Ideologies of The Funny

IDEOLOGIES OF THE FUNNY
Author(s): Carole Anne Taylor

Source: The Centennial Review, Vol. 36, No. 2 (SPRING 1992), pp. 265-296
Published by: Michigan State University Press
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By Carole Anne Taylor
many contexts, professional and otherwise, have dramatized for

masking of power relations in the very discourses available to theo
humor. Conferences and journals devoted to humor do not often ref
strangely, on how cultural studies constructs its key concepts.
little evidence of critical theorizing, reactive responses neverth
take hold in a frequently pejorative characterization of wome
"minorities" as humor police bent on destroying the fun and the fun
In an age where scholarship in general so painfully addresses its
hegemony and exclusions, whether to justify or to rectify, what d
it mean when senior male scholars complain of feminists as pot
censors of humor or when a white American scholar advises American
ethnic "minorities" to look on the funny side of ethnic humor (in this
case, the humor that dominant groups share about an ethnic Other)?2
In general, humor theorists have not critically engaged the ideological
predispositions so central to theoretical controversy across the disci
plines. As a result ideology often hides in its customary site, that of
whatever a discourse takes as so natural or so self-evident that it needs
no sense of its own historical sedimentation ("because we continue to
create it today)."3 From a position no less ideological, but commitedly
relational in its ideology, it appears that we have taken as our "texts"
those forms of humor that most readily fit dominant theories, excluding
much, and that we have vastly underexamined how power relations
affect both definition and value in humor theory itself.
Immensely diverse typologies of humor may foreground humorous
kinds (the joke, the riddle, parody, sexual humor), the performer or
initiator (jokester, clown, buffoon, comedian), the social context (in
groups and out-groups, relationships of avoidance, who's allowed to
joke and who's supposed to respond as audience), the motivation for
humor (comic relief, superiority to the butt of humor [disparagement],
coping mechanism), or the comparative frame of reference (humor as
an emotion, a cognitive pleasure in incongruity, an attitude like belief).
Among those who undertake something like Grand Theory (Apte; Boskin,
Humor and Sambo; McGhee; Morreal, Philosophy, "Rejection," and
Taking-, and Mulkay; among others), interdisciplinary methodologies
attend generally eclectic overviews drawing on diverse methodologies.
265
THE CENTENNIAL REVIEW
As such, even Grand Theory tends to describe how humor works

the world rather than how ideas about humor fit the ways we kno
the world.4 Perhaps this is why the acknowledgement of multip
contexts, functions, and kinds, without readily apparent performe
audiences, or targets, has not necessarily helped in explicating hum
experienced differently from different social positions (from hen
subject-positions); nor has it helped much in theorizing humor a
form of resistance.5 Without making any attempt to delimit the possib
variations of any ideological "content," I would like here to sugge
diverse senses of how power relations work, and how they should wor
and how they necessarily hover behind explanations of humor; for wh
we make primary in defining the humorous tends to become the highe
value, that is, the qualities that distinguish high and low forms
humor, the ethical or unethical uses of humor, and the positive
negative social functions of humor.6 Since value derives from the read
ings we give humorous kinds, even the names we give to such reading
have only provisional status. To name characteristic tendencies a
conservative, liberal, transgressive, or transformative, does not di
low the overlapping subject-positions of analysts themselves or t
shifting and often cooperative boundaries of practice. Ultimately
want to encourage both theory and research that would not devalue th
most interactive and difficult to measure forms of humor (inform
humorous rapport), would not disallow the resistance or solidarity tha
may inhere in less or non-aggressive humor, and would not avoid issu
of power—including the analyst's own—in valuing one explanation
humor over another.
Laughter to Bear with Living

For the first, provisional set of correspondences grouped under the
rubric of conservative ideological tendency, Freudian psychoanalytic
approaches will serve as theoretical example, not to deny the diversity
of political affiliations of those who use Freudian methods, but to
identify methods that however useful for explaining the aggressive and
defensive humorous kinds—those that seem clearly present in the power
plays of the joke, the riddle, the pun, and most comic routines—place
determinations of value in the hands of the most practiced users of any
systematic, named discourse. Such authoritative arbiters of the norma
tive include, by extension, the analyst.7
266
For Freud, even so-called "innocent" jokes, those where incongr

or intellectual play seem primarily at stake, betray the teller's d
to show off wit, an analogue to sexual exhibitionism. The personal
ference in the expenditure of "surplus" energy, whatever the hum
kind, involves a displacement which dissipates inhibition, ideatio
feeling in order to recapture the euphoric mood of childhood,
triumph of ego." Whether or not Freudian and neo-Freudian perspec
on humor give us an analysis that demonstrates how laughter
express or mitigate against neurosis, they have a normative visi
humor as sustaining the ego's drive for dominance. And theorie
humor that foreground the play of the conscious and unconscious,
when used as an analogy for socio-political or economic tensio
always refer back to individual or subjective psychic space. Be
psychoanalysis dedicates itself to avoiding the despotism of the pas
not the despotism of dominant institutions and discourses, it gener
pays little attention to the humor of the oppressed except as interna
self-disparagement or aggressive, inversionary backlash.8 Of co
Freudian theory has coverage here in that it views hostile humo
even castrating humor in the case of women) as sublimation rather
as any incitement to action or resistance. Elliott Oring's psychoanal
treatment of Freud's own fascination with jokes serves as a consiste
and characteristic case-in-point, for it finds a sublimation of Fr
unconscious rejection of Jewish identity in psychoanalysis itself.9 M
Christian atonement a pathological mechanism and the fact that "m
suffer from their pasts" the universal burden, Freud could gratify
own desire to escape the past by creating a science with strong r
blances to religion, and as analyst he could play the role of "sec
pastoral worker" (Jokes of Sigmund Freud 122-23).
The family romance posits a reconciling sublimation as the goo
discovery and self-acknowledgment that has strong personal im
tions but no very profound incitement to social change. Follow
Freud's own sustained struggle to keep politics from having an
tional hold on him, many theorists have made the analogical leap fr
the individual psyche to systemic repression, as Freud does in T
and Taboo, Civilization and Its Discontents, and Moses and Mon
theism', but such works make any political reality entirely secon
to subjective psychological reality. William McGrath describ
illuminating detail how Freud "dissolved history and politics i
267
psychology," representing for him a personal "victory over politic

(321 ff). Let me suggest briefly how even contemporary versions
Freudian psychoanalysis reduplicate the portrait of humor as dependen
upon a yearning for something missing (if not the absent childhood or
phallus then the absent "self' or unthreatened, gladly narcissistic iden
tity), and how in so doing they hold out little progressive hope fo
social transformation.
The "social change" described by those concerned primarily with the
aggressive/defensive functions of humor, for example, often mirrors
Bergson's sense of humor and difference: "Laughter is a social reaction
which punishes and puts down deviant elements in man's behavior and
in various events" (Bergson 76 [trans. Ziv, Personality 39]). The con
comitant belief that such humor-as-coercion has a kind of therapeutic
social function finds widespread support, as—typically—in Avner Ziv's
Personality and Sense of Humor which (among a cluster of related
tales) tells a moral saga about idealists and preachers whose self
importance and self-righteousness leave our "history strewn with
attempts to improve the world" (38). Opposed to these misled reformers,
"less serious and self-involved people have held that things might be
changed by a less tedious approach—that is, by means of humor" (39).
Ziv's humor as "social corrective" specifically values the "optimistic"
genres of comedy that demonstrate "Plus qa change, plus c'est le méme
chose," the conservative's credo. In this scenario, the laughter of the
oppressed does not attend meaningful resistance or even a vision of a
better world. Rather, "laughter shared by the oppressed at the expense
of the oppressor reduces fear and helps people to go on living under
the regime with more ease" (42).
Though Ziv approves of such humor, even notes cases in which it
acts as "an instrument of self-respect and the spirit of freedom," he
makes no distinctions between a humor of resistance, a humor which
merely "offers release," and a humor that specifically defuses any
protesting mechanisms.10 Blurring these distinctions helps support the
self-referential direction of popular, utilitarian incitements to humor,
the self-help psychology where healing always implies change of the
individual to adapt to the way the world is, not social change.11 And
it locates the social function of even "optimistic" humor in the context
of anxieties and aggressions. Ziv's later, sometimes collaborative, stud
ies of the creation of humor still presuppose that humor "allows us to
transgress social barriers and taboos" harmlessly, its value directly
268
dependent on the ability to displace critical focus with the "release

humorous expression.12
Norman Holland's refining and broadening of Freudian theory
cuses more on the laugher than on the joke, and his manner of
so helps explain both why the joke or the cartoon (disjunct hum
kinds with the strongest frame or closure) so often represent
psychoanalyst's favored humorous kind and why a negative vie
self-other tensions (alienation) never ultimately accepts the descrip
of humor offered by the analysand: the patient, the female, the su
tern, any Other.13 Holland's feedback loops involve individual
fenses, expectations, fantasies, and transformations that incorp
insights from most other theories. But in focusing on how explana
of humor themselves recreate personal identity, Holland values hum
as the self-conscious construction and reconstruction of identit
portantly for Holland, the joke is always "an other, and one res
to it as to any others, be they persons, things, or texts" (183). Holl
own students provide cases-in-point, and as researcher, he and a stu
laugh at, or not, and then deconstruct the parameters of resp
Problems of identity matter to explanation, but the model deals
with a performed "other," here the joke or the cartoon, forms in w
identity transacts humor much as it does "any other separate being
event." But suddenly and playfully confirming identity "through s
thing outside ourselves" does not capture the subject-object rela
of those engaged in humorous rapport, not just in the de- and r
structive processes Holland describes only as retrospective explanat
Holland's laugher recreates or confirms an already present identity
only analysis reveals any potential decentering. An interpersonal, i
active rapport that in the making of humor might de- and reconst
the subjective point of view finds no place in this theory, wher
anyalyst retains the hold on value even when "sharing" reconstruct
with the laugher (in this case, primarily, a female student Ho
repeatedly apologizes for—and yet partly denies—objectifying)
Even revisionary, feminist versions of psychoanalytic theory—m
Lacanian than Freudian—may represent little opportunity for wom
laughter to express any but authoritative, patriarchal values, since
gression always involves some repressed "law." Julia Kristeva's
tive portrait of the woman writer outside "legitimized" languag
example, posits a neurotic doomed to reminiscence: "if no pat
'legitimation' comes along to dam up the inexhaustible non-symboli
269
impulse, she collapses into psychosis and suicide" (41). And Luce
Irigaray suggests that the only protest available to women remains a
staged miming separate from, yet mysteriously related to, her real
"self," a role well-figured in the hysteric's repetition of the language
and role ascribed to her.14 For most psychoanalytically informed studies
of humor, laughing women remain either invisible (because women
laughing together stand outside the family romance), necessarily hid
den behind veils (Irigaray names her "La Mystérique"), or over the edge
like the hysteric or the madwoman, whose laughter speaks in riddles
and risks the mastery of newly author(iz)ed masculine exegesis. Such
revisionary psychoanalysis, however, usually shares or crosses the
borders of transgressive theory, and in so doing engages the tensions
set up by Lacanian psychoanalysis and feminist theory.
Polarities and the Avoidance of Power

Another set of correspondences links liberal ideological tendency with
theory that sets up definitions by relying on oppositional distinctions
(in and out groups, sameness and difference in identity, aggressive or
defensive postures, stimulus and response). Disposition theory, which
informs a wealth of studies in the social sciences, provides an initial
example here, followed by other examples of the kinds of oppositional
strategies that largely dominate research models and explanations.15
The chosen humorous kinds of disposition theory, with representative
emphasis on jokes and disjunct performances, overlap those of psycho
analysis but favor more ritualized social contexts: joking relationships
as opposed to jokes per se. Initial experiments show how the intensity
of negative or positive dispositions towards a disparaged individual or
group, proportional to one's own group identification, affect the inten
sity of mirth at disparagement humor. More sophisticated experiments
with stimulus and response contexts (sometimes called "misattribution
theory") separate out tendentious and non-tendentious "humor cues,"
discovering, for instance, that non-tendentious cues accompanying dis
paragement "liberate mirth," allowing those who laugh to justify that
laughter on some other grounds than disparagement of the other (al
lowing us, that is, "to be malicious with dignity" (Zillman, "Putdown"
100). Disposition theory corresponds in its distaste for addressing dif
ferentials in power to any of those theories that apply "even-handedly"
to people in whatever social contexts or whatever subject-positions, a
necessary focus on experimental opposition between when stimuli
270
produce projected responses and when they do not. Often, the inde
dent variables that serve as stimuli are a legacy of the tenden
psychoanalytic repertoire, and presume both the primacy of self-int
in affective disposition and the necessary superiority of the analys
his subjects, who "are poor judges of what, exactly, makes them lau
(Zillman, "Putdown" 101).
Even empirical studies that focus on the asymmetry in who's allo
humor often respond with notions of equalizing opportunities for h
without ever questioning the power relations that define humorous
havior in the first place. And as always, overlapping subject-pos
problematize both categories and analysis, as when Joseph Bos
(Humor), writing sensitively of the humor of the oppressed, never
less describes it as a humor of the "emasculated." Some of the most
interesting findings of disposition theory concern its anomalies, as
when Paul McGhee and N. S. Duffey found that Black and Mexican
American children did not find disparagement of white children any
funnier than disparagement of "their own kind," as opposed to white
children who, consistent with the theory, found disparagement of other
racial/ethnic groups to be funnier. To disposition theory this represents
a "dispositional inconsistency," presumably explained by the fact that
the minority children "have not yet developed dispositions that are
more positive toward their own kind than toward whites and/or more
negative toward whites than toward their own kind" [my emphasis]
(Zillman, "Putdown" 95). Rather than considering factors that might
explain the absence of the disparagement factor in the Mexican-American
and Black children as a characteristic not necessarily attributable to
dysfunction, theory finds some "inconsistency" explicable through a
kind of developmental retardation, the failure in not yet reaching the
normative (even essential?) way of responding.
Liberal studies that treat groups "equally" regardless of power dif
ferentials (as though in- and out-groups need only to be labeled and
plugged into the paradigm) disallow not only alternative explanations
for "inconsistency" or "confusion" in the findings, they may also sug
gest remedies for such inconsistencies that further rather than question
normative values, or they may counsel tolerance to the "butts" of
others' tendentious humor. The humorists described in such liberal
scholarship perform so that others find them funny, and their self
conception includes making others laugh; such studies do not even
conceive of the possibility of an interactive humor that does not provide
271
answers to the loaded question, "Who is most funny?" Despite th

necessarily artificial, power-loaded contexts of experiments—the
enforced conception of subjects that they are really objects here—t
theory gives up on any search for non-tendentious stimuli on the ground
that "all efforts at classifying seemingly intrinsically-funny stimulus
conditions have failed to differentiate between stimuli that consistent
produce mirth and those that consistently do not" (Zillman, "Putdown"
104). Yet the stimulus-response model itself may further the normative
hierarchial values implicit in oppositional thinking, and therefore miti
gate against exploring the full range of cultural contexts in whic
humor happens. Consistent with the limitations outlined by Micha
Sandel, Marthow Minow, Iris Marion Young, and others, such libe
alism evades relations of power by presuming neutrality.
Even anthropological overviews committed to exploring that fu
range of contexts may delimit the task by relying on such definin
oppositions as public and private spheres. Mahadev Apte, for examp
speculates about humor among women by using the public-privat
opposition to distinguish women's varieties of humor present "in t
private domain" from men's "public" forms of humor. (How man
women together does it take to make a public? Does not even participa
observation depend on looking primarily for such performative humor
as that found in joking rituals, rather than for more informal, undramatic,
or interactive amusement?) Apte senses that male dominance make
humor in the public domain impossible for women until they acqui
a status or age that mitigates against male power, making a male
dominated "public" the normative arena for humor. Understanding, as
do few others, that extant theory limits coverage of women's humor,
he nevertheless ascribes to the premise of disposition theory that humo
acts to promote in-group cohesion and inter-group conflict. The premi
catches ethnic groups, too, in the analytical category of "ethnocentric
humor," the very name disallowing a humor that might promote an
progressive solidarity with potentially cross-group values.
The way in which liberal theory delimits the contexts and definition
of humor theory promotes a suspension of ethical judgment in researc
designs presented as neutral or value-free. If in-groups and out-groups
function to dispose us to affective attitudes, then cross-group disp
agement becomes the expected norm, a view of human "nature" derive
from multiple examples necessarily fulfilling oppositional prophecy
Going further, such affective dispositions may serve normative fu
272
tions that acquire even intentional value. As when Erving Gof

implicitly justified the jokes told by surgeons about the bodie
which they operate (especially female bodies, of course) in term
presumably necessary role-distancing, humor research has continue
give us scores of studies that make tendentious or aggressive h
normative for surgeons and anyone else using it in the tasks
perform. What kind of evidence would one need to show that surg
might operate just as skillfully without the sexist and dehuman
humor? Can we even conceptualize experimental controls for su
thing, given the power of surgeons?
An "equal-handed" treatment of social contexts may isolate di
tions that seem irrefutable as far as they go, but they may not go
far towards any relational sense of ideological presumption. Ch
Davies's Ethnic Humor around the World: A Comparative Anal
offers a rich and invaluable description of the processes by w
primarily dominant groups differentiate themselves from those
ginal and subordinate ones about whom they feel some moral am
lence, and usefully traces how transformations of inter-group
become the intra-group jokes that differentiate the more assimilat
more mainstream group members from those less so. But as such, t
book focuses on joking dominance around the world, not ethnic hu
in any inclusive sense, its specific subject "those jokes told ab
people from the outside, which impute an undesirable quality to th
in a ludicrous way" (310). This explains why even though many
about African Americans find their way into Davies's book, practic
no humor of vastly rich Black traditions do, which is especially trou
since so many of the jokes targetting African Americans grow o
white minstrelsy (richly represented here) and yet no Black tra
mations of that racist humor warrant inclusion, not even an increas
resistant Black minstrelsy and a twentieth-century legacy of h
inseparable from double consciousness. Moms Mabley, Godfrey
bridge, Dick Gregory, Richard Pryor, Whoopi Goldberg, and ot
simply do not exist for a researcher who cites innumerable exam
from television and the popular entertainment industry.16
The power relations masked in Davies's title parallel an insist
on the value of this humor, evident in a largely appreciative rather
critical description, on the "superior structure" of these ethnic
and on their harmlessness. Indeed, a strong sub-textual criticis
those who do not laugh (the racial, ethnic, and female butts of
273
jokes) derides any suspicion that this humor participates in the so

construction of inequitable power relations. For Davies, jokes neith
construct nor reinscribe harmful social relations, something that w
"depend on the politicians, not the joke-tellers" (323). Even given t
hindsight that a "possible exception" to this rule involves groups
reotyped as "canny,"
the jokes in themselves are harmless (like all jokes they are the result, not
the cause, of a social situation), but they indicate that the peoples w
feature in the jokes are perceived in that society as 'excluded enterprisers,
a category of peoples which we know is liable to experience sudden att
and persecution. (323)
Thus, jokes "in themselves" come to attend an aggression postulat
as playful "in itself." The sub-text that morally exhorts others to
preciate humor as explicated by the analyst characterizes much
Davies's work, as in his recent "An Explanation of Jewish Jokes ab
Jewish Women," with the indicative ellipsis of "Jewish Men's Jo
about Jewish women," which concludes that,
Far from being an index of misogyny and patriarchy, Jewish jokes ab
women (in contrast to say jokes about Irish and Australian men) are a wry
acknowledgement of the powerful and legitimized influence that Jewi
women exercise, especially when contrasted with the women-folk of other
ethnic and religious communities. It is the man who does not and in a sens
cannot leave his wife at home and casually 'go out with the lads and g
drunk' who is going to tell jokes about the women who 'prevent' him from
doing so. Jewish women should reflect that the alternative to hard-joking
Jewish men is Andy Capp. (375)
The cross-cultural comparisons across the genders (generating Jew
men justified in put-down jokes because they are "too virtuous a
uxorious to go out with the boys and get drunk"), the presumed n
malcy among gentiles of that desire to "go out with the lads and
drunk," and the final advice to Jewish women to appreciate what the
have—all validate "playful aggression for its own sake" (italics add
(367). Ultimately rejecting the sociological insight that all versions
truth themselves represent social constructions (some with more pow
or privilege than others), Davies practices the privilege of tutoring th
afflicted from a subject-position presumed able to adjudicate the r
ity-quotients of others' constructions:
. . . whether we are studying neutrinos or numskulls, quirks or quack
am still inclined to kick stones with Dr. Johnson and to be willing t
274
demonstrate (notwithstanding that this is socially constructed) that "Ar

science or materialist critiques of relativity, feminist analyses of 's
humor, or the obscurantist obsession with context and dislike of com
sons held by collectors of humorous folklore are all plain barmy.
The distastes linked in list-form grant Davies himself the priv
described in masculist-realist terms, of deciding when humor harm
when it does not, and when responses to humor are appropria
inappropriate. Arguing here against Michael Mulkay's more care
contextual analyses, Davies shares the presumptions of many li
researchers that their methodologies reveal truths, as opposed to r
ing provisional truths dependent upon their own subject-positions
paradigms. And he shares, too, a distancing that allows him to
"feminist analyses of 'sexist' humor" alongside "'Aryan' scienc
comparably misguided conceptions, ignoring the differential p
relations specific to each. But the offensive use of humor by those
positions of dominance does not simply mirror a defensive hum
the oppressed, and our moral overview needs to acknowledge the po
relations that matter to evaluative reasoning.
Medusa at the Carnival

A last set of correspondences, before my own, groups together tho
who share a leftist ideological desire to subvert dominant or officia
power and who look to parodie and travestying forms of humor
important images of liberation. This theory values the laughter of som
disempowered Other, but only in extremis, and its highest value often
inheres in the mediated laughter brought to us by the abstracted creativ
intelligence of the artist-writer. Bakhtin's carnival, with its emphasis
on the ritual, public inversion of "official" power will serve as m
primary theoretical example,17 followed by examples from Cixous and
other postmodern explicators of transgressive extremes. Bakhtin se
the carnival's liberating laughter in the images of rogue, clown, an
fool, those who in everyday life, as "outside" figures, enact "the right
to be 'other' in the world, the right not to make common cause wit
the existing categories that life makes available" (Dialogical 159). Th
humorous kinds invoked by the idea of carnival involve less bounde
forms than the joke, pun, riddle, or set performative routine, because
they rely on a sustained, often ritual, inversion of already existin
forms. Such laughter releases carnival participants from fear, whether
the fear of death or authority or abusive power. Whether inversions o
275
ritual spectacle (tied to the church calendar or seasonal agricultur

rites, for example), vernacular parodies (of prayers, sermons, schol
ship, any institutionally sanctioned forms), or mimicry of the verb
abuse of the marketplace in transplanted contexts (praise as insult, for
example), all of Bakhtin's travestying forms are "ever changing, pl
ful, undefined" because they direct themselves at an order that includ
the one who laughs. Bakhtin's popular folk carnival does not acknow
edge the distinction between actors and spectators; rather than th
responses of individuals to a comic event or performance, carniv
produces a universally festive laughter.
Diverse readings of Bakhtin puzzle over the quality of laughter a
transgression and over the depth and significance of temporary libera
tion "from the prevailing truth and from the established order" (1
Seen positively in the hands of creative thinkers, Bakhtin's carniv
appears a source of liberation, a way of putting popular imagery t
subversive use. The carnival organized by the artist subverts the domi
nant language of "official" discourse, and value inheres in the dialo
cal interrelation of private and public spheres, inside and outside, s
and other. What happens in Rabelais provides the model of, but is not
synonymous with, what only nostalgically happens in the streets or at
the marketplace.
Consistent with this positive reading of public carnival and mediationa
artist, several make connections between the mad laughter importa
to Foucault and Bakhtin's carnival laughter, in part because both a
recuperable through literature (Patterson). Bakhtin emphasizes th
carnivalizing forces that oppose institutional or "official" discours
whereas Foucault emphasizes the complexly dynamic sites of instit
tional power. But however different in emphasis and method, Foucault
sense of discourse as "the path from one contradiction to another" (151
parallels Bakhtin's carnival laughter in its insistence on devious an
deviant paths to truth. Both Foucault's mad, delirious laughter an
Bakhtin's celebratory, festive laughter posit some form of rebir
after sundering all monological senses of truth (Patterson). Read thus,
examples of laughter's final recuperation and resolution lie in texts, an
in the dialogical responses of readers to texts and texts to each othe
More negative assessments of the Bakhtinian carnival as transgre
sion may reflect either a disbelief in "the people" as themselves po
sessing dialogical consciousness or the ease with which, historically
carnival lends itself to cooptation. Ken Hirschkop locates Bakhtin
276
theoretical difficulty in a dialogical consciousness that emerges "mo

or less automatically" from "the people." The "people" could not
suggests, achieve the appropriate level of abstraction to self-consci
envision their own roles in "the texture of public social life":
What is lacking is an account of some figure comparable to the nov
whose job it is to rework the local materials of everyday life i
'participatory description' of the world, one capable of reconnecting
obligations and commitments of the everyday world to the necessarily
abstract processes of public historical life. (35)
Hirschkop accuses Bakhtin of romanticizing "the people" and ev
description of who mediates between carnival and everyday "o
tions and commitments":
The valorization of becoming or historical change as such not only invokes

a metaphysics of history; on a more practical level, it disregards the need
for the stability and security which many think is part of the good and
desirable life" (32).
Thinkers more concerned with subverting oppressive power than with
stability and security may nonetheless see Bakhtin as relying too heavily
on canonical mediators of folk wisdom for artful opposition to official
language and institutions. For them, he has little interest in folk wis
dom per se as embodying values of "awareness," and he falls into too
easily oppositional thinking, as in his distinction between public and
private. In this view, parody and travestying forms necessarily limit
artistic creation to those with the mobility to represent the multiple
languages that make up heteroglossia; and women's social lives, never
public in Bakhtin's sense despite their presence in the marketplace,
disallow active, creative inclusion in the comedie.
Umberto Eco, one such disbeliever, argues that carnival does not feed
some revisionary view of how the world should be, but rather acts as
a release generally consonant with accommodation. For Eco, the
transgressional theory of carnival, however populist in Bakhtin, also
recommends itself to aristocratic or commercial usurpation, as in the
continuous "carnivalization of life" by the mass media which exploit
the funny and the ludicrous in the direction of social control ("To
support the universe of business, there is no business like show busi
ness," 3), and in the present-day Escola de Samba in Brazil with its
romantic idealizations of social status, wealth, and luxury accompany
ing a nostalgic, aristocratic history (Rector). Eco suspects that however
well Bakhtin understands the drive towards liberation and subversion
277
inherent in the Medieval folk carnival, the idea of carnival as actual

liberation cannot ultimately convince: . . there is something wrong
with this theory of cosmic carnivalization as global liberation. There is
some diabolic trick in the appeal to the great cosmic/comic carnival" (3).
Yet because of his commitment to the dialogical and its "ever chang
ing, playful, undefined forms," many from the left try to take Bakhtin
in the direction of new judgments and genres, fitting him to contem
porary concern with altering the sites of discourse.18 Because the laugh
ter of carnival both triumphs and derides simultaneously, it may have
affiliations with psychoanalysis, especially in the revisionary psycho
analysis of some feminist or transgressive theory. The individual sub
ject still experiences the extremes of rage, violence, madness, or hys
teria, a laughter on the boundaries of humor, even if criticism takes that
experience to represent a discourse, a subject-position, or a textuality.
This humor may well capture the urgency and rawness of unfulfilled
social desire because, in common with psychoanalysis, it focuses on
laughter always conscious of its unexpressed, its otherness.19 Some
feminist theorists, primarily French, claim for women's hysteria a sub
versive "content," although others, primarily American, warn of the
dangers of taking madness or hysteria as positive forms of protest.
Héléne Cixous's renowned "The Laugh of the Medusa" eloquently calls
for any woman to become a writer for women, taking up the struggle
as "a universal woman subject who must bring women to their senses"
(875). The Medusa figures whatever remains unrepresentable, horrific—
all the dark continents charted in their absence by phallocentric dis
course. Women's writing, says Cixous, must "look at the Medusa
straight on," express the "otherness" presumed inexpressible in men's
writing, in order to see that she is laughing and beautiful. The grotesque
becomes laughter through writing, through changes in identity made
possible by writing. Cixous's Medusa crosses Bakhtin's grotesque parody
with psychoanalytic sublimation, despite Bakhtin's own Marxist cri
tique of Freud. Just as much feminist critique has sensed the danger
in theoretical affirmations of women over the edge (Showalter), so it
has understood both Cixous and Irigaray as in some measure informed
by a Lacan ambivalently situated as both "an arch-phallocrat" and "the
prick who dares to speak its name" (Grosz 187).
The affirmation of hysteria as subversion belongs primarily to writer
analysts and probably reflects a receptivity to Lacanian insights appro
priate to particularly writerly subversions. An extension-in-difference
278
of what I (following Stallybrass and White) have called transgr

theory, emerges in the insistence of much decentering practice
writing, text, and discourse as the primary figures for activity
privileges writerly analysis in the act of proclaiming a general sub
sion.20 Those whose ideology resists using metaphors that figurativ
disempower most of the world's women, as does mine, may thr
the transgressive call but suspect that these visions of subversio
essarily characterize subject-positions of privilege. However much s
figures assert their general application to activities not confin
actual writers and thinkers, the "texts" comprising intertextuality
to bypass, or make figurative, the material, working lives of those
create humor as an everyday activity.
The late Allon White brilliantly extended this premise about se
order, disembodied transgression to arguing that the passage
embodied carnival ritual to semeiotic substitutes for that embodiment
comprises the neurosis of "polite and decorous culture." However good
with humor at the boundaries of intuitive definition, transgressive theory
often participates in a move from carnival conceived as subverting
official discourse in people's lives to a representational subversion
confined to literary or artistic representation. And the wild, extreme
laughter of disembodied texts "seems almost too ferocious to be be
lieved ... too disappointed with the world which is changeless only
in the comic versatility which is still resistant to change" (Blau 39).
Bakhtin remains the vital source for conceptions and readings of both
popular and elite culture, readings attentive to both celebration and
critique. But he also remains the source of a cultural problematics that
have not yet resolved the tensions between sentimentalizing a popular
consumer culture and sharing the apocalyptic despair of privileged
representations. And the revisionary psychoanalysis affirming laughter
in extremis risks complicity with the "cynical ideology" seeing ironic
laughter as "part of the game" (Zizek 28).
Leveling Positions, Humorous Rapport,

and Other-Aligning Actions
Since the correspondences that set the parameters of supplemental
theory fill in perceived holes, it matters to admit that provisional
groupings really are provisional, and that they reduce the difference
within generalized correspondences to more monolithic sensibility than
of course exists. Yet the overlaps follow the directional shifts suggested
279
by such correspondences: a psychoanalysis like Holland's, that at

tempts to place both his own and students' responses within analytical
focus, will seem more liberal than a Lacanian analyst whose ow
authority displaces relations of power to a historic logic of language;21
the disposition theorist who recognizes a predisposition to disallo
issues of "what makes something funny," as opposed to considerin
what responses given stimuli produce in given contexts, refreshing
names the limits of oppositional variables and will seem less bounde
by chosen oppositions; and the deconstructor of dominant presupp
tions who favors the image of laughter as extreme excess may or may
not spend any time relating such figures to the processes of everyday
life (if she does, she reduces the alienation between thinker-writ
artist-analyst and humor as others' lived experience). Similarly, tho
of us who talk of "women's humor" need to understand it as a name
for certain power relations and social contexts that have no essential
definition and may or may not be applicable to particular women (rather
as much of what was once described as "women's language" became
more aptly described as "powerless language," diversely applicable to
the world's women as well as to disempowered Others).
The humorous kinds and functions related to transformative ideologi
cal tendency emerge in part from the synthesis of diversely suggestive
research and in part from more speculative theory drawing on newly
revisionary notions of agency, resistance, and play. Women researchers
have frequently undermined not only frequently cited consensus about
gender differences in humor appreciation but also the methods that
routinely delimit humor to jokes or cartoons taken out of the context
of ordinary social interaction (Marlowe, Mackie). Recently, Joanne
Gallivan has called for "methods which make the participants' con
structions of reality, rather than the a priori constructs of the researcher,
the focus of investigation" (6).22 And Mary Crawford finds conversa
tional context the dimension of humor most gendered in its absence
from researchers' presumptions of normalcy.23 According to Crawford
and Diane Gressley, the gendered discrepancy may have less to do with
what men and women consider ideal forms of humor (with "creativity,
caring, and real-life anchoring" as important factors for both men and
women) and more to do with the conversational norms of male domi
nance as described by Henley and Kramarae. Certainly, neither gender
would name as humorist someone who merely participates in informal
humorous rapport.
280
Indeed, extant humor research often names its own ellipses, a

without necessarily relating those ellipses to power relations or
ogy. Directly addressing humor and power, Dwyer has aptly sugges
that if the power relations among jokester, target, and audienc
known, who laughs can be predicted. Yet this triadic paradigm
humor and power relations, in addition to its customary reliance on
joke, "is only capable of analyzing jokes that are targeted at per
or at affairs, such affairs as are interpreted by actors to repre
persons" (7). And although always focusing on the "male enterp
of inventing and telling jokes, Davies's treatment of "Jewish
about Jewish women" backhandedly allows that "Women employ ot
forms of humor and other forms of folklore, and it may be wo
humor researcher's while trying to find out whether in fact there
corresponding female response among Jewish women to the duty/
tation tension described here" (369). Perhaps most suggestively, Bos
recent discussion of American political humor names a dramatic
sis in how that humor targets particular political figures without cr
focus on structures, institutions, or systems of power. The humor
implicitly calls for takes leveling as a value and hierarchy as its foc
and the impetus for social change behind such humor distinguis
from the hostile, neurotic, or narrowly self-interested motivation b
aggressive humor.
Starting from some thoughts of others about a positive, "other-alig
humor, a humor that does not disallow empathy, let me try to sug
the relation-in-difference of a non-performative, interactive humor
has a stronger, more explicit relation to the possibility of social chan
Sheldon Ungar provides convincing examples of "other-aligning
opposed to self-deprecating, humor in the act of questioning
playing models that take "inter- and intra-role conflict as natural a
inevitable" (123). He recounts, for example, how friends rushed
tell stories of their own embarrassing spills on the occasion o
spilling a coke on the way to his seat in a movie theatre. But conce
only with the existence of "other-aligning" humor, Ungar does
describe the nature of humor that resists more oppressive social ru
than the ones of etiquette evoked in his case-in-point.
Consider a difference among two groups of women engaged i
morous rapport. The first tells anecdotal stories about times when
were caught in embarrassing situations, often caught with app
showing (or appearing to show), a "humorous" genre richly in evide
281
in write-in columns to popular women's magazines. Although alignin

themselves in the sense that they all refer to individually embarrassin
moments, their stories implicitly reinforce how much appearances matt
in their lives. Their shared stories do not ultimately criticize the value
that inhere in the social construction of an ideal woman, one without
appetites but always a good sense of humor. And their mutual "suppor
merely affirms and reinforces dominant, patriarchal ways of evaluatin
women. Consider, rather, a group composed primarily of women b
also a few men sitting around discussing a tendentious joke they fin
witty but disturbing in its implications, the still-resurfacing:
Question: "How many feminists does it take to screw in a lightbulb?
Answer: "That's not funny!"
They laugh, because the joke does seem funny, but recognize the joke's
reliance on the "feminists have no sense of humor" stereotype, which
itself ignores how power relations determine who is required to "ta
a joke" or "have a sense of humor," euphemisms for having to swallow
what someone with more power thinks humorous. "So what do y
do," says one, "laugh and then say it really isn't funny?" Individua
voices then merge in offering examples of funny-but-not humor, mak
ing humorous play out of the occasion of mutually creating an ope
ended catalogue.
Here, the humor lies neither in the telling of joke-examples nor
a particular joking relationship, but rather in the collective response o
"But that's not funny!" This interaction could be read as either "d
paragement" or "aggressive" humor, but it seems wrong to concep
alize it as such since the interaction and the tonality have little of eithe
and since neither the tellers of anti-feminist jokes nor men in general
were targeted here, only the tendency to deny women the power
adjudicate when and when not to laugh. Here, as so often elsewher
we have no very good descriptive language for the kind of humo
described in absentia by Boskin, the kind directed against structur
and systems of power, against oppressive institutions and their rituals
and not against the people who oppress from within those institutions
Many have posited a critical force to feminist humor, but that humo
too has often been conceived as only a female version of male aggr
sion, exemplified in women comedians, performers, or writers, not in
the more informal humorous rapport often described in women's f
tions and autobiographical narratives. Writing by contemporary wome
282
of color provides particularly suggestive examples of humorous rap

that mitigates against any sense of character as unitary or individu
subjectivity. Rather, interactive humor as value achieves somet
like the playfulness described by Maria Lugones in her "Playfu
'World'-Travelling, and Loving Perception," where "world" rem
purposefully "ontologically problematic" because it is both a con
tion (in this sense like a world-view) and a site inhabited by embod
people (in this sense different from either merely possible or Utop
worlds). Outsiders to mainstream culture customarily inhabit se
worlds simultaneously, and necessarily "travel" from one to the oth
according to experienced constructions of identity. An openn
constructing and reconstructing worlds that one may inhabit playf
distinguishes this travel from a Western, agonistic sense of pla
which rules, competences, and fixed conceptions of self defin
game.25 Importantly, Lugones's example of such play invokes a
periential "we"—like the intersubjective, processual characterization
many African American women's fictions—an identity that dif
from either role-playing or "any underlying 'I.'"
The problems of placement, definition, and value undertaken
transformative focus resemble those undertaken by theorists of re
tance who share in the criticism of a unificatory subject carried on
postmodern theory across the disciplines but who wish to retain
concept of agency and address the importance of power relati
Because a processual, interactive humor does not (re)present an iden
already there, yet creatively (re)constructs identity in the act of ma
itself anew, it shares the paradoxes of theorists for whom subjectiv
(agency) and structure (society/culture) remain dialectical but in
mensurable categories. Many have articulated the problematics of sc
arship that operates both by and on an ideology of the subject w
undermining any individual subjectivity (that is, any individuality
side socially positioned discourse). Yet critics who start by ackn
edging the tensions and inconsistencies within which they oper
academics have far greater tendency to also acknowledge the ov
ping, dialectical nature of academic oppositions, their tendency to m
the subject-position(s) of the analyst. Both Spivak (Post-Colonia
"Theory") and Anthony Appiah have tried to accommodate
postmodern and agency theory by confronting their own sub
position(s) and naming the incommensurable, noncoherent posit
283
their thinking entails. (Appiah calls them "tolerable falsehoods.")

lowing such leads suggests that resistance need not be measured
instrumental, teleological means, and that humor as resistance wou
not necessarily represent an identity already there, but rather a proces
an identity in the act of making itself anew.
What I have called transformative theory sympathizes with trangressi
theory, but finds that transgression often entails a form of exclusion
that either elevates a vicariously felt oppression or fails to ask, "What
happens when a hegemonic group destroys the physical, ritual practic
of a whole society and then endeavors to utilize the symbolism an
purely discursive forms of those rituals for its own ends?" (White 16
In so doing, transgressive emphasis often values extreme positions tha
make intellectual noncomformity somehow equivalent to materi
oppression of the kind inscribed on bodies. The dominance of mid
class, heterosexual, white women among those researching "femini
humor helps explain, for example, why individually "funny women" o
disjunct cultural performances have been taken as sites for wome
humor at large. Power relations within the academy always imp
ellipses representing the disempowered, only occasionally acknow
edged as such. We need to acknowledge that limitations on researc
reflect the limitations inherent in inequitable social and cultural r
tions; though popular, literary and folk texts provide formal example
of a kind, their interpretation often lacks the depth or subtlety provid
by cultural insiders. We will not know enough about gender differenc
in Black American humor, for example, until Black researchers of bot
genders with close communal ties provide a research that uses the
status as participant-observers, i.e., that does not wrench that humor o
of its socio-cultural context. Yet as hooks and Cornell West have
eloquently testified, precisely this difficult combination of academic
and social roles endangers Black intellectual life in America. Our
research designs still favor the easier, disjunct forms of humor, not
unexpectedly the ones over which researchers themselves have most
control. And even cross-cultural exegesis generally relies on ritual
public enough to allow an anthropologist's observation, even when
aware that anthropologists make their own documents. Yet only
participant-observers from within a culture could experience the humor
of a group already leveled, one whose humor might fulfill some of the
functions commonly identified as group-affiliating, without aggres
sively targeting people in some out-group. To label humor as aggressive
284
or tendentious, after all, implies hostility towards persons or toward

some targeted group. Even colloquially, it would seem more tha
passing strange to say, "I thought his behavior towards business p
tices aggressive." Yet an actively critical humor may be directed tow
changing social practices, rituals, structures, or institutions and
they work; and the collective, communal nature of such criticism m
imply open or overlapping social boundaries in a humor allowing
participation of any who abjure the alienating practices attending pr
lege or power.
This humor often acknowledges oppression, violence, or restrict
social roles as the backdrop for humorous interaction, but it does
confront or attack social power with its own inverted aggression
chosen resistances undermine existing rules of dominance by creatin
valued, intersubjective relations that cannot take place in context
felt power differentials or the dehumanization of others. And it
knowledges that the specificity of subject-positions, their differenti
in power, delimit any supposedly "neutral" research designs. At
same time, it recognizes that only emphasizing difference dehumaniz
an objectified Other. As Martha Minow puts it, "Formally neutral ru
and policies that ignore group differences often perpetuate the d
vantage of those whose difference is defined as deviant; but focu
on difference risks recreating the stigma that difference has carried
the past" (12-13).26
What would it mean, with this supplemental, transformative theor
foregrounded, to say that someone has no sense of humor or a no-go
sense of humor? It would suggest that the speaker inhabits—for
moment of space-time called analysis—a subject-position that eit
makes butts of those with less power/privilege than they or that th
humor furthers values that justify the privileges of those most l
themselves. Taking this humor seriously would involve not just seein
new forms in new places, with a changed sense of humor's subj
object relations, it would involve evaluation of other humorous ki
according to unfamiliar criteria. Since it posits the possibility of res
tance in intersubjective humor, it values even clearly subjective hum
in relation to the stridency with which it asserts or incorporates dom
nant power relations. Thus, Joan Rivers's revenge-fantasy in The Gir
Most Likely To would be a lesser form than Erma Bombeck's rum
tions of a hausfrau with humor, and Bombeck's would be a lesser for
than Lily Tomlin's adopted, sympathetic personae in The Search
285
Signs of Intelligent Life in the Unvierse, humorous characters who

their difference resist emotional detachment in an audience. And of
greatest value might be a moment in a 1986 Whoopi Goldberg video
of a stage-performance where, in the role of a self-reflective junkie, she
describes a visit to Anne Frank's house. While still in the character
made funny in part by the incongruity of distancing, stereotypical
expectation on the one hand and empathic experience on the other,
Goldberg asks the audience to imagine what it was like to be so long
in this attic room. The camera zooms backward and then forward in
simulation of time-passage, until Goldberg breaks her/our reverie with,
"Tough, ain't it?" Certainly within the realm of humorous rapport, the
moment relies on empathic, intersubjective '"world'-traveling," despite
the presence of the performer, the audience, and the roles. Here, hu
morous characters who ask for empathy have more status than they
have had in theories where humor disallowed empathy and where even
scathing wit partakes of some universal "nature" of self-other relations.
Accordingly, some cases of evaluation seem easy: who could dispute
that Nazi jokes about Jews or lynching jokes of the American south
cooperate in oppression, or that the laughter that strengthens immuno
logical responses represents humor's benevolent, therapeutic side? (I
suspect, however, that aggressive, hostile humor has less therapeutic
value than transformative varieties.) Other cases suggest more exacting
differentiation, as, for example, between in-groups' humorous kinds.
The ethnic jokes described by Davies may well suggest "structural"
superiority to related jokes without ethnic import, yet their value as
humor—particularly among the humorous kinds dealing with ethnic
ity—falls far short of those produced as responses to oppression. Their
relatively narrow, repetitively cross-referential scripts and their reliance
on stereotype allows for gradual change in response to changed social
conditions, but not significantly creative reconstruction of identity. By
contrast, the Apache's joking portraits of "The Whiteman" (Basso,
Portraits) provide creative, interpretive social commentary. In this
humor, even when the Apache ends with the almost ritual "The white
man is so stupid," it invokes an elliptical "in the way he treats us," not
some essential trait parallel to that in the "stupid" ethnic jokes cited
by Davies. Importantly, the joking relationship itself demands intimacy
and trust, not just membership in a group, and the Apache themselves
understand the social importance of their caricatures:
286
. . . Western Apache jokers are properly regarded as more than me

purveyors of preexisting cultural forms. They are creators of culture
well, and serve in this capacity as active agents of social change. (Bas
Portraits 80)
Transformative theory values the view from elsewhere over ex
sively Western, bourgeois, masculist seeing, and values, too, an e
temology that consciously supplements any opposition between reaso
and emotion (positing something akin to Nelson Goodman's "
cognition" over ideals of a detached rationality). It adopts Bakhti
emphasis on a populist, shared humor (one that always risks oppressi
cooptation in the arena of popular culture), but departs from his foc
on carnival and festival as paridigmatic context and any need f
mediational artist to utilize the potential in carnival images. The
of this humor remains interactive, dependent not upon artful ex
sion—though it may well be represented in some arts more than
others—but rather upon a communal ethics of what Lugones nam
"loving perception" (what might also be named "other-aligning"
tions, empathic inclusion, or any number of open-ended designations
Only research that pays attention to victims' accounts of humo
their expense could even begin to enable explanations that acknowled
how an "objective world" implies an "objectified" world. And th
experience of objectified others, however named, testifies to the
in which even this supplemental theory, like all ideology, "testifies t
the power of the very thing it denies" (Ryan 113). A transforma
ideological focus turns away from both the power of anger that erup
in violence and the telling absence of those who do not laugh. T
theory does not help much with conceptualizing which situations
duce hysterical, bitter, or mad laughter, if laughter at all, or situati
where people have been so oppressed that the impulse to humor
appears. Resistance itself, after all, takes energy, will, desire—all thi
that can be beaten out of us; and humor as resistance has a defini
"post-revolutionary" ring to it because it looks away from violen
unfunny struggle and imagines humor as capable of transformat
even in a world where the capacity for humor remains its own kind
privilege. Yet a focus on transformative humor begins to bridge
neatly bounded separation between "change and talking about change
Discovering that others fail to appreciate valued humorous kin
attributing self-inflicted disease to those who have not rightly an
287
mized their illnesses, or reading as harmless the jokes that reinscri

one's own power—all such views emanate easily from analytical p
sitions of privilege. As Blake's Enion laments, "It is an easy thing
talk of patience to the afflicted." From the position of the analysand,
it is easier to see how the humor most important in my life has no plac
in such views, how much hurt I receive from the jokes that act a
"positive" release for dominant others, or how the oppositions tha
frame so many humor studies represent fluid, overlapping, or n
existent categories in my lived experience. The frequent exhortatio
about the social value of "having a sense of humor" that conservatively
ignore the power relations in hierarchial social contexts, the "tolerance
of liberal researchers for humor that legitimizes dramatic social in
uity, even a transgressive emphasis theorized by those whom oppr
sion may disempower while leaving privilege very much intact—
have routinely failed to consider the experiential constructions of thos
for whom humor may be either "a psychic tax imposed on those lea
able to pay" or an interactive rapport (Lugones's '"world'-travelling
characterized by neither hostility nor self-deprecation.28
We need to consider the humor difficult to observe without parti
pant-observer status, humor that does not lend itself to the canne
contexts of stimulus and response experiments, not just because an
number of voices have begun to suggest how much we leave out
otherwise, but also because understanding the diverse functions o
diverse humorous kinds necessarily engages the ideological underp
nings of theory implicit in any typology, any description, any researc
design. How strange, in an age replete with explorations of both ep
temology and ontology as social constructions, to find so many car
fully, often collectively designed projects that avoid considering th
knower's relation to the known. Without more self-conscious positi
ing of researchers' own subject-positions, those constructed "witho
humor" will chafe against the assumption that adding more controls or
variables will correct for ideological predisposition. When I read, sa
"The most parsimonious explanation for the findings concerning mode
of presentation seems to be that women's enjoyment of humor may be
spoiled by explicit visual portrayals of violent or sexual events,"
wonder not only why parsimony should have any explanatory status b
also who engendered the sexual humor for the women and in wh
context. We have all found things funny on Saturday night with friend
that would neither appear in such experimental models nor affect us th
same way if they did. To undertake the further exploration that pract
288
cally all studies call for at their close, we need actual changes in
power relations among analysts and those they analyze. That is,
need researchers who themselves represent diverse social position
as well as those responsive to subtleties of context, to their own a pri
assumptions, and to the likelihood of some measure of complicity
appropriation in their own methods. The issue cannot be reduced
some essentialist reasoning that only women can work on wom
humor, Jews on Jewish humor, and so forth (though the most inform
interactive forms of humor may disallow formal observation by
Other); rather, the relational consciousness beginning to characte
theorizing across the disciplines, willing to make the ideological c
acter of its own subject-position(s) relevant to how any knowle
constructs itself, needs to find its way into both the social-scient
bases of research on humor and the theory that informs it. We need
believe Lugones when she explains how she "has had the fun
structed out of her," and believe, too, in the attendant vision of a fu
with less affinity to arrogant, imperialist perception and more affin
with loving, transformative perception.29
NOTES
'Although conferences on humor abound with examples, the International
Conferences on Humor in Sheffield, England, 1990 and in Ontario, Canada, 1991,
provided the specific examples here. Unexpectedly, these conferences yield few
women self-identified as feminists/womanists and almost no representatives of the
racial and ethnic groups most commonly invoked as lacking in humor appreciation.
In particular, there was much discussion of African Americans, albeit not African
American humor, and no African American presence, all in the context of "funny"
stories like the one about a humorless Dean ("a cottonfield black") who could not
see the humor in his Black child's saying "I'se an intelligent coon," or about "the
widows so affected by their husbands deaths that they insist on sleeping only with
black men for a year after," or about overzealous feminists seeking to purge the
canon of the likes of Rabelais (the straw woman here turned out tobe Wayne Booth!).
JI use the capitalized Other, as have many culture theorists, to signify an
unrepresentable category that resists the objectification the naming implies.
'Barbara Jeanne Fields explicates ideology in its difference from either doctrine
or inherited history. See also Gayatri Spivak's chapter "The Politics of Interpre
tations" {In Other Worlds) and Douglas Kellner. Despite the marginalization of
women and "minority" scholars in humor research, Nancy Walker's A Very Serious
Thing: Women's Humor and American Culture and two edited collections, Regina
Barreca's Last Laughs: Perspectives on Women and Comedy and Walker's and
Zita Dresner's Redressing the Balance: American Women's Literary Humor from
Colonial Times to the 1980's (1988) have most overtly begun to "redress the
balance" for some women by prioritizing a new practical criticism that discounts
289
former presumptions about the non-aggressive nature of women's humor

ever necessary this modification of extant theory, more suggestive for my
poses here have been theoretical suggestions linking an undocumented hu
(critical but not aggressive in the Freudian manner) to an undocumented res
(involved in identity-formation but not measurable instrumentally), both of
together frame my last section. Reginia Gagnier's insightful essay on humo
status, in particular, shares an emphasis on the sustained critical force of w
humor (as opposed to the Freudian momentary release) but ends with Cix
cry for an anarchic humor of women for women; my last section, in dovet
fashion, focuses on women in already leveled social situations and a wo
humor that has already been for women all along.
"John Morreall ("Rejection") and Salvatore Attardo, among others, have
discussed the rejection of humor in Western thought in relation to the dom
of "superiority" and "relief' theories. For this use of "Grand Theory," see Qu
Skinner. Because this is a relational overview, I do not here rehearse famili
though contested, distinctions between humor, laughter, comedy, play, et
a more particular focus would necessitate. Yet an implicit part of my arg
is that bounded definitions disallow the interdisciplinarity necessary to c
tualize and study transformative humor.
5Apte's analogy comparing the troubling state of humor research to trou
divisions within anthropology as a discipline makes frequent reference to h
research as "science," placing him outside the hermeneutic anthropology of
Kroeber, Bernard Cohn, Gerald Vizenor, and others more closely allied wi
anthropology conceived as making its own documents and therefore closer
emphasis here.
6In a more technical sense of ideology, I examine here the "nodal points" a
which scholarly practice "structures floating signifiers into an identifiab
logical field" (Zizek 67).
7Although some of the theorists I consider under transgressive humor th
have strong psychoanalytic affinities (Cixous, for example), I argue there tha
theory often coincides with a certain social cynicism. Interestingly, such le
revisions of Freud as those of the Frankfurt School (Adorno, Horkheimer
rarely invoked by humor theorists.
"There are, of course, Freudians who read Freud in the direction of a po
sustained social criticism; I address here what Jane Flax (91) has calle
"adaptive and conformist tendencies" of Freudian psychoanalysis.
'Oring himself ("Book Review") notes that although Jewish humor has b
much studied as a popular and visible form of humor in an extensive liter
"almost drowning out other ethnic laughters," "the serious study of Jewish
is something of a wasteland" (81).
10James Leary's response not to Ziv but to Alan Dundes's equally Fre
Cracking Jokes: Studies of Sick Humor Cycles and Stereotypes aptly artic
the limitations of seeing all jokes as generated by anxiety or aggression, esp
since even jokes about ethnic Others may be "performed in an inverse fas
signifying friendship, not aggression" (195).
nA compact, representative example of the genre is presented by Joel Goo
Although Goodman stresses a positive, empathic humor, which suggests s
290
correspondence with my own focus, he also stresses an ability to "laugh

oneself' and at universal "foibles" of human behavior by "holding up a mirr
to reality." Such language values optimistic acceptance rather than more criti
forms of "realism," a message reinforced by constant uncritical reference to
values of Candid Camera, success in the business and professional world, pu
relations, jogging, etc. By suggesting that we become "inverse paranoids," peo
who presume that the world is out to do us good, Goodman no doubt impro
sociability quotients among the privileged. (The altruistic tonality of the ge
brings to mind a cartoon image of an opulent white woman advising a B
woman laborer, on her knees scouring the floor, that for her own good she r
ought to get more aerobic exercise.)
12Ziv and Orit Gadish study humor creation by encouraging subjects to u
humor in writing responses to the TAT test. The degree to which such a te
"nonobtrusive" notwithstanding (anyone I ever knew realized full well that w
they wrote would be evaluated for something), such a research design defin
humor as something an individual humorist generates, thus discouraging bo
subjects and researchers from considering interactive humorous rapport as hu
ous behavior. Much of the clinical and experimental research confirming th
males use humor more frequently than females predispose findings in this w
a subject to which I return in speculative hypothesis about transformative hu
"Although the literature challenging the disjunctions serving dominance is v
see particularly the many essays in Out There: Marginalization and. Contempo
Culture (ed. Ferguson, et al.); see also hooks, Trinh Minh-Ha, and Cary
Cardea. Cardea presents an eloquent critique of the "power over" strategies
against working-class Lesbian women, among others.
'"Many feminist critics have warned against such direly contained routes
protesting woman's status as object, but see, for example, Sarah Kofman's T
Enigma of Woman.
15The work of Dolf Zillman ("Disparagement," "Putdown") and Zillman an
Joanne Cantor circumscribes disposition theory in several of its stages.
"Boskin provides an overview of this humor in Humor and Social Change
Twentieth-Century America's chapter on "Response of the Oppressed."
"Bakhtin's sense of carnival has, of course, received criticism from both
right and the left. Given my framework, only the critiques from the left de
the relevance of Bakhtin's carnival to positive social change.
"Clair Wills, for example, explicates some problems with carnival as a mo
for undermining patriarchal norms in relation to Kristeva and Bakhtin in "U
ting the Public." Wills, more concerned with a reading of Bakhtin (rather than
meaning as use), finds within Bakhtin due warning against celebrating carn
within texts that have lost any subversive, dialogical relation to public, off
forms. Graham Pechey, too, offers a transformative reading from the left w
sees "genre" in Bakhtin not as closed literary categories but as a catego
rehearsing and imitating "non-literary" ones, such that "the border of
sociopolitical has always already been crossed" (66).
"Wills explores these relations in the act of applying selective aspect
Bakhtin to women's texts.
291
"Peter Stallybrass and Allon White criticize the popular critical use tha
may avoid the distance between representations of carnival and any forceful
social criticism.
21On this aspect of Lacan, see Flax (89-132).
"This seems particularly problematic in research differentiating male and fe
male responses with supposedly symmetrical examples of gender-specific humor.
A collective exercise in disposition theory ("Gender Differences in Humor Ap
preciation" 1988), for example, studied male and female undergraduates' re
sponses to hostile, sexual, and nonsensical humor (represented by short jokes or
anecdotes). Although the researchers themselves suggest that an "important step
would be to control for subjects' dispositions toward their own and the opposite
gender," the few examples at the end demonstrating male or female victims of
the sundry humorous kinds seem significantly asymmetrical in relation to the
strength or specificity of a priori "scripts." An example of hostile humor with a
male victim reads: "Husband: I think, dear, that you fib a little occasionally. Wife:
Well, I think it's a wife's duty to speak well of her husband occasionally." Any
put-down of the husband (more coy than hostile and of singularly unbarbed
generality) dubiously accompanies the stereotype of the fibbing female, whereas
the corresponding hostile humor with a female victim has both much greater
specificity and plays upon the cultural script of women valued for their appearance
and obsessively concerned with aging: "Fortuneteller: I can see strength, courage,
kindness, and despair in your face. Woman: But how can you see all that in my
face? Fortuneteller: I can read between the lines."
"Crawford concluded this in Humor 1989.
"When I gave a section of this paper at the Midwest Conference for Radical
Scholars and Activists in October, 1990, in Chicago, someone in Performance
Studies—I regret not having the name—objected to my calling this "non
performative" on the grounds that everything, including the roles we play for
ourselves in our heads, is performative; from this perspective, the telling of a joke
differs as performance ritual from sharing a mood, but both involve performance.
Understanding this, I retain the word in its more literary, dramatic sense because
it seems useful to distinguish between a humor performed with a definite sense
of audience and an interactive humorous rapport in which no participants could
be designated as either humorists or audience (and which therefore might even
escape the designation "humor" among those used to the more conventionally
named kinds and contexts).
"Lugones rightly takes Johan Huizinga and Hans-Georg Gadamer as the classic
texts on this sense of play, perhaps supplemented by Roger Caillois's aptly titled
Man, Play and Games. Although theories of humor and of play both differ and
overlap, the agonistic quality central to these Western theories of play also inheres
in all three ideological tendencies I have outlined here; even transgressive humor
must take as a point of departure the rules it undertakes to break. Even cross
cultural studies of play delimit their own findings by using games and disjunct,
public rituals as the focus of analysis; of course, the more informal, contextual
play that Lugones describes presents anthropologists with a kind of methodologi
cal impasse, yet one that needs acknowledgement in order to address.
"Young cites this passage, p. 169.
292
"This phrase belongs to Cardea, who usefully elaborates upon how presum
tions of class privilege inhere in such analytical separations.
MMari J. Matsuda uses this phrase in describing a liberal tolerance for ra
"hate speech," which for her includes any number of "just kidding" stories
"jokes" thought harmless by those in positions of privilege and experienced
terrible constraints on freedom by victims.
29I would like to thank Stanley Brandes, Mary Crawford, Joanne Gallivan,
Joe Boskin for criticism and support at sundry stages in my work on hum
though not implicated in any of my reductions, all helped me with relationa
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Ideologies of The Funny

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IDEOLOGIES OF THE FUNNY

Author(s): Carole Anne Taylor

By Carole Anne Taylor

many contexts, professional and otherwise, have dramatized for

As such, even Grand Theory tends to describe how humor works

Laughter to Bear with Living

For Freud, even so-called "innocent" jokes, those where incongr

psychology," representing for him a personal "victory over politic

dependent on the ability to displace critical focus with the "release

Polarities and the Avoidance of Power

answers to the loaded question, "Who is most funny?" Despite th

tions that acquire even intentional value. As when Erving Gof

jokes) derides any suspicion that this humor participates in the so

demonstrate (notwithstanding that this is socially constructed) that "Ar

Medusa at the Carnival

ritual spectacle (tied to the church calendar or seasonal agricultur

theoretical difficulty in a dialogical consciousness that emerges "mo

The valorization of becoming or historical change as such not only invokes

inherent in the Medieval folk carnival, the idea of carnival as actual

of what I (following Stallybrass and White) have called transgr

Leveling Positions, Humorous Rapport,

by such correspondences: a psychoanalysis like Holland's, that at

Indeed, extant humor research often names its own ellipses, a

in write-in columns to popular women's magazines. Although alignin

of color provides particularly suggestive examples of humorous rap

their thinking entails. (Appiah calls them "tolerable falsehoods.")

or tendentious, after all, implies hostility towards persons or toward

Signs of Intelligent Life in the Unvierse, humorous characters who

. . . Western Apache jokers are properly regarded as more than me

mized their illnesses, or reading as harmless the jokes that reinscri

former presumptions about the non-aggressive nature of women's humor

correspondence with my own focus, he also stresses an ability to "laugh

Davies, Christie. Ethnic Humor Around the World: A Comparative Analysi

Huizinga, Johan. Homo ludens. Buenos Aires: Emecé, 1968.

Sandel, Michael J. Liberalism and the Limits of Justice. Cambridge: Cambridg

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