Sociology of Humor

The sociology of humor Giselinde Kuipers
1. Introduction Humor is a quintessentially social phenomenon. Jokes and other humorous utterances are a form of communication that is usually shared in social interaction. These humorous utterances are socially and culturally shaped, and often quite particular to a specic time and place. And the topics and themes people joke about are generally central to the social, cultural and moral order of a society or a social group. Despite the social character of humor, sociology, the discipline that studies society and social relations, has not concerned itself much with humor. When sociology emerged in the nineteenth century, it focused mainly on the great structural transformations of the modern times: modernization, industrialization, urbanization, secularization, etc. It was not very interested in the unserious business of everyday life: interactions, emotions, play, leisure, private life, and other things not directly related to great developments on the macro-level of society such as humor. In the course of the twentieth century, sociology became more diverse and increasingly concerned with the micro-reality of everyday life, but it still remained overwhelmingly devoted to the study of social problems, great transformations, and other serious matters. As a result, humor came into focus mainly when it seemed problematic in itself, or was concerned with important social issues: race and ethnicity, political conict, social resistance, gender inequalities. Meanwhile, questions about the social nature of humor were addressed by many other disciplines. Many of the classical humor theoreticians (Morreall 1983) touch on social aspects of humor. However, these questions were mostly answered from a more philosophical or psychological perspective. Anthropologists and folklorists were much ahead of the sociologists in paying serious and systematic attention to the social meanings and functions of humor (see Apte 1985; Oring this volume). Only after the 1970s can we speak of a serious emergence of a sociological interest in humor (Fine 1983; Paton 1988; Zijderveld 1983).
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In this chapter, I will give an overview of sociological thought about humor. Sociological thought is dened here broadly (and somewhat imperialistically) as any scholarship concerned with the social functions or social shaping of humor. Since the authors discussed here have used very dierent conceptualizations and denitions of humor, I will simply adopt the various notions of humor used by the authors discussed, and leave the matter of the denition of humor to other authors in this volume. First, I will discuss a number of theoretical perspectives on humor, roughly in chronological order: the functionalist, conict, symbolic interactionist, phenomenological, and comparative-historical approach. After that, I will discuss a number of issues central to todays sociological thought about humor: the relation between humor, hostility and transgression; humor and laughter; and the social shaping of humorous media and genres. 2. Sociological perspectives on humor 2.1. Pre-disciplinary history Superiority theory, relief theory, and incongruity are usually described as the three classical approaches to humor and laughter. These approaches predate academic disciplinary specialization, so most of the classical formulations are subsumed today under the heading of philosophy (Morreall 1983; 1987). The earliest sociologist who discussed humor was the British philosopher/sociologist/political theorist Herbert Spencer. His discussion of laughter can be placed in the tradition of relief theory: laughter, to Spencer, is the discharge of arrested feelings into the muscular system . . . in the absence of other adequate channels. (Spencer 1861/1987: 108109) However, Spencer connected this energy release with the experience of incongruity: laughter naturally results only when consciousness is unawares transferred from great things to small only when there is what we may call a descending incongruity. (ibid. 110, italics in original) The discharge of tension is still one of the main functions humor is believed to fulll, and as such the relief theory has had great inuence on modern humor scholarship, mostly via the work of Sigmund Freud (1905/1976). However, pure relief theorists, explaining all humor and laughter as release of tension or safety valve, cannot be found anymore in humor scholarship these days. Of the three classical approaches, superiority theory is the most obviously connected with social relations. This tradition can be traced back to
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Plato and Aristotle, and has most famously been formulated by Thomas Hobbes: Laughter is nothing else but sudden glory arising from some sudden conception of some eminency in ourselves, by comparison with the inrmity of others, or with our own formerly. (Hobbes 1650/1987: 20) Superiority theorists state that humor and laughter are expressions of superiority, which of course reects a social relationship. However, on close consideration the classical theorists describe superiority as an individual experience: the communicative or relational aspect of the joking and laughing is generally not examined in these theories. In other words: while addressing a social event, superiority theories of humor are not very sociological. As will become clear in this article, the relation between humor and superiority although referred to in other terms, such as power, conict, or hierarchy is still central to social scientic studies of humor. Incongruity theory the theory that states that all humor is based on the perception or recognition of incongruity is not as obviously related to sociological questions, since it is mainly concerned with the nature of humorous texts or other stimuli, or with the mental operations involved in processing these texts. However, as incongruity theory, in several varieties (Attardo and Raskin 1991; Oring 1992; 2003; Raskin 1985; Ruch 1998), became the dominant perspective in humor scholarship, it has been incorporated in sociological thought in various ways: how incongruities and their humorous potential are culturally and socially determined (Davis 1993; Oring 1992; 2003); how the incongruous form permits specic social functions (Mulkay 1988), and how incongruities get to be perceived and constructed as funny (Douglas 1973). The rst full-edged theory of humor was developed by Sigmund Freud. In his Jokes and Their Relation to the Unconscious (1905) he integrated elements of relief and incongruity theory, and combined them with his psychoanalytic theory. While Freuds theories on humor (and other topics) are much disputed, he was the rst to systematically address what I have called here sociological questions about humor, and his inuence on the sociology of humor has been immense. Without attempting to explain Freuds entire humor theory (see Martin 2006: 33 42; Palmer 1994: 7992), let me note two important themes. First, Freud discussed the importance of social relationships between the teller of the joke, his audience, and (when applicable) the butt of the joke. In other words: he introduced the social relationship into the analysis of humor. Second, Freud paid attention to the relationship between humor and socially constructed taboos. Jokes, according to Freud, were a way to avoid the censor, or the internalized social restrictions, thus
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enabling the expression (and enjoyment) of drives otherwise inhibited by society. To Freud, these forbidden drives were mostly sex and aggression. Freuds theory has been strongly criticized, especially for the claim that all humor in the end is based on sex and aggression, although, in all fairness, Freud is more nuanced about this in his discussion of actual jokes than in the general statement of his theory. Another main point of criticism is the unfalsiability of Freuds theory: the references to underlying drives are, by necessity, veiled and therefore hard to disprove. However, the notion of jokes as related to, and attempting to circumvent, social taboos has become very central to humor scholarship.1 The other early theorist of humor with sociological insight was Henri Bergson. Like Freuds theory, Bergsons Laughter (1900/1999) contains a number of rather untenable and untestable generalizations (for instance, that all laughter is a response to something mechanical encrusted on the living), alongside insightful contributions. For sociologists, his most relevant observations have to do with the social character of laughter. Bergson described humor and laughter as essentially social and shared. Laughing at someone, on the other hand, functions as a means of exclusion, and hence as a social corrective and form of social control. After Freud and Bergson, the various disciplines of humor studies branched out, and in the course of the twentieth century, a number of approaches emerged that are more or less specic to the social sciences: the functionalist approach; the conict approach; the symbolic interactionist approach; the phenomenological approach; and the comparative-historical approach. 2.2. The functionalist approach The functionalist approach interprets humor in terms of the social functions it fullls for a society or social group. Especially in older studies of humor, functionalist interpretations tended to stress how humor (and other social phenomena) maintain and support the social order. Functionalist studies of humor are often ethnographic studies, but humorous texts, events, and corpora have also been analyzed from a functionalist perspective. The earliest functionalist explanations can be found in the work of anthropologists on so-called joking relationships, a a relationship between two persons in which one is by custom permitted and in some instances required to tease or make fun of the other (Radclie-Brown 1940: 195). RadclieBrown interpreted such relationships, which exist in various non-Western
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societies, as a way to manage the strain inherent in specic relationships. They are modes of organizing a denite and stable system of social behaviour in which conjunctive and disjunctive components . . . are maintained and combined (Radclie Brown 1940: 200). This obligatory joking is a way to relieve tension in possibly strained relationships, thus maintaining the social order. Later, a number of studies were done of non-obligatory joking relationships in industrialized societies, with similar interpretations about the tension-relieving function of joking in situations that contained some sort of structural conict or contradiction (Bradney 1957; Sykes 1966). Other ritualized forms of humor, such as rituals of reversal (like carnival), and ritual clowning (Apte 1985) were similarly explained as a safety valve to blow o social tension. Another function ascribed to humor is social control. Stephenson (1951), in an analysis of American jokes about stratication, concluded that these jokes make fun of transgressions of the social order, and in that way reveal an adherence to a set of values regarded as the traditional American creed (Stephenson 1951: 574). This reasoning is reminiscent of Bergsons interpretation of humor and laughter as a social corrective: by laughing at something, it is dened as outside of the normal. A more sophisticated version of this corrective function of humor was developed by Powell (1988), who placed humor among other possible responses to things out of the ordinary, and dened it as one of the milder forms of social corrective (stronger forms being, for instance, declaring someone crazy). Very recently, social control theory has been revived by Billig, who in Laughter and Ridicule (2005) puts forward a theory of humor as a social corrective, closely linked with embarrassment, arguing that ridicule, far from being a detachable negative, lies at the heart of humor. (Billig 2005: 190; see also Billig 2001b) From a very dierent angle, Coser also noted the social control functions of humor. In one of her two inuential and oft-cited microsociological studies of humor in a hospital ward, she looked at the patterns of laughter during the sta meetings (Coser 1960). This study showed how the amount and direction of joking reected the social hierarchy. By counting the number of laughs, she discovered that doctors got signicantly more laughs than residents, who got more laughs than the nurses. Moreover, everybody tended to joke down: doctors tended to joke about residents, residents joked about the nurses or themselves, and the nurses joked about themselves, or about the patients and their families. According to Coser, this joking helps to maintain the social order: it keeps people in their place. The hierarchy-building function of humor, with the associated correlation between status and
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successful humor production, has been noted in various other studies (Pizzini 1991; Robinson and Smith-Lovin 2001; Sayre 2001). In her second paper on humor, on the use of joking by patients in the hospital ward, Coser explored another function of humor, which also contributes to the social order: social cohesion. In the more egalitarian and less formally structured life of the wards patients, humor served to create solidarity, share experiences, and build an identity within the group. This cohesive function may seem at odds with the hierarchy-maintaining function. However, hierarchical groups need cohesion too. Joking apparently manages, more than most other forms of combinations, to combine the seemingly contradictory functions of hierarchy-building and bringing about solidarity (e.g. at work, in the military, cf. Koller 1988: 233260). Moreover, Coser describes the use of humor in two very dierent contexts: a formally structured situation among people who know each other versus a more disorganized and egalitarian situation, which is likely to aect the functions humor can, and needs to, fulll. In her article on the cohesive functions of laughter, Coser wrote that to laugh, or to occasion laughter through humor and wit, is to invite those present to come closer. Laughter and humor are indeed like an invitation, be it an invitation for dinner, or an invitation to start a conversation: it aims at decreasing social distance. (Coser 1959: 172) One of the reasons for humors cohesive function is that a joke is an invitation the acceptance of which is immediately apparent: a laugh or a smile. There are very few forms of interaction that are connected as closely with social acceptance and approval as laughter (Provine 2000). Also, collective joking takes people outside of everyday life into a more playful non-serious atmosphere, creating what the anthropologist Victor Turner called communitas (Fine 1983). Hence, humor not only is a sign of closeness among friends, it is also an eective way of forging social bonds, even in situations not very conducive to closeness: it breaks the ice between strangers, unites people in dierent hierarchical positions, and creates a sense of shared conspiracy in the context of illicit activities like gossiping or joking about superiors. The ip 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. The excluding function of humor is often mentioned as the basis for the corrective function described above (Powell 1988; Billig 2005) What these three functions relief, control, cohesion have in common is their focus on humor and joking as contribution to the maintenance of social order. The insistence that all social phenomena maintain the social structure
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has become the focus of much criticism leveled at the (structural-) functionalism of the 1950s and 1960s: it makes functionalist explanations circular and basically untestable. Social phenomena do not necessarily have the same function for all concerned, and they may well be dysfunctional, at least from some peoples perspective. Despite the demise of functionalism as a theoretical framework after the 1960s, functionalist explanations of humor still are common in humor studies. Since the 1970s, sociologists have not employed functionalism as a complete theory or comprehensive framework, but instead have attempted to combine functional analysis of humor with analysis of content and context. Humor obviously fullls important social functions, but more recent studies tend to stress the multiple functions of humor, which can be a threat as well as a contribution to the social order: cohesion, control, relief, but also the expression of conict, inciting resistance, insulting, ridiculing or satirizing others (Holmes 2000; Martin 2006; Mulkay 1988; Palmer 1994). Martineau (1972), in an early attempt to move away from one-dimensional functionalism, constructed a model connecting the functions of humor with specic social relations. He distinguished esteeming and disparaging jokes, within and outside a group, targeting people within or outside the group. Depending on the conditions, he expected humor to solidify social bonds, demoralize, increase internal or external hostility, foster consensus or redene relationships. Powell and Paton (1988) edited a volume concentrating mainly on the complex interplay between resistance and control functions of humor, summarized under the heading of tension management, but illustrating a variety of other, positive and negative, functions along the way. The functions humor fullls can be psychological as well as social. Black or sick humor, for instance in disaster jokes, has often been explained as a way to cope with unpleasant experiences, both individually and collectively, and more generally to distance oneself from negative emotions such as fear, grief, or shame (Dundes 1987; Morrow 1987. For a critique, see Oring 1987). Sociologist Peter Berger (1997) stressed the psychological effects of humor, describing (some forms of) humor as consolation, liberation, and transcendence. Thomas Sche described humor and laughter as catharsis (Sche 1980) and anti-shame (1990). As in the social functions stressed by humor scholars, psychological functions ascribed to humor tend to be benecial. Scholars focusing on the dark side of humor will be discussed below. Robinson and Smith-Lovin (2001), in an excellent recent paper, attempted to test functionalist explanations by looking at the use of various types of
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humor in task-oriented groups in slightly diering social constellations. They discern four main social functions of humor: meaning making (derived from the symbolic interactionist perspective described below), hierarchy building, cohesion building, and tension relief. In their study, which looked at groups consisting of strangers in task-oriented interaction, they found most support for the hierarchical and (slightly less so) cohesive functions. They replicated Cosers nding that high status group members get more laughs and make more jokes. The cohesive functions of humor were shown to depend both on the type of humor (cohesive versus dierentiating, outward vs. inward -directed), on the status of the joker, and on the composition of the group. In other words, the functions of humor are not xed, but very much dependent on type of relation, social context, and on the content of the joke. 2.3. Conict approach Conict theories see humor as an expression of conict, struggle, or antagonism. In contrast with the functionalist theories described above, humor is interpreted not as venting o and hence avoidance or reduction but as an expression or correlate of social conict: humor as a weapon, a form of attack, a means of defense (Speier 1998). Conict theories of humor have been used especially in the analysis of ethnic and political humor, both cases where the use of humor has a clear target, and tends to be correlated with conict and group antagonism.2 This approach is clearly indebted to the Hobbesian tradition of humor as sudden glory. However, the literature about humor and conict suers somewhat from conceptual unclarity: in writings about the use of humor as a weapon hostility, aggression, superiority, and rivalry are often used interchangibly, and are not clearly distinguished or delineated. Superiority implies the (experience of) a higher position, a form of social ranking which is not necessarily related to the urge to hurt someone, which forms the basis of hostility and aggression. As Cosers ndings in the psychiatric ward suggest, there can be superiority without conict although some conict sociologists would contest this, claiming that all inequality entails conict.3 Conict, on the other hand, typically implies hostility. However, superiority (power, hierarchy) is an important moderator of how a conict plays out. In 1942, Obrdlik published a paper on the gallows humor in Czechoslovakia under the Nazi regime (in place at the time of publication). He interpreted this form of anti-Nazi joking in two ways: as resistance and morale
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booster for the Czech (which resembles the relief theory), but also as having a disintegrating inuence on the Germans occupiers. Moreover, Obrdlik pointed out that such humor was an index of the strength of the oppressors: if they an aord to ignore it, they are strong; if they react wildly, with anger. . . they are not sure of themselves, no matter how much they display their might on the surface (Obrdlik 1942: 716). Thus, humor has positive reinforcing functions for the ingroup, but in the context of intergroup relations humor was more like a weapon: an expression of aggression and resistance. The jokes described by Obrdlik are reminiscent of political humor in many oppressive regimes, such as the Nazi regime (Stokker 1995) or the former Communist regimes (Benton 1988; Davies 2007). Typically, the direct voicing of dissent in such regimes is impossible or very dangerous, and even joking may be a risky enterprise, as was memorably (though unscholarly) described in Czech novelist Milan Kunderas The Joke (1967). While this form of humor is clearly correlated with conict and antagonism, there has been considerable disagreement about the eects of such humor. Humor in repressive circumstances is usually clandestine they were called Flsterwitze or whispered jokes in Nazi Germany (Speier 1998). This would imply that the internal morale-boosting functions are more important than the eects on the powerful outgroup that the jokes target. Because such humor from below remains backstage or anonymous, many humor scholars conclude that the eects of such humor are relatively marginal. The 1988 collection of Powell and Paton on humor as resistance and control is organized around the interplay of these resistance and control functions of humor. Most of the authors in this volume adhere to some version of the conict theory of humor, focusing on conictive or unequal situations that range from political humor under Communist rule to the much less dramatic example of humor in the workplace. Generally, the authors conclude that the control function is the more important, and that resistance through joking provides mostly temporary relief but stabilizes potentially conictive situations. As Benton states in his contribution on jokes under communist rule: the political joke will change nothing. Its the relentless enemy of greed, injustice, cruelty and oppression but it could never do without them. It is not a form of active resistance. It reects no political programme. It will mobilize no one. Like the Jewish joke in its time, it is important for keeping society sane and stable. It cushions the blows of cruel governments and creates sweet illusions. . . . its impact is as eeting as the laughter it produces. (Benton 1988: 54). Or, as Speier (1998: 1395) succinctly put it: Accommodation, however much one peppers it with scorn, remains accommodation.
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However, other authors have more faith in the subversive potential of humor, and have argued that such weapons of the weak (Scott 1985) may be important in making people reect critically on their situation, allow them to express hostility against those in power, create an alternative space of resistance, or even give people the courage to take up more concrete actions (Gouin 2004; Hiller 1983; Jenkins 1994; Stokker 1995). Goldstein, in her provocative ethnography of poor women in a Brazilian shantytown, which she organized around the subjects and places of these womens laughter, argued that While the humor of the poor may not necessarily lead directly to rebellions and political revolutions, it does open up a discursive space within which is becomes possible to speak about matters that are otherwise naturalized, unquestioned, or silenced. (Goldstein 2003: 10). This debate on the subversive or conservative nature of humor is partly the result of underlying theoretical disagreements that cannot be resolved by empirical considerations. However, the dynamics of humor in conditions of conict, and hence humors revolutionary potential, strongly depends on the power division and status relations between jokers and their targets. To illustrate this using the case of political humor: in very repressive or unequal conditions, the humor of those without power tends to be clandestine and relatively toothless. Downward humor by those in power in such situations easily becomes aggressive to the point of cruel. A recent example, described by Paul Lewis (2006) is the cruel joking by American prison guards in Baghdad. Such humor by the mighty has received relatively little scholarly attention, but as Speier remarked in his essay on wit and politics: Jests from above, from those of higher status, rather than those from below, that is, jokes born of triumph instead of resistance, may be the prototypical political jokes. (Speier 1998: 1353). In more open societies and conditions power dierences tend to be less marked, and the dynamics of humor and conict is quite dierent: there are fewer restrictions on humor, and joking is more likely to transcend boundaries or mobilize people. Open societies generally have a wide range of institutions, persons, genres and publications devoted (in part) to satire and political humor (Lockyer 2006; Shiman, Coleman and Ward 2007; Speier 1998). Such institutionalized humorous genres are free spaces where those in power can be mocked and ridiculed: within their assigned spaces and clear limitations, much is allowed, and politics can be criticized or addressed quite clearly (Palmer 2005). On the other hand, political humor in the private sphere tends to have much less of an edge than political humor in repressive regimes a familiar complaint in former Communist countries is
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that, while everything else has become better, humor has worsened since the fall of the Wall. In open societies, the morale-boosting and resistance functions of political humor can be played out more openly. Many political organizations, factions and social movements have used humor to manifest themselves and make their point, at times forcing politicians to seriously address topics raised humorously. Political humor in such conditions becomes part of the political landscape: it highlights social rifts and disagreements because political conicts are performed and dramatized in the humorous realm. And in such cases, humor can sometimes spill over into serious political discourse (Lewis 2006, esp. chapter 3; Lockyer and Pickering 2005b; Wagg 1996). Finally, humor also can play a more direct role in politics when it is used within political conict and debate, for instance to criticize or ridicule political opponents. This form of humor seems increasingly important in todays media democracies, and has again dierent dynamics: unlike the professional comic genres, it is not played out in a free space, and the connection with actual, serious antagonisms and disagreements can be very real (Morreall 2005). Although the way such humor is used varies strongly, such humor between political adversaries may contain very visible forms of aggressive and defensive joking while at the same time, politicians using such humor play to the public with their wit (Speier 1998). Besides political humor, the other type of humor frequently analyzed from a conict perspective is ethnic humor, which is by far the most contested form of humor in modern Western societies (Lockyer and Pickering 2005a). The earliest studies of ethnic humor were done in the United States in the context of racial segregation, which highlighted the relationship between jokes and acute racial conict and inequality. Burma (1946), in an article on the use of humor as a technique in race conict, concluded from his analysis of jokes Whites told about Blacks, and vice versa: From the huge welter of humor, wit and satire which is current today, both written and oral, it is possible to isolate and examine a not inconsequential amount of humor which has as its primary purpose the continuation of race conict. Even more common is the borderline type: its chief purpose is humor, but it has secondary aspects which denitely can be related to racial competition and conict and the social and cultural patterns which have arisen from them. (714) This quotation aptly illustrates the problem of ethnic humor. While some of it may be geared to the continuation of ethnic conict, the complicated aspect is the not inconsequential amount of humor that is primarily intended as humorous, but it is concerned with groups that have a hostile or antagonistic
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relation such as Whites and Blacks in the highly segregated United States of the 1940s. Burma interprets ethnic humor, even when primarily for fun, as a technique, and hence a weapon in racial conict. After Burma, there have been many studies in which corpora of ethnic jokes, the repertoire of comedians, or other standardized forms of humor were linked with ethnic conict, hostility, or some other problematic social relationship (Draitser 1998; Dundes 1987; Dundes and Hauschild 1983; Gundelach 2000; Kuipers 2000; Oshima 2000). Generally, these studies attempt to link the existence of ethnic humor, as well as the particular ethnic scripts (Raskin 1985) about these groups to the conictive or strained relationship between joke-tellers and their targets. However, not all cases are as obviously related to conict and inequality as the jokes described by Burma. As Davies (1990, 1993, 2002) has pointed out, there are many ethnic joke cycles that are not related to conict or hostility, whereas there are other very conictive relationships that are not reected in jokes. Moreover, there are several reported cases of groups who very often joke about themselves, the most famous example of course being Jewish humor. This complicates the notion that ethnic humor is necessarily the result of inter-ethnic conict or hostility. Another approach to the relationship between ethnic humor and ethnic conict is by looking at peoples appreciation of ethnic humor, and the way this is related to their ethnic background or their opinion of the ethnic group targeted. Middleton (1959) found that, while (as expected) Blacks have higher appreciation of anti-White jokes than Whites, these groups didnt dier signicantly in their appreciation of jokes targeting Blacks. This led him to conclude that identication with a superior group (or the social order as a whole) is more important than ethnic aliation in the appreciation of humor. A line of research inspired by Middletons ndings explores the role between the appreciation of ethnic humor and identication. The studies conducted by LaFave (1972) show that people tend to appreciate jokes more when they target a group that people do not identify with. Such identication classes do not have to correspond to ones own background, and especially low status groups may prefer jokes targeting their own group. For instance, some studies have reported that women prefer jokes targeting women to jokes targeting men, or that ethnic minorities tend to prefer jokes targeting their own group to jokes targeting the dominant ethnic group (LaFave, Haddad and Marshall 1974; Nevo 1985). In a related line of research, Zillman (1983; Zillman and Stocking 1976) explored disparagement humor, concluding that people generally most enjoy humor that disparages groups they dislike or do not identify with. However, the conclusion that people like jokes more in the
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context of conict or hostility does not mean that humor is conict or hostility. After all, the same studies also show that people can very well like jokes that target groups they like and identify with (just maybe not as much). The conict approach is by far the most contested approach in sociological humor studies. It is used mainly to explain and analyze potentially oensive forms of humor, and thus is directly connected with societal controversies about ethnic, sexist, or political humor (Lockyer and Pickering 2005b). Moreover, debates about the relations between humor and conict, both in Academia and the real world, address the very nature of humor: its non-seriousness, which makes every humorous utterance fundamentally ambiguous. The central criticism leveled at the conict approach is that it takes humor too literally, ignoring humors basic ambiguity, which means that a joke can be enjoyed for many dierent reasons. Also, conict theories generally cannot explain why and when people in situations of conict decide to use humor rather than more serious expressions of antagonism. Since the matter of jokes at the expense of others is such a central issue in humor studies (and real life), the various perspectives on this matter will be addressed further below. The question why and when people use unserious modes of communication rather than straightforward serious talk has been taken up by the next two theoretical traditions: symbolic interactionism and phenomenology. 2.4. Symbolic interactionist approach The symbolic interactionist approach to humor focuses on the role of humor in the construction of meanings and social relations in social interaction.4 Symbolic interactionist studies generally are detailed studies of specic social interactions, using ethnographic data or detailed transcripts of conversations. In this approach, social relations and meanings, and more generally social reality are not seen as xed and given, but as constructed and negotiated in the course of social interaction. Humor, while not very central to big social structures and processes, plays an important role in everyday interaction, and its ambiguity makes it well-suited to negotiations and manipulations of selves and relationships. Within humor studies, the micro-interactionist approach gave a strong impetus to small-scale ethnographic studies of humor, as an alternative to the analysis of standardized forms of humor, joke ratings from questionnaires. In this approach, whether something is dened as humorous or serious is not a given, but something constructed in the course of interactions. The
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shift from serious to joking conversation becomes an act of conversational cooperation, which can succeed, be withheld, or fail, and this shift creates opportunities for specic types of communication. For instance, people who say something in jest usually have more freedom to transgress norms and bring up taboo topics (something also noted in functionalist analyses of humor). Emerson (1969) analyzed how this shift to joking and the consequent freedom to transgress norms is accepted, or challenged. She described this process as negotiating the serious import of humor. Goman (1974) used the notion of framing to describe this process of shifting from one type of interactional logic to another. Humor is one of the most common forms of framing used in everyday conversation. A humorous frame redenes everything someone says: it is not supposed to be taken seriously anymore. As many conversation analysts have shown, this shift to serious conversation if often marked by laughter, which often occurs at the beginning of a humorous utterance. Similarly, listeners may laugh as a sign of acceptance of this shift of frames (Jeerson 1979; Sachs 1974). This perspective has made laughter a central theme in sociological humor studies, not only as an automatic response to a humorous stimulus, but as a form of communication on its own. Recently, Hay (2001), a sociolinguist, has given a sophisticated account of this process, describing it as the garnering of humor support in the course of social interaction. Symbolic interactionist studies have not only looked at the negotiating, but also at the conversational eects and uses of this ambiguity or non-seriousness of humor. Humor and joking are important in negotiations over the meaning of things: the construction of norms, the debate about what is going on in a particular situation (Robinson and Smith-Lovin 2001). As Emerson noted, humor is used to bring up themes and topics that are taboo; or to feel out other persons (Mulkay 1988). Both Sachs (1974) and Fine (1983; 1984) noted how among teenagers humor is employed to bring up sexual topics, and can get to function as some sort of test of sexual knowledge. Among adults, too, sexual humor is very common in irtation, which also is a form of testing (Fine 1983; Walle 1976). Humor always provides a way out: both the joker and the audience can ignore any potential serious import of the joke. Similarly, humor can also be used to bring up and negotiate the meaning of a wide variety of other possibly sensitive topics, such as political opinions, money matters, or complaints about bosses or colleagues (Paton and Filby 1988). Moreover, conversational joking plays a role in the construction of social relationships. Fine (1983) described how humor can be used to create and
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dene a group culture not only by providing social solidarity in the functionalist sense, but by the use of ingroup humor, repeat jokes, and specic humorous styles and tastes that literally get to dene a group, and be used to demarcate its identity. However, this creation of a group culture also provides a strong outside boundary: humor includes and excludes at the same time. Many micro-interactionist studies have highlighted the ambiguous role of humor in social relationships (Holmes 2000; Kotho 2000; 2006; Mulkay 1988; Robinson and Smith-Lovin 2001). On the one hand, joking creates closeness and solidarity and is important marker of being on the same wavelength. On the other hand, humor has a strong power dimension, resulting in a relation between social status and humor initiation, as well an oft-reported tendency for people to joke down rather than up. Norrick (1993) has pointed out some of the mechanisms at work in the relationship between conversational humor and power. He calls humor a form of conversational aggression, because it disrupts the regular turn-taking pattern of conversation, and because the shift from serious to joking conversation means a drastic shift in the mode of conversation. Thus, any attempt at a joke implies a conversational coup on the part of the joker, who both breaks the serious frame and the turn-taking pattern. The relation between humor and gender has emerged as a central theme in micro-interactionist studies of humor: how are masculinity and femininity formed and performed in the course of interaction? Until recently, most studies found that men joked more and initiated more humor, which conrms older ndings, such as Cosers, that those in high status tend to joke more. More generally, initiating humor seemed to be associated with masculinity, whereas women were expected to laugh at mens jokes (Crawford 1995; 2003; Hay 2000; Holmes 2006; Kotho 2006; Kuipers 2006a). Many studies in the symbolic interactionist tradition have analyzed the way people perform gender, thereby creating and reinforcing gender roles as well as power divisions. These studies on gender and conversational joking also illustrate the larger implication of small-scale interactions: showing how social dierences on a macro-level are created and perpetuated in interaction. Also, changes in society at large manifest themselves in small-scale interactions: as Kotho (2006: 13) observes, recent studies increasingly show women initiating jokes, which marks historical changes in the cultural role of humor in communication (cf. Holmes 2006). In the small-scale studies of symbolic interactionists, humor, joking, and laughter are no longer marginal and frivolous. Rather, they are at the heart of social analysis, crucial to the shaping of meanings, situations, selves, and
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relationships. Critics of this approach have pointed out that symbolic interactionist studies tend to be overly descriptive and particular, and hence hard to generalize. In sociology, symbolic interactionism appears to have gone out of fashion after the 1980s. Since then, this line of humor research has been very successfully explored by sociolinguists (many of whom are cited here). Within sociology, symbolic interactionist understandings of humor have been incorporated in phenomenological studies of humor, described below, and in the sociology of emotions, which will be discussed in the section on laughter. 2.5. Phenomenological approach The phenomenological approach to humor conceptualizes humor as a specific outlook or worldview or mode of perceiving and constructing the social world. This humorous outlook is generally considered to be one option among several in the social construction of reality. This approach to humor emerged after the 1970s, and is eclectic in terms of methodology, combining textual analysis, historical data, and micro-interactionist studies to show how humor constructs and at the same time entails a particular worldview. The phenomenological approach to humor builds on a much older philosophical tradition about humor and laughter, which never made it into the canon of three classical theories. However, the notion of a humorous outlook on the world, or laughing at the world, dates back to irreverent ancient philosophers like Diogenes, and can also be discerned in the philosophical writings of Friedrich Nietzsche or in the postmodern embrace of irony and ambiguity. The sociologist Zijderveld (1982; 1983) dened humor as playing with meanings in various domains of social life. To Zijderveld, such playing with meanings is not trivial, but essential to the construction of meaning and everyday life, because it enables social experimentation and negotiation. Moreover, it allows people to become aware of the constructedness of social life itself: humor is a looking glass allowing us to look at the world and ourselves in a slightly distorted, and hence revealing, way. He likens humor to sociology: both debunk and denaturalize the world, showing us the relativity and sometimes even the ridiculousness of what we do. Davis (1993), taking this argumentation a step further, sees in this capacity of humor to expose the underlying structure of reality a strong subversive potential, concluding that humor can be an assault on reality.
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In his 1982 book Reality in a Looking Glass Zijderveld applies his perspective to a particular form of humor: the traditional folly of carnivals and court jesters. According to Zijderveld, this folly was not just a humorous style or institution, but a full-edged worldview, seen in many cultures around the world, based on turning upside down the rules and conventions of life. In the early modern era, it functioned as a counterpoint to the process of rationalization, but eventually, traditional folly was fully eclipsed by this process. Bakhtin (1984, but writing in 1930s Communist Russia) also looked at the thriving humorous traditions of the early modern period to understand humor as an alternative conception of the world that exists alongside everyday modes of interpretation (and behavior). Taking as his point of departure the raucous humor of early modern France, exemplied in the work of Francois Rabelais (c. 1490 1553), Bakhtin analyzed the carnivalesque as a space of freedom, community, and equality, denoted by laughter, humor, and more generally by corporeality, physicality, and the grotesque. In Bakthins view, carnival can function as an alternative sphere of freedom and resistance. Theorist of the public sphere Habermas (1992) acknowledged Bakhtins carnavalesque as possible alternative to the bourgeois public sphere, allowing for a dierent mode of popular civic participation. Phenomenological approaches diverge from functionalist and conict theories: because they see humor as a separate sphere or perspective, they see more potential for humor as an agent of social resistance and change (see also Goldstein 2003). The most complete and sophisticated exposition of the social functions and consequences of the humorous worldview is Mulkays On Humour (1988). In what he calls the humorous mode the rules of logic, the expectations of common sense, the laws of science and the demands of propriety are all potentially in abeyance. Consequently, when recipients are faced with a joke, they do not apply the information-processing procedures appropriate to serious discourse (Mulkay 1988: 37) According to Mulkay, this enables people to communicate about the many incongruous experiences that make up (social) life, and to convey meanings and messages that are as ambiguous as most of everyday life. As a result, humor can be used to expose and express the contradictory aspects of life, and to communicate and share this experience with others. However, in contrast with Bakhtin and Davis, Mulkay concludes that in the end, humor mostly serves to maintain social equilibrium and consolidate the social order. For instance, in an extended discussion of sexual joking (drawing on Spradley and Mann 1976), Mulkay relates sexual humor to the contradictory expectations and norms governing gender and sexual relations. In his view, the content and the strongly gendered usage
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patterns of sexual humor reconcile and neutralize these contradictory expectations and norms. The phenomenological approach generally contrasts the humorous worldview with the serious worldview. Berger (1997) set out to compare humor with another competing perspective on life, the religious. He starts out with an understanding of the comic very much resembling that of Zijderveld and Mulkay: the comic conjures up a separate world, dierent from the world of ordinary reality, operating by dierent rules. (Berger 1997: x; Italics in original) But in Bergers view, there is a transcendental element to this separate world: The experience of the comic is, nally, a promise of redemption. Religious faith is the intuition . . . that the promise will be kept. (ibid.: x) Bergers humor theory, while starting out from a constructivist premise similar to Zijdervelds and Mulkays, ends up resembling something more like the psychological relief theory of humor, with a theological twist. While Bergers perspective on humor resonates with fashionable views on healing humor (Lewis 2006), its reliance on the liberating, redeeming aspects of humor and laughter makes for a rather one-sided theory of humor. Critics have pointed out that phenomenological approaches to humor (much like conict theory, but on a more positive note) tend to essentialize humor: by focusing on humor as worldview, they neglect other meanings of humor, including negative or dysfunctional eects, and overstate the importance of humor. Also, phenomenological sociology is said to be hard to operationalize: it provides inspiring insights it is not clear how its notions and concepts are to be used in actual empirical research. However, unlike many other studies, phenomenological sociology takes into account the peculiarities of humor: its ambiguity and non-seriousness are central to the theories described above. The accounts of Zijderveld, Davis and Mulkay are quite successful in tying together various functions and characteristics of humor. For instance, they explain the relation with laughter, manage to combine microand macroperspectives of humor, and oer reasons why people would use humor rather than more straightforward communication. 2.6. Historical-comparative approach The historical-comparative approach attempts to understand the social role of humor through comparisons in time and place. Comparative-historical studies of humor are conducted in various scholarly elds, and draw on dierent theoretical traditions: there is no central theory or school of thought in com-
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parative-historical humor studies. Still, most sociological work on humor done since the 1990s is probably best captured by this rather vague umbrella term. Comparisons across time and space generally show great variations as well as some universalities. Constants in humor across cultures are primarily the preferred topics for joking: sexuality, gender relations, bodily functions, stupidity, and strangers (Apte 1985). In other words: people joke about taboo topics and deviance. This underlines the relationship between humor and the drawing of boundaries between the normal and the abnormal (Powell 1988). Other constants are the existence of specic delineated humorous roles and domains; humorous forms and techniques such as reversal, imitation, slapstick, wordplay; and the existence of rituals and ritual performances associated with humor which suggests a more or less universal separation of serious and non-serious domains, although the nature of this boundary may dier. But even within these constants, there are great variations: in humorous forms, genres and techniques as well as in humorous content. Each culture, nation, community and era is supposed to have specic humorous styles and forms. This local sense of humor is widely believed to a sort of index for the deepest nature of a group, place, or age. Sociology has generally relegated studies of the humorous Zeitgeist of a place or age to folklore, history, or the humanities; when sociologists have made qualications about a cultures sense of humor, this is usually in the context of a wider theory of societal dynamics. The book on folly by Zijderveld (1982), discussed above, is an example of this approach: he connected the rise and demise of a particular humorous style with the much wider development of rationalization and disenchantment of the world. Similarly, in the edited volume by Paton, Powell and Wagg (1996) many articles bring up the theme of postmodern humor: reexive and intertextual styles of humor that mirror a wider societal turn towards to reexive or post-modernity (cf. Gray 2006). In such studies, humor is not the index of an essential group culture, but a particular manifestation of a wider social phenomenon. Implicit in this approach is a comparison: between humor and other phenomena manifesting the same trend. The most explicit comparative research program in humor studies is the work of Davies on jokes (1990; 1998a; 1998b; 2003). In his 1990 book, Davies compared patterns of ethnic joking around the world. Although ethnic humor is probably universal, who is targeted, and how, varies signicantly, as Davies shows by looking both at the groups who are targeted, and the humorous scripts about these groups. Davies convincingly establishes that
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the same jokes are told in many parts of the world. The most common humorous script worldwide is stupidity, but there are also transnational corpora of jokes about such themes as dirtiness, stinginess, cowardliness, or eating habits. Davies comparative approach makes visible a cross-cultural pattern: stupidity jokes are generally told about slightly backward versions of ones own group, such as recent migrant groups (the Poles and the Irish in the US) or peripheral, often rural, communities in or close to ones own country (the Belgians for the French and the Dutch, Ostfriesen in Germany). Jokes about canny and stingy groups, on the other hand, are told about groups that are successful, notably in trade or the money business, and that have more central and dominant position: the Scots, the Jews, the Genovese in Italy, and the Dutch in Belgium. Davies points out that these jokes not only reect ethnic relationships, but also central moral categories, such as rationality, courage, or cleanliness. The stupid-canny dichotomy not only mirrors status relations, but also of the importance of rationality in the modern era: the stupid people exhibit a lack of rationality, whereas the canny are overly rationalized. Thus, Davies summarizes the globally popular genres of the stupidity and canniness jokes as jokes from the iron cage (1998a: 63), referring to Max Webers classical description of modern rationality as an iron cage. This analysis of ethnic humor has been extended to jokes about other categories, such as blonde jokes or political jokes (Davies 1998a; 2003), always showing how transnational joke genres, with mostly transnational moral themes, get applied to local conditions. Central to this comparative analysis is the question which genres and scripts do not diuse or have a more limited regional spread (such as dirtiness jokes, which are popular in North-West Europe but not in Anglo-Saxon countries), since such divergent patterns enable the isolation of variables determining the viability of a joke genre or script in a specic country (Davies 1998b). As Davies work illustrates, a cross-comparison of humor often ends up telling us as much, or maybe more, about the groups being compared as it tells us about humor. Whom people joke about tells us something about the relationship between the jokers and their butt although comparative sociologists usually tend to interpret these relations more broadly than conict scholars, and often in terms of status or inequality rather than conict or hostility (Kuipers 2000; Oring 1992; 2003). And what people joke about reects what they nd important and what is a source of concern to them. Sometimes these concerns are similar across cultures: Davies global comparisons uncover worldwide preoccupations with modernization and ration-
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ality. In their analysis of the blonde joke, another transnational genre, both Davies (1998) and Oring (2003) have argued that the rise of these jokes in many Western countries are related to changing gender relations. Some local color is often added to such global jokes: in the UK, blonde jokes are told about Essex girls, adding a working-class connotation these jokes dont have elsewhere. The preoccupations reected in humor may be more specic, and sometimes quite local. For instance, lawyer jokes are a typical American phenomenon, which is an index of the strong position of lawyers and the centrality of the legal system to American politics and society (Galanter 2004). Folklorist Oring (2003: 97115) argues there is a particular brand of humor specic to frontier societies: Australian, American and Israeli humor all show a fondness of tall tales and practical joking, and mock sophistication. According to Oring, such colonizing humor expresses the frontier experience of starting anew, away from civilization, and helps to forge a new identity based in this experience. A more detailed case study of this type of humor by Shiman and Katz (2005) analyzed the Israeli jokes told in the 1930s by Eastern European old-timers at the expense of the formality, rigidity, and general maladaptedness of well-bred German Jews (Yekkes), arguing that these jokes reect a very particular episode in Jewish migration history: the ethnic superiority in these jokes turns the tables on earlier migration episodes in Germany and the US, in which Jewish immigrants from Eastern Europe were denigrated by German Jewish immigrants. Not only who, and what people joke about; but also how they joke about this diers between cultures, as Kuipers (2006a) has demonstrated in her study of humor styles in the Netherlands and the US. Starting out from the appreciation of one particular humorous genre, the joke, she showed how humor styles in both countries demarcate salient social boundaries. In the Netherlands, joke telling is most popular among working or lower middle class men, corresponding to a humor style that favors sociability, exuberance, and performance skills. The college-educated upper middle classes generally dislike jokes, since for this group, a good sense of humor shows intellectual originality, deadpan restraint, and sharpness qualities they do not see in joke-telling. In the United States, humor styles are not as strongly connected to class background, but gender dierences tend to be stronger, and Americans evaluate humor less in terms of intellect or sociability, more in moral terms. This study shows that dierent social groups have dierent criteria for good and bad humor, which means that they joke not only about dierent subjects, but also in dierent ways. These standards are related
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more to style than to content, and they are linked with broader communication styles, taste cultures, and notions of personhood. A nal comparative question, brought up by historians such as Dekker (2001) and Wickberg (1998) deals with the social standing and meaning of humor in dierent societies. Dekker intriguigingly suggests there are conjunctural uctuations in humor, with some eras and cultures being more friendly to humor than others. He described the Dutch Golden Age, in the seventeenth century, as a very humor-friendly period, and the eighteenth and nineteenth century as more hostile to humor, noting the rise of Calvinism, a religious aliation notoriously suspicious of non-seriousness and play, as one of the factors in his shift. As Wickberg (1998) shows in his book The Senses of Humor, having a sense of humor became increasingly central to the American understanding of the self in the course of the twentieth century. The high social standing of humor has caused a veritable industry of humor promotion and development, especially in the US, discussed critically and hilariously by Lewis (2006). Billig (2005) has written a scathing criticism of the positive view of humor in current society as well as humor studies. These recent studies, while not explicitly comparative in their approach, give rise to intriguing comparative questions about social and cultural conditions conducive or prohibitive to humor. 3. Issues In the next section, I will discuss some issues which have recently been the topic of special interest in humor sociology: the interpretation of humor at the expense of others and more generally the dark side of humor; the relation between humor and laughter; and the study of humorous forms and genres, including mediatized forms of humor. 3.1. The dark side of humor: Humor, aggression, and transgression After many centuries in which humor and laughter had a bad reputation, modern humor studies have tended to stress the benecial character of humor, both for society and for the psyche. However, within humor studies there has been a consistent concern with the transgressive, aggressive, and conictive functions humor can have. This matter ties in to the more general question of the dark side of humor.
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Much humor is based on the transgression of societal boundaries, and such transgression can cause oense as well as amusement. And while not all humor has a butt, many jokes have some sort of target: groups, persons, objects, ideas, or the world at large. The various theoretical traditions have suggested dierent interpretations of transgressive or deprecating humor: conict theories stress its relation with conict and hostility; functionalist analyses interpret it as safety valve or social corrective; phenomenological and symbolic interactionist stress its ambiguous and manifold meanings, and its role in negotiating meanings and worldviews; and comparative-historical studies tend to stress its connection with larger social and cultural concerns. The present-day descendents of superiority theory take the dark side of humor most seriously. Gruner (1978) and more recently Billig (2005) have taken the position that humor and laughter are correlates of social superiority: every joke is basically a putdown or an act of social exclusion. Gruner has expounded the view that humor is a game with winners and losers, and Billig (2005) argues, in his social critique of humor that humor and laughter are social control mechanisms, based in ridicule and embarrassment. Other authors have argued that humor, while not intrinsically connected with hostility, aggression, or transgression, often overlaps with negative emotions: people often joke about what they dislike or feel superior to, and dislike or superiority adds to the liking of humor (see above). Oring (2003: 4157) and Billig (2001a) have shown that groups that are openly racist tend to underline and express this both with serious and joking expression of ethnic hostility and stereotyping. Ford and Ferguson (2004) showed that humor, because of its non-seriousness and playfulness, can diminish barriers to the expression of negative emotions, and thus facilitate hostility. Recently, Lewis (2006), looking at American humor from talk radio to horror movie jokes, has argued convincingly that humor (while not necessarily a force of darkness) reects the darker tendencies in American society: it highlights social rifts, exposes shared cultural fears, and is an outlet for hostility, for instance in the rather vicious humor of some talk radio hosts. The meaning of transgressive humor is not only debated in Academia, but a source of concern in everyday life as well. Transgressive humor is generally controlled by the unwritten rules of informal regimes (Kuipers 2006b; Palmer 2005), and also less frequently by formal censorship (Davies 1988). Both in Academia and in society at large, the most heated debates have been around ethnic and sexist humor, the most contested forms of humor in modern Western societies. This issue has been the subject of various debates in the HUMOR journal (Davies 1991; Lewis 1997; 2008; Oring 1991) and of
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a 2005 book by Lockyer and Pickering (2005a), all revolving around the same question: When, why, and under what conditions is humor targeting persons or groups just a joke, and when does it have a more serious meaning or consequences? With the exception of some die-hard superiority theorists, humor scholars generally concede they cannot solve the issue of ethnic and sexist humor by simply pinning down the one true meaning of jokes. Rather, they stress how the meaning of a joke is created within a specic context: whether it is a private conversation or a public situation; what the position and background of the joke-teller is; what the relationship is between the joker and his audience (and the butt); whether it is mediated or conversational humor (Lewis 1997; Lockyer and Pickering 2005a; Palmer 1994). Theorists of ethnic humor Davies (1990; 1991) and Oring (2003) have stressed the inherent ambiguity of humor. Davies, especially, tends to downplay the seriousness of humor, stating that humor is merely playing with aggression, although he notes that in some cases ethnic joke scripts overlap with actual ethnic hostility, which considerably changes these jokes serious implications. Oring (2003: 65) argued: Joke cycles are not really about particular groups who are ostenstibly their targets. These groups serve merely as signiers that hold together a discourse on certain ideas and values that are of current concern. Polish jokes, Italian jokes, and JAP jokes are less comments about real Poles, Italians, or Jewish women than they are about a particular set of values attributed to these groups. These attributions, while not entirely arbitrary, are, for the most part not seriously entertained. The contributors in Lockyer and Pickerings volume take a more critical view. Howitt and Owusu-Bempa (2005: 62), in the most explicitly critical contribution, conclude that no only [do] racist jokes provide ready opportunities to give expression to ideas of racial superiority. . . they continually reinforce the use of race categories, leading them to denounce even jokes mocking racism on the grounds that they reinforce racial thinking. However, most other contributions attempt to carefully balance what the editors call the self-defeating, regulatory, left-wing arguments associated with political correctness, and the opportunistic, unreexive, right-wing denunciations of its practice (Lockyer and Pickering 2005b: 24). In the insightful introduction to their book, Lockyer and Pickering, discussing what they call the ethics of humor, portray joking as a process of negotiation about the line between funny and oensive. Billig (2005) coined the concept of unlaughter the pointed non-acceptance of an attempt at humor to make a similar point about humors processual nature and uncertain outcome. This perspective on humor as the negotiation of boundar-
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ies allows the authors to bring out the power dimension of humor. However, it also illustrates how joking, when the negotiations are completed successfully, is about the creation of community. As Lockyer and Pickering put it: joking is about the construction of a we, which implies inclusion as well as exclusion. 3.2. Humor and laughter In humor studies, there has been a tendency to exclude laughter from the analysis, because there is no necessary one-on-one relationship between humor and laughter. There are other possible responses to successful attempts at humor (smiling, another joke, a verbal acknowledgment, groaning in response to a lame pun); and laughter can be related to several other moods and emotions, ranging from friendliness and play to nervousness and ridicule (Provine 2000; Ruch 1998). As we saw earlier, symbolic interactionists and phenomenologists brought laughter to the center of sociological humor studies, describing laughter as a marker of the shift to the humorous mode and of the acceptance of a joke, an important signal of social acceptance, the expression of a humorous worldview (Bakhtin), and as the language of humor (Zijderveld 1983). Recently, several authors have argued for inclusion of laughter in the sociology of humor. Billig (2005) made laughter central to his theory of humor and embarrassment, seeing laughter basically as derision. On a more positive note, Kuipers (2006a: 7) dened humor as the successful exchange of jokes and laughter, arguing that while laughter may not be a necessary corollary of humor, it is the ideal and most sought-after response to any attempt at humor, and hence essential to the understanding of the social meanings of humor. Outside of humor studies, sociologists have increasingly been paying attention to the role of emotions in social life. This has led several of them to take up the theme of laughter, generally without much awareness of the insights from humor scholarship; while on the other hand, insights from the sociology of emotion have not yet has much impact in humor research. One of the challenges for sociological humor scholarship is to integrate developments in the sociology of emotions into humor studies (and, reversely, to sell humor studies to the sociology of emotions). Sche, in his sociological theory of emotions, sees shame and pride as the basic emotions of social life. In his work on catharsis, he described laughter as form of relief from social pressure (Sche 1980). In later work on the
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emotional foundations of social life (1990) he described laughter more specically as the absence of shame, or anti-shame. Billig (2001a; 2005), in his work on ridicule and embarrassment, is inuenced by Sches work on shame in social life. However, he sees laughter not as the freedom of embarassment in the self, but rather as causing embarrassment and hence conformity to norms in others. Another sociologist of emotion, Katz (1996), did a highly innovative study of laughter in a Parisian funhouse. He examines the metamorphosis from a sober disposition to laughter, followed by a second transformation from doing laughter to what Katz calls being done by giving oneself over to laughter. This metamorphosis is brought about by the shared watching, generally with family members, of the incongruous images in the funny mirrors, tying family groups together in a strongly embodied bond of laughter and playfulness. Katz study pays great attention to the bodily aspect of laughter and the way this contributes to the forging of social bonds, making his study an interesting corrective to the rather instrumentalist and very verbal image of social life emerging from conversational analysis, which locates the creation of relationships primarily in talk. Also, Katz pays careful attention to the nature of the humor provoking all this laughter: he analyzes in detail the way the distorted (incongruous) image in the mirror is collectively constructed as funny by the family group. Finally, Collins theory on interaction ritual chains (2004), a widely praised integration of Durkheimian theory and Gomanian micro-sociology, is probably the rst sociological theory to give a central place to laughter. According to Collins, social life is built on emotional energy, emerging in small-scale interactions, but congealing in larger networks and cultural symbols with a strong emotional content. Emotional energy emerges in interaction, through the physical co-presence with other people in so-called interaction rituals (to Collins, all interactions are rituals). All interactions, but especially successful, high-energy interactions, lead to the mostly unconscious rhythmical coordination or actions, movements and speech that Collins calls attunement. Laughter is a clear example of the rhythmically attunement of a successful high-energy interaction, and hence, the generation of laughter, typically through humor, becomes one of the central signs of closeness and social understanding. However, while laughter is central to Collins theory, he hardly addresses humor. Extrapolating his reasoning, we can assume that in Collins view, humor is a culturally specic form of bringing about successful high-energy interactions and attunement and as such: a central dimension of social life.
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3.3. The social shaping of humor: Genres and mediated forms of humor Most sociological humor scholarship has been concerned with a limited number of humorous forms: conversational humor, and most notably jokes, the fruit ies of humor scholarship. The joke has been the favorite genre of humor scholars because jokes are easily available, very clearly intended to be humorous, and it is clear where the humor is located: in the punchline. However, as Martin and Kuiper (1999) have shown, canned jokes make up a very small percentage of the humor people enjoy on a day-to-day basis. Moreover, genre is likely to aect the meaning and the appreciation of a humorous utterance. Kuipers (2006a) has shown that the joke, as a genre, does not have the same connotation to dierent social groups: it is considered a male genre (cf. Crawford 1995), and in the Netherlands (and probably other Western-European countries) it also class-coded. Also, as Davies (2003) has illustrated, the joke is not a universal genre, and some cultures do not have jokes. The study of humorous forms and their consequences has been relatively marginal in humor sociology as usual, the folklorists are way ahead. But sociologists are becoming increasingly aware of this, especially because of the growing importance of the media in the creation and dissemination of humor. People increasingly enjoy humor not in face-to-face interaction but through a variety of media: print, television, the Internet. This mediatization of humor has the potential to aect the interpretation of humor, and has resulted in the emergence of new, mediated, humorous forms. New media have always given birth to new humorous forms: Dekker (2001) argues that the short humorous anecdote received an important boost from the possibility of cheap printing. Wickberg (1998) argues that the joke is an essentially a nineteenth century genre, reecting processes of industrialization and commodication during this period. Also, older genres can incorporate elements from new genres: Oring (1987) suggested that disaster jokes are a response to media discourse on disaster, noting that this oral genre incorporated many references and fragments of media culture. More recently, television created several new humorous genres (incorporating of course fragments of older genres), most notably the sitcom. Mills (2005), in his excellent recent study of this genre, has been the rst to look specically at the humor of sitcom. The rare studies of the genre so far have investigated the sitcom mainly in terms of its politics, and especially its politics of stereotyping and representation. Finally, in the past decade, the Internet has led to the proliferation of a wide variety of humorous genres, many of which are
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derived from earlier folk genres and oce lore with a strong do-it-yourself avor (Kuipers 2005; Shifman 2007). The consequences of genre and form for the interpretation and appreciation of humor is another understudied eld in humor scholarship. Reception studies of mediated humor are few and far between. Despite the centrality of humor to popular media, media and communication studies have paid little attention to humorous forms such as comedy, cartoons or humorous advertising. The scarce reception studies of comedy mainly focus on racial issues (Coleman 2000); there are two full monographs dedicated to the reception of 1980s hit The Cosby Show (Fuller 1992; Jhally and Lewis 1992). These studies seem more concerned with issues of race and representation than with the humorous aspect of comedy shows. In his recent book on The Simpsons, Gray (2006) presents a small reception study as part of a longer and perceptive study of this highly intertextual and media-savvy cartoon/sitcom hybrid, interpreting the humorous aspect of this show mostly as parody. Finally, the increasing prominence of mediated humor also sheds new light on old questions about the meaning of humor. Lockyer and Pickering (2005a) note that mediated humor seriously complicates negotiations over the meaning of a joke, because mediated humor is not rmly located in one context anymore, making mediated jokes even more polysemic and ambiguous. The 20052006 controversy surrounding the Muhammad cartoons, originally published in a Danish newspaper but leading to worldwide protests, is a dramatic illustration of how an attempt at humor can lead to dierent responses in dierent contexts (Lewis 2008). 4. Conclusion Sociology is a discipline with weak boundaries and a contested core: there is no central framework, theoretical perspective, or methodological approach that all sociologists adhere to. Many central ideas in sociology have been borrowed from other disciplines, and many ideas from sociology have diused to other disciplines. This is especially visible in the small and interdisciplinary eld of humor studies: there has been much boundary trac between sociology and related disciplines. For this reason, this overview of sociological humor studies has featured many anthropologists, folklorists, linguists, and psychologists. To some, this may reek of sociological imperialism. As I hope to have shown in this contribution, this openness often is the strength of sociological contributions to humor research. If done well, sociol-
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ogy provides the tools to connect small-scale interactions with larger societal developments; cultural conditions with individual amusement; and the social functions of humor with its form and content. However, sociologys weak boundaries and its eclecticism also entail considerable risks: undertheorized empiricism and overgeneralization from a single case or limited ndings; a proclivity to the scavenging of loose concepts, fragments of theories, and isolated ndings from ot/her disciplines; the tendency to reduce all humor to a single function or meaning; or more generally lack of theoretical or methodological rigor. However, in the past decades, sociological humor scholarship appears to have matured. Recent studies are generally more sophisticated and rigorous: when theoretical, their claims are notably less brash, and when empirical, the ndings have a clear connection with wider theories. Having reviewed the various sociological approaches to humor, it is clear there is no one sociological theory of humor. The scholars and theorists discussed have very dierent perspectives on humor, generally derived from a more general social theory. Hence, despite its openness to other disciplines, the development of humor sociology looks a lot like the development of sociology as a whole; while insofar as it resembles the development of humor studies, this is mainly in its increasing rigor and sophistication. The connection between humor sociology and general humor theories, such as the various versions of incongruity theory, and (with notable exceptions) superiority theory, is still quite weak. So far, sociologists have not joined in the attempts by linguists and psychologists to integrate their ndings into a general theory of humor. In my views, this is not a bad thing. The best sociology of humor, both theoretical and empirical, has been rmly rooted in sociological theory: incorporating insights from humor scholarship at large, with a sensitivity to the ambiguities and specicities of humor, but basing its interpretive framework and methodological approach in the authors social theory of choice.
Notes
1.. Oring (1994), in a highly original variation on psychoanalytic humor theory, transferred Freudian theory to the present, suggesting that humor in modern day America is used to vent and express sentiment, an emotion increasingly tabooed and suppressed in modern Western societies. 2. Too late for extended discussion, but just in time for favourable mention in a footnote, the International Review of Social History published a special issue on humor and social protest (t Hart and Bos 2007), containing many insightful
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Giselinde Kuipers contributions and interesting case studies that directly address the issues discussed in this section. This conceptual unclarity is partly caused by the theoretical background of many conict scholars of humor. Sociologists using this approach often adhere to Marxist or Marxist-inspired traditions where society is conceptualized as a struggle, which means that all forms of inequality necessarily imply conict and superiority and conict are very much the same thing. Moreover, in humor studies there has been a strong Freudian inuence, which also leads to interpretations of unconscious drives and motives in humor. Both Marxist and Freudian theories, while very insightful at times, tend to facilitate interpretations of humor in terms of conict or aggression even when the concerned parties do not agree with this interpretation and even disagree vehemently (blaming it on false consciousness or denial, respectively). I am using symbolic interactionism as an umbrella term for a variety for sometimes antagonistic schools in social research focusing on the construction of meaning in everyday interaction, from the work of Erving Goman (who refused to be called symbolic interactionist) and ethnomethodologists (who also refused to be called symbolic interactionists) to more recent work in sociology and sociolinguistics by scholars who are not as particular about these labels anymore.
3.
4.
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