Engaging Humor

Folklore, Dec, 2004 by J.C.H. Davies

Engaging Humor. By Elliott Oring. Urbana: University of Illinois Press, 2003. 208 pp. $29.95/22.00[pounds sterling] (hbk). ISBN 0-252-02786-8

Elliott Oring's most recent book on humorous folklore confirms that he is one of the world's leading scholars of humour, a position that he had already consolidated with his earlier masterpiece, Jokes and Their Relations. As with his previous book, Engaging Humor covers many themes, including absurd humour, blonde/Essex girl jokes, and the humour of settlers on the frontiers of America, Australia, and Israel.

There are two particularly interesting chapters on internet humour, one on the use of humour as hate on Aryan Supremacist websites and one on the jokes about William Jefferson Clinton that circulated after the Monica Lewinsky scandal. It is clear from these chapters that humour is not a form of aggression, but merely a way of attracting people to read "hateful" messages; it is the same trick that is used in a more benign context by advertisers. Wit is not a weapon, but merely decoration on the holster. In the case of the Clinton jokes, Oring has able to show that the internet need not be regarded merely as an anonymous source of modern folklore. He was able to contact and communicate with those who had posted large numbers of Clinton jokes on several sites and to ask them about their motives and political views. Many of them turned out to be Democrats and even Clinton supporters or individuals sympathetic to his predicament; all that the posters of the jokes shared was a sense that the jokes were funny. They were not Clinton-hating members of "the vast right-wing conspiracy." By chance, as I was writing this review, I turned up a fossilised chat-room of serious, although carefully anonymous, hate messages about Norman Tebbitt that revelled in an extremely nasty way in the injuries he and his wife sustained in the Brighton bombing carried out by IRA terrorists. One of them had added the joke "He must have been a fast reader. He went through four storeys in ten seconds." I laughed even though I was appalled by the earlier sick outbursts of hate.

Engaging Humor focuses on three major issues: the structure of humour, the motives of humour, and the meanings of humour. Oring's essays on the structure of humour are particularly insightful, for he is able to clarify the centrality to humour of "appropriate incongruity." It is very clear from Oring's work that we are wrong to think of jokes in terms of incongruity resolution since the incongruities are never truly resolved; indeed, a joke may involve a statement that at first appears straightforward, but that we realise is incongruous when at the end of the joke we fully understand it. The incongruity comes last and is never properly resolved:

Patient: Doc, no one believes anything I say.

Doctor: You're kidding!

The patient's problem remains intact and so does the incongruity. Yet the joke makes sense because a spurious appropriateness has been established.

Oring both directly and indirectly demolishes the aggression theory of humour and indeed the theories of its ultimately cynical originators, Hobbes and Freud. Oring's essay on sentiment is a particularly effective undermining of Freud's view that humour is a way of distracting the forces of the rational conscious mind to allow the expression of repressed sexual and aggressive impulses in another guise. As Oring shows, we use humour to express other kinds of unfashionable feelings, such as sentiment, as when we send a comic greeting card to express an affection we feel inhibited from stating directly in a way that would have been quite customary and appropriate in Victorian England. Sentiment is hardly a primitive impulse and it is the views of others we are evading rather than a censorious superego. There is a link here between Oring's work and that of Michael Mulkay who analysed the use of humour in the acceptance speeches of Nobel prize winners. The winners were expected to feel proud and probably did, but they had to express their pride in a culture that deprecates the open expression of such feelings and so they used humour.

It is one of the merits of Oring's thoughtful analysis of everyday items of modern folklore that it enables him to gain insights into broader philosophical and anthropological issues and to enable the reader to have new thoughts about them. It now occurs to me that those thinkers at the end of the nineteenth century and in the early twentieth century, such as Freud and Durkheim, who analysed human behaviour in terms of innate and limitless impulses restrained by the forces of civilisation, failed to see the converse possibility that restraint can be instinctive and civilisation can override restraint. Many animals do not kill members of their own species because they are restrained by a primitive impulse from doing so, but within human civilisation this restraint can be overridden by the manipulation of words and symbols. Words and symbols lie at the very heart of humorous folklore and of what it is that makes us human. Elliott Oring has written a profound as well as a clear and entertaining book.