Most readers would immediately recognize the elliptical premise above as

the sort of phrase invariably used to set up the exposition of precisely the
kind of occasional, humorous anecdote that is synonymous with the very
idea of a ‘joke’. Such jokes are typically brief, anecdotal narratives; some
affect a tone of casually deceptive veracity, although most are obviously
formulaic, and tend to be tightly patterned and repetitive in structure,
constructed with an economic brevity designed to heighten the impact of an
unanticipated ‘punch line’. Subtly alive to contingency, successful jokes
accommodate the particular circumstances that alter and determine the
details of their every retelling. Such mercurial adaptability renders even the
most recently coined jokes capable of making their own ‘girdle around the
earth’—and that, too, with a speed that even Shakespeare’s Puck might
himself have envied.

The line quoted at the head of the paragraph above in fact opens Anthony
Horowitz’s 2006 comic thriller, The Killing Joke. Early in that novel, the ‘guy’
in question (literally, one ‘Guy Fletcher’) steps into The Cat and Fiddle—an
establishment he immediately intuits to be ‘one of the most inhospitable
pubs in all of North London if not the entire world’. Guy’s impression is
confirmed when he overhears a joke being told that—for reasons both
general and personal—strikes him as inconceivably ‘sick’. The coarse and
opportunistic ‘humour’ of the joke is profoundly tasteless, and unabashedly
vulgar. Yet Guy soon finds himself obsessed by the larger issues raised by
the popular acceptance of such tasteless humour, generally. Who tells such
jokes? More perplexing still … who thinks of them in the first place?
And why? Guy’s initial, boozy speculations on the origins of such ‘sick’
humour results in an unlikely quest that eventually finds him attempting to
‘trace’ the precise origins of so repellant a joke to its original source.

Central to shaggy dog narratives such as Horowitz’s is the basic question:

why would any of us ever tolerate, much less pass on to others, such
morbidly tasteless jokes—jokes that seem to take a gleefully cruel and
gratuitous advantage of the misfortunes of our fellow human beings? The
possible responses are predictable enough. ‘Every minute of every day
throws something hateful at us but we simply bat it aside’, Horowitz’s own
protagonist is reminded—and we do so most effectively with humor. Even
the most appalling examples of what has variously been referred to in
English as ‘black humour’, ‘gallows humour’, ‘dodgy humour’, ‘sick jokes’
etc.—are calmly justified by another figure in Horowitz’s novel as ‘tiny
grain[s] of salvation’ in a world very nearly engulfed by the full tide of
human misery. Such jokes, made in shockingly poor taste ‘amuse’—one
feels compelled to concede—‘even if [they] shouldn’t’. Faced with the
immense and inescapable fact of our own mortality, such jokes become ‘our
most vital defense system’. They protect us, if only because they allow us
momentarily ‘to forget’.

Readers today are likely to be most familiar with superiority theory of

humour, memorably articulated by Hobbes in his Leviathan. Yet the writers
and philosophers of the eighteenth century would continue to be
particularly interested in the question of what provoked the laughter of
their fellow human beings, and why. Hutcheson, Shaftesbury, Beattie, and
Hume all addressed the subject explicitly in their works; Kant and
Schopenhauer would consider the subject at length. Many would emphasize
the element of incongruity inherent in situations perceived to be
humourous.

Simon Dickie’s Cruelty and Laughter returns to the vein of coarse humour that
ran throughout the mid-eighteenth century Britain. His work is particularly
anxious to underscore the extent to which the ‘progressive tendencies’ (p.
190) of the Enlightenment project have in recent years ‘been so intensively
studied that it has been easy to lose sight’ of the era’s markedly less
sympathetic attitudes with respect to certain activities. Acknowledging that
‘a murky continuum of ambivalence and inconsistency’ characterizes the
spectrum of definable attitudes within any given cultural period, Dickie
suggests that the ambivalence of such ‘obscure middle ground’ can help us
to achieve more accurate perspectives on particular cultural movements.
Closer scrutiny devoted to first-hand sources can in this particular instance,
he suggests, compel us ‘to qualify our assumptions about levels of
sentimentalism and about the rapid sharpening of social divisions in mid-
century Britain.’ (p. 20)

The extensive archival material that Dickie explores is used to best effect in
his survey of the popular jestbooks published in the period. Some of these
were merely chapbooks packed with cruel and degrading jokes of the sort
that had already been ‘repeated ad nauseam for decades’ (p. 23). Such
collections contributed to a more generically indiscriminate and
heterogeneous body of writing that typically included ‘humourous’
representations of what would, in our own time, be described as ‘all manner
of physical disabilities, impairments, or “defects”, whether congenital or
acquired’ (p. 45). Dickie attempts to locate the ‘limits of sympathy’ when it
came to such subjects in the period; he is also keen on demonstrating the
extent to which various afflictions routinely provided the subject matter of
cultural phenomena, and were a part of lived human experience in the
period. He has assembled an impressive amount of evidence—evidence that
is clearly the result of considerable archival research.

The fact that ‘class contexts’ created and fuelled this larger body of comic
representations comes as no surprise. Dickie’s account draws particular
attention to the ways in which ‘the old comic representations of low life and
the behavioral freedoms that went with them’ (p. 112)—representations
that mocked ignorant and foolish servants, fumbling and inarticulate, rustic
lovers, grubby passengers and untrustworthy soldiers, and the entire army
of ‘ordinary folk who belch, fart, and declare their love in dialect’ (p. 111)—
persisted in the face of the yet-emerging sensibilities of the period. Such
long-inherited and prejudiced attitudes, he notes, ‘continued to determine
hierarchical interactions, from chance encounters and servant-master
relations to poor law hearings and the justice system’ (p. 112).

The attempt seamlessly to include the book’s fourth chapter—‘a densely

contextual reading of Fielding’s Joseph Andrews’—as ‘a text that brings
together so many of its culture’s debates about the nature and ethics of
laughter’ (p. 14) is more than a little disingenuous, insofar as the chapter
itself is patently not a representative example that has developed
organically from the broader surveys and conclusions of the chapters
immediately preceding it. Be that as it may, it stands on its own as a useful
contribution to on-going debates with reference to the ethical and satiric
aims of the novel in the period. The possibility that certain works can be
read and enjoyed for so long in ways that were ‘so contrary to its author’s
announced intentions’ (p. 158)—the notion that not only can readers ‘get a
text so wrong’, but that experienced authors themselves can so seriously
miscalculate the effects of their own writing—raises a host of intriguing
issues. Nor is there any need to agree with Dickie’s own, more specific
arguments with reference to the meaning and significance of Fielding’s
representation of Parson Adams in Joseph Andrews to appreciate the scale of
the representational dilemmas that are brought to the fore in this section.

The range and depth of Dickie’s scholarship is impressive. Indeed, the

achievement of his survey is qualified only by the frequent reiteration of
what appears to be a genuine sense of naïve or even prim incredulity—the
result, perhaps, of too much time spent exclusively in the rarified
atmosphere of the groves of academe—that such jokes and such humour
were or could ever be popular. ‘One struggles to understand a world,’ he
comments at one point, ‘in which it could be funny to rob a pauper of his
last resources [or] to torment the indigent … ’ (p. 131). I am far from
suggesting that the author spend more time in his local pub listening in on
the jokes being told around him; he need only have a look at the Internet to
see what passes for humour among a great many individuals. Cruelty and
laughter keep no more distant company than they did in the mid-
eighteenth century.