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HUMOR AND SOCIOLOGY
by Don L. F. Nilsen
and Alleen Pace Nilsen
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Four Social Functions of Humor
1. Meaning Making
2. Hierarchy Building
3. Cohesion Building
4. Tension Relief
(Kuipers 367)
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Humor for Group Solidarity
and for Discrimination
• Humor “‘breaks the ice’ between strangers,
unites people in different hierarchical
positions, and creates a sense of shared
‘conspiracy’ in the context of illicit activities
like gossiping or joking about superiors.”
• “The flip side of this inclusive function of
humor is exclusion. Those who do not join
in the laughter, because they do not get the
joke, or even worse, because the joke targets
them, will feel left out, shamed, or ridiculed.”
• (Kuipers 366)
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Social Control Theory
• “Very recently, social control theory has
been revived by Michael Billig, who in
Laughter and Ridicule (2005) puts forward a
theory of humor as a social correctie,
closelyl lilnked with embarrassment, arguing
that “ridicule, far from being a detachable
negative, lies at the heart of humor.”
• (Billig (2005): 190)
• (Kuipers (2008) 365)
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Humor as a Social System
• Mahadev Apte said, “joking
relationships…manifest a consciousness of
group identity or solidarity” (1985, 66).
• David Viktoroff said, “One never laughs
alone—laughter is always the laughter of a
particular social group” (1953, 14).
• Henri Bergson called humor a “social
corrective..intended to humiliate.” There is
no interaction for Bergson; humor is onesided: those who laugh and those who are
lauged at.
(Carroll in Raskin [2008] 305).
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Gendered Humor
• Thomas and Inger Burns worked with 11
informants who encountered the same joke:
• “A newlywed couple agrees to refer to sexual
intercourse as ‘doing the wash.’ One night
the man turns to his wife in bed and
suggests they ‘do the wash.’ The wife
refuses. Later she reconsiders and consents
to ‘do the wash,” whereupon the husband
replies: ‘Oh, it’s all right. It was a small load
and I did it by hand’”
(Oring [2008] 201).
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• Informants were asked to comment on the
actions in the joke, viz., the use of a
euphemism for sex, the husband’s request for
sex, the wife’s refusal, the wife’s subsequent
acquiescence, and the husband’s recourse to
masturbation.
• The point of the study was to explore the
ways that these individual tellers related to
the various aspects of the joke and to
ascertain the joke’s psychological and social
functions.
• The responses told a great deal about the
listeners’ personalities. (Oring [2008] 201)
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The Humane Humor Rules
• 1. Never target an attribute that cannot be changed.
(But this can be used as a manipulation device)
• 2. Target yourself (this is called self-depricating
humor)
• 3. Target your own ethnic group or gender, but no
other ethnic group or gender (Consider
“Embodiment”)
• 3. Never target the victim
• 4. Always target a strength (NOTE: Teasing and
Verbal Competition are empowering devices)
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The People of the Joke
• The Scots became “the people of the joke” at
about the same time as or slightly earlier
than the Jews.
• These Scottish jokes were about the canny
Scotsman who was covetous, argumentative,
and obsessed with keeping the Sabbath.
• But in fact these jokes were told by Scots
about Scots. They are therefore selfmocking in tone. (Davies [2008]: 175)
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The Jews and the Scots
• What the Jews and the Scots have in
common is a sense of double identity.
• They are both grounded in their religious
tradition, and love to argue for the sake of
argument.
• “From this arose the Jewish and Scottish
pre-eminence in physics, philosophy and
economics and in jokes that no other small
nation can match” (Davies [2008]: 176).
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Comedy Teams
• 43 out of the 500 entries in Ronald L.
Smith’s Who’s Who in Comedy are
about comedy teams. There are many
reasons for this high number:
• Teams are often more recognized and
more memorable than are the
individuals who make up the teams.
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• Good “chemistry” enhances creativity and
enjoyment.
• Through interacting with each other, team
members can revitalize old gags.
• Differing appearances, personalities and
voices provide for contrast and for the
efficient creation of stock characters.
• With teams, audiences can enjoy both
surprise and anticipation because while
teams do new material they usually have a
style that carries over from one performance
to another.
• (Nilsen & Nilsen 82)
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The Dyadic Tradition
• This is a term coined by Elliott Oring to refer
to the special joking relationship enjoyed by
couples, siblings or close friends.
• “Dyadic traditions are largely humorous and
much of that humor involves insult, abuse, or
references to re-creations of shared,
unpleasant experiences” (Oring [2008] 188).
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Gender Issues
• A. J. M. Sykes noted that obscene joking was
acceptable between the sexes when the
jokers are not danger of a real sexual
relationship as with old men and very young
women, or old women and much younger
men.
• “The sexually possible relationships between
men and women of the same age group were
marked by modesty and restraint” (Oring
(2008) 186)
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Jokes
• “The Brothers Grimm included comic tales in their
famous collection of Kinder- und Hausmärchen
(Children’s and Household Tales).”
• “Jokes and anecdotes comprised approximately a
third of the tale type in Antti Aarne and Stith
Thompson’s index The Types of the Folktale.”
• “Since the early 1960s, folklorists have been
documenting, analyzing, and interpreting the jokes
and joke cycles that have come to dominate oral
expression in contemporary society.”
• (Oring [2008] 192-193)
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Joke Cycles
• Elephant Jokes
– How do you know if an elephant has been in your
refrigerator?
– There are footprints on the marshmallows.
• Dead Baby Jokes
– What is red and sits in the corner?
– A baby chewing on razor blades.
• Alan Dundes says that such jokes show a hostility
and resentment against babies that resulted in the
contraception and abortions from the 1960s to the
1980s, when the joke cycle ended (Dundes [1987] 314).
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–
–
–
–
–
–
–
–
–
–
–
Dumb blonde jokes
Stupid Jokes
Promiscuous Jokes
Sick Jokes
Challenger Jokes
Polish Jokes
Jewish American Mother Jokes
Jewish American Princess Jokes
Lightbulb Jokes
Urban Legends
Tall Tales
• Christie Davies (1990) showed that such jokes are not
told about our adversaries, but are told about groups
that are peripheral to the mainstream: in terms of
geography, ethnicity, or economics (Oring [2008] 194).
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JAPS AND JAMS
• The Jewish American Princess is portrayed as
“spoiled, self-centered, materialistic, excessively
concerned about her appearance, and indifferent to
sex and the needs of her family.”
• In contrast, the Jewish American Mother is portrayed
as “over-solicitous of her children; she is ever
concerned with their feeding and health; she suffers
for them and enjoys her martyr role; and she looks
forward to nothing so much as the attention and
appreciation of her children” (Oring [2008] 203).
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Challenger Jokes
• “Challenger jokes did not appear all at once, but in
stages. The weeks following the explosion of the
shuttle on 28 January, 1986, jokes appeared on three
different college campuses that focused on the
acronym NASA (e.g. Need Another Seven
Astronauts), on Bud Light (e.g. they found the flight
recorder and all that was on it was, “no, Bud Light,”
and on Christa McAuliff’s last words (“What’s this
button for?).”
• “The jokes signaled a move towards closure;
meaning a willingness to bring the tragedy back to
private discourse”
(Oring [2008] 196).
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Alan Dundes’ “Cathartic Theory”
• Dundes views sexual and aggressive joking
as cathartic.
• People use joking to express their repressed
sexual and aggressive wishes.
• The cathartic theory of joking can also be
applied to Auschwitz jokes, quadriplegic
jokes, and Helen Keller jokes (Oring [2008]
193).
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Keying Jokes
• “Keying” refers to the words, actions and props that
identify telling a joke as “performance.” Parties and
roasts can be considered to be “joke places.”
• “Jokes may also be keyed by
– stereotypical actors and locales (“Guy goes into a bar…”);
– a pervasive present tense (“asks the bartender for a
martini…”);
– formulaic introductions (“Have you heard the one about…”);
– appeals to tradition (“Here’s an old chestnut…”);
– and disclaimers (“My husband is the joke teller in the family,
but...)” (Oring [2008] 200).
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Late-Night Humor
• “Alf Walle (1976) studied a diner in upstate New York
and focused on the dynamics of joking during the
period of 12:45 to 2:00 A.M.”
• “Many bars in the immediate area of the diner closed
at 1:00 A.M. and waitresses who began work the
previous evening got off at 1:30 A.M.”
• So this period, known locally as ‘the bar rush,’ was
the period in which men from the bars went to try
and pick up waitresses who were getting off from
work” (Oring [2008] 199)
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• “The jokes provided a way for customers to
test the availability of waitresses without
risking a personal rejection.”
• “Similarly, waitresses could encourage
someone they were interested in or
discourage others without having to entertain
or reject explicit sexual overtures.”
• “Thus joking in the social context of the bar
rush was a coded communication about
intimacy and sexual availability” (Oring [2008]
200).
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Play
• “Play is not the opposite of
seriousness.”
• “The comic in ritual is not comic relief;
it is another system of signification that
speaks to, against, and with the serious
one.”
(Oring [2008] 189)
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• “Carnivals can be affairs of great seriousness
requiring enormous discipline, expenditure, and even
pain.”
• “The preparation for Carnival goes on throughout the
year, and these preparations are not something apart
from the festive celebration itself”
• But sometimes “carnival” goes too far.
• Some members of the Lutheran congregation use the
term “chancel prancers” to label and criticize those
members who take delight in “high church” and
Catholic-like ritual behaviors (Oring [2008] 190).
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Police Humor
• When California police office Adelle Roberts got out
of her squad car to deal with a domestic dispute she
heard yelling and things being thrown against the
wall inside.
• Then a portable TV set cam crashing through the
front window.
• She knocked very loudly and a voice inside asked,
“Who is it?”
• “TV repair” Adelle responded, and the husband and
wife caught onto the humor and came to the door
smiling.
(Morreall [2008] 240)
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Political Humor
• “It is difficult to make stupidity jokes about a
democratic leader with a popular mandate
because it would imply that the people rather
than the system were stupid since they put
him there.
• Therefore, mass joking about the stupidity of
politicians normally doesn’t exist in Western
democracies
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• There is, however, joking about Sir Alec
Douglas-Home (British Prime Minister
1963-4), President Gerald Ford, VicePresident Dan Quayle, President
George “Dubya” Bush, and Governor
Evan Mecham.
• What they have in ;common is that they
were not elected in the usual way, and
lost legitimacy as a consequence.
• (Davies (2008): 171)
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Practical Jokes
• Some practical jokes become
institutionalized:
– April Fool Jokes
– Halloween Trick-Or-Treat Jokes
– The Snipe Hunt
– The Farm Animal in the Classroom
– The Animated Corpse
– Video Clips: Piano, Squirril
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• !Practical jokes occur during particular times
of the year (April Fool’s Day, Halloween).
• They occur during certain events (Initiations,
Weddings, Wakes)
• Certain groups are prone to practical jokes
(students, males, fraternity or sorority friends)
• They are a means of social control, social
resistance, and folk aesthetics.
• (Oring (2008) 187-188)
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!!THE SOCIAL CONSTRUCTION OF MEANING
• Penelope Eckert said, “the
use of variation does not
simply reflect, but
constructs, social
categories and social
meaning.”
• (Eckert 4)
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!!!Joking and Social Rules:
Community over Hierarchy
• Mary Douglas says that joking promotes
community over hierarchy and reveals
ambiguities in the fabric of society.
• Douglas said that jokes are anti-rites that
subvert the normative social order, the order
usually validated and maintained by religious
and civic rituals (Oring [2008] 187).
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Related PowerPoints & DVD
• Accidental Humor
• American Pop Language
• Body Humor
• Gender Issues
• Stand-Up Comedy
• Make ‘Em Laugh (DVDs)
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