Humor
Serious consideration of humor as an influence on society is too often pushed behind the curtain. This research project, however, is not alone in contending that humor belongs on the center-stage because its power is far-reaching and transcendent.[1] Max Eastman and Murray S. Davis both argue that humor has been overlooked as inconsequential to society for far too long.[2]
This lack of careful consideration could be caused by the notorious difficulty to pin down a definition of humor. Davis notes that the logic of the definition is similar to the Supreme Court’s logic in defining obscenity;[3] it’s humor because, “I know it when I laugh at it.”[4] In the mid-nineteenth century, Henry Reed defined that “untranslatable” term ‘humor’ as the “happy compound of pathos and playfulness.”[5] The Oxford English Dictionary attempts to define humor—as dictionaries are apt to do—as “perceiving what is ludicrous or amusing,” and offers a bevy of terms that could serve as synonyms, such as jocularity and facetiousness.
Some scholars, such as E. B. White[6] and Robert Benchley,[7] have purposely avoided analyzing humor since its potency must be dependant on its inscrutability. “[Humor] won’t stand much poking. It has a certain fragility, an evasiveness, which one had best respect,” White claimed.[8] As this research project explores in Chapter 5, failing to examine the intentions of a humorist can only serve to shield the humorist from criticism, which will not encourage the public discussion necessary for a deliberative democracy.
In examining humor, Murray pointed out that no matter the scholars’ research background, they all come to the same conclusion: humor finds sociological structures and rips them down. “[H]umor needs stiff cultural and social structures to snap,” Murray argued. “No structure, no snap, no laugh.”[9] The humorist can substitute for a humanist, articulating a worldview that is balanced between two extreme philosophical positions.[10] Humanist schools of sociology, such as Marxism[11] and symbolic interactionism,[12] assume that humans construct societal structures. Humorists start from the same assumption, and then focus on the deconstruction of these processes, unlike humanists, which look at how the world is constructed.
Comedy not only takes apart societal structure, but also dismantles the concept of structure itself. “A joke confronts one relevant structure by another clearly less relevant, one well-differentiated view by a less coherent one,” Mary Douglas observed.[13] In this way humorists can weaken the legitimacy of a dominant conceptual structure, [14] exposing the inadequacy of those same structures.
One of humor’s great theorists, Mikhail Bakhtin, asserted that laughter is unique in “allowing social analysis, reflection and criticism.”[15] Humor and laughter are not separate from serious analysis, and humor serves as a necessary device to halt the stranglehold a norm may have on criticism.[16] Bakhtin also discussed the medieval celebration, “carnival,” as a time when the common people partied, practiced licentious behavior, and performed parodic plays with bawdy humor.[17] This carnival allowed the commoners refuge “from prevailing truth and established order,” of which they were on the bottom.[18] Humor belonged in Bakhtin’s carnival because it allows social controls to be resisted, rearranged, and renegotiated.
Of course, many of these theorists have been analyzing humor in broad terms; certainly sight gags and fart jokes, though types of humor, do not serve such a mighty purpose as encouraging deliberative democracy. The function of this research project is not to denigrate low-brow humor, which possesses a power of its own. This type of humor is simply not the focus of this research. I focus on a type of humor that, according to Charles Schutz, is like a puzzle of criticism, requiring “mental participation by the audience, and its lessons are not hortatory, but self-learned.”[19] This research project intends to show that “[t]he highest form of humor,” or satire, “points how arbitrary and tenuous our own self system is—which everyone tries to ignore.”[20]
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[1] See Max Eastman, The Sense of Humor. (New York: Scribners, 1921), 3-4. See also Murray S. Davis, introduction to What's so Funny?: The Comic Conception of Culture and Society. (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1993), 5.
[2] Ibid.[3] In Jacobellis v. Ohio, 378 U.S. 184 (1964), Justice Potter Stewart wrote in his concurring opinion, “I shall not today attempt further to define the kinds of material I understand to be embraced within that shorthand description ["hard-core pornography"]; and perhaps I could never succeed in intelligibly doing so. But I know it when I see it, and the motion picture involved in this case is not that.”
[4]Murray S. Davis, introduction to What's so Funny?: The Comic Conception of Culture and Society. (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1993), 4.
[5] Henry Reed. Lectures on English literature a 1854, ii (1855), 63.
[6] E. B. White, preface to A Subtreasury of American Humor, ed. E.B. White and Katherine S. White. (New York: Coward-McCann, 1941).
[7] Robert Benchley, “What does it mean?” in The Benchley Roundup, ed. Nathaniel Benchley. (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1983), 92.
[8] White, preface to A Subtreasury of American Humor, xviii.
[9]Davis, conclusion to What's so Funny?, 310, Note 5.
[10]Davis, conclusion to What's so Funny?, 310.
[11] Marxism states that humans have constructed capitalism, a system whereby the working class is forced to sell their labor at a disproportional level. Marx’s theory is one in which, according to Microsoft Encarta, “class struggle is a central element in the analysis of social change in Western societies.”
[12] Society is based on the construction of interacting symbols. See Herbert Blumer, "Society as Symbolic Interaction,” in Human Behavior and Social Process: An Interactionist Approach, ed. Arnold M. Rose (Boston: Houghton-Mifflin, 1962).
[13] Mary Douglas, "Jokes," in Implicit Meanings: Essays in Anthropology, (London: Routledge, 1979), 105.
[14] Ibid., 108.
[15] Jonathan Gray, Jeffrey Jones, and Ethan Thompson. Satire TV: Politics and Comedy in the Post-Network Era. (New York: New York University Press, 2009), 9.
[16] Mikhail M. Bakhtin, The Dialogic Imagination, trans. Caryl Emerson and Michael Holquist (Austin: University of Texas Press, 1981), 23.
[17] Mikhail M. Bakhtin, Rabelais and His World, trans. Helene Iswolsky (Bloomington: Indiana University Press, 1984), 123.
[18] Ibid., 10.
[19] Charles E. Schutz, Political Humor: From Aristophanes to Sam Ervin (London: Associated University Presses, 1977), 332. Schutz also argued that humor plays a cathartic role, providing a means of release of frustration. The type of cathartic venting that satirical news provides is somewhat different than traditional rhetorical definitions. Satirical news takes its catharsis from truthful, real social condition existing in the real world, as opposed to the Aristotelian concept of generating catharsis through narrative or plot.
[20]Davis, conclusion to What's so Funny?, 312.
This lack of careful consideration could be caused by the notorious difficulty to pin down a definition of humor. Davis notes that the logic of the definition is similar to the Supreme Court’s logic in defining obscenity;[3] it’s humor because, “I know it when I laugh at it.”[4] In the mid-nineteenth century, Henry Reed defined that “untranslatable” term ‘humor’ as the “happy compound of pathos and playfulness.”[5] The Oxford English Dictionary attempts to define humor—as dictionaries are apt to do—as “perceiving what is ludicrous or amusing,” and offers a bevy of terms that could serve as synonyms, such as jocularity and facetiousness.
Some scholars, such as E. B. White[6] and Robert Benchley,[7] have purposely avoided analyzing humor since its potency must be dependant on its inscrutability. “[Humor] won’t stand much poking. It has a certain fragility, an evasiveness, which one had best respect,” White claimed.[8] As this research project explores in Chapter 5, failing to examine the intentions of a humorist can only serve to shield the humorist from criticism, which will not encourage the public discussion necessary for a deliberative democracy.
In examining humor, Murray pointed out that no matter the scholars’ research background, they all come to the same conclusion: humor finds sociological structures and rips them down. “[H]umor needs stiff cultural and social structures to snap,” Murray argued. “No structure, no snap, no laugh.”[9] The humorist can substitute for a humanist, articulating a worldview that is balanced between two extreme philosophical positions.[10] Humanist schools of sociology, such as Marxism[11] and symbolic interactionism,[12] assume that humans construct societal structures. Humorists start from the same assumption, and then focus on the deconstruction of these processes, unlike humanists, which look at how the world is constructed.
Comedy not only takes apart societal structure, but also dismantles the concept of structure itself. “A joke confronts one relevant structure by another clearly less relevant, one well-differentiated view by a less coherent one,” Mary Douglas observed.[13] In this way humorists can weaken the legitimacy of a dominant conceptual structure, [14] exposing the inadequacy of those same structures.
One of humor’s great theorists, Mikhail Bakhtin, asserted that laughter is unique in “allowing social analysis, reflection and criticism.”[15] Humor and laughter are not separate from serious analysis, and humor serves as a necessary device to halt the stranglehold a norm may have on criticism.[16] Bakhtin also discussed the medieval celebration, “carnival,” as a time when the common people partied, practiced licentious behavior, and performed parodic plays with bawdy humor.[17] This carnival allowed the commoners refuge “from prevailing truth and established order,” of which they were on the bottom.[18] Humor belonged in Bakhtin’s carnival because it allows social controls to be resisted, rearranged, and renegotiated.
Of course, many of these theorists have been analyzing humor in broad terms; certainly sight gags and fart jokes, though types of humor, do not serve such a mighty purpose as encouraging deliberative democracy. The function of this research project is not to denigrate low-brow humor, which possesses a power of its own. This type of humor is simply not the focus of this research. I focus on a type of humor that, according to Charles Schutz, is like a puzzle of criticism, requiring “mental participation by the audience, and its lessons are not hortatory, but self-learned.”[19] This research project intends to show that “[t]he highest form of humor,” or satire, “points how arbitrary and tenuous our own self system is—which everyone tries to ignore.”[20]
_____________________________________
[1] See Max Eastman, The Sense of Humor. (New York: Scribners, 1921), 3-4. See also Murray S. Davis, introduction to What's so Funny?: The Comic Conception of Culture and Society. (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1993), 5.
[2] Ibid.[3] In Jacobellis v. Ohio, 378 U.S. 184 (1964), Justice Potter Stewart wrote in his concurring opinion, “I shall not today attempt further to define the kinds of material I understand to be embraced within that shorthand description ["hard-core pornography"]; and perhaps I could never succeed in intelligibly doing so. But I know it when I see it, and the motion picture involved in this case is not that.”
[4]Murray S. Davis, introduction to What's so Funny?: The Comic Conception of Culture and Society. (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1993), 4.
[5] Henry Reed. Lectures on English literature a 1854, ii (1855), 63.
[6] E. B. White, preface to A Subtreasury of American Humor, ed. E.B. White and Katherine S. White. (New York: Coward-McCann, 1941).
[7] Robert Benchley, “What does it mean?” in The Benchley Roundup, ed. Nathaniel Benchley. (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1983), 92.
[8] White, preface to A Subtreasury of American Humor, xviii.
[9]Davis, conclusion to What's so Funny?, 310, Note 5.
[10]Davis, conclusion to What's so Funny?, 310.
[11] Marxism states that humans have constructed capitalism, a system whereby the working class is forced to sell their labor at a disproportional level. Marx’s theory is one in which, according to Microsoft Encarta, “class struggle is a central element in the analysis of social change in Western societies.”
[12] Society is based on the construction of interacting symbols. See Herbert Blumer, "Society as Symbolic Interaction,” in Human Behavior and Social Process: An Interactionist Approach, ed. Arnold M. Rose (Boston: Houghton-Mifflin, 1962).
[13] Mary Douglas, "Jokes," in Implicit Meanings: Essays in Anthropology, (London: Routledge, 1979), 105.
[14] Ibid., 108.
[15] Jonathan Gray, Jeffrey Jones, and Ethan Thompson. Satire TV: Politics and Comedy in the Post-Network Era. (New York: New York University Press, 2009), 9.
[16] Mikhail M. Bakhtin, The Dialogic Imagination, trans. Caryl Emerson and Michael Holquist (Austin: University of Texas Press, 1981), 23.
[17] Mikhail M. Bakhtin, Rabelais and His World, trans. Helene Iswolsky (Bloomington: Indiana University Press, 1984), 123.
[18] Ibid., 10.
[19] Charles E. Schutz, Political Humor: From Aristophanes to Sam Ervin (London: Associated University Presses, 1977), 332. Schutz also argued that humor plays a cathartic role, providing a means of release of frustration. The type of cathartic venting that satirical news provides is somewhat different than traditional rhetorical definitions. Satirical news takes its catharsis from truthful, real social condition existing in the real world, as opposed to the Aristotelian concept of generating catharsis through narrative or plot.
[20]Davis, conclusion to What's so Funny?, 312.