SOURCE: "The Use of Jokes in Cabrera Infante's Tres Tristes Tigres [Three Trapped Tigers]," in Latin American Literary Review, Vol. V, No. 9, Fall/Winter, 1976, pp. 14-21.

In the following essay, Resnick explores themes of humor and sexuality in Tres tristes tigres.

Cabrera Infante's Tres Tristes Tigres [Three Trapped Tigers] continually underlines the interrelation of humor, language and sexuality. The humor in this novel is immediately evident to any reader, and has received some attention in several critical studies, most of which tend to emphasize its linguistic aspects. One article discusses the problems of translating not only the jokes, puns, and anagrams but the whole atmosphere of the novel. Another posits the text as a novel about language and literature in which verbal games serve to point out, among other things, an underlying sexual obsession in which masturbation is a recurrent theme. A third critic suggests the importance of...