Date of Award

2015

Document Type

Thesis

Degree Name

Bachelors

Department

Humanities

First Advisor

Edidin, Aron

Keywords

Jokes, Humor, Communication, Feelings

Area of Concentration

Philosophy

Abstract

When I first started thinking about this thesis, ‘A Joke is a Very Serious Thing’, I knew that I wanted to explore what a joke was and how it affected the situation once it was uttered. I was particularly interested in the ways that humor could connect and distance us from one another. A successful joke could engender positive feelings and comradely but a failed joke, or a derisive joke, could ostracize a group or individual, make a situation tense or negatively impact a relationship. I was interested in the ways that humor is inclusive and the ways that it is exclusionary. While a shared laugh reminds us of our similarities, a joke that fails to amuse can show us just how different our perspectives are. Humor is exclusive and it takes membership in a community to understand and fully engage in its humor and because of this humor’s inclusivity always comes at the price of exclusion of another. The more that I thought about it, the more I wondered how we could ever know that something was meant as a joke and how we knew what utterances were jokes with what seemed like from experience a low margin for error. There is no way to guarantee that an audience will find a joke amusing or even think of it as a joke when its presented to them, yet jokes are given with a sincerity that shows that the joker thinks they couldn’t not be funny. It is our common starting points, our worlds that allow us to communicate comedy. Humor reconnects us to these worlds because it shows us that we belong in them. I struggled for a long time to come up with a satisfying explanation for why jokes amuse us. Humor takes us out of our immediate experience and presents us with absurdities that contradict our expectation. Humor is a useful and simple way of abstracting away from our own experience and gaining new perspectives that would be difficult to come to otherwise. Humor makes examination of our culture and beliefs pleasurable.

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