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The sociology of humor 367

Plato and Aristotle, and has most famously been formulated by omas Hob-bes: Laughter is nothing else but sudden glory arising from some sudden

conception of some eminency in ourselves, by comparison with the inrmityof others, or with our own formerly. (Hobbes 1650/1987: 20) Superioritytheorists state that humor and laughter are expressions of superiority, whichof course reects a social relationship. However, on close consideration theclassical theorists describe superiority as an individual experience: the com-municative or relational aspect of the joking and laughing is generally notexamined in these theories. In other words: while addressing a social event,superiority theories of humor are not very sociological. As will become clearin this article, the relation between humor and superiority although referred

to in other terms, such as power, conict, or hierarchy is still central to so-cial scientic studies of humor. Incongruity theory the theory that states that all humor is based on theperception or recognition of incongruity is not as obviously related to socio-logical questions, since it is mainly concerned with the nature of humoroustexts or other stimuli, or with the mental operations involved in processingthese texts. However, as incongruity theory, in several varieties (Attardo andRaskin 1991; Oring 1992; 2003; Raskin 1985; Ruch 1998), became the dom-inant perspective in humor scholarship, it has been incorporated in socio-

logical thought in various ways: how incongruities and their humorous poten-tial 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 (Douglas1973). e rst full-edged theory of humor was developed by Sigmund Freud.In his Jokes and eir Relation to the Unconscious (1905) he integratedelements of relief and incongruity theory, and combined them with his psy-choanalytic theory. While Freuds theories on humor (and other topics) are

much disputed, he was the rst to systematically address what I have calledhere sociological questions about humor, and his inuence on the sociologyof humor has been immense. Without attempting to explain Freuds entirehumor theory (see Martin 2006: 33 42; Palmer 1994: 79 92), let me notetwo important themes. First, Freud discussed the importance of social rela-tionships between the teller of the joke, his audience, and (when applicable)the butt of the joke. In other words: he introduced the social relationship intothe analysis of humor. Second, Freud paid attention to the relationship be-tween 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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368 Giselinde Kuipers

enabling the expression (and enjoyment) of drives otherwise inhibited bysociety. To Freud, these forbidden drives were mostly sex and aggression.

Freuds theory has been strongly criticized, especially for the claim that allhumor 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 inthe general statement of his theory. Another main point of criticism is theunfalsiability of Freuds theory: the references to underlying drives are, bynecessity, veiled and therefore hard to disprove. However, the notion of

jokes as related to, and attempting to circumvent, social taboos has becomevery central to humor scholarship. 1

e other early theorist of humor with sociological insight was Henri

Bergson. Like Freuds theory, Bergsons Laughter (1900/1999) containsa number of rather untenable and untestable generalizations (for instance,that all laughter is a response to something mechanical encrusted on theliving), alongside insightful contributions. For sociologists, his most rele-vant observations have to do with the social character of laughter. Bergsondescribed humor and laughter as essentially social and shared. Laughing atsomeone, on the other hand, functions as a means of exclusion, and hence asa social corrective and form of social control. A er Freud and Bergson, the various disciplines of humor studies branched

out, and in the course of the twentieth century, a number of approachesemerged that are more or less specic to the social sciences: the functional-ist approach; the conict approach; the symbolic interactionist approach; thephenomenological approach; and the comparative-historical approach.

2.2. e functionalist approach

e 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 socialphenomena) maintain and support the social order. Functionalist studies ofhumor are o en ethnographic studies, but humorous texts, events, and cor-pora have also been analyzed from a functionalist perspective. e earliest functionalist explanations can be found in the work of anthro-pologists on so-called joking relationships, a a relationship between twopersons in which one is by custom permitted and in some instances requiredto tease or make fun of the other (Radcli ff e-Brown 1940: 195). Radcli ff e-Brown 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.ey are modes of organizing a denite and stable system of social behav-

iour in which conjunctive and disjunctive components . . . are maintained andcombined (Radcli ff e Brown 1940: 200). is obligatory joking is a way torelieve tension in possibly strained relationships, thus maintaining the socialorder. Later, a number of studies were done of non-obligatory joking rela-tionships in industrialized societies, with similar interpretations about thetension-relieving function of joking in situations that contained some sort ofstructural conict or contradiction (Bradney 1957; Sykes 1966). Other ritu-alized forms of humor, such as rituals of reversal (like carnival), and ritualclowning (Apte 1985) were similarly explained as a safety valve to blow

off 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 revealan adherence to a set of values regarded as the traditional American creed(Stephenson 1951: 574). is reasoning is reminiscent of Bergsons interpret-ation 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 thiscorrective function of humor was developed by Powell (1988), who placed

humor among other possible responses to things out of the ordinary, and de-ned it as one of the milder forms of social corrective (stronger forms being,for instance, declaring someone crazy). Very recently, social control theoryhas been revived by Billig, who in Laughter and Ridicule (2005) puts forwarda theory of humor as a social corrective, closely linked with embarrassment,arguing that ridicule, far from being a detachable negative, lies at the heartof humor. (Billig 2005: 190; see also Billig 2001b) From a very di ff erent angle, Coser also noted the social control functionsof humor. In one of her two inuential and o -cited microsociological stud-

ies of humor in a hospital ward, she looked at the patterns of laughter dur-ing the sta ff meetings (Coser 1960). is study showed how the amount anddirection of joking reected the social hierarchy. By counting the number oflaughs, she discovered that doctors got signicantly more laughs than resi-dents, who got more laughs than the nurses. Moreover, everybody tended tojoke down: doctors tended to joke about residents, residents joked aboutthe nurses or themselves, and the nurses joked about themselves, or aboutthe patients and their families. According to Coser, this joking helps to main-tain the social order: it keeps people in their place. e hierarchy-build-ing function of humor, with the associated correlation between status and

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successful humor production, has been noted in various other studies (Pizzini1991; Robinson and Smith-Lovin 2001; Sayre 2001).

In her second paper on humor, on the use of joking by patients in the hos-pital ward, Coser explored another function of humor, which also contributesto the social order: social cohesion. In the more egalitarian and less formallystructured life of the wards patients, humor served to create solidarity, shareexperiences, and build an identity within the group. is cohesive functionmay seem at odds with the hierarchy-maintaining function. However, hier-archical groups need cohesion too. Joking apparently manages, more thanmost other forms of combinations, to combine the seemingly contradictoryfunctions of hierarchy-building and bringing about solidarity (e.g. at work, in

the military, cf. Koller 1988: 233 260). Moreover, Coser describes the use ofhumor in two very di ff erent contexts: a formally structured situation amongpeople who know each other versus a more disorganized and egalitarian situ-ation, which is likely to a ff ect the functions humor can, and needs to, fulll. In her article on the cohesive functions of laughter, Coser wrote thatto laugh, or to occasion laughter through humor and wit, is to invite thosepresent to come closer. Laughter and humor are indeed like an invitation, beit an invitation for dinner, or an invitation to start a conversation: it aims at de-creasing social distance. (Coser 1959: 172) One of the reasons for humors

cohesive function is that a joke is an invitation the acceptance of which isimmediately apparent: a laugh or a smile. ere are very few forms of in-teraction that are connected as closely with social acceptance and approvalas laughter (Provine 2000). Also, collective joking takes people outside ofeveryday life into a more playful non-serious atmosphere, creating whatthe anthropologist Victor Turner called communitas (Fine 1983). Hence, humor not only is a sign of closeness among friends, it is also aneff ective way of forging social bonds, even in situations not very conduciveto closeness: it breaks the ice between strangers, unites people in di ff erent

hierarchical positions, and creates a sense of shared conspiracy in the con-text of illicit activities like gossiping or joking about superiors. e ip sideof this inclusive function of humor is exclusion. ose who do not join in thelaughter, because they do not get the joke, or even worse, because the joketargets them, will feel le out, shamed, or ridiculed. e excluding functionof humor is o en mentioned as the basis for the corrective function describedabove (Powell 1988; Billig 2005) What these three functions relief, control, cohesion have in common istheir focus on humor and joking as contribution to the maintenance of socialorder. e insistence that all social phenomena maintain the social structure

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has become the focus of much criticism leveled at the (structural-) function-alism of the 1950s and 1960s: it makes functionalist explanations circular

and basically untestable. Social phenomena do not necessarily have the samefunction for all concerned, and they may well be dysfunctional, at least fromsome peoples perspective. Despite the demise of functionalism as a theoretical framework a erthe 1960s, functionalist explanations of humor still are common in humorstudies. Since the 1970s, sociologists have not employed functionalism asa complete theory or comprehensive framework, but instead have attemptedto 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 wellas a contribution to the social order: cohesion, control, relief, but also theexpression of conict, inciting resistance, insulting, ridiculing or satirizingothers (Holmes 2000; Martin 2006; Mulkay 1988; Palmer 1994). Martineau (1972), in an early attempt to move away from one-dimension-al functionalism, constructed a model connecting the functions of humor withspecic 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 rede-ne relationships. Powell and Paton (1988) edited a volume concentratingmainly on the complex interplay between resistance and control functions ofhumor, summarized under the heading of tension management, but illus-trating a variety of other, positive and negative, functions along the way. e functions humor fullls can be psychological as well as social. Blackor sick humor, for instance in disaster jokes, has o en been explained asa way to cope with unpleasant experiences, both individually and collec-tively, and more generally to distance oneself from negative emotions such

as fear, grief, or shame (Dundes 1987; Morrow 1987. For a critique, seeOring 1987). Sociologist Peter Berger (1997) stressed the psychological ef-fects of humor, describing (some forms of) humor as consolation, liberation,and transcendence. omas Sche ff described humor and laughter as catharsis(Scheff 1980) and anti-shame (1990). As in the social functions stressedby humor scholars, psychological functions ascribed to humor tend to bebenecial. Scholars focusing on the dark side of humor will be discussedbelow. Robinson and Smith-Lovin (2001), in an excellent recent paper, attemptedto test functionalist explanations by looking at the use of various types of

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that, while everything else has become better, humor has worsened since thefall of the Wall.

In open societies, the morale-boosting and resistance functions of pol-itical humor can be played out more openly. Many political organizations,factions and social movements have used humor to manifest themselves andmake their point, at times forcing politicians to seriously address topics raisedhumorously. Political humor in such conditions becomes part of the pol-itical landscape: it highlights social ri s and disagreements because polit-ical conicts are performed and dramatized in the humorous realm. And insuch 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 usedwithin political conict and debate, for instance to criticize or ridicule polit-ical opponents. is form of humor seems increasingly important in todaysmedia democracies, and has again di ff erent dynamics: unlike the professionalcomic genres, it is not played out in a free space, and the connection withactual, serious antagonisms and disagreements can be very real (Morreall2005). Although the way such humor is used varies strongly, such humorbetween political adversaries may contain very visible forms of aggressiveand 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 froma conict perspective is ethnic humor, which is by far the most contestedform of humor in modern Western societies (Lockyer and Pickering 2005a).

e earliest studies of ethnic humor were done in the United States in the con-text of racial segregation, which highlighted the relationship between jokesand acute racial conict and inequality. Burma (1946), in an article on theuse of humor as a technique in race conict, concluded from his analysisof 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 pos-sible to isolate and examine a not inconsequential amount of humor whichhas as its primary purpose the continuation of race conict. Even more com-mon is the borderline type: its chief purpose is humor, but it has secondaryaspects which denitely can be related to racial competition and conict andthe social and cultural patterns which have arisen from them. (714) isquotation aptly illustrates the problem of ethnic humor. While some of itmay be geared to the continuation of ethnic conict, the complicated aspectis the not inconsequential amount of humor that is primarily intended ashumorous, 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 Statesof the 1940s. Burma interprets ethnic humor, even when primarily for fun, as

a technique, and hence a weapon in racial conict. A er Burma, there have been many studies in which corpora of ethnic

jokes, the repertoire of comedians, or other standardized forms of humorwere linked with ethnic conict, hostility, or some other problematic socialrelationship (Draitser 1998; Dundes 1987; Dundes and Hauschild 1983; Gun-delach 2000; Kuipers 2000; Oshima 2000). Generally, these studies attemptto link the existence of ethnic humor, as well as the particular ethnic scripts(Raskin 1985) about these groups to the conictive or strained relation-ship between joke-tellers and their targets. However, not all cases are as obvi-

ously related to conict and inequality as the jokes described by Burma. AsDavies (1990, 1993, 2002) has pointed out, there are many ethnic joke cyclesthat are not related to conict or hostility, whereas there are other very con-ictive relationships that are not reected in jokes. Moreover, there are sev-eral reported cases of groups who very o en joke about themselves, the mostfamous example of course being Jewish humor. is complicates the notionthat ethnic humor is necessarily the result of inter-ethnic conict or hostility. Another approach to the relationship between ethnic humor and ethnicconict 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 grouptargeted. Middleton (1959) found that, while (as expected) Blacks have higherappreciation of anti-White jokes than Whites, these groups didnt di ff er sig-nicantly in their appreciation of jokes targeting Blacks. is led him to con-clude that identication with a superior group (or the social order as a whole)is more important than ethnic a ffi liation in the appreciation of humor. A lineof research inspired by Middletons ndings explores the role between theappreciation of ethnic humor and identication. e studies conducted byLaFave (1972) show that people tend to appreciate jokes more when they

target a group that people do not identify with. Such identication classesdo not have to correspond to ones own background, and especially low sta-tus groups may prefer jokes targeting their own group. For instance, somestudies have reported that women prefer jokes targeting women to jokes tar-geting men, or that ethnic minorities tend to prefer jokes targeting their owngroup to jokes targeting the dominant ethnic group (LaFave, Haddad andMarshall 1974; Nevo 1985). In a related line of research, Zillman (1983; Zill-man and Stocking 1976) explored disparagement humor, concluding thatpeople generally most enjoy humor that disparages groups they dislike or donot 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 hostil-ity. A er 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). e conict approach is by far the most contested approach in sociologic-al humor studies. It is used mainly to explain and analyze potentially o ff en-sive forms of humor, and thus is directly connected with societal controver-sies about ethnic, sexist, or political humor (Lockyer and Pickering 2005b).Moreover, debates about the relations between humor and conict, both inAcademia and the real world, address the very nature of humor: its non-seri-ousness, which makes every humorous utterance fundamentally ambiguous.

e central criticism leveled at the conict approach is that it takes humor too

literally, ignoring humors basic ambiguity, which means that a joke can beenjoyed for many di ff erent reasons. Also, conict theories generally cannotexplain why and when people in situations of conict decide to use humorrather than more serious expressions of antagonism. Since the matter of jokesat 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. equestion why and when people use unserious modes of communication ratherthan straightforward serious talk has been taken up by the next two theoret-ical traditions: symbolic interactionism and phenomenology.

2.4. Symbolic interactionist approach

e symbolic interactionist approach to humor focuses on the role of humorin the construction of meanings and social relations in social interaction. 4

Symbolic interactionist studies generally are detailed studies of specic so-cial interactions, using ethnographic data or detailed transcripts of conversa-tions. In this approach, social relations and meanings, and more generally

social reality are not seen as xed and given, but as constructed and negoti-ated in the course of social interaction. Humor, while not very central to bigsocial structures and processes, plays an important role in everyday interac-tion, and its ambiguity makes it well-suited to negotiations and manipulationsof selves and relationships. Within humor studies, the micro-interactionistapproach gave a strong impetus to small-scale ethnographic studies of humor,as an alternative to the analysis of standardized forms of humor, joke ratingsfrom questionnaires. In this approach, whether something is dened as humorous or seriousis not a given, but something constructed in the course of interactions. e

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relationships. Critics of this approach have pointed out that symbolic interac-tionist studies tend to be overly descriptive and particular, and hence hard to

generalize. In sociology, symbolic interactionism appears to have gone outof fashion a er the 1980s. Since then, this line of humor research has beenvery successfully explored by sociolinguists (many of whom are cited here).Within sociology, symbolic interactionist understandings of humor havebeen incorporated in phenomenological studies of humor, described below,and in the sociology of emotions, which will be discussed in the section onlaughter.

2.5. Phenomenological approach

e phenomenological approach to humor conceptualizes humor as a specif-ic outlook or worldview or mode of perceiving and constructing thesocial world. is humorous outlook is generally considered to be one optionamong several in the social construction of reality. is approach to humoremerged a er the 1970s, and is eclectic in terms of methodology, combin-ing textual analysis, historical data, and micro-interactionist studies to showhow humor constructs and at the same time entails a particular worldview.

e phenomenological approach to humor builds on a much older philosoph-ical tradition about humor and laughter, which never made it into the canonof three classical theories. However, the notion of a humorous outlookon the world, or laughing at the world, dates back to irreverent ancientphilosophers like Diogenes, and can also be discerned in the philosophicalwritings of Friedrich Nietzsche or in the postmodern embrace of irony andambiguity. e sociologist Zijderveld (1982; 1983) dened humor as playing withmeanings in various domains of social life. To Zijderveld, such playing

with meanings is not trivial, but essential to the construction of meaningand everyday life, because it enables social experimentation and negotiation.Moreover, it allows people to become aware of the constructedness of sociallife itself: humor is a looking glass allowing us to look at the world and our-selves in a slightly distorted, and hence revealing, way. He likens humor tosociology: both debunk and denaturalize the world, showing us the relativ-ity and sometimes even the ridiculousness of what we do. Davis (1993), tak-ing this argumentation a step further, sees in this capacity of humor to exposethe underlying structure of reality a strong subversive potential, concludingthat humor can be an assault on reality.

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In his 1982 book Reality in a Looking Glass Zijderveld applies his per-spective to a particular form of humor: the traditional folly of carnivals and

court jesters. According to Zijderveld, this folly was not just a humorous styleor institution, but a full-edged worldview, seen in many cultures around theworld, based on turning upside down the rules and conventions of life. In theearly modern era, it functioned as a counterpoint to the process of rationaliza-tion, but eventually, traditional folly was fully eclipsed by this process. Bakhtin (1984, but writing in 1930s Communist Russia) also looked at thethriving humorous traditions of the early modern period to understand humoras an alternative conception of the world that exists alongside everyday modesof 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 generallyby corporeality, physicality, and the grotesque. In Bakthins view, carnivalcan function as an alternative sphere of freedom and resistance. eorist ofthe public sphere Habermas (1992) acknowledged Bakhtins carnavalesqueas possible alternative to the bourgeois public sphere, allowing for a di ff erentmode of popular civic participation. Phenomenological approaches divergefrom functionalist and conict theories: because they see humor as a separate

sphere or perspective, they see more potential for humor as an agent of socialresistance and change (see also Goldstein 2003). e most complete and sophisticated exposition of the social functionsand consequences of the humorous worldview is Mulkays On Humour(1988). In what he calls the humorous mode the rules of logic, the expect-ations of common sense, the laws of science and the demands of proprietyare all potentially in abeyance. Consequently, when recipients are faced witha joke, they do not apply the information-processing procedures appropriateto serious discourse (Mulkay 1988: 37) According to Mulkay, this enables

people to communicate about the many incongruous experiences that makeup (social) life, and to convey meanings and messages that are as ambiguousas most of everyday life. As a result, humor can be used to expose and ex-press the contradictory aspects of life, and to communicate and share this ex-perience with others. However, in contrast with Bakhtin and Davis, Mulkayconcludes that in the end, humor mostly serves to maintain social equilibriumand consolidate the social order. For instance, in an extended discussion ofsexual joking (drawing on Spradley and Mann 1976), Mulkay relates sexualhumor to the contradictory expectations and norms governing gender andsexual relations. In his view, the content and the strongly gendered usage

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patterns of sexual humor reconcile and neutralize these contradictory expect-ations and norms.

e phenomenological approach generally contrasts the humorous world-view with the serious worldview. Berger (1997) set out to compare humorwith another competing perspective on life, the religious. He starts out withan understanding of the comic very much resembling that of Zijderveld andMulkay: the comic conjures up a separate world, di ff erent from the world ofordinary reality, operating by di ff erent rules. (Berger 1997: x; Italics in ori-ginal) But in Bergers view, there is a transcendental element to this separateworld: e 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 simi-lar to Zijdervelds and Mulkays, ends up resembling something more like thepsychological relief theory of humor, with a theological twist. While Bergersperspective on humor resonates with fashionable views on healing humor(Lewis 2006), its reliance on the liberating, redeeming aspects of humor andlaughter 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 essentializehumor: by focusing on humor as worldview, they neglect other meanings

of humor, including negative or dysfunctional eff

ects, and overstate the im-portance of humor. Also, phenomenological sociology is said to be hard tooperationalize: it provides inspiring insights it is not clear how its notions andconcepts are to be used in actual empirical research. However, unlike manyother studies, phenomenological sociology takes into account the peculiari-ties of humor: its ambiguity and non-seriousness are central to the theoriesdescribed above. e accounts of Zijderveld, Davis and Mulkay are quite suc-cessful in tying together various functions and characteristics of humor. Forinstance, they explain the relation with laughter, manage to combine micro-

and macroperspectives of humor, and off

er reasons why people would usehumor rather than more straightforward communication.

2.6. Historical-comparative approach

e historical-comparative approach attempts to understand the social role ofhumor through comparisons in time and place. Comparative-historical stud-ies of humor are conducted in various scholarly elds, and draw on di ff erenttheoretical 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 humordone since the 1990s is probably best captured by this rather vague umbrella

term. Comparisons across time and space generally show great variations aswell as some universalities. Constants in humor across cultures are primarilythe preferred topics for joking: sexuality, gender relations, bodily functions,stupidity, and strangers (Apte 1985). In other words: people joke about tabootopics and deviance. is underlines the relationship between humor and thedrawing of boundaries between the normal and the abnormal (Powell1988). Other constants are the existence of specic delineated humorousroles and domains; humorous forms and techniques such as reversal, imita-

tion, slapstick, wordplay; and the existence of rituals and ritual performancesassociated with humor which suggests a more or less universal separationof serious and non-serious domains, although the nature of this boundarymay diff er. But even within these constants, there are great variations: in humorousforms, genres and techniques as well as in humorous content. Each culture,nation, community and era is supposed to have specic humorous styles andforms. is local sense of humor is widely believed to a sort of index forthe 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, orthe humanities; when sociologists have made qualications about a culturessense of humor, this is usually in the context of a wider theory of societaldynamics. e book on folly by Zijderveld (1982), discussed above, is anexample of this approach: he connected the rise and demise of a particularhumorous style with the much wider development of rationalization and dis-enchantment of the world. Similarly, in the edited volume by Paton, Powelland Wagg (1996) many articles bring up the theme of postmodern humor:reexive and intertextual styles of humor that mirror a wider societal turn to-

wards to reexive or post-modernity (cf. Gray 2006). In such studies, humoris not the index of an essential group culture, but a particular manifestationof a wider social phenomenon. Implicit in this approach is a comparison: be-tween humor and other phenomena manifesting the same trend. e most explicit comparative research program in humor studies is thework of Davies on jokes (1990; 1998a; 1998b; 2003). In his 1990 book, Dav-ies compared patterns of ethnic joking around the world. Although ethnichumor is probably universal, who is targeted, and how, varies signicantly,as Davies shows by looking both at the groups who are targeted, and the hu-morous scripts about these groups. Davies convincingly establishes that

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ality. In their analysis of the blonde joke, another transnational genre, bothDavies (1998) and Oring (2003) have argued that the rise of these jokes in

many Western countries are related to changing gender relations. Some localcolor is o en added to such global jokes: in the UK, blonde jokes are toldabout Essex girls, adding a working-class connotation these jokes dont haveelsewhere. e preoccupations reected in humor may be more specic, and some-times quite local. For instance, lawyer jokes are a typical American phenom-enon, which is an index of the strong position of lawyers and the centralityof the legal system to American politics and society (Galanter 2004). Folk-lorist Oring (2003: 97 115) argues there is a particular brand of humor spe-

cic to frontier societies: Australian, American and Israeli humor all showa fondness of tall tales and practical joking, and mock sophistication. Ac-cording to Oring, such colonizing humor expresses the frontier experienceof starting anew, away from civilization, and helps to forge a new identitybased in this experience. A more detailed case study of this type of humorby Shiff man and Katz (2005) analyzed the Israeli jokes told in the 1930s byEastern European old-timers at the expense of the formality, rigidity, andgeneral maladaptedness of well-bred German Jews (Yekkes), arguing thatthese jokes reect a very particular episode in Jewish migration history: the

ethnic superiority in these jokes turns the tables on earlier migration epi-sodes in Germany and the US, in which Jewish immigrants from EasternEurope were denigrated by German Jewish immigrants. Not only who, and what people joke about; but also how they joke aboutthis diff ers between cultures, as Kuipers (2006a) has demonstrated in herstudy of humor styles in the Netherlands and the US. Starting out from theappreciation of one particular humorous genre, the joke, she showed howhumor styles in both countries demarcate salient social boundaries. In theNetherlands, joke telling is most popular among working or lower middle

class men, corresponding to a humor style that favors sociability, exuber-ance, and performance skills. e college-educated upper middle classesgenerally dislike jokes, since for this group, a good sense of humor showsintellectual originality, deadpan restraint, and sharpness qualities they donot see in joke-telling. In the United States, humor styles are not as stronglyconnected to class background, but gender di ff erences tend to be stronger,and Americans evaluate humor less in terms of intellect or sociability, morein moral terms. is study shows that di ff erent social groups have di ff erentcriteria for good and bad humor, which means that they joke not only aboutdiff erent subjects, but also in di ff erent ways. ese standards are related

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more to style than to content, and they are linked with broader communica-tion 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 ofhumor in di ff erent societies. Dekker intriguigingly suggests there are con-

junctural uctuations in humor, with some eras and cultures being morefriendly to humor than others. He described the Dutch Golden Age, in theseventeenth century, as a very humor-friendly period, and the eighteenth andnineteenth century as more hostile to humor, noting the rise of Calvinism,a religious a ffi liation notoriously suspicious of non-seriousness and play, asone of the factors in his shi . As Wickberg (1998) shows in his book e

Senses of Humor, having a sense of humor became increasingly central tothe American understanding of the self in the course of the twentieth century.e high social standing of humor has caused a veritable industry of humor

promotion and development, especially in the US, discussed critically andhilariously by Lewis (2006). Billig (2005) has written a scathing criticism ofthe positive view of humor in current society as well as humor studies. eserecent studies, while not explicitly comparative in their approach, give rise tointriguing comparative questions about social and cultural conditions condu-cive or prohibitive to humor.

3. Issues

In the next section, I will discuss some issues which have recently been thetopic of special interest in humor sociology: the interpretation of humor at theexpense of others and more generally the dark side of humor; the relationbetween humor and laughter; and the study of humorous forms and genres,including mediatized forms of humor.

3.1. e dark side of humor: Humor, aggression, and transgression

A er 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 hasbeen a consistent concern with the transgressive, aggressive, and conictivefunctions humor can have. is matter ties in to the more general question ofthe dark side of humor.

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Much humor is based on the transgression of societal boundaries, andsuch transgression can cause o ff ense 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. e various theoretical traditions havesuggested di ff erent interpretations of transgressive or deprecating humor:conict theories stress its relation with conict and hostility; functionalistanalyses interpret it as safety valve or social corrective; phenomenologicaland symbolic interactionist stress its ambiguous and manifold meanings, andits role in negotiating meanings and worldviews; and comparative-historicalstudies tend to stress its connection with larger social and cultural concerns. e present-day descendents of superiority theory take the dark side of

humor most seriously. Gruner (1978) and more recently Billig (2005) havetaken the position that humor and laughter are correlates of social superior-ity: every joke is basically a putdown or an act of social exclusion. Grunerhas expounded the view that humor is a game with winners and losers,and Billig (2005) argues, in his social critique of humor that humor andlaughter are social control mechanisms, based in ridicule and embarrassment.Other authors have argued that humor, while not intrinsically connected withhostility, aggression, or transgression, o en overlaps with negative emotions:people o en joke about what they dislike or feel superior to, and dislike or

superiority adds to the liking of humor (see above). Oring (2003: 41 57) andBillig (2001a) have shown that groups that are openly racist tend to underlineand express this both with serious and joking expression of ethnic hostilityand stereotyping. Ford and Ferguson (2004) showed that humor, because ofits non-seriousness and playfulness, can diminish barriers to the expressionof negative emotions, and thus facilitate hostility. Recently, Lewis (2006),looking at American humor from talk radio to horror movie jokes, has arguedconvincingly that humor (while not necessarily a force of darkness) reectsthe darker tendencies in American society: it highlights social ri s, exposes

shared cultural fears, and is an outlet for hostility, for instance in the rathervicious humor of some talk radio hosts. e meaning of transgressive humor is not only debated in Academia, buta source of concern in everyday life as well. Transgressive humor is gener-ally controlled by the unwritten rules of informal regimes (Kuipers 2006b;Palmer 2005), and also less frequently by formal censorship (Davies1988). Both in Academia and in society at large, the most heated debates havebeen around ethnic and sexist humor, the most contested forms of humor inmodern Western societies. is issue has been the subject of various debatesin 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 samequestion: 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 con-sequences? With the exception of some die-hard superiority theorists, humorscholars generally concede they cannot solve the issue of ethnic and sexisthumor by simply pinning down the one true meaning of jokes. Rather, theystress how the meaning of a joke is created within a specic context: whetherit is a private conversation or a public situation; what the position and back-ground of the joke-teller is; what the relationship is between the joker andhis audience (and the butt); whether it is mediated or conversational humor(Lewis 1997; Lockyer and Pickering 2005a; Palmer 1994).

eorists of ethnic humor Davies (1990; 1991) and Oring (2003) havestressed the inherent ambiguity of humor. Davies, especially, tends to down-play the seriousness of humor, stating that humor is merely playing withaggression, although he notes that in some cases ethnic joke scripts overlapwith actual ethnic hostility, which considerably changes these jokes seriousimplications. Oring (2003: 65) argued: Joke cycles are not really about par-ticular groups who are ostenstibly their targets. ese groups serve merely assigniers that hold together a discourse on certain ideas and values that are ofcurrent concern. Polish jokes, Italian jokes, and JAP jokes are less comments

about real Poles, Italians, or Jewish women than they are about a particularset of values attributed to these groups. ese attributions, while not entirelyarbitrary, are, for the most part not seriously entertained. e contributors in Lockyer and Pickerings volume take a more criticalview. Howitt and Owusu-Bempa (2005: 62), in the most explicitly criticalcontribution, conclude that no only [do] racist jokes provide ready oppor-tunities to give expression to ideas of racial superiority. . . they continuallyreinforce the use of race categories, leading them to denounce even jokesmocking racism on the grounds that they reinforce racial thinking. However,

most other contributions attempt to carefully balance what the editors callthe self-defeating, regulatory, le -wing arguments associated with politicalcorrectness, and the opportunistic, unreexive, right-wing denunciations ofits practice (Lockyer and Pickering 2005b: 24). In the insightful introduction to their book, Lockyer and Pickering, dis-cussing what they call the ethics of humor, portray joking as a processof negotiation about the line between funny and o ff ensive. Billig (2005)coined the concept of unlaughter the pointed non-acceptance of an at-tempt at humor to make a similar point about humors processual nature anduncertain outcome. is perspective on humor as the negotiation of boundar-

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contributions and interesting case studies that directly address the issues dis-cussed in this section.

3. is conceptual unclarity is partly caused by the theoretical background ofmany conict scholars of humor. Sociologists using this approach o en adhereto Marxist or Marxist-inspired traditions where society is conceptualized asa struggle, which means that all forms of inequality necessarily imply conictand superiority and conict are very much the same thing. Moreover, in humorstudies there has been a strong Freudian inuence, which also leads to interpret-ations of unconscious drives and motives in humor. Both Marxist and Freud-ian theories, while very insightful at times, tend to facilitate interpretations ofhumor in terms of conict or aggression even when the concerned parties do notagree with this interpretation and even disagree vehemently (blaming it on false

consciousness or denial, respectively).4. I am using symbolic interactionism as an umbrella term for a variety for some-times antagonistic schools in social research focusing on the construction ofmeaning in everyday interaction, from the work of Erving Go ff man (who re-fused to be called symbolic interactionist) and ethnomethodologists (who alsorefused to be called symbolic interactionists) to more recent work in sociologyand sociolinguistics by scholars who are not as particular about these labels any-more.

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