Joke
A joke is a display of humour in which words are used within a specific and well-defined narrative structure to make people laugh and is usually not meant to be interpreted literally.
[2] Linguist Robert Hetzron offers the definition: A joke is a short humorous piece of oral literature in which the funniness culminates in the final sentence, called the punchline… In fact, the main condition is that the tension should reach its highest level at the very end.
However, subverting these and other common guidelines can also be a source of humour—the shaggy dog story is an example of an anti-joke; although presented as a joke, it contains a long drawn-out narrative of time, place and character, rambles through many pointless inclusions and finally fails to deliver a punchline.
[note 2] The oldest identified joke is an ancient Sumerian proverb from 1900 BC containing toilet humour: "Something which has never occurred since time immemorial; a young woman did not fart in her husband's lap."
The second oldest joke found, discovered on the Westcar Papyrus and believed to be about Sneferu, was from Ancient Egypt c. 1600 BC: "How do you entertain a bored pharaoh?
[11] British classicist Mary Beard states that the Philogelos may have been intended as a jokester's handbook of quips to say on the fly, rather than a book meant to be read straight through.
[11] Many of the jokes in this collection are surprisingly familiar, even though the typical protagonists are less recognisable to contemporary readers: the absent-minded professor, the eunuch, and people with hernias or bad breath.
Examples of this are the characters of Rabelais in France, Till Eulenspiegel in Germany, Lazarillo de Tormes in Spain and Master Skelton in England.
Grinning made easy; or, Funny Dick's unrivalled collection of curious, comical, odd, droll, humorous, witty, whimsical, laughable, and eccentric jests, jokes, bulls, epigrams, &c. With many other descriptions of wit and humour.
"An elephant walks into a bar…"; a person sufficiently familiar with both the English language and the way jokes are told automatically understands that such a compressed and formulaic story, being told with no substantiating details, and placing an unlikely combination of characters into an unlikely setting and involving them in an unrealistic plot, is the start of a joke, and the story that follows is not meant to be taken at face value (i.e. it is non-bona-fide communication).
Studies by the cognitive science researchers Coulson and Kutas directly address the theory of script switching articulated by Raskin in their work.
This varies to reflect the complexities of a matrix of different social factors: age, sex, race, ethnicity, kinship, political views, religion, power relationships, etc.
When all the potential combinations of such factors between the narrator and the audience are considered, then a single joke can take on infinite shades of meaning for each unique social setting.
[34] In one long-term observation of men coming off the late shift at a local café, joking with the waitresses was used to ascertain sexual availability for the evening.
[40] "The computer networks appear to make possible communities that, although physically dispersed, display attributes of the direct, unconstrained, unofficial exchanges folklorists typically concern themselves with".
[42] This correlates with the new understanding of the internet as an "active folkloric space" with evolving social and cultural forces and clearly identifiable performers and audiences.
Now, an Internet-enhanced collection creates a time machine, as it were, where we can observe what happens in the period before the risible moment, when attempts at humour are unsuccessful[45] Access to archived message boards also enables us to track the development of a single joke thread in the context of a more complicated virtual conversation.
An in-depth analysis of the Challenger joke cycle documents a change in the type of humour circulated following the disaster, from February to March 1986.
"It shows that the jokes appeared in distinct 'waves', the first responding to the disaster with clever wordplay and the second playing with grim and troubling images associated with the event…The primary social function of disaster jokes appears to be to provide closure to an event that provoked communal grieving, by signalling that it was time to move on and pay attention to more immediate concerns".
Beginning in the 1960s, social and cultural interpretations of these joke cycles, spearheaded by the folklorist Alan Dundes, began to appear in academic journals.
[note 5][67] Elephant jokes have been interpreted variously as stand-ins for American blacks during the Civil Rights Era[68] or as an "image of something large and wild abroad in the land captur[ing] the sense of counterculture" of the sixties.
As folktales and other types of oral literature became collectables throughout Europe in the 19th century (Brothers Grimm et al.), folklorists and anthropologists of the time needed a system to organise these items.
…"[70] Due to its focus on older tale types and obsolete actors (e.g., numbskull), the Aarne–Thompson Index does not provide much help in identifying and classifying the modern joke.
A more granular classification system used widely by folklorists and cultural anthropologists is the Thompson Motif Index, which separates tales into their individual story elements.
A third significant problem is that the "excessive prudery" common in the middle of the 20th century means that obscene, sexual and scatological elements were regularly ignored in many of the indices.
The folklorist Robert Georges has summed up the concerns with these existing classification systems: …Yet what the multiplicity and variety of sets and subsets reveal is that folklore [jokes] not only takes many forms, but that it is also multifaceted, with purpose, use, structure, content, style, and function all being relevant and important.
[80] It has proven difficult to organise all different elements of a joke into a multi-dimensional classification system which could be of real value in the study and evaluation of this (primarily oral) complex narrative form.
The studies of jokes from each of the interested disciplines bring to mind the tale of the blind men and an elephant where the observations, although accurate reflections of their own competent methodological inquiry, frequently fail to grasp the beast in its entirety.
A new psychological assessment tool, the Values in Action Inventory developed by the American psychologists Christopher Peterson and Martin Seligman includes humour (and playfulness) as one of the core character strengths of an individual.
Given the plethora of variants revealed by even a superficial glance at the problem,[94] it becomes evident that these paths of scientific inquiry are mined with problematic pitfalls and questionable solutions.
