Ha! (14 page)

If this interpretation is wrong and racial jokes really are a matter of picking on the downtrodden, then the content of those jokes shouldn't matter. But again, this isn't the case. Though in America we're equally comfortable telling jokes about Poles, Irish, or Italians being stupid or dirty, overseas things are very different. It won't take much time in an English pub before you hear someone call an Irishman stupid, but you'll be walking a long way along Haverstock Hill before you hear a Brit calling an Irishman unclean. Grooming habits just don't show up on the list of things that Londoners tease foreigners about. So what gives?

The clearest example of insult jokes saying more about the teller than the target is the prominence of “dirty jokes” in America, but almost nowhere overseas.
Why do Italian men wear mustaches? To look like their mothers.
You'd never hear that joke in Switzerland, even though
the Swiss frequently make fun of Italians. Why the difference? “The key is that Americans and Canadians are obsessed with cleanliness. It's a central value,” says Christie Davies. “In Britain and elsewhere, it's something empirical. It matters more how clean you are depending on the circumstances. It's utilitarian. Things ought to be clean because the consequences of being unclean are bad. In America it's a moral value.”

Nobody in Britain makes fun of the grooming habits of Irish or Belgian people because nobody there cares. This is one more way that insult humor says more about the tellers of jokes than about their targets, because it shows what their values truly are. It's not that Italians or the French are pathologically dirty and don't own razors, it's that Americans are obsessively clean. To us, everybody is dirty, making such jokes less about insulting others than about coping with our own feelings about personal hygiene.

Arguments like these might sound like unscientific conjecture, and in a way they are, but they're still important for anthropologists and sociologists because humor trends are difficult to quantify. Analysis can go overboard, too. Consider the review published by Roger Abrahams and Alan Dundes in the 1960s. Abrahams was an English professor, Dundes a folklorist, and together they examined a growing wave of humor making its way across America: elephant jokes. “One cannot help but notice in this regard that the rise of the elephant joke occurred simultaneously with the rise of the Negro in the civil rights movement,” they wrote. “The two disparate cultural phenomena appear to be intimately related, and, in fact, one might say that the elephant is a reflection of the American Negro as the white man sees him and that the political and social assertion by the Negro has caused certain primal fears to be reactivated.”

In case you missed it, these authors are implying that white people like elephant jokes because they're afraid of black people. The article goes on to consider several elephantine characteristics supposedly shared by these groups, including phallic ones.

Obviously, some judgment is required here, as well as patience with 1960s' racial terms and stereotypes. Still, just because such analysis can
go overboard doesn't mean insult humor doesn't say more about its tellers than its targets. And to see how, let's finish this chapter with an example involving a slightly less sensitive subject. Let's laugh at some lawyers.

        
How do you stop a lawyer from drowning? Shoot him before he hits the water.

        
How many lawyers does it take to roof a house? Depends on how thin you slice them.

        
How many lawyers does it take to stop a moving bus? Not enough.

Have you heard these jokes before? If not these specific ones, you've probably heard others like them. That's because in the last several decades, lawyer jokes have become one of the most popular kinds in this country. A study of humor types in the 1950s found that of the 13,000 jokes found in common circulation, so few were about lawyers that they didn't warrant counting, but by the late 1990s more than 3,000 Internet sites had been constructed for the sole purpose of sharing lawyer jokes, as compared to 227 for doctor jokes and 39 for accountant jokes. That's a big increase.

When lawyer jokes exploded three decades ago, they were notorious for being both popular and amazingly violent. Looking at the three jokes shown above, we see that all involve murder. None have anything to do with the law, and none give hints for why lawyers should be so reviled. Could it be that lawyers are by nature an especially unlikeable group? Maybe, but as numerous sociologists have pointed out, lawyers have a much worse reputation in other countries. The Netherlands, for example, are well known for their antagonistic attitude toward lawyers. Yet among the 34,000 jokes and humorous anecdotes compiled by Dutch sociologist Theo Meder, only 5 targeted this group.

Something changed within the American court system in the 1980s. That decade brought a pernicious wave of litigiousness to the United
States as well as a near doubling of the number of lawyers. Then, on February 27, 1992, Stella Liebeck ordered a cup of coffee at a McDonald's drive-through in Albuquerque, New Mexico. After leaving with her order, she spilled the coffee in her lap, suffering third-degree burns over 6 percent of her skin. Though Liebeck initially sought to settle only for the costs of her medical bills, about $20,000, the case eventually went to court and Liebeck was awarded almost $3 million in compensatory and punitive damages.

Liebeck and her lawyers were merely trying to change the fast-food chain's practices to make their product safe—over seven hundred similar incidents were already on record—but the public was outraged. McDonald's coffee is supposed to be hot. What is the world coming to if spilling fast food on your lap makes you a millionaire? Only in America, where everyone wants to become a successful, highly paid professional, could the public have such contradictory feelings about lawyers. On the one hand, we want to praise them for protecting the innocent, preserving the law, and making a successful living. On the other, we want to feel certain that someone tripping on the sidewalk outside our house can't sue us into oblivion. By taking such a prominent role in society, lawyers have exposed themselves to both admiration and fear. It's a catch-22—love them or hate them, lawyers are here to stay. Our only option is to laugh at them.

In this way we see that humor serves an important social function, helping us deal with grief and resolve conflicting opinions about prominent figures. It may also be a consequence of living in a social society, allowing us to work through our differences in more mature ways than our ancestors did, for example, with clubs and sticks. The Russian psychologist V. I. Zelvys recounts the story of the Dyak tribes of Borneo, who used to engage in frequent battles among themselves—including headhunting. Whenever these tribes went to war, they always began their skirmishes by approaching one another and swearing in the most obscene of ways. The insults were gruesome, replete with promises to remove limbs and shove them up very private places. They were also quite personal, involving offensive remarks about sexual prowess. Similar
traditions have been found in ancient North America and Italy, where the ritualized insults even took on a special rhythmic meter, making them a form of poetry. Only after these insult matches concluded were any actual battles allowed to begin.

I wonder whether, sometimes, the insult matches became so lively that the two sides forgot to actually strike each other physically. Like sick humor and jokes about tipping dead pizza delivery boys, these shouting matches served a social purpose, and for the Dyak tribes of Borneo that purpose was to delay violence, at least for a short while. In modern society this purpose has evolved, helping us to deal with the anger and grief associated with tragedy, as well as to integrate conflicting opinions about prominent individuals. It's easy to see the value of humor in these difficult situations, just as it's easy to see how doctors must sometimes joke about their most helpless patients. Humor doesn't have to be cruel, and it doesn't have to be hurtful either. Sometimes it's simply the only available way to react.

   
PART TWO

       
“What For?”

            
H
UMOR AND
W
HO
W
E
A
RE

4

   
S
PECIALIZATION
I
S FOR
I
NSECTS

              
A person without a sense of humor is like a wagon without springs. It's jolted by every pebble on the road.

—H
ENRY
W
ARD
B
EECHER

              
I have a fine sense of the ridiculous, but no sense of humor.

—E
DWARD
A
LBEE

I
T
'
S TIME TO SHIFT GEARS.
I
N THE FIRST THREE CHAPTERS WE
focused on the
What is?
question of humor. What is humor, and why do some things make us laugh and others not? So far we've seen that humor has distinct components, such as conflict and resolution, but now it's time to shift to what I call the
What for?
question: What purpose does humor serve, and why don't our brains adopt simpler means for turning conflict into pleasure? All this arguing within ourselves
seems an inefficient way to do business. Surely, if our brains were simpler and worked more like computers, we'd be happier, more jovial people? Not so. And to show why, let's get to know A.K., a sixteen-year-old girl who went to the UCLA Medical Center hoping to find a treatment for epilepsy and left knowing the exact part of her brain that makes her laugh.

A.K.

“The horse is funny,” exclaimed patient A.K. in response to the doctor's question. The doctor had just inquired why she was laughing, and lacking other explanations, this was her best answer. In front of her the doctor held a picture of a horse, and although it wasn't particularly special, it seemed hilarious to her. She didn't know why.

The doctor continued to show her pictures, and to ask her to read paragraphs and move her fingers and arms. While he did these things, another doctor worked just out of sight, nearer her head. A.K., whom we know only by her initials, understood that the second doctor was probing her brain. The doctors were trying to find out why she was periodically experiencing seizures, and the only way to do that was to identify which area of her brain was malfunctioning. What she didn't understand was why her body kept abandoning her control.