaked out, you just slipped on a banana peel. It's like stepping on a rake. You see that in real life. Or if it happens to you, it's worse if you're living out the cliche. But slapstick isn't the only Type of humor that has a claim to be universal. How about this? A pompous man is undermined by the witty remark of his servant. That's pretty timeless. Banter between men and women, flirtatious banter, little put downs, little moments between them. That's pretty timeless. So that's what we're going to discuss today. The types of humor that we find in Shakespeare and what we can learn from them today. Okay, I realize that some of you might have come to this episode thinking that we were going to hear the funniest lines in Shakespeare or something similar. You might have have come here to laugh and instead we're doing the usual thing where my guest is going to go deep into something very smart and I will be scrambling to keep up. It's a little like Martin Scorsese who was asked why his film the King of Comedy, which is a wonderful film, actually great film, one of Scorsese's best. Scorsese was asked why the film flopped at the box office. Do you know this film, people? Jerry Lewis plays a late night talk show host who is stalked by a couple of obsessed fans. Rupert Pupkin, who is played by Robert De Niro and Sandra Bernhardt plays the other one, the other fan. And Scorsese said, well, I think I set the audience up for a bit of disappointment. That's why it didn't do well at the box office. It was a movie that had the word comedy in the title and Jerry Lewis is in it and it's not a comedy. Well, end quote. I hope that's not what happened here. And I hope that when I say I've got a couple of Shakespeare jokes for you, I don't mislead you into what that is either. These are just two of my favorite Shakespeare stories. They make me laugh. They're about Shakespeare. I don't know if they're jokes exactly, but once again I feel the sting of having failed at something in the past. This is the kind of thing that really bothered me. I don't know why, but in fourth grade I checked out a book from the school library. It was called the Abraham Lincoln Joke Book. It compiled many humorous things that Abraham Lincoln had said and done over the years. He was a great ironist. He had a lightning wit and so on. He could tell a good story. Very humorous. And a teacher, not my teacher, but another teacher, saw the book in my hand and she said, abraham Lincoln choke book. That poor man. She was rather a large woman, especially compared with skinny nine year old me. She had a booming voice and I tried to explain that this was not a book of jokes about Abraham Lincoln, but one of it was a book of jokes that he himself told. It was reverential toward him, not making him the object of jokes. But as I tried to explain this, she said something like, how would you like it if someone 100 years from now made a bunch of jokes about you and put them in a book? And then she put up her hand, not wanting to hear my protests, and she said, you wouldn't like it at all. Then she walked away down the hall while my face burned with anguish and frustration. So these are not jokes where we say, hey, Shakespeare talks too much, or he's too addicted to puns. These are humorous stories that are about the phenomenon of Shakespeare being the greatest writer in the English language and what that means for the rest of us mere mortals. I'll deliver those during our intermission, but first, Indira Ghosh. Okay. Joining me now is Indira Ghosh, an emeritus professor of English at the University of Fribor in Switzerland. She previously joined us to discuss her book A Defense of Civility and the Theater in Early Modern England. She's here today to discuss her work on Shakespeare and humor, a topic she's written about a few times, including in her book Shakespeare in Jest. Indira Ghosh, welcome back to the history of literature.

[Indira Ghosh]

Thank you for having me.

[Jack Wilson]

So I wanted to tell you a little bit about what I'm planning to talk about before we run this discussion. In the introduction to this episode, I'm planning to talk a little bit about hum, and why it doesn't endure across time necessarily. There's a whole discourse around Shakespeare and comedy. And you talk about this at the start of your book that basically says, well, you know what, Shakespeare's actually funny. We just need to explain the jokes to you. And that's not what your book or what this discussion is about. Instead, I see it as more like, well, granted, humor needs context and we would need to explain it if we want to laugh along with Shakespeare. But let's examine how he was funny, what made a joke a joke to him, and see if those categories of humor are new to Shakespeare and how they might compare with the present day. So how much of our humor can we trace back to Shakespeare to see if the types of things that he set forth for Elizabethan audiences to laugh at and appreciate track with the kinds of humor that we see today. Does that sound good to you?

[Indira Ghosh]

That sounds perfect. In fact, I don't want to go into explaining jokes because I think that's the worst thing, you kill off a joke.

[Jack Wilson]

Right. Jokes with footnotes is not where you want to be.

[Indira Ghosh]

No, no, it's. I mean, nothing has a shorter shelf life than humor. I mean, even jokes of the last generation we don't find funny anymore, do we?

[Jack Wilson]

Right, right.

[Indira Ghosh]

And young people probably don't find our jokes funny and so on.

[Jack Wilson]

Well, speak for yourself, ind. I'm sure they are laughing at all of my references. And every time that I quote a movie from the 1980s, they nod knowingly and think about how current and hip I am.

[Indira Ghosh]

Okay. Present company excluded.

[Jack Wilson]

Okay, so let's look a little bit before Shakespeare so we can see what he was dealing with. And maybe we should start with some of the Renaissance theories of humor, where they came from and how much was inherited from other sources like ancient Greece and Rome. So what did, what did, I mean, how did the, how did people in the Renaissance talk about humor?

[Indira Ghosh]

Well, actually, I'd first like to go back to the point you were making about what Shakespeare's humor has to do with today's humor. And there I do find quite not the same jokes that. But the mechanisms, what makes people laugh, those are pretty similar, whether it's, you know, Roman jokes or Shakespeare's jokes or today's jokes. And I think Shakespeare's humor particularly had an effect on today's humor because he has this iconic status. For instance, you find that today's entertainment or the entertainment of our century and the last century has been decisively influence a stand up comedy. I find you can really trace back to the clowns and fools in Shakespeare's theater or in my book, I look at some of these late night show hosts and they have quite a bit in common with Shakespeare's wise fools, you know, who were sort of detached, ironic commentators on the absurdity of the world. And then there's Shakespeare's dark humor, which we find increasingly current today. And things like not just theater of the absurd, but even in films like Pulp Fiction and Fargo and so on. So it's the mechanisms of humor, the kind of things it taps into, which I think have endured particularly well in the case of Shakespeare.

[Jack Wilson]

Right, okay. So I was going to build up to that, but let's just go into that more now. You mentioned kind of the wise fool. And presumably since it's so interesting to me that kings were somebody who had gestures around and the late night talk show hosts are a good example, their main source of humor, the object of their jokes is often people in power. And so we can kind of see there, okay, Here's a form of humor, somebody who is there to tweak the king or make fun of, somebody who everybody recognizes has a bunch of power over the rest of us.

[Indira Ghosh]

And that goes back to these wise fools who were basically Shakespeare's invention. I mean, they were court jesters. That's an old tradition that goes back. Even the Romans had jesters, but whose job was. I mean, they were called licensed fools. They were allowed to make jokes when no one else was allowed to make jokes. And in fact, it was their job to sort of instill sanity into the powerful. But Shakespeare hones that into a fine art with his string of wise fools. And this ironic, detached observation of the world is something which I think is typical of Shakespeare and for which he's famous. And that's something we do find in, you know, in today's satirists or late night shows or standup comedians or people like that.

[Jack Wilson]

Right. Okay, let's talk about another category which I really associate with Shakespeare. Seduction gambit.

[Indira Ghosh]

Yes. That relates to these smart young people jesting or making in, particularly in the comedies and their jokes. I mean, it's the, the, the traditional idea of battle of the sexes that still appeals to us today. Look at, you know, rom coms today or classics like when. When Harry Met Sally or.

[Jack Wilson]

Yeah.

[Indira Ghosh]

Or what have you, or screwball comedies, you know, the 30s and 40s with Katharine Hepburn and Spencer Tracy or Humphrey Bogart and Lauren Bacall or that this idea of men and women in a skirmish of wit is something that has always appealed to audiences. And Shakespeare is famous for these young couples, particularly, for instance, Beatrice and Benedick.

[Jack Wilson]

Yeah.

[Indira Ghosh]

And Machadou, but nothing. Who are engaged in a merry war of wit. And it's partly competition and it's partly flirtation. And that's. Yeah, that's very appealing. And that's something he makes, you know, which he's very good at. His competitor, Shakespeare's competitors are better at other things like, say, satirical comedies. But Shakespeare's particularly famous, was at the time already famous for romantic comedies. That was where he made his name. Yeah.

[Jack Wilson]

What I love about that example of Beatrice and Benedict is it also, it almost is like a built in plot because you have these two who are, you know, jousting with one another socially. They're in this, in this back and forth and this witty repartee. And as time goes by, you, first of all, you have this built in obstacle that, oh, these two hate each other. Right. They can't, they can't get away from mocking each Other. But as time goes by, you start to realize, no, these two belong together. Nobody else could participate at this level of their wit. And you see that in movies like His Girl Friday and movies like that, where the two main characters are so fast and their wit is so appealing, and we like them both. And then we think, well, these other people around them would be kind of dull for them to wind up with. We want these two to wind up together precisely.

[Indira Ghosh]

Even though, as you said, we think that they actually hate each other. And they tell us that they hate each other, but we secretly think. And people watching them also come to the conclusion, and these people actually belong together, which is what the plot of Much Ado About Nothing is. You know, a part of the plot is a. Is about that their friends are watching and saying, you know, we need to put these two in touch with each other. We need to sort of trap them into. Into falling in love with each other.

[Jack Wilson]

Okay? Another example is that humor can be used as a defense mechanism. And we see this with. In life a lot of times. We see this with the class clown, or there's bullies, but there's somebody who's about to get beat up, but he knows how to make the bullies laugh, or he knows how to make the people around the bullies laugh, and he can defuse the situation like that. And it sounds like you're tracing that back to Shakespeare as well.

[Indira Ghosh]

Well, I think you find that with the women, particularly the witty women, who are always at a disadvantage in. And who always have to fight against these very oppressive gender norms, what they're expected to say or not to say. In fact, they were not expected to say much anyway, that the ideal was for a woman to be. There were three things which were important above all. That was to be chaste, silent and obedient.

[Jack Wilson]

Yeah.

[Indira Ghosh]

And there Shakespeare is putting some of the wittiest characters on stage who are women. And these women are clearly fighting against, you know, the expectations, the norms of their society. There's this one scene, for instance, in Much Ado About Nothing, where Beatrice's uncle, who's Leonato, who's actually, you know, fond of her, but he does warn her, you know, girl, you're never going to find a husband that way because you're what he calls too cursed. That means you're too bad tempered and too mean to find a husband. And she turns that into a joke. And she. She plays on the word two, as in the number two, and she says, well, maybe I'll have, like a cow. I'll have two horns. And that will stop everyone else from. That'll be my defense, you know, so they are. This defense mechanism is something, I think you see a sort of an undercurrent, a less funny undercurrent that underpins the humor of the witty women, that they are defending themselves against stereotypes and sort of expectations of society.

[Jack Wilson]

It is really fascinating that Shakespeare did this and did this so often and did this to such a, such an extreme. As you note, it's a society in which eloquence in women was frowned upon. And yet I can't imagine Shakespeare without having these witty women. Some of his most witty, wittiest characters are women. Why do you think he did that? I mean, you could imagine a playwright saying, well, if I do this, I might lose the audience. They might walk out on me because this is not what they want to hear. But instead he seemed to, I mean, did he just love his characters to be as smart as possible, including the women? Or do you think he was trying to skewer some of these pompous men who were insisting that women should be silent? Or do you, what do you think he did? Why do you think he did it? Or should the question be what does it do for the plays?

[Indira Ghosh]

No, I think you're quite right to ask why did he do it? But I think we need to see it in a larger context. There's the theory and there's reality. So the theory was women were supposed to be chaste, silent and obedient. I think in reality, like in every society, there were plenty of quick witted women around. But it's not just in Shakespeare, Shakespeare's plays. If you look at a sort of much cruder form of humor jest books, it's full of witty women, women who could, you know, give just as good as they got. In fact, jest books, which are supposed to be misogynistic and so on, and if you look at them carefully in most of the jokes, the women win hands down. It's a sort of running gag, in fact, that women are not only notoriously talkative, but they're smarter than men, sort of ingesting. So in one of these first jest books called 100 Merry Tales, one of the taglines they used to have, you know, taglines under the jests giving the moral. And one of the taglines that keeps popping up is by this ye may see that a woman's answer is never to seek. So in other words, it's not a good idea to argue with a woman. You're sure to lose your face. So this is something people. I think, in society there would have been. There would have been not only plenty of witty women, but also an awareness that there were plenty of witty women and plenty of people, including, you know, men and other women who appreciated that. I don't think this was Shakespeare's plan to shock audiences. He was catering to a demand. These were hugely popular. And there were women in the audience too. And men laughed at these jokes too. You know, men laugh at jokes for. For different reasons than for. You often enjoy jokes about other people being put into place, you know. You know.

[Jack Wilson]

Yeah, that. That really seems like the key. So many of. Of Shakespeare's, the humorous situations are a man strides onto the stage and he's, you know, dressed in. In finery, and we know that he is a very important person and then somebody comes along to take him down a peg.

[Indira Ghosh]

Exactly, exactly. And in the case of these jest books, for instance, just to stay there for a minute, they were enormously popular amongst young men, and young men were unmarried men. And they often loved to watch, you know, the jokes about how married men are being out tricked by their wives and they thought of their bosses and their fathers and older men around them and just chortled along with the joke for different reasons than we might think. You know, they didn't see themselves as men, but they thought themselves as men against these older men. So there are all these different things going on in, you know, who laughs about jokes? It's never as clear cut as that. So I think we can definitely conclude that witty women was something that was in demand with audiences.

[Jack Wilson]

If you will indulge me. Since you brought up 100 merry tales, I wanted to share a story and I've got it here, so I'll just read it out. So this is the first English jest book and it came out 500 years ago this year in 1526. And I just loved it because it felt so modern to me. Not only the story, but then the little punchline, you know, when they have the. As you said, they've. They have a little anecdote, a humorous anecdote, and then they'll have what is supposed to be the moral that we take away from it. Almost like you see that in Aesop's Fables and things like that, where they'll have the, you know, the story, and then they'll say something like, as you see, it is better to be steady and win the race than it is to be fast and fall asleep or whatever it is like the moral Is the moral of the story is X. And instead what they put forth as the moral is clearly part of the joke. Yes, and it felt so modern to me. So here's the one that I copied over from your book. So this is from 100 Merry Tales. A preacher in the pulpit which preached the word of God and among other matters, spoke of men's souls and said they were so marvelous and so subtle that a thousand souls might dance in the space of a nail of a man's finger, among which audience there was a merry, conceited fellow of small devotion that answered and said thus, master doctor, if that a thousand souls may dance on a man's nail, I pray you tell, then where shall the piper stand? And then the little moral of it is, by this tale a man may see that it is but folly to show or to teach virtue to them that have no pleasure nor mind, nor there too. And I just loved it. It felt so modern. Because clearly it's making fun of the seriousness of the preachers, and we've talked about that already, the seriousness of the. Of the duke or. Or whoever it is who's coming out and has some pomposity built into them. But it's also making fun of it. It seems like it's going to be making fun of this more rustic audience member who asks a question in the middle of a discourse on how many souls can stand on a man's fingernail. But you see, like, who's the fool here? The one who's asking a silly question, or the one who's focused on something that is itself kind of ridiculous. How many souls can dance on a finger? And then the tagline makes fun of the whole project of trying to find virtue in this by saying, the problem is you can't teach virtue to people who are too dumb to get it. But what is this doctrinal question of a thousand souls dancing on a fingernail is kind of absurd in the first place. And pointing out the absurdity is wiser than it is foolish. And so it really felt to me like 500 years have gone by. And yet I can appreciate this as if it had been written last month about somebody who was asking a question in church.

[Indira Ghosh]

Well, I'm delighted because it's one of my favorites, too, and it was one of the favorites, too, of, you know, some of the cleverest men in the realm. It's not as if jokes was just something for the vulgar, or jest books was for the vulgar. They were actually cultivated by people like Thomas More and Erasmus. And, you know the most educated people in the kingdom, and they love these jokes because they actually collected jokes because they like to make fun of, as you said, the kind of abstruse theological arguments with which the generation of theologians they were making fun of, the medieval scholastics were concerned. And they were really concerned with questions like, you know, how many angels do this and that? You know, literalism? And these jokes just point out how absurd it is to take these questions literally instead of figuratively. And so many of these jokes are actually very clever because they sort of play with language and with paradox and with logic and they're tongue in cheek. And I suppose that's the kind of thing that people like Erasmus and Thomas More loved about them.

[Jack Wilson]

Okay, let's take a quick break and come back with more from Indira Ghosh

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[Jack Wilson]

Okay, this is Jack. We're taking a break from our conversation with Indira Ghosh. I promised you a couple of humorous stories about Shakespeare. The first was told by Michael McKeon of Spinal Tap and Laverne and Shirley and Better Call Saul and many other classics. One of my favorite actors and comedians and a frequent collaborator with Christopher Guest. Another hero of mine, Michael McKeon, is lead singer David St. Hubbins to Christopher Guest's guitarist Nigel Tufnell. If you've ever seen Spinal tap. Anyway, Michael McKeon said that for his birthday one year, Christopher Guest gave him a handsome edition of the collected works of William Shakespeare. And inside the book he had written. Dear Michael, happy birthday. This is that writer I was telling you about. Chris. This is that writer I was telling you about. Shakespeare.

[Indira Ghosh]

That guy.

[Jack Wilson]

Okay, here's the second story. I just heard this one recently in the context of actors who love to blame writers or directors or anyone else for their performance. Blame the audience? Why not? Why? Why didn't this thing I was doing play very well? Well, it wasn't me, it was the material. Maybe it's too difficult for actors to face the idea that people don't like them. They're very exposed up there on the stage, very vulnerable. When Sally Field said at the Oscars, you like me, it probably spoke for a lot of Hollywood that you really are wondering, do people like me? And when your big movie comes out and it's a flop, people interpret that as, well, the public doesn't like him or doesn't like her. To think of it from the actor's point of view to say, well, I'm walking around Hollywood now. Once I was a king of this place, the star of a big blockbuster. And now producers and executives everywhere are just shrugging and saying, eh, the numbers are the numbers. People just don't like that guy. America doesn't like him. Women don't like him, or whatever they say, yeah, we gave him a shot, but turns out public doesn't like him or her. It's rough stuff. If you're ego driven, as you almost have to be even to get that far in Hollywood. Okay, that's kind of sad and depressing to think about, but this story actually makes me laugh. Okay, the story is, a man was on stage, he was playing Hamlet. The performance was going poorly. So poorly that when he gets to the famous soliloquy to be or not to be. That is the question. The audience starts to boo, so the actor breaks character and shouts, hey, I didn't write this shit, okay? Love that story. And now, please forgive the language. And now, part two of our talk with Indira Ghosh. Okay, we're back. So, Indira, you mentioned Shakespeare's dark humor. And then we didn't fully explore that. But I was wondering, what are the examples of his dark humor? And how well do those travel across time? Does it still feel fresh to us, or. It seems like dark humor is an area where what might have been funny 500 years ago could feel cruel or transgressive in a way that offends our sensibilities today. It could be overly violent or racist or sexist or just mean. What do you see in the dark humor of Shakespeare? And is it something that we can still appreciate?

[Indira Ghosh]

There was a time when Shakespeare's dark humor was heavily criticized. There were sort of all sorts of rules. You shouldn't mix comedy with tragedy. And people like Voltaire, for instance, they called the graveyard scene in Hamlet disgusting. How could a prince sort of, you know, bandy jokes about with a grave digger and play games with skulls and things? You know, people like Coleridge were convinced that Shakespeare hadn't written some of these scenes, like the Porter scene in Macbeth. He says, this must have been written by someone else for the ignorant masses. But things changed completely in the 20th century. People felt that this was exactly what the theater of the absurd felt, that Shakespeare's grotesque humor was basically paving the way for them. That's this one line from King Lear, which had. I'd like to quote, when Edgar says, as flies to wanton boys are we to the gods. They kill us for their sport. We're just a joke. We're just part of a huge cosmic joke where the laugh is on us. And this kind of nihilistic, existentialist bleak that the world is barbaric and meaningless. And a huge joke that chimed in perfectly with people like Samuel Beckett in Endgame, where he has this brilliant line, nothing is funnier than unhappiness. You know, I mean, it really cuts to the quick because it's so dark. But it's the kind of humor that you do find in things like, as I said, Fargo or Pulp Fiction. The idea that dark humor is also kind of in a meaningless world, that that's all we have to cope with terror and despair is to laugh. That that's a kind of a survival strategy. I think that's very much of our Age, in fact. So I think Shakespeare's dark humor is probably back in fashion and maybe appeals to us more than some of the. More the clever quibbles of the clowns.

[Jack Wilson]

Right. It's life affirming to be able to laugh. And kind of the phrase you often hear is, well, I'm laughing because otherwise I would, I would cry.

[Indira Ghosh]

Yeah, exactly. That's something that I think Nietzsche said. He said humans had to invent laughter because otherwise they'd be weeping all the time.

[Jack Wilson]

Yeah.

[Indira Ghosh]

And they'd be in despair at the kind of reality surrounding us. And yeah, that's, that's something, I think why these tragedies still appeal to us because they, they are bleak. And then they have these moments of, of dark humor which doesn't make things better, but it shows up the sort of absurdity of everything that's happening around us. If you look at examples like, you know, in Hamlet, you see, there's this moment when Hamlet has just killed Polonius, who's the court counselor, and he's hidden the body and the king asks him where's. Asking Hamlet, where is Polonius? And Hamlet answers, he's at supper not where he eats, but where he's eaten. And then he goes on to explain there's this huge convocation of worms who are munching their way through him. And yeah, look, you're laughing. Actually, it's not funny. It's not funny. There's this poor old Polonius who's. Who's just been murdered by Hamlet and still there's something about it which is very darkly funny that he should crack a joke at this moment. Yeah, it's something I think that we can still. That still chimes with us today.

[Jack Wilson]

It does. And it also seems like maybe an example where Shakespeare is saying, I don't care about the theory about tragedy and what I should have here. I know human beings and I know that in instances like this they would be laughing kind of in spite of themselves.

[Indira Ghosh]

I fully agree. Shakespeare didn't give a fig about the theories which also at the time weren't that much in sway. That actually started after Shakespeare. I mean, people like Ben Johnson still, they believed in these sort of neoclassical theories. But in Shakespeare's time there was plenty of dark humor around revenge plays, for instance, by other playwrights, by Middleton or something full of dark jokes. Jokes where, you know, there's after a murder scene and there's a sound of thunder, which is a stage effect. And then the protagonist turns up and says, oh, they're enjoying the joke. Or you know, things like sort of jokes about being on stage as well as breaking the fourth wall. That was something you'd find in many of the plays at the time.

[Jack Wilson]

And to trace it to the contemporary day, Alfred Hitchcock has a lot of humor like this. I don't know if that's contemporary, but the Coen brothers, certainly this is an area that they are very comfortable in.

[Indira Ghosh]

I fully agree.

[Jack Wilson]

So you have a whole section in Shakespeare in Jest that is devoted to humor and ethics. So how do these two concepts interconnect?

[Indira Ghosh]

Well, humor has always been under attack for sort of mocking orthodoxies. People like Plato wanted comedians who mocked others banned. And in the ideal state, he thought, you know, citizens or God should never be shown laughing. That's partly because laughter for the ancients was always a form of mockery. It was always derision, was always ridicule. And then the church fathers attacked laughter for quite different reasons. They said, you know, if the world is a veil of tears, how dare we laugh? And Jesus never laughed, according to them. They said, you know, then they'd cite there was a time to weep and a time to laugh. And now, you know, in a fallen world, the time to laugh is clearly in the hereafter and not now. So laughter was always had this bad press where it was linked to things like pride and idleness and immorality. And today laughter is attacked often for mocking our own pieties and offending, you know, certain sensibilities. And I think that's often when, like Puritans, we tend to take the jokes literally and immediately take offense. But humor is more complicated. It's. Humor is not just about the content, it's about the context, who's making the joke, to whom, in which context. And then jokes are also very ambiguous. They're double edged. Often people laugh at the same jokes for different reasons. One good example, for instance, Jewish jokes, which are some of the best humor, they're famous for their jokes. But you might take offense and say, well, these are anti Semitic jokes, jokes made by Jews, about Jews. But they might be mocking people who fall for these stereotypes. You know, the very same joke could be using a stereotype about Jews to make fun of the idiots who fall for that kind of humor. So it's not that straightforward. It's difficult to judge a joke on the level of content only. You always have to take the context into consideration.

[Jack Wilson]

I hear comedians today will often criticize. They'll criticize a certain type of humor, like, let's say they'll. People will be making fun of Somebody who's different or an out group and other comedians will say, that's not what comedy is about. You need to punch up. You can't be punching down like that. That's not funny. And it strikes me that when you're describing the ancient world, they don't seem to have gotten that if they say that humor is only about derision, they seem to be saying that they didn't really see a kind of humor that was punching up, that it was only punching down, and it was making fun of somebody, you know, kicking them when they're down, so to speak. And I'm wondering, you know, it seems so bleak to think that we wouldn't have any humor. Did Shakespeare and these Renaissance people who were collecting joke books and so on, did they save us from that. That world, do you think, or do you think? Is that giving them too much credit that we should. In an ideal world, we would take laughter out of it?

[Indira Ghosh]

Well, actually, that development happened 100 years after Shakespeare, when laughter was reinvented as something positive, as something benevolent. It was people like, you know, philosophers like Shaftesbury who came up with the idea that laughter is actually benign. But I think, once again, we need to separate theory from reality. Humor is about making fun of everything, whether up or down. You can't. Everything else is prescriptive. If you say joke should be about such and such, I completely disagree. Jokes make everything absurd, even the things we believe in. That's what humor is about. It's a different world. You know, it's a moment of sort of stepping outside your world and seeing things in an as if world, and you turn. Even things you cherish, seeing them, making fun of them doesn't mean that you're devastating things. You can. You can mock things, even in a way which is positive. It's the way we tease each other, tease people we love, without necessarily attacking them. This idea of what we should laugh about or how jokes should be, I don't buy into that. And I don't think the jokes we see in Shakespeare do either. They're just about this moment of absurdity when you step outside your world and where the rules of logic and. And decorum and common sense don't apply just for a brief moment. It's a flash of imagination that lightens up our world. But where morality doesn't really play a role.

[Jack Wilson]

Was Shakespeare ever criticized for types of jokes I'm thinking of? Doesn't he have characters who will say that these. These Welsh are cheese eaters and things like that? And was he Accused of being politically incorrect, so to speak.

[Indira Ghosh]

No, the jokes were too clever for that. They were just. There's this inbuilt ambiguity in jokes. They're double edged. And there's this inbuilt deniability in jokes too. You can always step back and say, well, it was just a joke. So when they were coded political jokes, they were, they covered their tracks. And Shakespeare was particularly good at that. He'd have characters, people like the wise fool say it, it wasn't Shakespeare saying these things.

[Jack Wilson]

Right, right.

[Indira Ghosh]

It was characters saying these things and these characters who were known to make jokes about everything anyway. You didn't take anything seriously anyway. So that's a clever strategy about which good comedians use today too, this deniability and this covering your tracks and cutting out at all sides in the same joke.

[Jack Wilson]

Yeah. Okay. Well, let's talk a little bit about another example that Shakespeare might have seen as an influence and that is Sir Thomas More. I didn't realize he had the reputation he did for humor. So who was he and what did he mean to the people of this era?

[Indira Ghosh]

Well, his real reputation is of course for the things you knew about him. He's this person who inspired film and play. A man for all seasons. He's a man of integrity who stood up for his belief against an authoritarian, a tyrant king. That's the main thing about. Yes, exactly. That's surely the main thing about Thomas. But he also had this reputation of wit and of being, being someone witty. And he belonged to this, this circle around Erasmus who collected jokes. As I said, collecting jokes was something that the, the most intellectual people did wasn't, you know, something for, for the masses only. And part of his, his reputation was that he joked all the way to the scaffold and you know, that, that he took everything with a, with a sense of humor. So you find his name immortalized in things like jest books after his death. So I wouldn't say he had a direct influence on Shakespeare, but his circle, people like him and Erasmus, they certainly, they were humanists and they opposed this orthodox view, the Puritan view of that the church fathers had that, you know, there's a time to weep and a time to laugh, and the time to weep is now and the time to laugh is in the hereafter. They sort of rediscovered they were Christian humanists, but they thought combining piety with humor was perfectly acceptable and was actually in a Christian spirit. And that I think did pave the way for making humor far more acceptable, at least from a philosophical point of view, because they rediscover things like Aristotle's writings where Aristotle says, not directly about humor, but he says, enjoying yourself and relaxation is not something. It mightn't be the greatest good, but it is a good because it fortifies you in the pursuit of a virtuous life. So the value of relaxation, including through jokes and through humor, was something that people like Erasmus and more appreciated and also wrote about.

[Jack Wilson]

Yeah. Speaking of Aristotle, I grew up with reading plays and reading Shakespeare's plays, his tragedies. And then there was a little section in the back of my book of the edition where it would talk about his influences and so on. And one of the things that it often would talk about is, well, he departs from the traditional Aristotelian theory of tragedy in these ways and kind of point out that they had this guidebook handed to them from Aristotle of tragedy. And then there had to be unity of time and place, for example, and sometimes Shakespeare would follow that, and sometimes he would. He would cut against it. And I found it really interesting to kind of see what, you know, these tragedians from the Elizabethan era were, how they were and were not influenced by the ancient Greeks. But Aristotle famously had a book about comedy that has been lost. And so are you able to kind of, you being an expert, can we kind of figure out what Aristotle said about comedy from his other writings or from what we know? Or is it really just. There is a whole section there that's just been. Our knowledge has just been lost. We don't know what Aristotle thought of jokes and joke telling and comedy.

[Indira Ghosh]

Well, of course, there's this wonderful book, Name of the Rose.

[Jack Wilson]

Name of the Rose, Yeah.

[Indira Ghosh]

Which is all about. Which is. Which is marvelous about the rediscovery of this book of jokes and how dangerous it was for the. For those monks at the time who had the attitude. I was talking about. Yeah, this idea that jokes are dangerous and. And sinful and a form of blasphemy. But there are a few things that. That still have survived about. I mean, a few lines that Aristotle says about humor. And these were very influential. One of them was that, well, he says, for instance, humans are the only animals that laugh, even though apparently that's not quite true, but still. And he also said that humor was something that was inspired by the shameful, which is. By ugliness and deformity. Something that wasn't either harmful or painful. And that's what the. The basis of this tradition of laughter as a form of ridicule, possibly in this. In this Lost book. He would have gone on to say that humor was a form of catharsis as well. That by laughing at other people's stupidity and folly on stage, or it wasn't books at the time, but on stage that he would sort of learn to. You might pick at its best. The idea was that you would learn the lesson not to follow their example, but Aristotle's ideas that what we laughed at were not human crimes or real pain, but things like ignorance and self deception. These were what was the source of humor. That was certainly followed by people like Ben Jonson. But Shakespeare, once again, as you said, your school book quite correctly, said he breaks the rules. And dark humor is one of the ways. You're not actually supposed to laugh at things which are painful and which are. Or at crimes like murder. But he packs in the jokes there anyway. And I think this goes back to an older tradition that you laugh at imagination, evil. The devil was associated with laughter. The devil was the person who was laughing. But laughter was, at the same time was a strategy to defeat the devil. You laughed at evil to. You mocked it in. In medieval plays, you mocked the devil to sort of curtail his power, right? Exactly. Exactly. And so laughter at sort of grotesque laughter, laughter at macabre moments, you find that in Christopher Marlowe. You find that in medieval drama that's not really an invention of Shakespeare's. It's just something he was particularly good at, and that wasn't Aristotelian at all.

[Jack Wilson]

Now, my last question. I remember reading Shakespeare, and I think this might have come from Dr. Johnson, but someone like him who said Shakespeare, maybe it was Ben Johnson, but basically saying Shakespeare's. His one weakness was puns, that he was so in love with puns and wordplay that there were times where he deployed it in an inappropriate situation and undermined his own dramatic or his tragic effects that he was building. Do you find that his humor kind of sometimes takes the wind out of his own sails, so to speak, or do you view it as being more carefully deployed in the ways that we've been talking about, where you're kind of. Just because you're laughing in a graveyard doesn't mean that you're going for something slightly different than just making the audience feel a certain way, that this is a moment where laughter is appropriate?

[Indira Ghosh]

Well, this was definitely Dr. Johnson because he was writing at a time when these neoclassical ideas. You shouldn't mix comedy with tragedy. We're gaining force. But we need to remember that at the time, people loved these puns. This was a Society that was in love with language, the English language was just the potential of the English language as more than just a means of communication was being discovered. At this time, English felt exciting and new people went to hear a play. And they loved games with words. Puns and quibs and riddles were popular with everyone at all levels of society. It's just difficult for us to catch today. But that doesn't mean that at the time it was these difficult riddles that were spoiling the plot or whatever. So, no, I wouldn't agree at all. I think the problem is, of course, and I understand the problem is for, for people who are staging a play, how do you bring the jokes across? Because we really need footnotes very often to understand them. One strategy is that comedians today, or actors today, they replace Shakespeare's humor with jokes that people would understand today, often with, you know, more physical humor or what have you. That is a problem, but, you know, it's not something that Shakespeare's responsible for the fact that humor moves so fast, that it has such a short shelf life. But I certainly don't think that Shakespeare's humor, I think it's a huge enrichment to his work and not in any way his weakness.

[Jack Wilson]

Well, ordinarily I would be bristling at the idea of anyone criticizing my hero, Dr. Johnson, but in this case, since you are defending my even greater hero, Shakespeare, I will allow it. Indira Ghosh, thank you so much for joining me on the history of literature.

[Indira Ghosh]

Thank you, Jack. Thanks a lot.

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[Indira Ghosh]

We all know it's not a cookout

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[Jack Wilson]

And finally today, we talked to Nicholson Baker. In one of my personal favorite episodes. Back in episode 615, after he and I talked about his deeply personal journey, learning to paint for the first time, I asked him a special question. Okay, we're joined now by Nicholson Baker, award winning author of numerous books, including Finding a Likeness, a deeply Personal account of his journey learning how to paint for the first time. Nicholas Lynn. This question comes from a listener who asks, what do you want your last book to be? This will be the last book you will ever read. You can either choose one that exists or describe one that has not yet been written.

[Nicholson Baker]

It's really hard. That's so hard. Okay. Because once you. When you add the thing about the one that doesn't exist, the last book that I read, it can't be the last book I write. It has to be the last book that I read. Yeah, Okay. I know it comes to my head, okay. It's too personal. But it's true. I mean, sometimes you got to be personal. My wife wrote me a series of emails about 20 years ago when she was going swimming, and I better not talk about it. I haven't asked her if I can talk about it, but it's not sexual or anything like that. It's just. It's a book that she wrote. And I keep thinking that, you know, she's written this very private, personal book that is one of the best books I've ever read, but it's never been published. So it's. Let me just put it this way. So my wife, something like 20 years ago, wrote me a series of emails that I have kept. It's actually, I'm looking at it right now. It's on a shelf in my office, clipped together all the emails printed out. It's a book of her thoughts and experiences. And it was just an outpouring from her. And it's. I think that the thing that I would do last, it forms a kind of book, an account of a period of her life. And I would probably read that book. I think that book, something. It's incredibly personal and, of course, precious to me because I'm married to her. But also it's. It's just. I think it makes me think about. It does the things that art does. It makes me think about life in an excited way. Now, whether she will ever publish this book or what, I don't know. But that's probably the one that I would hold on to.

[Jack Wilson]

Yeah. And although I'm greedy enough to want to be able to buy the book and read it, I also wonder if it would change things for you, if it would put a layer of a different kind of memory on top of it that would change the experience for you when you were reading it as your last book.

[Nicholson Baker]

I think you're right. It. It would. It would change it. And I think she's right. That some things are for private. Maybe forever or maybe for a long time. So I don't think she needs to do anything with it. And I. What I do every so often is pull it off the shelf and peek into it.

[Jack Wilson]

Yeah.

[Nicholson Baker]

And it's good. So I guess I. That's a very personal answer, but is probably the true answer to that very difficult question. It reminds me of a question, actually, that I think that when I was a substitute, people were asking kids to write what their farewell message to the world would be or something like that.

[Jack Wilson]

Right.

[Nicholson Baker]

Third grade, fourth grade. They're just barely learning to ride a bike or something and they're having to sign their. Well, maybe it was junior high. I don't know. People. But people were. Some people were really taking it very seriously. And some people were a bit. Not traumatized, but made nervous.

[Jack Wilson]

Yeah. It reminded me. You know, I've been trying to. Ever since the listener posed this, I've been trying to come up with what my last book would be. And kind of my first idea for doing this as a series was that all of the people I talked to would help to give me suggestions. And. And one of the things that comes to mind. I had this sort of a ritual with my kids where every holiday season I would write them some kind of book. And one year it was. We wanted to do something because my son was getting ready to graduate from high school and he'd be leaving home soon, and we were looking back at all of the baby photos we had and everything. And I realized that I had written all of these emails to my parents and to some friends where I had described what was happening or a funny story that had just happened, or he just learned how to walk, or all of my accounts of that. And that I could basically just go through my email and do a search on his name and come up with all of this text that would go along with all of these photos. And so we put together a book like that for my boys. And it occurs to me that that book is probably going to be on my short list of books I would want to have by my bedside at the end because it's so special and feels so. You know, I have such a connection to it.

[Nicholson Baker]

That's a beautiful and true answer. I love that. That's great. Yeah, absolutely. If you've had kids, we've both been through it. It's so huge. It dwarfs everything. And there are those periods where there's just watching your. Your kid learn something, catch something, learn to read is one big one. But also Other moments where things start to come together for them and they're full of curiosity and, oh, so great. How old are your kids now?

[Jack Wilson]

Now they are. Let's see, this year they'll turn 17 and 20.

[Nicholson Baker]

Oh, great. Well, that's. And then they become. After that, they become your best friends. My kids are 30 and 37. I think that's right, 31. And I, I'm there. My confidants and best friends and life companions and all that. So wonderful. So that's a very. I think that's a great. You've got. And I look forward to this anthology of answers that people.

[Jack Wilson]

Yeah.

[Nicholson Baker]

Give to that complicated question.

[Jack Wilson]

Right. Yeah. Maybe that'll be the answer. Maybe I'll turn those answers into a book and then that'll be the last book that I read. Okay. Nicholson Baker, thank you so much for joining me on the history of literature.

[Nicholson Baker]

Thank you. I really appreciate it. Take care.

[Jack Wilson]

Okay, there we go. Episode 800 is in the books. A special shout out to our show's producer, Emma, who has worked so tirelessly over the years, and to Gabriel Ruiz Bernal, who supplies our music. Many thanks to both of you and thank you to Nicholson Baker and Indira Ghosh for joining me today. Both of them have books worth buying. We are still on tour on our way from Oxford to Bath, so we'll have an episode coming up soon for the occasion. I'm Jack Wilson. Thank you for listening and we'll see you next time.

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