Ways of Laughter & Humor
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There are three different ways of laughing. These may sound the same to the uninitiated, but in fact they are very different from each other. There is in the first place laughter by those who have power against those who do not. This is laughter that is meant to keep people in their place, although this aspect of power is often not acknowledged and may even be denied. This is the laughter of the adult at the child who mispronounces a word, the laughter of a man at a woman who does not know how to avoid a kiss or a fondle, the laugh of an employer at an employee who comes in late because his car has broken down, the laughter of a master at a slave. This is a form of laughter that sets up boundaries, that excludes the person being laughed at from membership in the group belonged to by the person with superior power. And there is laughter engaged in by those without power against those who have it. By the teenagers who use their own argot to laugh at adults. By blacks laughing at whites. By Jews laughing at an anti-Semitic society. By immigrants laughing at the native-born. This too is an exclusive kind of laughter, laughter meant to draw lines around one group and to keep it safe from another. But it is very different in kind than the laughter of the social superior, for it has in it an element always of defensiveness, an acknowledgment that while one group of people is as worthy of power as any other, equality is not something that this society has to offer. This
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ased to be slapstick at all, losing the universal appeal that it had possessed in exchange for the sharp, language-based wit of various national theatrical traditions. The traditions of the Commedia can easily be detected in the comedies of the French dramatists Moliere and other playwrights working during the same time, and certainly no one would wish to say that Moliere does not have merit as a great writer and commentator on the nature of human folly. But for the modern American reader (for example) of his works, the plays are lovely and enjoyable but clearly set within a world that is very distant from our own. Many of his jokes and references now need footnotes for us to understand. This alone shows us how far Moliere has come from the world of slapstick: Slapstick never needs footnotes (Encyclopedia Britannica, 1999 CD-ROM version, entry on theater.)
A note should be made here that nothing that humans do is entirely outside of culture, and some things will always be funnier to one audience than to another. A pie in the face is as funny to a Swede as to an Italian (although one imagines that the Italian may laugh more loudly), but it is probably not as funny to a Nigerian, for whom the practice of eating desserts covered
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Approximate Word count = 3491
Approximate Pages = 14 (250 words per page)
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