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It Has Teeth: Is All Humor Aggressive? No! But ...
| Article
# : |
19895 |
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Section : |
CULTURE
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| Issue
Date : |
4 / 1992 |
1,143 Words |
| Author
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Victor Raskin
Victor Raskin is professor of linguistics at Purdue
University. He is editor in chief of the quarterly magazine
Humor: International Journal of Humor Research. As a
contributing editor to the Culture section, he has prepared
the special series The Mission of Humor, which continues
publication in this issue of THE WORLD & I. The series, which
began in the April 1992 issue, will conclude in the August
1992 issue. |
Making jokes, real jokes, not Doonesbury-type propaganda posing as humor, is often more politically effective than threatening to "throw the rascals out," which the electorate somehow never quite manages to do. Real jokes bite. They sting. They are memorable and funny for the absurd truth that is about them. Consider this one, delivered by Jay Leno on the Tonight show, while Congress was agonizing over the budget:
"Have you heard of that certain house in Nevada that the government first wanted to operate and then decided to close down?
"I would close the Congress instead! Why close a house which does provide a useful service? (Paraphrased by author.)
This bites because it has teeth. An influential theory of humor has for centuries maintained that humor is a civilized form of aggression, that all of it is based on malice and hostility. In Human Nature, published in 1650, Thomas Hobbes commented:
The passion of laughter is nothing else but sudden glory arising from some sudden conception of some eminency in ourselves, by comparison with the infirmity of others, or with our own formerly: for men laugh at the follies of themselves past, when they come suddenly to remembrance, except they bring with them any resent dishonor.
He had the authorities of Plato, Aristotle, and Cicero behind him on this. For them too, humor was based on malice and focused on the ugly deformities possessed or assigned to its object that the laugher was happy not to possess.
Kinder And Gentler Aggression
Three hundred years after Hobbes, the theory is still going strong. In contemporary psychology, it has many names, none of them too nice; disparagement theory, superiority theory and vicarious superiority theory, dispositional theory. In is influential 1951 book The Origins of Wit and Humor, Albert Rapp proposed a whole theory of humor evolution based on the civilizing of aggression. For him, the single source from which all modern forms of wit and humor developed is "the roar of triumph in an ancient jungle duel." Then a transition to gentler and kinder forms of aggression followed, from physical to verbal. First came crude ridicule, then more subtle witticisms, and, finally affectionate ridicule and even self-disparagement, the ability to laugh at one's own
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