Taking Humour Seriously

Jerry Palmer, Mr Jerry Palmer

• Publisher: Routledge
• Year: 2003
• eBook ISBN: 9781134851379
• Topic: Social Sciences
• Subtopic: Media Studies
• Index: Social Sciences

First published in 1993. When do we laugh? Why do we laugh? What makes us stop? What does 'humour' consist of? Listen to any everyday conversation: it is full of the constant interruptions and detours of humour. Look at the TV schedules for any evening—how many of the programmes are comedies or contain a degree of humour? Humour and comedy invite our pleasure at every step we take—they are absolutely integral to any culture. In Taking Humour Seriously, Jerry Palmer argues that we must take humour seriously (as well as humorously) or fail to understand a fundamental part of culture. Taking Humour Seriously unravels the reasons why humour is a challenge for every different theoretical approach. It is multi-dimensional, it is part of personality and part of our cognitive and emotional processes; it is subject to social rules governing appropriate behaviour on different occasions. It is part of literary and audio-visual narrative; it is subject to moral and aesthetic judgment, and it is a rhetorical instrument. Palmer argues that it is only through investigating those separate dimensions that we can begin to understand the phenomenon of humour. Taking Humour Seriously examines the role humour and comedy play in many different types of society. It also looks at the many different approaches to its study—from Freud to anthropology, from literary criticism to biology. Finally it considers its limits—the things that prevent humour and comedy from delivering their usual pleasures—and explores the aesthetic value of those pleasures.

Part I
OCCASIONS FOR HUMOUR

1
JOKING RELATIONSHIPS

Consider this situation: it is the day of your grandfather’s funeral, you are in the service, with all your relatives and your grandparents’ friends. Suddenly you are seized with the overwhelming urge to tell a joke. Standing on one side of you is your brother, on the other your aunt; do you tell the joke? And if so, to which of the two? Let us also assume, for the sake of argument, that you are young and male, and the joke you want to tell is a ‘dirty’ joke. Assuming a minimal degree of sociality on your part, and an averagely reticent relationship with your aunt, the answer is likely to be either neither of them, or your brother; there is a place, a time and a list of normal interlocutors for ‘dirty’ jokes in our culture, and neither family funerals nor most family members figure on the list.

The situation is of course caricatural: an extreme version of circumstances where this levity is considered inappropriate. Other such circumstances might include church services in general, military parades, job interviews (though there would probably be exceptions here), being interrogated by the police, first meetings with strangers anywhere other than a pub or a party. And we may note that although a joke about sex was specified, in order to make the outcome obvious, it is largely the case that any joke, regardless of its theme or manner of delivery, would be similarly taboo in any of the social circumstances listed here. Such knowledge is part of the common sense of our culture, part of the set of rules for polite conduct which we all learn in the ordinary course of growing up, without any special, institutionalised form of instruction being necessary. No doubt the details vary from region to region, from social class to social class, and to some extent from person to person or family to family. Even more, it is equally clear that deviation from these rules occurs: people do tell jokes under inappropriate circumstances, sometimes no doubt through inadequate awareness of the rules governing the occasion—i.e. the rules observed by the majority of those present—sometimes no doubt in order to subvert the nature of the occasion: say, the dignity of a religious or military ceremony. But we should note that for the subversion to take a form satisfactory to the subverter it is likely that the joke would have to be shared: that is why, in all likelihood, if you did tell a joke at your grandfather’s funeral it would be more likely that your brother was chosen as audience rather than your aunt.

This example implies various principles involved in humour. It indicates that the social identity of the occasion is problematic, that the identity of the participants (including the relationships between them) is problematic, and that the theme of the joke may be problematically related to these sociological dimensions. More generally, it indicates a principle fundamental to humour, and long ago formulated by Douglas: that a joke must not only be recognised as such, but also permitted (1968:366). We shall see in Part IV that the question of permission is less simple than first sight suggests, but for the moment we may content ourselves with the observation that permissibility is indeed an integral dimension of humour.

Part I of this book is concerned with the extent to which the social identity of occasions and participants determines the existence of humour. The caricatural opening example indicated a thoroughgoing prohibition on humour which is relatively rare in our culture: of all the situations that make up the normal course of everyday life, there are relatively few where jokes are really out of the question—although no doubt rather more where certain categories of joke are outlawed: anti-Semitic jokes at a bar-mitzvah, jokes in favour of cowardice at a regimental dinner. Similarly, there are few if any categories of person with whom joking is out of the question—even if you cannot tell your aunt a dirty joke during a funeral, it is certainly well within the bounds of normality to joke with her on other occasions. Now let us think of the opposite possibility: are there any situations where jokes are obligatory in our culture? Clearly it would be very strange if a professional comedian said or did nothing funny during the course of a performance and if you are at a party or in the pub with a group who are all telling jokes or making funny remarks, total abstinence from humour might be regarded as anti-social; otherwise it is rare to find circumstances where joking behaviour is obligatory, let alone to find a type of relationship where the partners are obliged to joke with each other (see Sykes, 1966).

Assuming this brief outline sketch of the social circumstances of joking in our culture is approximately correct, let us make a comparison with another form of social organisation where the circumstances surrounding joking are very different. In many tribal societies joking occurs predominantly within the framework of ‘joking relationships’: that is to say, the list of people with whom one may indulge in joking behaviour is regulated, and therefore the occasions on which such behaviour is possible are regulated by the occasions on which one meets these people. In this form of social organisation of humour we see very clearly revealed something which is much more difficult to perceive on the basis of an examination of our own society alone: that the occasions for humour may be analytically independent of the contents or structure or psychological function of humour. Without prejudging whether this is universally so or not, we may use the literature on ‘joking relation-ships’ in tribal society to clarify what could be meant by a dimension of humour based solely on the occasions on which it is permissible; thereafter we may ask ourselves whether this dimension of humour is to be found elsewhere as well, or whether it is a feature of tribal society only.

In the first summary analysis of joking relationships, Radcliffe-Brown (1952) suggests they have several basic features. In the first instance, they are relationships in which ‘one is by custom permitted, and in some instances required, to tease or make fun of the other, who in turn is required to take no offence’ (1952:90). This stresses what is by far the most important aspect of the relationships in question: that they are non-optional, or prescriptive, that it is not up to the individual to choose whether joking is appropriate or not under these circumstances, with two exceptions. First, any individual has potential joking relationships with a very large number of others, of which only a small number may in fact be realised due to lack of opportunity. Second, if neither partner (on any given occasion) initiates joking behaviour the relationship of joking partner may nonetheless continue without any hiatus or suggestion of failure. The second feature of these relationships is that they are based in the kinship pattern or some other objective feature of the social structure in question. Although there is wide variation between societies in this respect, the commonest joking relationships appear to be between siblings-in-law and between grandparents and grandchildren; they are also reported between categories of relation such as cross-cousins (i.e. cousin by marriage), uncle and nephew/aunt and niece, and even between vaguer kin such as all those with a common ancestor at the distance of great-grandparents or beyond, for instance the ‘duuse’ relationship reported by Barley (1983:92f.). Joking relationships are also to be found between entire clans or tribes, between villages, between groups of men who were all circumcised at the same time or groups of women all of whom started menstruating at the same time. We shall see that place in kinship patterns is central to Radcliffe-Brown’s explanation of joking relations.

The third element in Radcliffe-Brown’s theory is the observation that the forms of behaviour expected of joking partners are such ‘that in any other social context it would express and arouse hostility’, and that it is the context of the fixed joking relation which ensures that offence is neither given nor taken. Although much joking behaviour between joking relatives consists essentially of witticisms or teasing, it is frequently the case that it goes far beyond these limits: Dogon joking partners exchange the grossest insults and commonly talk about each other’s parents’ sexual organs when meeting; the Kaguru ‘think it witty to throw excrement at certain cousins’ and the Lodagaba dance grotesquely at joking partners’ funerals; at Tarahumara funerals the deceased’s joking partner will ‘dance up to a simulated corpse made of old clothing and kick at it while making lewd jokes and gestures’, and Luguru joking partners will even lie down in the grave, demanding payment before allowing the funeral to proceed and will make sexual advances to women mourners. Tarahumara grandfathers will chase their granddaughters with a corncob simulating a penis and pretend to rape them, and the girls retaliate in kind, pretending to grope under the old man’s loincloth; parallel behaviour is observed between grandson and grandmother, although usually in a more restrained version (Douglas, 1968:364–5; Kennedy, 1970:41f.; Christensen, 1963:1317f.). Under all of these circumstances no member of the relevant culture would dream of finding the proceedings anything but hilarious. These few examples indicate the extent to which the behaviour normal within joking relations would be deemed totally unsuitable under any other circumstances, for in none of these societies would such behaviour be tolerated except in this context. Clearly, also, such behaviour would not be tolerated in modern Western society, regardless of setting and regardless of whether the intention was humorous or not; the level of transgression acceptable in tribal societies’ joking relationships is clearly—insofar as these examples are typical—far beyond what is acceptable in the industrial world. However, this should not lead us to imagine that any form of behaviour would be possible in joking relationships: although the ethnographic literature has little to say on this subject, it is known that in some circumstances only certain parts of the body may be touched in obscene horseplay, but not others (see Sharman, 1969; Apte, 1985:32).

Three other features of the behaviour theorised by Radcliffe-Brown demand comment; although he himself does not refer to them, it is clear from the literature he summarises that they are common. First, the tendency for joking behaviour to be aggressive and/or obscene is often held to indicate that the primary source of joking relations is sexual. Brant (1948), for example, argues on the basis of a survey of some 220 societies that joking relations arise most frequently, although not exclusively, between those who are potential sexual partners. Second, such behaviour is public behaviour, both in the sense that it is not in any sense furtive, and in the more important sense that there is usually an audience (Kennedy, 1970:52)—this feature underlines how fully integrated into the social structure such behaviour is. Third, as Apte points out (1985: ch. 2), there is considerable dissymmetry between male and female in these relationships. Although joking relationships are extremely common between men and men, and between men and women, they are rare between women and women in tribal societies, although more frequent in peasant societies, where female modesty prevents joking when men are present but allows it when men are absent. Clearly this refers us to the dimension of power in humorous situations (see Part IV).

Radcliffe-Brown’s theory aims to explain this behaviour by assigning it a function—specifically, a latent function, since (as we shall see) the function in question is often denied by participants. What should be stressed in this context is how closely related function is to the identity of the participants. In brief outline, his theory is that joking relations are a form of ‘permitted disrespect’ which enters the social structure at points of stress, points where some aspect of the relationship involves both ‘disjunction and conjunction’ between the participants—for example marriage, where the wife’s family and the husband’s family have different interests vis-à-vis their offspring, and where relationships that demand respect (for example, the relation of younger to elder) may run counter to relationships where discord—e.g. economic competition—would be likely. Joking relationships, he argues, arise at such ambivalent points in the social system, and their nature, the ambiguous relationship between friendship and hostility that is intrinsic to joking—or at any rate to the forms observed here—both expresses and contains the ambivalence that derives from the positions that participants occupy in the social structure. The functional aspects of this theory will be discussed in the pages devoted to the ‘functions’ of humour (Part II); what should be stressed in the present context are two features of his theory:

1. This theory of joking makes no reference at all to the contents of jokes, and no explicit reference to the form, or process of humour (although it is clear that Radcliffe-Brown is assuming a common-sense model of it).
2. Humour is explained entirely on the basis of the social relationships between the participants. That is to say, it is clear that for RadcliffeBrown humour functions psycho-socially: it performs its social function through its psychological function, through the way in which it affects the mind—it relieves specific forms of tension; yet this tension is assumed to arise entirely from the nature of the social relationships between people, with no individual variation. And indeed this is necessarily so, for the whole point about joking relations is precisely the fact that they are largely non-optional—not just in Radcliffe Brown’s theory, but according to an enormous body of empirical research. Assuming the accuracy of the empirical research, this would suggest that the occasions on which humour occurs, as well as the sociological relationships between the participants, are a matter which is largely independent of either the structure or the function of humour.

The adequacy of Radcliffe-Brown’s model has frequently been challenged, primarily on grounds related to its functionalism (see Part II). However, one criticism commonly made in recent comments refers directly to the relevance of the notion of occasions for humour. It is based on Radcliffe-Brown’s assumption that he is able to recognise what a joke is. It is axiomatic that laughter does not necessarily mark the place of a joke—it might mark embarrassment, for instance. Radcliffe-Brown assumes that non-offence at something potentially offensive combined with laughter necessarily indicates a joke; in this he is making an assumption that would probably be valid in our society, but it is perhaps a piece of ethnocentrism. Only if we could be sure that there was some universal feature to jokes that made them clearly recognisable could we be sure that our assignment of a given event to the category ‘joke’ was correct. For example, the story about the recent Christians quoted as an epigraph to these pages: there it is interpreted as a joke, but it is difficult to know whether it was intended as such, or as a serious device. It is a commonplace of studies of joking relationships to assert that when x insults y and no offence is taken, what has occurred is a joke—that is to say, it is asserted that the insult is the phenomenal form of a relationship whose essence is that it is a joking relationship; but perhaps—some anthropologists argue—it is really in essence an insulting relationship, whose phenomenal form is that of a joke: the point is that in Western society we would be right in interpreting the relationships between the two categories of action in these terms, but in another social structure there can be no certainty that such an interpretation is correct (Apte, 1985:34ff.). What this criticism points to is the necessity of working out the relationship between occasions for joking and the structure of humour; we shall return to this point.

Radcliffe-Brown’s theory of joking relationships was based largely on studies of tribal social structures and was probably not intended to have any application outside of this framework. Clearly the feature of the social structure responsible for this exclusive focus is the fact that joking relationships are institutionalised—or ‘ritualised’—for this is a feature that is not to be found in modern Western industrial societies. Now this focus produced both the theory’s main strength and a considerable weakness. The strength is that, despite the criticisms of detail that have been offered, the empirical evidence clearly reveals that we are indeed in the presence of a set of institutionalised relationships which provide a framework for humour; its existence suggests that the psychological and/or semantic structure of humour is not—as is often supposed—the most fundamental layer of humour, for here we are in the presence of an independent variable in the humour equation, its setting or occasion; this directs our attention to the question of the role that setting, or occasion, or social relationships between participants may play in the overall nature of humour, not only in tribal society, but in other forms of society as well. The concomitant weakness is that the exclusive focus on the institutional setting for humour blinded Radcliffe-Brown to the question of the form of the joke, i.e. its semantic and/or psychological structure, and this produced two further problems, both analysed in Douglas’ (1968) The Social Control of Cognition’. The first of these is that Radcliffe-Brown is forced to ignore the content of the jokes that he refers to, in the sense that even if he notes them, the contents are practically irrelevant to the functional account of joking relationships (except in the mimimum common-sense manner referred to above); the result—which constitutes the second problem—is that the jokes in question become well-nigh incomprehensible, and have to be referred to cultural relativism for an explanation: if we (Westerners) cannot understand them, this is because we are not members of the appropriate culture, and we re-enter the problem of whether we are right in assigning any given action to the category ‘joke’ or not.

The critical observation that Douglas makes of Radcliffe-Brown’s theory is the starting point for her own theory. The form of the joke, she holds, is universal, and she hopes that by finding a relationship between this universal form and the occasions on which joking is a permitted, or even obligatory activity, it will be possible to ascribe a universal function to joking. Her definition of joke form is conventional: ‘It brings into relation disparate elements in such a way that one accepted pattern is challenged by the appearance of another which in some way was hidden in the first’ (1968:365).

This challenge is simultaneously ascribed a psychological modality: it is the relaxation of conscious control in favour of some pressure or other from the subconscious, a conception derived from Freud (see Part II). But this universal form and function must be related, Douglas insists, to the joking occasion: jokes occur—i.e. are permitted as well as attempted—at points in the social structure where something in the social relationship in question has the same form as the joke form. Thus, if the bishop gets stuck in the lift, suddenly the mildest sally becomes hilarious, because the social situation mirrors exactly the joke form—the subversion of one pattern by another which was hidden in it. Another example is taken from observation of the relationships normal on Norwegian fishing boats, where the net boss, who supervises the actual fish catching process, has an area of authority which is entirely distinct from that of the captain: the captain commands until the nets are lowered, the net boss commands once they are down. While the captain is in command the net boss constantly makes jokes, but once he is in command the joking stops; the technicalities of fishing and the division of expertise that goes with them are such that a pattern of partially subverted authority is normal, and the joke form mirrors this, therefore joking is possible; once the situation is changed, it no longer is.

In this context it is possible to give ritual or prescriptive joking a new meaning: the combination of the joke form and the kind of occasion when it is possible affirms something Douglas regards as a feature of all social structures: the sense of community, as opposed to the sense of structure. By structure she means the formal skeleton of any society: its laws, fixed customs, kinship system, etc.; community refers instead to the entirely informal network constituted by fellow-feeling, and joking is especially apt to express this since it both mirrors the subversion of established patterns and is based in pleasure, specifically the pleasure that derives from the relaxation of conscious control in favour of the unconscious: ‘Laughter and jokes, since they attack classification and hierarchy, are obviously apt symbols for expressing community in this sense of unhierarchised, undifferentiated social relations’ (1968:370). The strength of Douglas’ theory derives from the manner in which she brings together joke form—the semantic structure of jokes—jokes’ psychological function and jokes’ place in the social structure. Concomitantly, problems seem to arise from the very scope which is the argument’s strength. In the first place, it seems questionable whether joking alwa...

Table of contents

• COVER PAGE
• TAKING HUMOUR SERIOUSLY
• TITLE PAGE
• COPYRIGHT PAGE
• INTRODUCTION
• PART I: OCCASIONS FOR HUMOUR
• PART II: THE FUNCTIONS OF HUMOUR
• PART III: THE STRUCTURE OF HUMOUR
• PART IV: THE LIMITS OF HUMOUR
• CONCLUSION
• NOTES
• BIBLIOGRAPHY