Cartoonesque 17: That is (not) funny!
Jokes can be funny, or not. What matters is who has the power to define what is funny and what the position of the target of the joke is. It is the transgressive quality of jokes that makes them funny but also very suitable for political uses. Which jokes are made and the responses to these jokes reveal important processes, hierarchies and discourses in society.
In the next video you will see a famous (at least in the Netherlands) Dutch speed skater: Sven Kramer. He, of course, wins the race and then rips his suit so you can see his behind. The video is in Dutch, but is nevertheless comprehensible for non-Dutch speaking as well, I think. Try it:
[youtube:http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=VaZxp-J8C94]The pizza guy in the last scene of the commercial says ‘What a failure’ and then the other people stop laughing. What is happening here? First you see how Kramer’s girlfriend laughs at him and then she plays the video again for her friends and then, I think, for the entire neighbourhood. All of them sort of belonging to the ingroup; friends, neighbours laughing amongst each other because of the failure of one them. The pizza guy who is there can laugh with them but he is an outsider and when in the end he says a little too loud ‘What a failure’ he transgresses the line. According to anthropologist Radcliffe-Brown the best joking relationship exists when two groups have ‘both attachment and separation, both social conjunction and social disjunction’. Take for example the Dutch jokes on the Belgians in which the latter group usually features as the dumb ones. The Dutch and Belgians are neighbours, they share each others language (between the Dutch and the Flemish anyway), they share a large part of history that still lives in on both countries. Nevertheless, or maybe because of those shared features, they also are separated and occupy different political and cultural positions nowadays. In the Belgian jokes, the Belgians become the stupid and funny versions of the Dutch.
Anthropology of Laughter and Humor – Open Anthropology Cooperative
Carty & Musharbash (2008) call a ‘sense of humour’ the “strangely nebulous heart of understanding, and belonging, within social relationships” (p. 209). Humour is seen as a boundary between in- and outgroups: “Laughter is a boundary thrown up around those laughing, those sharing the joke. Its role is demarcating difference, of collectively identifying against an Other, is as bound to processes of social exclusion as to inclusion” (p. 214, emphasis by the authors). And although humour and laughter are universals, “they remain intimately and often elusively localised in their nuance and content” (p. 213).
The video shows both: humor as a way to demarcate difference between the pizza guy as an outsider and the others as insiders. And among the insiders humor as a way to bond: they even get some food to share with each other and watch the video. Humor also draws people together. Depending on the context humor can be offensive (and in fact the offense is often part of the joke as it is intended to ridicule a particular group) but humor can also be protective against outsiders (when intended to protect the group from ridicule) and can be both at the same as well.
Humor is often build on stereotypes:
European Heaven And Hell
In Heaven…
* the mechanics are German
* the chefs are French
* the police are British
* the lovers are Italian
* and everything is organized by the Swiss.In Hell…
* the mechanics are French
* the police are German
* the chefs are British
* the lovers are Swiss
* and everything is organized by the Italians.
And consider the next joke used by Don L.F. Nilsen in a class about humor:
Why aren’t Jews concerned about the abortion controversy?
Because they don’t consider a fetus viable until after it graduates from medical school.
According to Nilsen if the tellers or listeners of this joke are gentiles, it may be anti-semitic, criticizing Jews as being overly ambitious and arrogant. But if the tellers or listeners are Jews, it may be an expression of Jewish pride and the extraordinarily high standards of child rearing. Nilsen goes on by saying:
When a group member tells an ethnic or religious joke, it opens the door for inner-group communication and invites group members to examine their attitudes and behavior.
But if outsiders tell the same joke, the effect is the opposite, because the outsider focuses on the group’s most obvious characteristics and implies that these characteristics belong to everyone in the group.
This is something that directly pertains to the video as well of course. And as mentioned before ridicule is often part of the joke because the ridicule is what makes it funny for one and offensive for the other. What is funny for one crosses the boundary of what is acceptable for the other. This means that power is also part of joking. Usually the targets of jokes are those groups that are at the periphery of society as Nilsen explains: migrants, ‘white trash’, mentally ill and so on. If these outsiders feel offended and complain about the jokes they ‘just can stand a joke’ sometimes attributed to their lack of integration, education or individual pathology. We could witness this phenomenon during the Muhammad Cartoons affair in which during the debates Muslims were sometimes envisaged as the ultimate Other and backward because they lack any sense of humor, fun and joy and therefore cannot laugh at themselves. Such a discourse makes people blind to the long standing traditions of jokes and humor that every group has, including Muslims with regard to religious matters but also in relation to politics. The discourse about Muslims without humor therefore served to strenghten the Muslims as being outside our ‘normal”secular’ ‘rational’ ‘modern’ public sphere. At the same time among the opponents of the cartoons often all of the cartoons were seen as offensive while in reality many people exhibit different responses to the different cartoons; some were really funny others were offensive and most of them are ambiguous. It shows the political uses of humor. Giselinde Kuipers in a very interesting exposé on the Muhammad Cartoons (asking herself why is it that cartoons are so important in this case) for example shows how every society knows it past controversies about humor going to far, social movements using humor and mockery to state their claims or opposing to particular forms of humor that transgres the boundaries of what, according to them, should be acceptable. In another article Asef Bayat shows how islamists use humor (or forbid or regulate fun) for their political messages.
Humor is a powerful political tactic because, as Kuipers explains, it leaves the target with only few elegant responses. In the above mentioned video skater Sven Kramer chooses to laugh along with the joke that is at his expense. What else can he do? An angry reaction would have made it only more funny, a violent reaction or forcing to not show the video anymore would have made the situation only more ridiculous for him. Because it is a joke people can say, come on this is only a joke, don’t take it so personally. If he objects he makes clear that is not ‘in on the joke’ the same way as some Muslims made clear that they were not in on the joke of the Muhammad cartoons. Not in on the joke results in saying I’m not in to your social conventions. And why are they not in to ‘our’ social conventions? Because they have a strict religiosity and religiosity is at odds with fun and humor according to some Islam pundits but also according to some religious puritans. Ignoring and laughing along are, according to Kuipers, the typical reactions of those with little power and objecting to humor by demonstrations, going to court or whatever, is the strategy of groups that aim to empower their constituency and at the same time a sign of a growing consciousness about themselves as part of a group that is being mocked. Responding, in particular by joking back, requires power as Kuipers explains, also because apparently some people have the power define what is humor and what is not, while others are in a subaltern position.
Of course, jokes can be used as well against people in power for example in the past when in the Netherlands humor was used to disparage the churches or, still, people in government. In that sense humor also has the quality the empower and is also a sign of already apparent self-respect and confidence. The difference is that the latter is part of a countermovement against those in power while Muslims in the West opposing to the Muhammad cartoons are the outsiders targeted by those who belong to the dominant majority. Now the Muhammad cartoons were, partly, produced as a result of an attempt to teach Muslims a lesson: that they should comply do the Danish standards of humor and religion criticism. But as Nilsen explains “because outsiders have little power to bring about internal change, the effect is to stereotype the group, and this lessens the chances for change”. If that is correct, the cartoons produced the opposite of what was intended actually by the pundits which as a result (for them) proves their point once more.
Nilsen, Alleen Pace, and Don L. F. Nilsen. “Just How Ethnic is Ethnic Humour?” Canadian Ethnic Studies/Études Ethniques au Canada 38.1 (2006): 131-139.
Nilsen, Alleen Pace, and Don L. F. Nilsen. “Ethnic Humor.” Encyclopedia of 20th Century American Humor. Westport, CT: Greenwood, 2000, 115-118.
Nilsen, Alleen Pace, and Don L. F. Nilsen, Eds. “Names and Ethnicity.” a Special Issue of Names 56.1 (March 2008): 1-54.
Nilsen, Don L. F. “Ethnic Humor.” New Mexico English Journal 6.2 (1991): 20-25.
Nilsen, Don L. F. Humor in Irish Literature: A Reference Guide. Westport, CT: Greenwood Press, 1996.
Rappoport, Leon. Punchlines: The Case for Racial, Ethnic, and Gender Humor. Westport, CT: Prager, 2005.