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Humor and Truth: The Mission of Humor
| Article
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19972 |
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Section : |
CULTURE
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| Issue
Date : |
8 / 1992 |
958 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. |
Humor stands in an interesting relation to the truth. When a stand-up comic says that a funny thing happened to him on the way to the club, we can be reasonably sure that nothing actually did. He just happened to have overheard the joke he is about to tell us, or he paid fifty dollars--out of the money the last bunch of humor-starved citizens paid him--to a joke writer.
All those woes of unfaithful and kleptomaniac girlfriends, interfering mothers-in-law, and perfidious pets usually are blatantly false. And even those who know that this wonderfully frivolous comedienne is a faithful wife and a mother of three will still roar with laughter at her saucy tales of romantic encounters with numerous men of various dimensions.
Though a serious speaker is held accountable for what he says, a comedian plays by a different rule. No commitment to the truth is required. We let them get away with anything! Well, not quite . . . Woe to the comedian who makes jokes about something his audience knows nothing of and cares less about. This is why standup comics start their acts by talking about things the entire audience is familiar with: the weather they are experiencing, the town they are in, the supermarket (they all eat), the relationships (all either are in one or seeking one--otherwise, what are they doing in a club, anyway?).
They tell us zany, fantastic stories. Nobody's mother-in-law wears a Nazi uniform and arrives for a visit with a whip. Nobody's car stalls when he spots Madonna with Michael Jackson and LaToya's python in a limo just in front of them and tries to pass the limo to see more. Nobody's supermarket cart refuses stubbornly to be pushed toward All-Bran and propels itself instead toward Frosted Flakes.
But . . . some mothers-in-law are authoritative. Mechanisms do tend to let us down when we need them most, and many carts do have crooked wheels. So there is a great deal of truth about those funny stories. They do relate directly and very clearly to our real-life experiences. And they are capable of telling a special kind of truth0-to quote from Joseph Boskin, the truth "writ large."
Boskin does believe in jokes. He thinks that a historian of the future can reconstruct the zeitgeist, the spirit, the psyche of a decade from its humor, and much more reliably so than from blue-ribbon commission reports. In my "Casualty of Glasnost," a precursor of this series published in this magazine in April 1991, I recalled challenging him at
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