AMERICANS TELL JOKES

I love to laugh and a few years ago I decided to take a series of road trips around the U.S. with a friend and a simple goal: to collect jokes. I began by asking strangers—usually in public spaces—to tell me a joke on camera. Over four years I recorded about 700 jokes: long and short, nasty and silly, dark, joyful, funny, angry—and somehow, despite, or because of that, they made me laugh.

Freud collected jokes obsessively because he believed they were a form of evidence—compressed messages from both the unconscious and the culture. I’m not pretending to be a clinician, but I do think jokes function as a kind of American folklore: passed along, altered in the telling, and continuously reshaped by individuals and the moment they’re living in.

I’ve started editing my collection into short videos, and I wanted to share them here.