Mirth of Nations, The

Western Folklore, Summer 2004 by Ellis, Bill

The Mirth of Nations. By Christie Davies. (New Brunswick and London: Transaction Publishers, 2002. Pp. xi 252, notes, bibliography, index. $39.95 cloth)

This shrewd survey of ethnic jokes takes a healthy empirical approach to the phenomenon. Earlier studies, Davies observes, have tended to assume universal functions for humor and so, in his words, "tend to be wildly speculative, oddly opinionated, and rooted in a variety of inconsistent yet dogmatic theories [that] lead nowhere" (3). Repeatedly he problematizes "standard wisdom" arguments: Do jokes circulate because those who tell them accrue social benefits? Does joking enact a potentially dangerous form of aggression against cultural Others? Does a new cycle of ethnic humor show that the marginalized group is seen as a new political or economical threat? Maybe so, in some cases, Davies concedes, but none of these "common sense" assumptions provides a methodology that will explain all ethnic jokes, and many are directly contradicted by the data.

One of Davies's goals in The Mirth of Nations is "to expose and explode circular arguments" (5), and indeed all his chapters reveal impatience with existing folkloristic research on humor. One regrets the querulous tone of his arguments and the hammering home of key assumptions so many times, so many places. (In a blurb, Dundes comments that Davies "does not suffer fools gladly"). While he justly criticizes others for their irrelevant political comments, he is not above making space for his own hobbyhorses-his disgust, for instance, with television, which is "to complex thought and speech what puking is to eating for it breaks them down and spews them out again as a shapeless colloid of pictures decorated with words" (95-96).

Nevertheless, Davies is right about the slippery methodology used in a great deal of previous research. He admits that jokes can be seen in terms of a weak version of the superiority theory of humor, that we laugh at "comically defective attributes" ascribed to Others (18-19). Trying to explain a given set of jokes entirely on such a priori concepts is useless: a theory that explains everything with enough stretching essentially explains nothing. "We can only begin to understand and explain the social world," he concludes, "if we see it as to some extent consisting of objective, knowable, and discrete social facts, and not as a mere projection of debatable philosophical speculations about human nature" (199).

So Davies begins and ends with a plain, sensible statement of methodological principles. First, a study of jokes should be based on the jokes themselves, in all their variant forms. second, interpretations should be checked with independent records of social and historical patterns relevant to the jokes' context, not inferences drawn from the jokes that the researcher chooses to study. Finally, a broad international approach is best, in which we can see common elements in joking cycles from widely differing societies-elements more likely to be intrinsic to the rules of verbal play than disguised forms of aggression or anxiety specific to one and only one culture. He notes, for instance, that many nations have cycles of jokes about peoples who are reputed to be "stupid" (e.g., Polish-Americans, Newfies) and also about those felt to be "canny" (crafty, calculating, economically shrewd, e.g., Jews and Scots).

In a thorough and carefully argued pair of chapters, Davies compares the history of "canny" jokes about Scots and Jews, showing that many elements thought to be "self-mocking" in Jewish also appear in a culture that has never faced a similar degree of hostility. Accordingly, much theory proposed by Freud and his followers about the supposedly unique functions of Jewish humor cannot be sustained. Additional chapters discuss important ethnic cycles in the United States, Canada, and Australia, with particular emphasis on the relationship between regional numskull humor, abundantly present in the jokes preserved by Newfoundlanders about themselves, and the broader stereotype of Newfie jokes that emerged more generally in Canada.

The final case study casts light on a more visible dispute: why did Polish jokes emerge in pan-American joking in the 1960s? Davies patiently debunks some of the most common explanations-that they were disguised variations of "nigger" jokes, that they reflected economic competition from immigrants, or that they expressed Anglo hostility toward blue-collar ethnic groups. Possibly some tellers have such motives, Davies concedes. But the absence of seriously malicious ethnic stereotypes of Poles in general suggests that they are, like most jokes, "a means of playing with the forbidden, in this case of playing with inter-ethnic verbal aggression much as other jokes play with forbidden statements about sex, disasters, and politics" (198).

Davies painstakingly documents his own arguments with examples drawn from popular published collections of jokes (often quite obscure) and from the vast archives of student collectanea at Berkeley and at the Memorial University of Newfoundland. Through this extensive survey, Davies documents joking as a social process rather than as a set of discrete subliterary texts, an approach that allows him to reference a wide range of social-science studies about the place and role of groups that have been the subject of humor and to place his inferences on a firm cross-disciplinary foundation. His conclusions are, by his own intention, "elegant and parsimonious," seeking to "explain many things using few variables and making few assumptions" (15). To that extent, Davies has set the bar quite high for those who would like to refute his opinions. In the end, he demonstrates in this meticulous study that the joke's the thing that deserves our close attention-not the mental construct that may (or may not) lie behind it.