The Mirth of Nations - Book Review

Folklore, Dec, 2003 by W.M.S. Russell

By Christie Davies. New Brunswick, N.J.: Transaction, 2002. xii 252 pp. 32.95 [pounds sterling]/$33.95 (pbk). ISBN 0-7658-0096-9

This splendid book is the third in Professor Davies's magisterial trilogy on ethnic jokes--the definitive treatment of this subject. In Ethnic Humour around the World, he showed that ethnic jokes fall into pairs (stupidity and canniness, for instance, and militarism and cowardice in organised war), that stupidity and canniness jokes are amazingly widespread, and that the butts of stupidity jokes are always groups that are geographically or culturally marginal in a society. In Jokes and their Relation to Society, he examined special problems of marginality, such as peoples caught between two cultures (Belgium, Bosnia); canniness jokes as evidence in favour of Max Weber's thesis connecting capitalism with the Protestant ethic; fool towns and the transition to regional ethnic jokes; and ethnic jokes about alcohol. In all three books, Davies makes brilliant explicit use of the comparative method developed by Weber and, more recently, by Stanislav Andreski. This enables him to demolish many gross errors made by social scientists focussing exclusively on one set of jokes.

Most of this third book is devoted to the peoples who tell jokes about themselves. The self-jokers par excellence are the Jews and the Scots, though both also have plenty of other-directed jokes. The Jews at least could be humorous about themselves long ago, but Davies shows that among both Jews and Scots the great outburst of self-directed jokes occurred in the nineteenth and twentieth centuries. The two peoples are so closely similar in this respect that Jewish self-humour cannot be related to their persecution, since, as Davies points out, nobody was persecuting the Scots during this period. Instead, he considers the self-jokes a response to the factors these two peoples have most conspicuously in common--great intelligence, high educational level, and a passion for intellectual and logical argument and abstruse speculation, such as we see in the Talmud and the Scottish theologians. (Sydney Smith said the Scots "are so imbued with metaphysics that they even make love metaphysically.") Davies raises the question why the Japanese, just as intelligent and highly educated as the Jews and Scots, have apparently no ethnic jokes at all, self-directed or other-directed. He ascribes this to the two centuries of Japanese isolation under the Tokugawa Shogunate, when they had virtually no contact with non-Japanese peoples. This may well be true, but I think there is another possible factor. Zen (as Ch'an) originated in sixth-century China, but from the twelfth century it became extremely important in Japanese culture. Over four million Zen Buddhists were reported in Japan in 1958. Now Zen koans are perfectly designed to meet a passion for intellectual and logical argument and abstruse speculation. So I suggest: if you have koans, who needs ethnic jokes?

Davies's intellectual thesis perfectly fits the conception of Arthur Koestler and of the late Claire Russell and myself, that humour is a branch of intelligence, playing in the same way with new combinations of apparently disparate things.

Other topics treated in this fascinating book include American jokes about Poles, and Canadian (including Newfoundlander) jokes about Newfoundlanders. There is an interesting chapter on jokes by Jewish men about Jewish women, and jokes by Australian men about themselves. Davies relates these to the intensely family-oriented matrilineal Jewish culture, and to the Australian all-male bachelor drinking culture, which he ascribes to the enormous numerical preponderance of males in nineteenth-century Australia.

Throughout the book, a main theme is Davies's demonstration that ethnic jokes are playful, that they are not expressions of aggression, and that they do not create or exacerbate hostile tensions between peoples or groups. He provides such a mass of overwhelming evidence against these aggressive interpretations that I hope we have heard the last of them. I can only give a very few examples. He shows that serious ethnic slurs are quite uncorrelated with ethnic jokes, the authors of which do not for a moment believe the butts have the qualities ascribed to them in the jokes. For instance, in Europe there are many ethnic slurs against the Poles, but very few Polish jokes. In the United States, the land of the Polish joke, there are very few ethnic slurs against Poles. The propensity of the Scots and the Jews to tell jokes with themselves as the butts "is fatal for the unproven but widely accepted theory that ethnic jokes are an expression of conflict, hostility and aggression" (p. 17), and Davies makes mincemeat of the casuistic attempts to get round this indisputable fact. In the case of the Scots and Poles, he shows that when there was real hostility to them there were no jokes, and when there were jokes there was no real hostility. This timing is decisive. He notes that there was great hostility in the United States to Japanese during the Pacific war, but there were no ethnic jokes about the Japanese at this time. He notes also that jokes about Bosnians might have served as a warning that they were a marginal people between two cultures (Serbs and Croats) and might be in danger if violence erupted, but there is no evidence that the jokes had anything to do with the violence. "It is the human propensity for ideological fanaticism that creates danger for us all, not the human search for amusement" (p. 131).