We finish out our all too brief survey of American Humor by getting down to the most basic form of humor of all, The Joke. We're going to focus on the types of jokes told in the last half of the 20th century. Jokes run in cycles, and reflect tensions and contractions in the culture itself. As we can see, they can be deliberatel cruel, deliberately gross, and deliberately demeaning to someone group, whether cultural, ethnic, religious, or racial. Consequently we often have a mixed reaction when we hear certain of them: Part of us wants to laugh, and may not be able to stifle the laugh which tries to bust out. Another part of us is ashamed at finding that joke funny.
Unlike the literary humor we've read about and sampled, or the stand-up comics upon which our last segment focussed. Most jokes are truly anonymous. They also are chameleon-like, as we'll see attitudes and traits transferred from one group to another in the blink of an eye.
Read, in Boskin, The Humor Prism,
Part IV: Events and Script
1950s-1960s Sick and ElephantThe Giant and the Child: "Cruel" Humor
in American Culture (Boskin) 187194
1960 Hellen Keller The Helen Keller Joke Cycle (Barrick) 195-207
1950s-1980s Polish Racial Riddles and the Polack Joke (Barrick) 208-224
The figure to the right isn't the sterotypical Polack, but the Stereotypical Irish Immigrant of the 1870s.
Obviously you don't have to memorize all the cracks, quips, and one-liners here. What you need to do is grasp the author's interpretation of the joke type, why it arose when it did and what situations/tensions within American culture it espressed. I'd like you to look at the jokes, and locate any you feel are especially outrageous or especially funny. What is that takes that joke "over the top" into bad taste, or into hilarity? Some may do both. Try for a list of at least ten, varried by subject matter. put thiem on your journal and we'll hold a contest for the best and worst jokes of the last 50 years.
To supplement examples for you, I've prepared a list of links to websites featuring these kinds of humor. Reach it by
The J. A. P. and the J. A. M. in American Jokelore (Dundee) 225-249
1970s, Lighbulb
Many Hands Make LIght Work or Caught in the Act of Screwing In
Lightbulbs.(Dundes) 250-257
We'll continue on as we did on Monday, trying to decide what makes us laugh, what makes us groan, and what makes us do some of both. Note that on the webiste list 'I've included websites which make fun of people like me. It seemed only fair.
