Jokes and the Unconscious: A Graphic Novel

Daphne Gottlieb

Aug 2006 · Simon and Schuster

About this ebook

Heard the one about the dying father? In this savagely brilliant graphic novel by slam poet Daphne Gottlieb (Final Girl) and Hothead Paisan creator Diane DiMassa, a 19-year-old woman named Sasha loses her father to cancer and takes a job in the hospital where he had worked as a doctor. Moving from room to room with her clipboard of forms, Sasha encounters the insane, the suicidal, and the brave — then returns to her office to look up all her friends’ and enemies’ medical records. Taking its title from Freud’s Jokes and their Relation to the Unconscious, Gottlieb and DiMassa’s first collaboration is both moving and darkly funny. Where comedy meets chemo, where mirth meets mortality, Jokes and the Unconscious explores the murky terrain of grief — a shadowland of memory, sexual escape, and morbid snickering.

About the author

Performance poet Daphne Gottlieb stitches together the ivory tower and the gutter just using her tongue. She is the author of Final Girl (Soft Skull Press, 2003), Why Things Burn (Soft Skull Press, 2001), and Pelt (Odd Girls Press, 1999), and the editor of Homewrecker: An Adultery Anthology (Soft Skull Press, 2005). Final Girl was named one of the Village Voice’s Favorite Books of 2003 and received rave reviews from Publishers Weekly, The San Francisco Chronicle, and The Village Voice. Why Things Burn was the winner of a 2001 Firecracker Alternative Book Award (Special Recognition — Spoken Word) and was also a finalist for the Lambda Literary Award for 2001. Recent press has praised her work as “fierce,” “unapologetic,” “scorching,” and “deliriously gutsy.” She has been widely published in journals and anthologies including Nerve.com, Exquisite Corpse, and Short Fuse: A Contemporary Anthology of Global Performance Poetry. Besides anchoring three national performance poetry tours, recently headlining with Maggie Estep, Hal Sirowitz, and Lydia Lunch, Gottlieb has also appeared across the country with the Slam America bus tour and with all-girl wordsters Sister Spit. She has performed at festivals coast-to-coast, including South by Southwest, Bumbershoot, and Ladyfest Bay Area. Gottlieb is the poetry editor of Other magazine and the online queer literary magazine Lodestar Quarterly. She lives in San Francisco. Jokes and the Unconscious "When I finished reading this book I thought the last page was weird and blurry. Then I realized I was trembling. This fierce and powerful book gives us every scary thing in the world refracted through a sharp, curved death head’s grin. Daphne Gottlieb and Diane DiMassa were already fearsome by themselves, but in this mad scientist’s hybrid of a book they’re going to wreak havoc all over the countryside. Read it — or get out of the way." — Daniel Handler, a.k.a. Lemony Snicket "A perfect collaboration. You will love this heartfelt, beautifully illustrated novel. Funny... true...this book will change how you think about loss." — Stephen Elliott, author Happy Baby "As vivid and surreal as grief itself." — Alison Bechdel, author Fun Home