He's treating it as "ha ha only serious": http://catb.org/jargon/html/H/ha-ha-only-serious.html .
Haven't read it myself but he sounds right. Jokes like that aren't funny if they don't have a lot of truth in them.
Haven't read it myself but he sounds right. Jokes like that aren't funny if they don't have a lot of truth in them.
[EDIT] That is, I wouldn't take it as a straightforward academic effort or something like that, but I wouldn't dismiss it because it happens to be entertaining. Not one thing I had first-hand knowledge of in it make me go "oh come on, that's not quite right". I'd guess if it contains such, it's a very small portion of the book.
Two other examples of this genre I know of are the original Peter Principle book, and the Basic Laws of Human Stupidity [1]. Both of them wrap some hard truths in this format because it's the only way to get them past a lot of people's filters...
[1]: http://harmful.cat-v.org/people/basic-laws-of-human-stupidit...