The Laugh that Laughs at the Laugh: Writing from and about the Pen Man, Raymond Federman is the twenty-third issue of The Journal of Experimental Fiction and the volume that established the press's signature form. Raymond Federman suggested an entire issue devoted to his own work, and Eckhard Gerdes built the result into the template every later JEF Festschrift would follow.
The issue gathers previously unpublished fiction by Federman, running from work he wrote as a student at Columbia to a long excerpt from a novel-in-progress, alongside criticism and homage from more than thirty-five friends, colleagues, and admirers: Jerome Klinkowitz, Charles Bernstein, Ronald Sukenick, Larry McCaffery, Doug Rice, Lance Olsen, and Mark Amerika among them. It is a working portrait of the metafictioneer assembled by the writers closest to him, and an early addition to the scholarship on his work.
The single-author tribute became JEF's editorial identity. For the press's other major Festschrift, see The Literary Terrorism of Harold Jaffe, also edited by Gerdes.