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Jokes:
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Joke
A joke is a short story or series of words spoken or communicated with the
intent of causing laughter or being found humorous by the listener. A
practical joke differs from a verbal one in that the humor is mainly
physical rather than verbal (e.g. blocking a door while the "victim" is
still in the room).
In 1975 anthropologist Mary Douglas noted that "Joking is one mode of
expression has yet to be interpreted in its total relation to other modes of
expression";[1] scholar Seth Graham remarked that 30 years later that
statement is still largely valid.[2]
Jokes are performed either in a staged situation, such as a comedy in front
of an audience, or informally for the entertainment of participants and
onlookers. The desired response is generally laughter, although loud groans
are also a common response to some forms of jokes, such as puns and shaggy
dog stories.
Anthropology of jokes
In 1975 anthropologist Mary Douglas noted that "Joking as one mode of
expression has yet to be interpreted in its total relation to other modes of
expression";[3] scholar Seth Graham remarked that 30 years later that
statement is still largely valid.[4] She also noted:[5]
When people throw excrement at one another whenever they meet, either
verbally or actually, can this be interpreted as a case of wit, or merely
written down as a case of throwing excrement? This is the central problem of
all interpretation.
Psychology of jokes
Why we laugh has been the subject of serious academic study, examples being:
* Immanuel Kant, in Critique of Judgement (1790) states that "Laughter is an
effect that arises if a tense expectation is transformed into nothing." Here
is Kant's two hundred and seventeen year old joke and his analysis:
"An Englishman at an Indian's table in Surat saw a bottle of ale being
opened, and all the beer, turned to froth, rushed out. The Indian, by
repeated exclamations, showed his great amazement. - Well, what's so amazing
in that? asked the Englishman. - Oh, but I'm not amazed at its coming out,
replied the Indian, but how you managed to get it all in. - This makes us
laugh, and it gives us a hearty pleasure. This is not because, say, we think
we are smarter than this ignorant man, nor are we laughing at anything else
here that it is our liking and that we noticed through our understanding. It
is rather that we had a tense expectation that suddenly vanished..."
* Henri Bergson, in his book Le rire (Laughter, 1901), suggests that
laughter evolved to make social life possible for human beings.
* Sigmund Freud's "Jokes and their Relation to the Unconscious". (Der Witz
und seine Beziehung zum Unbewuίten).
* Arthur Koestler, in The Act of Creation (1964), analyzes humor and
compares it to other creative activities, such as literature and science.
* Marvin Minsky in Society of Mind (1986).
Marvin Minsky suggests that laughter has a specific function related to the
human brain. In his opinion jokes and laughter are mechanisms for the brain
to learn nonsense. For that reason, he argues, jokes are usually not as
funny when you hear them repeatedly.
* Edward de Bono in "The Mechanism of the Mind" (1969) and "I am Right, You
are Wrong" (1990).
Edward de Bono suggests that the mind is a pattern-matching machine, and
that it works by recognizing stories and behaviour and putting them into
familiar patterns. When a familiar connection is disrupted and an
alternative unexpected new link is made in the brain via a different route
than expected, then laughter occurs as the new connection is made. This
theory explains a lot about jokes. For example:
* Why jokes are only funny the first time they are told: once they are told
the pattern is already there, so there can be no new connections, and so no
laughter.
* Why jokes have an elaborate and often repetitive set up: The repetition
establishes the familiar pattern in the brain. A common method used in jokes
is to tell almost the same story twice and then deliver the punch line the
third time the story is told. The first two tellings of the story evoke a
familiar pattern in the brain, thus priming the brain for the punch line.
* Why jokes often rely on stereotypes: the use of a stereotype links to
familiar expected behaviour, thus saving time in the set-up.
* Why jokes are variants on well-known stories (eg the genie and a lamp and
a man walks into a bar): This again saves time in the set up and establishes
a familiar pattern.
* In 2002, Richard Wiseman conducted a study intended to discover the
world's funniest joke [1].
* Humor and Jokes have also been concluded to be logic that is completely
random or vise versa.
Laughter, the intended human reaction to jokes, is healthful in moderation,
uses the stomach muscles, and releases endorphinss, natural
happiness-inducing chemicals, into the bloodstream.
One of the most complete and informative books on different types of jokes
and how to tell them is Isaac Asimov's Treasury of Humor (1971), which
encompasses several broad categories of humour, and gives useful tips on how
to tell them, whom to tell them to, and ways to change the joke to fit one's
audience.
Rules
The rules of humour are analogous to those of poetry, as said the French
philosopher Henri Bergson: "In every wit there is something of a poet"[6](In
this essay Bergson viewed the essence of humour as the encrustation of the
mechanical upon the living. He used as an instance a book by an English
humorist, in which an elderly woman who desired a reputation as a
philanthropist provided "homes within easy hail of her mansion for the
conversion of atheists who have been specially manufactured for her, so to
speak, and for a number of honest folk who have been made into drunkards so
that she may cure them of their failing, etc." This idea seems funny because
a genuine impulse of charity as a living, vital impulse has become encrusted
by a mechanical conception of how it should manifest itself.) These common
rules are mainly: precision, synthesis and rhythm
Precision
To reach precision, the comedian must choose the words in order to obtain a
vivid, perfectly in focus image, and to avoid being generic (that drives the
audience confused, and results in no laugh); to properly arrange the words
in the sentence is also crucial to get precision. An example by Woody Allen
(from Side Effects, "A Giant Step for Mankind" story [2]):
Grasping the mouse firmly by the tail, I snapped it like a small whip, and
the morsel of cheese came loose.
Synthesis
As Shakespeare said in Hamlet, "Brevity is the soul of wit".[7] That means
that a joke is best when it expresses the maximum meaning with a minimal
number of words; this is today considered one of the key technical elements
of a joke. An example from Woody Allen:
I took a speed reading course and read War and Peace in twenty minutes. It
involves Russia.
Though, the familiarity of the pattern of "brevity" has lead to numerous
examples of jokes where the very length is itself the pattern breaking "punchline".
Numerous examples from Monty Python exist, for instance, the song "I Like
Traffic Lights", and more modernly, Family Guy contains numerous such
examples, most notably, in the episode Wasted Talent where Peter Griffin
bangs his shin, a classic slapstick trope, and holds his shin whilst
exhaling and inhaling to quiet the pain. This goes on for considerably
longer than expected. This joke is repeated again in the fourth season in
the episode Brian Goes Back to College when Peter is dressed as John
"Hannibal" Smith from The A-Team, and once more in the opening theme during
season six, in which Peter trips and falls on one of the dancers, crushing
her whilst the gag runs as per usual.
Rhythm
The joke content (meaning) is not what provokes the laugh, it just makes the
salience of the joke and provokes a smile. What makes us laugh is the joke
mechanism. Milton Berle demonstrated this with a classic theatre experiment
in the 1950s: if during a series of jokes you insert phrases that are not
jokes, but with the same rhythm, the audience laughs anyway. A classic is
the ternary rhythm, with three beats: introduction, premise, antithesis
(with the antithesis being the punch line).
In regards to the Milton Berle experiment, they can be taken to demonstrate
the concept of "breaking context" or "breaking the pattern". It isn't
necessarily the Rhythm that caused the audience to laugh, but the disparity
between the expectation of a "joke" and being instead given a non-sequitur
"normal phrase." This normal phrase is, itself, unexpected, and is a kind of
punchline.
Conclusions
When a technically-good joke is referred changing it with paraphrasing, it
is not laughable any more; this is because the paraphrase, changing some
term or moving it within the sentence, breaks the joke mechanism (its
vividness, brevity and rhythm), and its power and effectiveness are lost.
Douglas Adams described sentences where the joke word is the final word as
"comically weighted." This saves the "payoff" until the last possible
moment, allowing the expectation for surprise to reach its highest point,
while the mind is more firmly rooted in the pattern established by the rest
of the sentence.
Why do we laugh (model of appreciation)
No satisfactory theory of laughter that explains why humans laugh has yet
gained wide acceptance.
Some of the prominent explanations (that is a humour appreciation model)
comes from part of the ideas contained in the psychology essay Jokes and
their Relation to the Unconscious, by Sigmund Freud (1905) [3].
According to Freud's operational description, we laugh when the unconscious
energy emerges to reach the conscious mind; and it reaches it unexpectedly
thanks to the techniques used by the comedian. This exceeding energy is
rapidly discharged in the form of laughter.
Freud distinguishes three fields: the comic, the wit, and the humour.
Comic
In the comic field plays the 'economy of ideative expenditure'; in other
words excessive energy is wasted or action-essential energy is saved. The
profound meaning of a comic gag or a comic joke is "I'm a child"; the comic
deals with the clumsy body of the child.
Laurel and Hardy are a classic example. An individual laughs because he
recognizes the child that is in himself. In clowns stumbling is a childish
tempo. In the comic, the visual gags may be translated into a joke. For
example in Side Effects (By Destiny Denied story) by Woody Allen:
"My father used to wear loafers," she confessed. "Both on the same foot".
The typical comic technique is the disproportion.
Wit
In the wit field plays the "economy of censorship expenditure"[8](Freud
literally calls it "the economy of psychic expenditure".); usually
censorship prevents some 'dangerous ideas' from reaching the conscious mind,
or helps us avoid saying everything that comes to mind; adversely, the wit
circumvents the censorship and brings up those ideas. Different wit
techniques allow one to express them in a funny way. The profound meaning
behind a wit joke is "I have dangerous ideas". An example from Woody Allen:
I contemplated suicide again - this time by inhaling next to an insurance
salesman.
Wit is a branch of rhetoric, and there are about 200 techniques (technically
they are called tropes, a particular kind of figure of speech) that can be
used to make jokes.[9]
Irony can be seen as belonging to this field.
Humour
In the comedy field, humour induces an "economized expenditure of emotion"
(Freud literally calls it "economy of affect" or "economy of sympathy".
Freud produced this final part of his interpretation many years later, in a
paper later supplemented to the book.).[8][10] In other words, the joke
erases an emotion that should be felt about an event, making us insensitive
to it. The profound meaning of the void feel of a humour joke is "I'm a
cynic". An example from Woody Allen:
Three times I've been mistaken for Robert Redford. Each time by a blind
person.
This field of jokes is still a grey area, being mostly unexplored. Extensive
use of this kind of humour can be found in the work of British satirist
Chris Morris, like the sketches of the Jam television program.
Black humour and sarcasm belong to this field.
Cycles
Folklorists, in particular (but not exclusively) those who study the
folklore of the United States, collect jokes into joke cycles. A cycle is a
collection of jokes with a particular theme or a particular "script". (That
is, it is a literature cycle.)[11] Folklorists have identified several such
cycles:
* the elephant joke cycle that began in 1962
* the Helen Keller Joke Cycle that comprises jokes about Helen Keller[12]
* viola jokes[13]
* the NASA, Challenger, or Space Shuttle Joke Cycle that comprises jokes
relating to the Space Shuttle Challenger disaster[14][15][16]
* the Chernobyl Joke Cycle that comprises jokes relating to the Chernobyl
disaster[17]
* the Essex girl and the Stupid Irish joke cycles in the United Kingdom[18]
* the Dead Baby Joke Cycle[19]
* the Newfie Joke Cycle that comprises jokes made by Canadians about
Newfoundlanders[20]
* the Little Willie Joke Cycle, and the Quadriplegic Joke Cycle[21]
* the Jew Joke Cycle and the Polack Joke Cycle[22]
* the Rastus and Liza Joke Cycle, which Dundes describes as "the most
vicious and widespread white anti-Negro joke cycle"[23]
* the Radio Erevan (or Yerevan) Joke Cycle, which satirizes Radio Yerevan as
offering naive or stupid answers to questions from its listeners, answers
that often satirize Communism, Marxism, Socialism, Russian society, or
Russian institutions[24]
Gruner discusses several "sick joke" cycles that occurred upon events
surrounding Gary Hart, Natalie Wood, Vic Morrow, Jim Bakker, Richard Pryor,
and Michael Jackson, noting how several jokes were recycled from one cycle
to the next. For example: A joke about Vic Morrow ("We now know that Vic
Morrow had dandruff: they found his head and shoulders in the bushes") was
subsequently recycled and applied to the crew of the Challenger space
shuttle ("How do we know that Christa McAuliffe had dandruff? They found her
head and shoulders on the beach.").[25]
Berger asserts that "whenever there is a popular joke cycle, there generally
is some widespread kind of social and cultural anxiety, lingering below the
surface, that the joke cycle helps people deal with".[26]
Types of jokes
Jokes often depend on the humour of the unexpected, the mildly taboo (which
can include the distasteful or socially improper), or playing off
stereotypes and other cultural beliefs. Many jokes fit into more than one
category.
Subjects
Political jokes are usually a form of satire. They generally concern
politicians and heads of state, but may also cover the absurdities of a
country's political situation. Two large categories of this type of jokes
exist. The first one makes fun of a negative attitude to political opponents
or to politicians in general. The second one makes fun of political clichιs,
mottos, catch phrases or simply blunders of politicians. Some, especially
the you have two cows genre, derive humour from comparing different
political systems.
Professional humour includes caricatured portrayals of certain professions
such as lawyers, and in-jokes told by professionals to each other.
Mathematical jokes are a form of in-joke, generally designed to be
understandable only by insiders.
Ethnic jokes exploit ethnic stereotypes. They are often racist and
frequently considered offensive.
For example, the British tell jokes starting "An Englishman, an Irishman and
a Scotsman..." which exploit the supposed parsimony of the Scot, stupidity
of the Irish, or some combination. Such jokes exist among numerous peoples.
Racially offensive humour is increasingly unacceptable, but there are
similar jokes based on other stereotypes such as blonde jokes.
Religious jokes fall into several categories:
* Jokes based on stereotypes associated with people of religion (e.g. nun
jokes, priest jokes, or rabbi jokes)
* Jokes on classical religious subjects: crucifixion, Adam and Eve, St.
Peter at The Gates, etc.
* Jokes that collide different religious denominations: "A rabbi, a medicine
man, and a pastor went fishing..."
* Letters and addresses to God.
Self-deprecating or self-effacing humour is superficially similar to racial
and stereotype jokes, but involves the targets laughing at themselves. It is
said to maintain a sense of perspective and to be powerful in defusing
confrontations. Probably the best-known and most common example is Jewish
humour. The egalitarian tradition was strong among the Jewish communities of
Eastern Europe in which the powerful were often mocked subtly. Prominent
members of the community were kidded during social gatherings, part a
good-natured tradition of humour as a leveling device. A similar situation
exists in the Scandinavian "Ole and Lena" joke.
Self-deprecating humour has also been used by politicians, who recognize its
ability to acknowledge controversial issues and steal the punch of criticism
- for example, when Abraham Lincoln was accused of being two-faced he
replied, "If I had two faces, do you think this is the one Id be wearing?".
Dirty jokes are based on taboo, often sexual, content or vocabulary. Many
dirty jokes are also sexist.
Other taboos are challenged by sick jokes and gallows humour; to joke about
disability is considered in this group.
Surrealist or minimalist jokes exploit semantic inconsistency, for example:
Q: What's red and invisible? A: No tomatoes..
Anti-jokes are jokes that aren't funny in regular sense, and often can be
decidedly unfunny, but rely on the let-down from the expected joke to be
funny in itself.
An elephant joke is a joke, almost always a riddle or conundrum and often a
sequence of connected riddles, that involves an elephant.
Styles
The question / answer joke, sometimes posed as a common riddle, has a
supposedly straight question and an answer which is twisted for humorous
effect; puns are often employed. Of this type are knock-knock joke, light
bulb joke, the many variations on "why did the chicken cross the road?", and
the class of "What's the difference between..." joke, where the punch line
is often a pun or a spoonerism linking two apparently entirely unconnected
concepts.
Some jokes require a double act, where one respondent (usually the straight
man) can be relied on to give the correct response to the person telling the
joke. This is more common in performance than informal joke-telling.
A shaggy dog story is an extremely long and involved joke with a weak or
completely non-existent punchline. The humour lies in building up the
audience's anticipation and then letting them down completely. The longer
the story can continue without the audience realising it is a joke, and not
a serious anecdote, the more successful it is. Shaggy jokes appear to date
from the 1930s, although there are several competing variants for the
"original" shaggy dog story. According to one, an advertisement is placed in
a newspaper, searching for the shaggiest dog in the world. The teller of the
joke then relates the story of the search for the shaggiest dog in extreme
and exaggerated detail (flying around the world, climbing mountains, fending
off sabre-toothed tigers, etc); a good teller will be able to stretch the
story out to over half an hour. When the winning dog is finally presented,
the advertiser takes a look at the dog and states: "I don't think he's so
shaggy"
Notes
1. ^ 1975 p.291
2. ^ A CULTURAL ANALYSIS OF THE RUSSO-SOVIET ANEKDOT 2003 p.2
3. ^ "Jokes" 1975 p.291
4. ^ Seth Benedict Graham A CULTURAL ANALYSIS OF THE RUSSO-SOVIET ANEKDOT
2003 p.2
5. ^ "Jokes" 1975 p.293
6. ^ Henri Bergson [1901] (2005). Laughter: An Essay on the Meaning of the
Comic. Dover Publications.
7. ^ William Shakespeare (1600-1602). Hamlet, act 2, scene 2.
8. ^ a b Sigmund Freud (missingdate). Wit and its relation to the
unconscious. missingpublisher, 180,371374.
9. ^ Salvatore Attardo (1994). Linguistic Theories of Humour. Walter de
Gruyter, 55. ISBN 3-11-014255-4.
10. ^ Sigmund Freud (1928). "Humour". International Journal of
Psychoanalysis.
11. ^ Salvatore Attardo (2001). "Beyond the Joke", Humorous Texts: A
Semantic and Pragmatic Analysis. Walter de Gruyter, 6971. ISBN 311017068X.
12. ^ K. Hirsch and M.E. Barrick (1980). "The Hellen Keller Joke Cycle".
Journal of American Folklore 93: 441448.
13. ^ Carl Rahkonen (Winter 2000). "No Laughing Matter: The Viola Joke Cycle
as Musicians' Folklore". Western Folklore 59 (1): 4963.
DOI:10.2307/1500468.
14. ^ Elizabeth Radin Simons (October 1986). "The NASA Joke Cycle: The
Astronauts and the Teacher". Western Folklore 45 (4): 261277.
DOI:10.2307/1499821.
15. ^ Willie Smyth (October 1986). "Challenger Jokes and the Humor of
Disaster". Western Folklore 45 (4): 243260. DOI:10.2307/1499820.
16. ^ Elliott Oring (July September 1987). "Jokes and the Discourse on
Disaster". The Journal of American Folklore 100 (397): 276286.
17. ^ Laszlo Kurti (July September 1988). "The Politics of Joking: Popular
Response to Chernobyl". The Journal of American Folklore 101 (401): 324334.
18. ^ Christie Davies (1998). Jokes and Their Relation to Society. Walter de
Gruyter, 186189. ISBN 3110161044.
19. ^ Alan Dundes (July 1979). "The Dead Baby Joke Cycle". Western Folklore
38 (3): 145157. DOI:10.2307/1499238.
20. ^ Christie Davies (2002). "Jokes about Newfies and Jokes told by
Newfoundlanders", Mirth of Nations. Transaction Publishers. ISBN 0765800969.
21. ^ Christie Davies (1999). "Jokes on the Death of Diana", in eJulian
Anthony Walter and Tony Walter: The Mourning for Diana. Berg Publishers,
255. ISBN 1859732380.
22. ^ Alan Dundes (1971). "A Study of Ethnic Slurs: The Jew and the Polack
in the United States". Journal of American Folklore 84: 186203.
23. ^ (1991) "Folk Humor", in Alan Dundes: Mother Wit from the Laughing
Barrel: Readings in the Interpretation of Afro-American Folklore. University
Press of Mississippi, 612. ISBN 0878054782.
24. ^ Dr Arthur Asa Berger (1996). "What's in a Joke? A Microanalysis",
Manufacturing Desire: Media, Popular Culture, and Everyday Life. Transaction
Publishers, 7478. ISBN 1560002263.
25. ^ Charles R. Gruner (1997). The Game of Humor: A Comprehensive Theory of
Why We Laugh. Transaction Publishers, 142143. ISBN 0765806592.
26. ^ Dr Arthur Asa Berger (1993). "Healing with Humor", An Anatomy of Humor.
Transaction Publishers, 161162. ISBN 0765804948.
References
* Mary Douglas Jokes. Rethinking Popular Culture: Contemporary
Perspectives in Cultural Studies. [1975] Ed. Chandra Mukerji and Michael
Schudson. Berkeley: U of California P, 1991.
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