What do you think?
Animal Joy: A Book of Laughter and Resuscitation
A Time Must-Read Book of 2022
A Publishers Weekly Best Book of 2022
Aster(ix) Journal's 12 Best Nonfiction Books of 2022
An invigorating, continuously surprising book about the serious nature of laughter.
Laughter shakes us out of our deadness. An outburst of spontaneous laughter is an eruption from the unconscious that, like political resistance, poetry, or self-revelation, expresses a provocative, impish drive to burst free from external constraints. Taking laughter’s revelatory capacity as a starting point, and rooted in Nuar Alsadir’s experience as a poet and psychoanalyst, Animal Joy seeks to recover the sensation of being present and embodied. Writing in a poetic, associative style, blending the personal with the theoretical, Alsadir ranges from her experience in clown school, Anna Karenina’s morphine addiction, Freud’s un-Freudian behaviors, marriage brokers and war brokers, to “Not Jokes,” Abu Ghraib, Frantz’s negrophobia, smut, the Brett Kavanaugh hearings, laugh tracks, the problem with adjectives, and how poetry can wake us up. At the center of the book, however, is the author’s relationship with her daughters, who erupt into the text like sudden, unexpected laughter. These interventions―frank, tender, and always a challenge to the writer and her thinking―are like tiny revolutions, pointedly showing the dangers of being severed from one’s true self and hinting at ways one might be called back to it.
A bold and insatiably curious prose debut, Animal Joy is an ode to spontaneity and feeling alive.
A Publishers Weekly Best Book of 2022
Aster(ix) Journal's 12 Best Nonfiction Books of 2022
An invigorating, continuously surprising book about the serious nature of laughter.
Laughter shakes us out of our deadness. An outburst of spontaneous laughter is an eruption from the unconscious that, like political resistance, poetry, or self-revelation, expresses a provocative, impish drive to burst free from external constraints. Taking laughter’s revelatory capacity as a starting point, and rooted in Nuar Alsadir’s experience as a poet and psychoanalyst, Animal Joy seeks to recover the sensation of being present and embodied. Writing in a poetic, associative style, blending the personal with the theoretical, Alsadir ranges from her experience in clown school, Anna Karenina’s morphine addiction, Freud’s un-Freudian behaviors, marriage brokers and war brokers, to “Not Jokes,” Abu Ghraib, Frantz’s negrophobia, smut, the Brett Kavanaugh hearings, laugh tracks, the problem with adjectives, and how poetry can wake us up. At the center of the book, however, is the author’s relationship with her daughters, who erupt into the text like sudden, unexpected laughter. These interventions―frank, tender, and always a challenge to the writer and her thinking―are like tiny revolutions, pointedly showing the dangers of being severed from one’s true self and hinting at ways one might be called back to it.
A bold and insatiably curious prose debut, Animal Joy is an ode to spontaneity and feeling alive.
320 pages, Paperback
First published August 16, 2022
Ratings & Reviews
Friends & Following
Create a free account to discover what your friends think of this book!
Community Reviews
Displaying 1 - 30 of 86 reviews
March 2, 2026
fundamentally enriched the way i think about humor forevermore.
April 6, 2024
Loved this so much - searing, brilliant, and full of life - the structure keeps revealing more with every read
January 16, 2023
Doesn't really do what it says on the tin. There's very little joy found in these pages, but a lot of effort. You can feel Alsadir straining to create connections, to structure webs of callbacks, to say something, in short, to write meaningfully. At times it's quite lovely, but there are plenty of duds along the way.
The book is loosely organized into short essayistic sections that scoop up a handful of quotes and anecdotes then labor to lace them together. Alsadir references all kinds of interesting thinkers, mostly from the worlds of literature, philosophy, and psychology, with Freudian psychoanalysis providing the conceptual scaffolding. The best anecdotes are always the ones she tells about her kids. Those feel the most authentic, which is a welcome respite from the many, many passages where Alsadir painfully, awkwardly tries to telegraph her social station to the reader. She'll never pass up an opportunity to tell you where she summers (Cape Cod), what she studied in college (neuroscience, briefly), or where she and all the other important people live (New York, darling, and don't you forget it). For a book so beset by anxieties about authenticity, the False Self deserves at least a coauthoring credit.
It's an unfortunate and sour tic that mars an otherwise pleasant read. Alsadir's prose is decent and she has an eye for curating passages from other thinkers. It's not as insightful as she'd like it to be, but there are beautiful moments. She's trying to pin down a moving target, so oblique approaches are inevitable when trying to capture ineffable jouissance. A certain amount of repetition is a poetic necessity for the task. However, it does feel a touch excessive. She could have lost at least 30-50 pages and retained a tighter, more powerful text.
Despite that, I found much to enjoy here, even if I chafed at the Procrustean bed of Freudianism Alsadir forces upon everything. Don't read this if you're looking for a complete theory of laughter or joy, but it's a good choice if you like reading memoirs about the latent anxieties of certain kinds of urban intellectuals. She tells you a lot about herself inadvertently while trying to tell you other things about herself.
The book is loosely organized into short essayistic sections that scoop up a handful of quotes and anecdotes then labor to lace them together. Alsadir references all kinds of interesting thinkers, mostly from the worlds of literature, philosophy, and psychology, with Freudian psychoanalysis providing the conceptual scaffolding. The best anecdotes are always the ones she tells about her kids. Those feel the most authentic, which is a welcome respite from the many, many passages where Alsadir painfully, awkwardly tries to telegraph her social station to the reader. She'll never pass up an opportunity to tell you where she summers (Cape Cod), what she studied in college (neuroscience, briefly), or where she and all the other important people live (New York, darling, and don't you forget it). For a book so beset by anxieties about authenticity, the False Self deserves at least a coauthoring credit.
It's an unfortunate and sour tic that mars an otherwise pleasant read. Alsadir's prose is decent and she has an eye for curating passages from other thinkers. It's not as insightful as she'd like it to be, but there are beautiful moments. She's trying to pin down a moving target, so oblique approaches are inevitable when trying to capture ineffable jouissance. A certain amount of repetition is a poetic necessity for the task. However, it does feel a touch excessive. She could have lost at least 30-50 pages and retained a tighter, more powerful text.
Despite that, I found much to enjoy here, even if I chafed at the Procrustean bed of Freudianism Alsadir forces upon everything. Don't read this if you're looking for a complete theory of laughter or joy, but it's a good choice if you like reading memoirs about the latent anxieties of certain kinds of urban intellectuals. She tells you a lot about herself inadvertently while trying to tell you other things about herself.
May 23, 2022
My review for LIBER: https://www.liberreview.com/issue-1-3...
A POET AND a psychoanalyst walk into a bar. That sounds like the setup to a joke, but really, it’s a scene from Nuar Alsadir’s enthralling new book, Animal Joy: A Book of Laughter and Resuscitation, and, in this case, the poet and the psychoanalyst are one and the same: Alsadir herself.
In this expansive and erudite meditation on the relationship between laughter and basically everything else, Alsadir interweaves both of those strands of her identity—along with many more, including her experiences as the daughter of Iraqi immigrants and as the mother of two daughters—to explore what laughter can reveal about our deepest selves and the reality that surrounds us. On the very first page, she quotes George Orwell: “A thing is funny when—in some way that is not actually offensive or frightening—it upsets the established order. Every joke is a tiny revolution.”
From there, she lets the reader ride her waves of thought, considering the ways in which this revolutionary power can be manifested in environments as diverse as her studies in a clown class at Yale University to broader contexts of activism and resistance such as those described by John Lennon:
When it gets down to having to use violence, then you are playing the system’s game. The establishment will irritate you—pull your beard, and flick your face—to make you fight. Because once they’ve got you violent, then they know how to handle you. The only thing they don’t know how to handle is nonviolence and humor.
Or, as Alsadir puts it shortly thereafter, “By behaving spontaneously, in line with our instincts, we have the potential to provoke ourselves—and others—into possibility, whether its personal, poetic, or political.”
In the associative style of Freudian talk therapy, Alsadir riffs to her audience on an astonishing array of people, topics, and theories—from Pee-wee’s Big Adventure to Primo Levi, from the Still Face Experiment to Audre Lorde, from the Brett Kavanaugh Supreme Court hearings to Martin Heidegger, from Sarah Silverman to Mister Rogers’ Neighborhood—all in the service of examining how the human activity of laughter is inextricably connected to our conscious and unconscious minds, our physical bodies, and our body politic.
Although she deliberately avoids a clear plot, throughline, or thesis, Alsadir comes across as rhetorically persuasive on page after page. Proceeding by the method of unexpected leaps and pleasing juxtapositions, she makes the convincing case that humorous ruptures and the laughter that accompanies them stand—if they are honest—to divulge a great deal about who we are, how we live, and what we desire.
Over and over again, she shows that what makes us truly laugh also has the capacity to expose hypocrisies and falsehoods. Writing of Sascha Baron Cohen’s personae—including Borat, the supposed journalist from Kazakhstan—she notes how deftly these figures can draw “real people into fictional scenarios they believe to be nonfictional in order to reveal their genuine—perverse—feelings and beliefs.” In the summer of 2020, Baron Cohen infiltrated a conservative rally against Covid-19 restrictions in Washington State, leading them in a singalong designed to expose “the extent to which the ‘rights’ the protesters were defending were entangled with the infringement on the rights of others” (e.g., “Chinese people, what we gonna do? Nuke ’em up like in World War II,” and, “Journalists, what we gonna do? Chop ’em up like the Saudis do”), until one of the organizers recognized the prank and unplugged the sound system.
ALSADIR IS THE author of the poetry collections More Shadow Than Bird (Salt Publishing, 2012) and Fourth Person Singular (Pavilion Poetry LUP, 2017), which was shortlisted for the Forward Prize for Best Collection in England and Ireland. Just as her style resembles therapy, so too does it resemble poetry, utilizing repetition and surprise to advance her ruminations. She crafts her book from patterns and variations, though it is also intellectually rigorous: she tells stories and also quotes experts, calling back to them as the book progresses.
If the book can be said to have an overarching mission, it is arguably to help the reader regain awareness of what the psychoanalyst D.W. Winnicott refers to as the “True Self,” a self that manifests in the spontaneous gestures of human infants but that begins to transform by necessity into a False or “socialized” self as the baby grows up. Both Winnicott and Alsadir argue that one way to reaccess the True Self is through unrehearsed, impetuous play, play in which we don’t worry about other people failing to affirm or accept us but to which we can simply abandon ourselves. Early on, Alsadir puts forth the concept of “addressivity” as defined by the philosopher Mikhail Bakhtin, a phenomena in which, right before we speak, we project ourselves into our listener, envisioning how they’ll receive what we are about to say and then tailoring our communication to those expectations. Addressivity is the reason why “you can feel connected speaking with one person but talk about the same thing in the same way with someone else and feel like a fumbling bore.” Perhaps addressivity illuminates why I, as one particular reader, felt absorption and pleasure in the style and structure of Animal Joy. The book was a game that I wanted to play, a back-and-forth that felt invigorating and real. The addressee of which Alsadir appears to conceive is smart and curious, sophisticated and patient, quick-witted yet eager to slowly reflect—qualities that feel potentially true but also aspirational, as if she thinks her readers are going to bring their best selves to the task of reading her words, a belief which might, in turn, encourage those selves to be present.
At one point, she recounts how, during her time studying at Oxford University, she was so keen to get to know her fellow students that she came on too strong, peppering them with icebreaker-esque inquiries. Finally, one of them told her, “Here in Europe, when we try to get to know someone, we don’t ask questions. We enter into conversation and get to know a person by the way they think.” Alsadir admits she doesn’t know if this is, in fact, the European way, but that getting to see the movements of a person’s mind can be captivating. Watching the motion of her mind across her capacious subject matter is captivating as well, for we get to know her not by the questions we might want to ask (What do you do all day? Who do you love? Why did you write this book?) but by simply spending time with her as she thinks on the page.
The book is full of witty but subtle touches. For instance, she titles her bibliography not “Works Cited” but “A Shrewdness of Thinkers and Feelers.” And the thoughts and feelings she cites from them are indeed shrewd, as when she quotes Joseph Brodsky as saying that in a poem, “you should try to reduce the number of adjectives to a minimum. So if somebody covered your poem with a magic cloth that removes adjectives, the page would still be black enough because of nouns, adverbs and verbs. When that cloth is little, your best friends are nouns.” Because adjectives call up prefabricated judgments in the mind of the reader rather than letting them see things directly and decide for themselves, she concludes that, “Adjectives are the canned laughter of language.”
Alsadir draws her title from the opening epigraph from Chekhov: “The so-called pure, childlike joy of life is animal joy.” But perhaps the most powerful of her epigraphs is the one preceding the second section from Shirley Jackson: “I am the captain of my fate. Laughter is possible laughter is possible laughter is possible”—a necessary mantra in a world that can feel like absurdity all the way down.
A POET AND a psychoanalyst walk into a bar. That sounds like the setup to a joke, but really, it’s a scene from Nuar Alsadir’s enthralling new book, Animal Joy: A Book of Laughter and Resuscitation, and, in this case, the poet and the psychoanalyst are one and the same: Alsadir herself.
In this expansive and erudite meditation on the relationship between laughter and basically everything else, Alsadir interweaves both of those strands of her identity—along with many more, including her experiences as the daughter of Iraqi immigrants and as the mother of two daughters—to explore what laughter can reveal about our deepest selves and the reality that surrounds us. On the very first page, she quotes George Orwell: “A thing is funny when—in some way that is not actually offensive or frightening—it upsets the established order. Every joke is a tiny revolution.”
From there, she lets the reader ride her waves of thought, considering the ways in which this revolutionary power can be manifested in environments as diverse as her studies in a clown class at Yale University to broader contexts of activism and resistance such as those described by John Lennon:
When it gets down to having to use violence, then you are playing the system’s game. The establishment will irritate you—pull your beard, and flick your face—to make you fight. Because once they’ve got you violent, then they know how to handle you. The only thing they don’t know how to handle is nonviolence and humor.
Or, as Alsadir puts it shortly thereafter, “By behaving spontaneously, in line with our instincts, we have the potential to provoke ourselves—and others—into possibility, whether its personal, poetic, or political.”
In the associative style of Freudian talk therapy, Alsadir riffs to her audience on an astonishing array of people, topics, and theories—from Pee-wee’s Big Adventure to Primo Levi, from the Still Face Experiment to Audre Lorde, from the Brett Kavanaugh Supreme Court hearings to Martin Heidegger, from Sarah Silverman to Mister Rogers’ Neighborhood—all in the service of examining how the human activity of laughter is inextricably connected to our conscious and unconscious minds, our physical bodies, and our body politic.
Although she deliberately avoids a clear plot, throughline, or thesis, Alsadir comes across as rhetorically persuasive on page after page. Proceeding by the method of unexpected leaps and pleasing juxtapositions, she makes the convincing case that humorous ruptures and the laughter that accompanies them stand—if they are honest—to divulge a great deal about who we are, how we live, and what we desire.
Over and over again, she shows that what makes us truly laugh also has the capacity to expose hypocrisies and falsehoods. Writing of Sascha Baron Cohen’s personae—including Borat, the supposed journalist from Kazakhstan—she notes how deftly these figures can draw “real people into fictional scenarios they believe to be nonfictional in order to reveal their genuine—perverse—feelings and beliefs.” In the summer of 2020, Baron Cohen infiltrated a conservative rally against Covid-19 restrictions in Washington State, leading them in a singalong designed to expose “the extent to which the ‘rights’ the protesters were defending were entangled with the infringement on the rights of others” (e.g., “Chinese people, what we gonna do? Nuke ’em up like in World War II,” and, “Journalists, what we gonna do? Chop ’em up like the Saudis do”), until one of the organizers recognized the prank and unplugged the sound system.
ALSADIR IS THE author of the poetry collections More Shadow Than Bird (Salt Publishing, 2012) and Fourth Person Singular (Pavilion Poetry LUP, 2017), which was shortlisted for the Forward Prize for Best Collection in England and Ireland. Just as her style resembles therapy, so too does it resemble poetry, utilizing repetition and surprise to advance her ruminations. She crafts her book from patterns and variations, though it is also intellectually rigorous: she tells stories and also quotes experts, calling back to them as the book progresses.
If the book can be said to have an overarching mission, it is arguably to help the reader regain awareness of what the psychoanalyst D.W. Winnicott refers to as the “True Self,” a self that manifests in the spontaneous gestures of human infants but that begins to transform by necessity into a False or “socialized” self as the baby grows up. Both Winnicott and Alsadir argue that one way to reaccess the True Self is through unrehearsed, impetuous play, play in which we don’t worry about other people failing to affirm or accept us but to which we can simply abandon ourselves. Early on, Alsadir puts forth the concept of “addressivity” as defined by the philosopher Mikhail Bakhtin, a phenomena in which, right before we speak, we project ourselves into our listener, envisioning how they’ll receive what we are about to say and then tailoring our communication to those expectations. Addressivity is the reason why “you can feel connected speaking with one person but talk about the same thing in the same way with someone else and feel like a fumbling bore.” Perhaps addressivity illuminates why I, as one particular reader, felt absorption and pleasure in the style and structure of Animal Joy. The book was a game that I wanted to play, a back-and-forth that felt invigorating and real. The addressee of which Alsadir appears to conceive is smart and curious, sophisticated and patient, quick-witted yet eager to slowly reflect—qualities that feel potentially true but also aspirational, as if she thinks her readers are going to bring their best selves to the task of reading her words, a belief which might, in turn, encourage those selves to be present.
At one point, she recounts how, during her time studying at Oxford University, she was so keen to get to know her fellow students that she came on too strong, peppering them with icebreaker-esque inquiries. Finally, one of them told her, “Here in Europe, when we try to get to know someone, we don’t ask questions. We enter into conversation and get to know a person by the way they think.” Alsadir admits she doesn’t know if this is, in fact, the European way, but that getting to see the movements of a person’s mind can be captivating. Watching the motion of her mind across her capacious subject matter is captivating as well, for we get to know her not by the questions we might want to ask (What do you do all day? Who do you love? Why did you write this book?) but by simply spending time with her as she thinks on the page.
The book is full of witty but subtle touches. For instance, she titles her bibliography not “Works Cited” but “A Shrewdness of Thinkers and Feelers.” And the thoughts and feelings she cites from them are indeed shrewd, as when she quotes Joseph Brodsky as saying that in a poem, “you should try to reduce the number of adjectives to a minimum. So if somebody covered your poem with a magic cloth that removes adjectives, the page would still be black enough because of nouns, adverbs and verbs. When that cloth is little, your best friends are nouns.” Because adjectives call up prefabricated judgments in the mind of the reader rather than letting them see things directly and decide for themselves, she concludes that, “Adjectives are the canned laughter of language.”
Alsadir draws her title from the opening epigraph from Chekhov: “The so-called pure, childlike joy of life is animal joy.” But perhaps the most powerful of her epigraphs is the one preceding the second section from Shirley Jackson: “I am the captain of my fate. Laughter is possible laughter is possible laughter is possible”—a necessary mantra in a world that can feel like absurdity all the way down.
January 10, 2023
Exquisite. I will be returning to passages in this book for the rest of my life.
August 14, 2022
I was a little disappointed to find that this book is not funny nor is it really about laughter? There are parts about laughter and it runs through as a theme but I would say this book is about psychoanalysis more generally. It’s quite academic but doesn’t fit squarely in that zone but neither would I describe it as poetic as some are. Most interesting to me was the discussion of racist subjects and the psychological splitting involved to maintain that outlook which in turns motivates behaviour that is fundamentally irrational as the unconscious exerts its influence.
March 29, 2024
surprisingly dense: clowning, non-Duchenne laughter, psychoanalysis, lots of Freud. Good, but slightly scattered and I wish each essay was more clearly distinguished as I lost train of thought, but overall impression was that Alsadir knows what she is talking about and knows how to deliver it.
Read
June 13, 2023ah i'm quite torn. I really really loved Alsadir's poetry collection, Fourth Person Singular, which was a beautiful marriage of her psychoanalytic background with a fresh, exquisitely 21st century, lyric theory. I was good with Animal Joy, Alsadir's a good writer & I was surprised to find myself rly enjoying the anecdotes and psychoanalytic examples via her daughters.
I don't know how much laughter-theory is published these days but it's a nice case of it, I would! recommend if that's your zone. Maybe I'm just HMMing because my expectations were set so astronomically high by Fourth Person Singular ... maybe I wanted More clown content. maybe I'm wondering if it needed all of those tangents,,, but who's complaining!
I don't know how much laughter-theory is published these days but it's a nice case of it, I would! recommend if that's your zone. Maybe I'm just HMMing because my expectations were set so astronomically high by Fourth Person Singular ... maybe I wanted More clown content. maybe I'm wondering if it needed all of those tangents,,, but who's complaining!
April 23, 2026
So unfathomably brilliant. Nuar Alsadir I bow before you!!!! My brain was so happy reading this (challenged, provoked, reassured, and affirmed in equal measure). Love love love I spent a month reading this and I’m sad it’s over.
May 15, 2024
Psychoanalysts have a skewed worldview because they only talk to people who can afford psychoanalysis.
September 4, 2026
normally i give three stars because the book is Okay and i will probably not remember it all that well but i had a fine time reading it.
this is three stars because at some points i wanted to throw it out of the window and scream in a pillow. no i'm not 'flashing my skeleton' when i laugh at you and stop telling me about the 'moth' in mother. this was psychoanalysis and i don't know much psychoanalysis because i think it's really stupid to look at spelling mistakes in an e-mail from an ex and think they reveal all kinds of profound things about the universe.
then on the other hand there were beautiful and honest passages on masking and letting go of the mask; on the necessity of vulnerability in conversation to stay connected to yourself, and how that same necessity also becomes important when making art and writing poetry specifically (reflections on what it means to follow an idea of what poetry must look like or what your success might look like, versus allowing yourself to look at what you want to write or just write); and i thought the way this was connected to joy and laughter; to opening yourself up not only in a vulnerable see me cry way but also in a starting to laugh because it's how feelings come out, always stayed on the right side of insightful to not become self-helpy. (and i do think laughter and crying are closely connected; many people assume my work would consist of a lot of crying/dealing with crying but there's so much humour and laughter and sometimes i think its because the crying is also there already.)
then she mentioned an analysand who went to the toilet before a conversation because he did not want to bring shit into the work. or how one image in a dream was somehow a screen for the most intense childhood harm and did i mention wanting to throw this book out of a window?
where she stitched thoughts of laughter and humour to direct political situation and the psychoanalytic theory which strayed from the individual to the social were again more interesting; those things lying in the subconsciousness of groups of people, how that does not mean they're invisible yet being directly confronted with certain ideas still results in discomfort better solved through laughing uncomfortably. i would have liked more of that maybe, or more of the honesty and deep dive into poetry (or the connections between those) but at the end of the day this book is a meandering path of associations, small pieces of writing clicking togethet sometimes satisfyingly and sometimes barely. i can see why that's the case considering her broader pscyhoanalytic philosophy and everything but boy im kinda happy i finally finished it.
this is three stars because at some points i wanted to throw it out of the window and scream in a pillow. no i'm not 'flashing my skeleton' when i laugh at you and stop telling me about the 'moth' in mother. this was psychoanalysis and i don't know much psychoanalysis because i think it's really stupid to look at spelling mistakes in an e-mail from an ex and think they reveal all kinds of profound things about the universe.
then on the other hand there were beautiful and honest passages on masking and letting go of the mask; on the necessity of vulnerability in conversation to stay connected to yourself, and how that same necessity also becomes important when making art and writing poetry specifically (reflections on what it means to follow an idea of what poetry must look like or what your success might look like, versus allowing yourself to look at what you want to write or just write); and i thought the way this was connected to joy and laughter; to opening yourself up not only in a vulnerable see me cry way but also in a starting to laugh because it's how feelings come out, always stayed on the right side of insightful to not become self-helpy. (and i do think laughter and crying are closely connected; many people assume my work would consist of a lot of crying/dealing with crying but there's so much humour and laughter and sometimes i think its because the crying is also there already.)
then she mentioned an analysand who went to the toilet before a conversation because he did not want to bring shit into the work. or how one image in a dream was somehow a screen for the most intense childhood harm and did i mention wanting to throw this book out of a window?
where she stitched thoughts of laughter and humour to direct political situation and the psychoanalytic theory which strayed from the individual to the social were again more interesting; those things lying in the subconsciousness of groups of people, how that does not mean they're invisible yet being directly confronted with certain ideas still results in discomfort better solved through laughing uncomfortably. i would have liked more of that maybe, or more of the honesty and deep dive into poetry (or the connections between those) but at the end of the day this book is a meandering path of associations, small pieces of writing clicking togethet sometimes satisfyingly and sometimes barely. i can see why that's the case considering her broader pscyhoanalytic philosophy and everything but boy im kinda happy i finally finished it.
Read
October 14, 2022Part psychological treatise, part philosophical review, part memoir, part political and social study, Nuar Alsadir discusses so much in this volume. Clowning, jokes, laughter and its social function, and all the threads you can pull from why we laugh, types of humor, laughter as a means to power. There’s a lot to further my understanding of others and myself.
Alsadir is at her best when she uses experiences from her own life, as a homeowner, a neighbor, and especially, a parent, to highlight the aspect of the human condition she is discussing at the moment.
Sometimes, she seems to stretch the material to fit: If she has rats living in her kitchen, I don’t think she has a phobia of rats, but, seriously, a rat problem. There was a short piece about an analysand with a perfect partner and then, a link to a realdoll website that I didn’t understand and was hesitant to explore online for further edification.
Animal Joy abounds with literary references, contemporary politics, and examples from TV and popular song. All this makes it very engaging.
There isn’t one reference to Moby Dick, though. (Bartleby The Scrivener gets some time. However, Melville is not included in the list of “Thinkers and Feelers” at the back of the book.)
Alsadir is at her best when she uses experiences from her own life, as a homeowner, a neighbor, and especially, a parent, to highlight the aspect of the human condition she is discussing at the moment.
Sometimes, she seems to stretch the material to fit: If she has rats living in her kitchen, I don’t think she has a phobia of rats, but, seriously, a rat problem. There was a short piece about an analysand with a perfect partner and then, a link to a realdoll website that I didn’t understand and was hesitant to explore online for further edification.
Animal Joy abounds with literary references, contemporary politics, and examples from TV and popular song. All this makes it very engaging.
There isn’t one reference to Moby Dick, though. (Bartleby The Scrivener gets some time. However, Melville is not included in the list of “Thinkers and Feelers” at the back of the book.)
April 5, 2023
Animal Joy. Überraschung. In diesem Buch geht es nicht um Freude, bzw wird das nur ganz kurz angerissen. Leider war es auch das was mich enttäuscht hat weil meine Erwartungshaltung eine andere war thematisch.
July 1, 2023
Animal Joy by Nuar Alsadir Review.
I didn’t know the author or this book, until I was at this bookstore, which had a simple sticky note over the book - basically saying the reader would enjoy it if they like Maggie Nelson (who is my favorite author). That caught my attention - as I have been wanting books like Maggie’s On Freedom. I’ll get this out of the way - it more than lived up to the expectations- but also, I found Nuar a lot more focused on one topic - Laughter and what it means to be your true self - which allowed this whole book to feel like a steady stream of thoughts - start to finish.
The book is feverish - it’s not for before bedtime read. I realized I enjoyed it the most in early morning, when my mind is more fresh and relaxed. It’s a heady book - deeply referential and just so vividly inside Nuar’s mind - it feels like a dream, and along the way, punches that shake you out in reality and not doze off. The book had great gifts throughout - you just have to be patient and sometimes reread paragraphs to grapple with what Nuar is getting at.
The book’s primary focus remains on what happens when we collectively lose our sense of self, in favour of what it means to pledge allegiance to those around us, without critically thinking about it. How it can run so far out of you, that even you have disconnected with your self and don’t realize the gap / the nasty hole that’s been created. Laughter is just one those mediums that can allow us to break out of this vicious cycle - if driven from unconsciousness state of mind, or pure joy, vs. forcing yourself to laugh - the latter driven by curation and not actual feelings of joy and laughter.
Nuars landscape is massive - using analysts like Freud, Lacan, Winnicott, and many more, to guide us through the analyst and its patients relationship (Nuar uses such anecdotes to ground ourselves in what she is searching for), Anna Karenina’s morphine addiction, Trump, Iraq war, and many more, thus allows us to jump in many different years over our recent history, and see how cutting ties with one’s true self, can show up in ways - that even we are surprised by - if we just took a step back and asked ourselves - what’s our false self? What’s our true self?
Perhaps the biggest draw within such a wildly imaginative ecosystem - is her own relationship with her daughters, from the very start. They give backdrop to what feels like, certain shaking up from going to nap / sleep for Nuar as she writes this book - and jolts us all with curiosity and questions, that bring Nuar and us, as readers, back to reality, and not be overwhelmed with the dream like sensations that Nuar’s writing can evoke. I think it’s telling then, the books ultimate goal - her relationship with her daughters - as she asks one of the two if she is a good mother in the last two pages of the book - the daughter merely complying and saying “yes” only to carry on the conversation with a friend on the phone.
I would love to read this book again, what a masterpiece. Thank you.
I didn’t know the author or this book, until I was at this bookstore, which had a simple sticky note over the book - basically saying the reader would enjoy it if they like Maggie Nelson (who is my favorite author). That caught my attention - as I have been wanting books like Maggie’s On Freedom. I’ll get this out of the way - it more than lived up to the expectations- but also, I found Nuar a lot more focused on one topic - Laughter and what it means to be your true self - which allowed this whole book to feel like a steady stream of thoughts - start to finish.
The book is feverish - it’s not for before bedtime read. I realized I enjoyed it the most in early morning, when my mind is more fresh and relaxed. It’s a heady book - deeply referential and just so vividly inside Nuar’s mind - it feels like a dream, and along the way, punches that shake you out in reality and not doze off. The book had great gifts throughout - you just have to be patient and sometimes reread paragraphs to grapple with what Nuar is getting at.
The book’s primary focus remains on what happens when we collectively lose our sense of self, in favour of what it means to pledge allegiance to those around us, without critically thinking about it. How it can run so far out of you, that even you have disconnected with your self and don’t realize the gap / the nasty hole that’s been created. Laughter is just one those mediums that can allow us to break out of this vicious cycle - if driven from unconsciousness state of mind, or pure joy, vs. forcing yourself to laugh - the latter driven by curation and not actual feelings of joy and laughter.
Nuars landscape is massive - using analysts like Freud, Lacan, Winnicott, and many more, to guide us through the analyst and its patients relationship (Nuar uses such anecdotes to ground ourselves in what she is searching for), Anna Karenina’s morphine addiction, Trump, Iraq war, and many more, thus allows us to jump in many different years over our recent history, and see how cutting ties with one’s true self, can show up in ways - that even we are surprised by - if we just took a step back and asked ourselves - what’s our false self? What’s our true self?
Perhaps the biggest draw within such a wildly imaginative ecosystem - is her own relationship with her daughters, from the very start. They give backdrop to what feels like, certain shaking up from going to nap / sleep for Nuar as she writes this book - and jolts us all with curiosity and questions, that bring Nuar and us, as readers, back to reality, and not be overwhelmed with the dream like sensations that Nuar’s writing can evoke. I think it’s telling then, the books ultimate goal - her relationship with her daughters - as she asks one of the two if she is a good mother in the last two pages of the book - the daughter merely complying and saying “yes” only to carry on the conversation with a friend on the phone.
I would love to read this book again, what a masterpiece. Thank you.
May 27, 2023
From the blurb:
Taking laughter's revelatory capacity as a starting point, and rooted in Nuar Alsadir's experience as a poet and psychoanalyist, Animal Joy seeks to recover the sensation of feeling alive and embodied.
Maybe it's just my fault for not knowing what that sentence really meant before buying. No, the book about laughter and why people laugh is not funny. Nor can I really say I gained any particular insight to the nature of laughter. I have now understood that whenever someone, in writing, 'draws on their experience as a poet,' this really means, 'writes synopses of Radiolab podcasts' and 'likes to signal that they studied at Oxford'. When a book 'seeks to recover the sensation of feeling alive and embodied', it will tell the reader, through reverse psychology, to put itself down, go outside, get a bit of exercise.
I used to have a special interest in psychoanalysis, and I'm still somewhat fond of Freud and friends, even as all the evidence mounts that psychoanalysis, as a practice, is just a meandering probing of the nebulous thoughts of the wealthy, and as a literary form, gives us insights like
'Recently, I noticed the moth in the word mother, a tendency towards light.'
Without all the repeated allusions to Alsadir's upper-middle class credentials and lifestyle, I never would've realised statements like these were meant to be profound and not utterly insipid. So I'm thankful.
This is a particularly terrible book because Alsadir is a competent writer and is often, in between moments such as above, mildly interesting. If I wasn't frequently dumbfounded by how stupid this book was, I might've thought it had a lot to say.
Taking laughter's revelatory capacity as a starting point, and rooted in Nuar Alsadir's experience as a poet and psychoanalyist, Animal Joy seeks to recover the sensation of feeling alive and embodied.
Maybe it's just my fault for not knowing what that sentence really meant before buying. No, the book about laughter and why people laugh is not funny. Nor can I really say I gained any particular insight to the nature of laughter. I have now understood that whenever someone, in writing, 'draws on their experience as a poet,' this really means, 'writes synopses of Radiolab podcasts' and 'likes to signal that they studied at Oxford'. When a book 'seeks to recover the sensation of feeling alive and embodied', it will tell the reader, through reverse psychology, to put itself down, go outside, get a bit of exercise.
I used to have a special interest in psychoanalysis, and I'm still somewhat fond of Freud and friends, even as all the evidence mounts that psychoanalysis, as a practice, is just a meandering probing of the nebulous thoughts of the wealthy, and as a literary form, gives us insights like
'Recently, I noticed the moth in the word mother, a tendency towards light.'
Without all the repeated allusions to Alsadir's upper-middle class credentials and lifestyle, I never would've realised statements like these were meant to be profound and not utterly insipid. So I'm thankful.
This is a particularly terrible book because Alsadir is a competent writer and is often, in between moments such as above, mildly interesting. If I wasn't frequently dumbfounded by how stupid this book was, I might've thought it had a lot to say.
July 27, 2024
-FASCINATING
-so rich with ideas, useful and thought provoking quotations, explaining psychology in easy to understand phrasing without necessarily dumbing it down (accessible but I felt clever reading it lol)
-‘feeling’ feelings (as opposed to intellectualising them), modes of connection, actual self vs presented self, how much we communicate in order to receive a certain response vs communication that comes from natural spontaneous thought/emotion
-a little 90’s self help vibe but not annoying
-did start to feel a bit formulaic over halfway through- ‘anecdote, well-placed quote, discuss’- however, this was useful in the more ‘heavy’ psychological stuff as it gave me something to connect the concept to as Alsadir often referred to previously discussed concepts
-so rich with ideas, useful and thought provoking quotations, explaining psychology in easy to understand phrasing without necessarily dumbing it down (accessible but I felt clever reading it lol)
-‘feeling’ feelings (as opposed to intellectualising them), modes of connection, actual self vs presented self, how much we communicate in order to receive a certain response vs communication that comes from natural spontaneous thought/emotion
-a little 90’s self help vibe but not annoying
-did start to feel a bit formulaic over halfway through- ‘anecdote, well-placed quote, discuss’- however, this was useful in the more ‘heavy’ psychological stuff as it gave me something to connect the concept to as Alsadir often referred to previously discussed concepts
September 22, 2022
Consistently surprising, delightful, humane. She zooms in and out from her most intimate relationships to literature to the political scene, acknowledging painful irreconcile truths while making associative leaps that connect you playfully to the world at large. Laughter can be defensive and restorative, cruel, connecting, and impulsive. Her language washed over me. Reading it was fun, provocative and therapeutic. I love this book and will be sharing it widely.
August 10, 2023
What a weird book. Not at all what I was expecting but still enjoyable. One of those random books you just happen to read at the perfect time.
February 24, 2024
ok wow yes.
I feel a change in the way I think/see the world/myself/how I talk to other people/how I LISTEN to other people
more soon on worms mag dot com
I feel a change in the way I think/see the world/myself/how I talk to other people/how I LISTEN to other people
more soon on worms mag dot com
October 8, 2025
“The wrong answer is the right answer looking for a different question.” – Bruce Mau
Nuar Alsadir dives deep into our psyche, weaving the theories of great minds with the messiness of everyday life — her daughters at the centre of it that. She explores the role laughter plays, how poems work, and how language shapes the way we see the world.
It’s a hard read, but its insights stick. Bit by bit, you carry them into your consciousness — and find yourself one step closer to understanding both the world and yourself. 💙
Nuar Alsadir dives deep into our psyche, weaving the theories of great minds with the messiness of everyday life — her daughters at the centre of it that. She explores the role laughter plays, how poems work, and how language shapes the way we see the world.
It’s a hard read, but its insights stick. Bit by bit, you carry them into your consciousness — and find yourself one step closer to understanding both the world and yourself. 💙
Read
December 28, 2025A book I would have read for a CULP class in college and then talked about incessantly at a wine night when I had a little too much. Felt nice to feel like I was in the classroom again. A blend of politics, ethnography, media analysis, personal history and psychology. Motivated me to analyze how I can bring out genuine joy and laughter out of myself while curbing the fake effect given to others. Lots of inspiration for how to make writing and poetry more direct and poignant as well. Excellent read!
March 10, 2023
What does our laughter say about us? What hidden parts of ourselves do we reveal when we laugh? Why do we feel the urge to laugh at inappropriate times? What is the connection between laughter and orgasm, or laughter and violence? Psychoanalyst and poet Nuar Alsadir dissects these questions meticulously in “Animal joy” while giving us some humourous anecdotes from her life here and there.
Don’t assume that this book is all lighthearted, though. Alsadir also discusses politics, racism, and violence. CONTENT WARNING: There is a particularly difficult section about rape. If you have trauma in your past, there are some parts of the book that may be uncomfortable for you.
Sometimes funny, sometimes dry, and sometimes both, “Animal joy” is overall an interesting read.
Don’t assume that this book is all lighthearted, though. Alsadir also discusses politics, racism, and violence. CONTENT WARNING: There is a particularly difficult section about rape. If you have trauma in your past, there are some parts of the book that may be uncomfortable for you.
Sometimes funny, sometimes dry, and sometimes both, “Animal joy” is overall an interesting read.
February 4, 2024
Not what I expected. We learn types of laughter, and interesting connections to the uncanny, impropriety and defiance, but I hoped for something a bit more ecstatic and possibly even funny. The anecdotes from literature, psychoanalysis, philosophy, current events and motherhood are interesting, but I felt the book lost momentum by the end.
March 26, 2026
Way too esoteric , I refuse to believe it’s all that
deep
deep
August 29, 2026
4.5 :) had to google a few words hey hey
November 23, 2022
This book is not for everybody. A writer of sorts myself, I often had to look up words and reread sentences and paragraphs to understand what Ms. Alsadir was saying. I am not an intellectual, so it was work to read it. Joy was hard to come by. Because it was such slow going – especially the first half – I “wore out” quickly and put the book down for long spells. I paid the price for that because of the author’s frequent references to earlier anecdotes and sources, some of which I remembered later and some of which I didn’t.
Laughter was a recurring but not dominant theme. Octogenarian and perhaps too sensitive veteran that I am, I found myself repeatedly jolted by the author’s frequent use of “bad” words in references to scatological or sexual functions and profanity, when a euphemism would have often served the purpose. She also seemed to take every opportunity to disparage Donald Trump. That’s consistent with her promotion of free spirit and listening to one’s inner self, citing Friedrich Schiller’s arguments about being “moored to Reason” in the process.
“We elude being known even by ourselves,” she writes. I’ll buy that and appreciated many of the other observations and personal sharing of this very intelligent, thoughtful, and articulate writer and good mother. But generally speaking, I don’t think old fuddy-duddies like me (and many conservatives) are going to enjoy the book or come away with life-changing perspectives after reading it.
To me, the most enjoyable lines in the book were in the author’s account of when Congressman Jim Jordan was questioning acting ambassador to the Ukraine William Taylor during Trump’s 2019 impeachment hearings:
“Taylor’s laughter was likely a reflexive method of disassociating from the role he had been placed into, the dishonest person he was made out to be, like a metaphysical sneeze that helped him return to a state of psychological homeostasis.”
That may give you an idea of what you should be ready for if you read this book, one that my county library (gulp) obligingly bought at my request because of a favorable review I read.
This is just one man’s opinion, of course – and unlike that of most other reviewers. OK, but having had it drilled into me in eighth grade that Shakespeare said “This above all: to thine own self be true,” I’m still trying to do that (to the extent I know myself). (Insert eye-rolling emoticon here.)
Laughter was a recurring but not dominant theme. Octogenarian and perhaps too sensitive veteran that I am, I found myself repeatedly jolted by the author’s frequent use of “bad” words in references to scatological or sexual functions and profanity, when a euphemism would have often served the purpose. She also seemed to take every opportunity to disparage Donald Trump. That’s consistent with her promotion of free spirit and listening to one’s inner self, citing Friedrich Schiller’s arguments about being “moored to Reason” in the process.
“We elude being known even by ourselves,” she writes. I’ll buy that and appreciated many of the other observations and personal sharing of this very intelligent, thoughtful, and articulate writer and good mother. But generally speaking, I don’t think old fuddy-duddies like me (and many conservatives) are going to enjoy the book or come away with life-changing perspectives after reading it.
To me, the most enjoyable lines in the book were in the author’s account of when Congressman Jim Jordan was questioning acting ambassador to the Ukraine William Taylor during Trump’s 2019 impeachment hearings:
“Taylor’s laughter was likely a reflexive method of disassociating from the role he had been placed into, the dishonest person he was made out to be, like a metaphysical sneeze that helped him return to a state of psychological homeostasis.”
That may give you an idea of what you should be ready for if you read this book, one that my county library (gulp) obligingly bought at my request because of a favorable review I read.
This is just one man’s opinion, of course – and unlike that of most other reviewers. OK, but having had it drilled into me in eighth grade that Shakespeare said “This above all: to thine own self be true,” I’m still trying to do that (to the extent I know myself). (Insert eye-rolling emoticon here.)
August 26, 2024
Two short passages from Animal Joy:
*
The dominant issue bringing people into my office for psychoanalysis is the sense that, after sacrificing so much to achieve the lives they had dreamed of, they’re unable to experience the pleasure they had expected to accompany those ideal lives they labored to construct.
*
“Look at your aggressiveness,” Winnicott writes in a letter; “…it provides one of the roots of living energy.” By numbing aggression, as by supressing anxiety, you may avoid conflict with those around you, but you will also lose access to the taproot, the ability to feel creative, alive, connected to others, real. By harnessing your living energy – aggressiveness, anxiety, primitive destructive impulses, savage complexity, you can, as McGonigal suggests, “use some of this energy, some of this biochemistry to make choices or take actions that are consistent with what matters most.”
*
*
The dominant issue bringing people into my office for psychoanalysis is the sense that, after sacrificing so much to achieve the lives they had dreamed of, they’re unable to experience the pleasure they had expected to accompany those ideal lives they labored to construct.
*
“Look at your aggressiveness,” Winnicott writes in a letter; “…it provides one of the roots of living energy.” By numbing aggression, as by supressing anxiety, you may avoid conflict with those around you, but you will also lose access to the taproot, the ability to feel creative, alive, connected to others, real. By harnessing your living energy – aggressiveness, anxiety, primitive destructive impulses, savage complexity, you can, as McGonigal suggests, “use some of this energy, some of this biochemistry to make choices or take actions that are consistent with what matters most.”
*
February 7, 2026
Wow! Deep, authentic, beautiful! this book mentions theater and I feel like every book that even mentions theater work goes an extra level and talks of things that aren’t overly talked about/played out.
This is not stuff you can generally teach, so I’m surprised that the author was able to put it into words. It’s mostly just part of bigger stuff that comes naturally to our character or personality. It’s not stuff you remember which makes it impossible to explain, or understand, except instinctively. The author did a great job, explaining the parts of our subconscious and how our subconscious relates to other people- subconsciously. I’m terrible at explaining it so you can understand how I valued this concise work put into words so eloquently.
So much on the human psyche and what’s buried within us and how we relate to each other in a certain way and the root of why. I am definitely looking at the other books by this author, and I highly recommend it, Great title too!
This is not stuff you can generally teach, so I’m surprised that the author was able to put it into words. It’s mostly just part of bigger stuff that comes naturally to our character or personality. It’s not stuff you remember which makes it impossible to explain, or understand, except instinctively. The author did a great job, explaining the parts of our subconscious and how our subconscious relates to other people- subconsciously. I’m terrible at explaining it so you can understand how I valued this concise work put into words so eloquently.
So much on the human psyche and what’s buried within us and how we relate to each other in a certain way and the root of why. I am definitely looking at the other books by this author, and I highly recommend it, Great title too!
July 30, 2025
I appreciated the insights in this book. It is dense and there is no map or roadmapped path, and sometimes I began a page and wondered why I was reading this or that anecdote from her life, but she won my trust from the get go with how she used each example to pull insight and foster understanding for how caged / repressed we can be subsconsciously / without knowing it. It's not to scare and make everyone think they are going to have a breakdown, but rather to become more aware of the pressures so we can acknowledge them even if we choose to keep bowing to them
May 20, 2023
Wonderful read.
I have no idea how this book is categorised; part psychotherapy textbook, part clowning manual, part memoir; all of it blended into a fascinating, illuminating whole.
I have no idea how this book is categorised; part psychotherapy textbook, part clowning manual, part memoir; all of it blended into a fascinating, illuminating whole.
Displaying 1 - 30 of 86 reviews