Clip from Goodfellas (Scorsese, 1990)
"Explaining humour is like dissecting a frog. Few people are interested and the thing dies in the process." –Source unknown
What is a joke?
"Jokes tear holes in our usual predictions about the empirical world." –Simon Critchley
Three theories of humour
Superiority
Nervous laughter
Incongruity
How do jokes work?
Social Contract
"What is it like for people not to have the same sense of humour? They do not react properly to each other. It is as though there were a custom among certain people for one person to throw another a ball which he is supposed to catch and throw back; but some people, instead of throwing it back, put it in their pocket." - Ludwig Wittgenstein
Build up of tension
"We were so poor when I was a child that I couldn't go out to play with the other children because my mother couldn't afford to buy us clothes..."
Comic timing
"Brevity is the soul of wit." - Hamlet
Different types of humour
Task: Think of as
many types of humour as you can in 2 minutes.
Regional humour
Questions:
Is there an international language of
humour?
What characterizes the humour in the place where you are from?
Thinking about laughter
Questions:
How much, in what ways and how often do you laugh?
How much is laughter part of being human?
What is humour used for?
Jokes reveal things about ourselves and the world around us
I've got a mate whose nickname is "shagger".
You may think, "That's pretty cool".
She doesn't like it.
Jokes show us that an accepted pattern has no necessity
How many men does it take to tile a bathroom?
It depends how thinly you slice them.
Jokes reinforce consensus
A Finn, a Swede and a Russian walk into a bar...
Who do your jokes make fun of?