The great joy of the English literature degree course I took was that it gave us a great degree of freedom to read whichever authors we wanted, as long as we could write something halfway intelligent about them. Much of the time we were constrained only by time period, and when it came to thematic papers, not even that. I would take every opportunity to read and to write about the funniest authors I could find. I loved reading Swift, Pope, Rochester, Sterne, Dickens, Thackeray, Stoppard and, especially, Wilde. I also enjoyed pushing the envelope a bit as regards the canon, writing about the work of Alan Bennett, Tom Sharpe and Douglas Adams on occasion.
One of my tutors was in the habit of spending the tutorial reading my weekly essay aloud, and marking it in real time as we progressed. Much (I imagine) as stand-up comedians hone their instincts by practising in front of live audiences, this came with the considerable advantage that I would get not just her considered feedback, but also her raw, immediate response to what I had written. I quickly learned that cramming in as many funny quotes as I could justify was an effective strategy for getting a positive response, not least when I was taking liberties as regards my choice of texts.
In my third year I wrote an extended essay on satire, which was a solid justification for a sizeable dose of non-canonical reading. I was – and remain – fascinated by dissecting jokes, looking at how they work, what they depend on to make sense and what effect they have on readers. In the context of satire this often led to a troubling paradox, however. Satire to me had always felt like a freewheeling, licentious, and free-spirited mode of art, but the more I read critically and especially the more criticism I read, the more I came up against both the idea that satire tends towards conservatism (quite often Conservatism too), and conversely that it tends towards futility and impotence. These two critiques don’t always combine in the same way. Sometimes a satire flirts with undermining the system, but either explicitly or implicitly acknowledges that it won’t change anything. Other times it might mock the pretensions of those who would seek to change the status quo (the tedious “I identify as…” jokes would be a particularly egregious example of this). Intellectually this made sense, certainly to a substantial degree, but I found it rather depressing. Surely there was more to satire, and to comedy in general for that matter, than reenforcing the status quo?
I believe comedy and satire are much more nuanced than this analysis suggests. Ridicule of others can absolutely be used by the powerful to demonstrate and enhance their power, and showing the magnanimity to laugh at themselves can armour the powerful against critique. But laughter is much more complex and interesting than this. It really can be effective to undermine leaders who masquerade as strong, but are in fact very brittle, by subjecting them to ridicule. Such jokes might not bring down a regime, but they can certainly help to build solidarity among the resistance. Many jokes have a target selected for mockery, but this does not inevitably mean that they create in-groups and out-groups, it is possible for laughter to relieve tension, speaking the otherwise unspeakable (or just awkward) and helping everyone to recognise their common humanity.
There is an old joke that dissecting jokes is like dissecting frogs “nobody laughs and the frog dies”. Yet I find taking jokes apart and examining them like the cogs in a Swiss watch, seeing how they fit together, fascinating. I believe it tells us much about ourselves, sometimes our specific cultures, sometimes our broader humanity, to understand what makes us laugh.
Humour can be difficult to translate across languages and cultures, both geographically and historically – few comedies stand up well to the passage of time. There are a variety of reasons for this, but very often it boils down to humour being dependent on a mismatch of expectations. To take a very well-known example
“Why did the chicken cross the road? To get to the other side.”
In order for this to work, we need to understand the setup and punchline joke format, and therefore have an expectation that the response part of that equation will be something contrived to be funny. It might, for instance, involve a chicken or egg-related pun of some sort, or play up to our stereotypes of how chickens behave (see for example, every joke about stingy Scots, or idiotic Irish). That the punchline makes no reference to chickens, or chicken-adjacent themes, undermines our expectations, it is an anti-punchline. It is funny because the setup has conjured up a specific scenario and asked us to explain it, with the inference to be made that the pay-off must in some way relate to the specificity of a *chicken* crossing a road. The pay-off to this setup is that the punchline is mundane and generic. It’s the same reason anyone or anything would cross a road.
This joke is not funny unless we have an expectation of the structure of this kind of joke. For that matter, it also – to state the obvious – requires some basic familiarity with both chickens and roads. Such familiarity becomes more fragile as we cross cultural and linguistic barriers, including with our own culture’s past. The elements required for the chicken crossing the road joke to work are present in most contemporary cultures, and a good many historical ones, but a joke that depends on word play will often only work in a single language. One that is based on recent events, or figures of the day may work quite widely geographically, but only within a relatively narrow historical window. Physical comedy is perhaps the most universal, because it has no dependence on language and often, though not always, is quite broad in its cultural references. A silly walk or funny face will remain so in a wide range of cultural and historical contexts.
This is my most exploratory blog post so far, because I like to imagine that my own thoughts on the Theme might be of some interest. Of course I by no means intend to limit books within this theme to only the kinds of things I’ve touched on here. I can’t possibly capture the full scope of my own enthusiasms within a few hundred words, let alone anticipate all the possible areas for exploration that others may be pursuing. It seems to me an area with vast potential, and also one by which I feel so many of us are intrigued. Do get in touch with your own ideas as to where you’d like us to go with this theme!
