All over the world, people tell each other funny stories and anecdotes. The form of these stories and the subjects they deal with vary. The aim of people telling such stories is always the same: to make someone else laugh. To elicit laughs, one can invent one’s own funny stories but each culture also has its own freely available repertoire of fun that belongs “to everyone”: communal anecdotes, freely told and retold, that no one would dare to assert he had thought up himself. In the Netherlands, this repertoire consists primarily of jokes [moppen], a genre that has expanded during the last two centuries to become the most important orally transmitted humorous genre in the Western world.
Rigorous Darwinian principles govern orally transmitted genres such as the joke. Funny stories that no one likes do not survive; they simply are not retold. A joke that no one likes any longer is snuffed out the moment insufficient people retell it. Joke books can sometimes keep corny jokes alive a little longer, but they simply defer their demise. No one buys a book with jokes that are no longer funny. Thus purely bad jokes do not exist; at most, some superannuated jokes may still be limping around.
This applies to all orally transmitted genres, not only jokes, but also riddles, urban legends, songs and children’s games. Oral literature is dependent for its survival upon people thinking that something is worth transmitting to another person, who in turn thinks it worth passing on to someone else, who then tells it to someone else again, who then does the same, until enough people have heard the joke or story to ensure that it stays alive - for the time being. This means that the joke can justifiably be called what Durkheim (1964) has called “a social fact”: a cultural expression of a whole society, or of specific groups who appreciate the genre.
Even though the Dutch joke repertoire belongs to everyone, not everyone has the same affinity with the genre. Some people never hear or tell jokes, while others know hundreds. In the first part of this book, the central question is why some people appreciate the joke as a genre.
Genre primarily refers to distinctive formal characteristics. The joke genre is defined by its humorous content, the presence of a punch line, its short length, and other recurring elements such as settings and characters. It also has specific narrative conventions, like standardized opening lines. In Dutch these openings lines often reverse noun and verb. A similar effect can be created in English by leaving out the article: “Guy walks into a bar”.
Genres are also social forms. They are often connected with specific audiences, institutions, and settings (Oring 1986). This association between genre and audience leads to variations in the status of genres: genres preferred by groups with more social status tend to be regarded as better or higher (Bourdieu 1984; Roose et al. 2012; Van Eijck 2001, 2013; van den Haak 2014). However, the social status of genres can also be related directly to formal characteristics. For instance, prestigious genres are more complex, are serious or tragic rather than comical, and have more fluid conventions. In popular genres, on the other hand, one usually knows what sort of ending to expect.
Before we can answer the question how people evaluate the joke genre, we need to know what the genre amounts to: what are jokes? How do they come into existence? How are they spread? I begin with the most-asked question about jokes: if jokes do indeed belong “to everyone” - to all Netherlanders, for example, but to no one in particular - then who makes them up?
Who makes up jokes? Anyone who has ever told a joke - that is, almost everyone - will have wondered about this question. In particular, jokes already doing the rounds within hours of a disaster or a scandal cause a great deal of surprise: how can it be that jokes are already circulating about an airplane crash, a sunken ferry, a terrorist attack, an exploded spaceship, the death of a celebrity or of a princess and her lover within a day of these events?4 Where did these jokes come from?
This can probably best be answered by saying that jokes are not made up but that they come into existence in the course of many interactions. People are rarely aware of what they are doing when they produce a joke. Professional joke writers do exist, but the majority of jokes are not purposefully invented but grow slowly from a spontaneous quip into a real joke. I imagine a joke coming into existence a bit like this: someone says something funny, such as a rapid-fire remark, a well-aimed witticism, an apt description or an appealing play on words. Provided that it is not too context-dependent, one hearer then retells it, or forwards it through a medium like e-mail. If the tellers are modest, they will mention the original maker of the funny remark, but they may not even be aware of not making it up themselves. Then someone will tell this funny story on another occasion, and then again, and again, until the moment comes when the original joker and context have been totally forgotten. Meanwhile, ingredients from the local joke culture have begun to trickle in. The words to the what-is-almost-a-joke are placed in the mouths of established joke personages - a blonde, a Belgian, a woman at the doctor’s or a man in a bar. It is relocated to standard joke situations: a desert island, Main Street, a bar. It gets framed by the narrative conventions of oral culture, where riddles are not expected to have real answers, and things usually happen thrice. Thus, the original anecdote or one-liner becomes embedded in the pattern a culture has for humorous narratives.
This means that people in the process of producing a joke seldom know they are doing it. The first person simply makes a remark; the next tells about the witty remark “somebody or other” made yesterday or pretends she thought it up herself; the third and subsequent tellers repeat an anecdote they’ve heard from someone else and slowly but surely a new joke germinates without anyone involved being aware of their contribution.
This is most obvious for jokes that come into existence in reaction to a news event. One of the jokes in the questionnaire, for instance, dealt with the death of Diana Spencer, the former wife of the British Prince Charles and her lover Dodi Al-Fayed. They died in a car crash in Paris in 1997, several months before I distributed the survey.
Diana and Dodi are sitting in the car arguing. Their dinner that evening was disappointing and they still want something to eat but can’t agree on what. Diana wants to go get Chinese food and Dodi wants shawarma. The chauffeur is sitting there listening and he’s just about had his bellyful of the bickering in the back seat. He turns around and says: “If you can’t make a decision, why not the drive-in?”
It is possible to state with a great degree of certainty that jokes like this are new, since they only make sense in a highly specific context. This joke refers to their chauffeur-driven car crashing into a wall while being chased by paparazzi. The original joke (skillfully adapted here by the translator) is also exclusively Dutch, since it contains a reference to the exclusively Dutch tradition called “eating out of the wall” (uit de muur eten): fast food, mostly deep-fried variations on sausages and meat balls, dispensed from small coin-operated windows in the wall.
Nevertheless, I have never heard people claim to have invented such jokes themselves. In 1996, I actually attempted to trace the source of a joke about the Belgian child molester Marc Dutroux.5 In the Dutch-Flemish joke cycle about this scandal, there was one particularly famous joke, based on a play on words concerning Dutroux’ name and a children’s songs.6 This joke must have been invented specifically to refer to this event. I asked everyone who told it where they had heard it, hoping to get some inkling of the ditty’s distribution, but it spread so rapidly that I quickly gave up. In spite of the fact that practically everyone in the Netherlands eventually had heard it, I never heard anyone claim this particular joke as his or her own.
Of course, with the rise of the Internet (still in its infancy in 1996), such an effort has become even more complex. Jokes about the attacks on the World Trade Center in New York on September 11, 2001 spread so rapidly, often across national borders, that any attempt to track them was impossible (Ellis 2001; Kuipers 2002, 2005). Today’s funny Internet memes spread across the globe within hours (Shifman 2013).
The Diana joke, like the Dutroux joke I tried to trace, is definitely tailored to a particular situation. Often, however, disaster jokes are not really new. Many Dutroux jokes I had already heard as sick jokes about Hitler (generalized jokes about sadism and random cruelty) or, more topically, about pop singer Michael Jackson, who was accused of child abuse in 1993. Some jokes about 9/11 were recycled jokes about the explosion of the Challenger Space Shuttle in 1986 (Oring 1987). Jokes are recycled more often than new jokes are invented: existing jokes are continually adjusted to new situations. This applies not only to jokes in reaction to current affairs. Over time, almost all jokes now in circulation have been adjusted a number of times to social shifts.
This variability is characteristic of orally transmitted genres (Kotthoff 2007; Oring 1986). A joke is public property and thus everyone is free to change or add elements to it. Such changes are most easily observed in ethnic jokes targeting groups with specific characteristics. In the Netherlands, as time went on, the same jokes about stupidity, with the same punch line, were told about German immigrants, maids, farmers, Belgians, Surinamese immigrants, and, most recently blondes. Similarly, the same “attitude jokes” targeted Surinamese in the 1980s, Turks in the 1990s and early 2000s, shifting to Moroccans in the late 2000s. They consistently targeted the ethnic group with the lowest societal status (Kuipers 2012; Van der Ent 2012).
There are few really new jokes. Most jokes that people tell have existed in one form or another for many years or even for many centuries. Researchers have been able to trace jokes, or, more accurately, their basic punch lines, back to seventeenth-century jests (Neumann 1986: 22–24; Röhrich 1977: 22–28) or even to jokes from classical antiquity (Baldwin 1983: 59). Most jokes are probably not that old. It is certain that a repertoire of “basic punch lines” exists, some old, some more recent, to be reshaped again and again into jokes with new casts in different situations.
This repertoire is transnational. Variants of most of the jokes told in the Netherlands circulate in other countries. The sociologist Christie Davies found exactly the same jokes about stupid people all over Europe and North America, but also as far as India or Colombia (Davies 1990, 1998a, 2012). Not only the themes but even the punch lines and the situations could be exactly the same. One of the latest examples of the international spread and adaptation of jokes is the blonde joke (see Davies 2012; Oring 2003: 58–70). The “dumb blonde” jokes that appeared in the Netherlands in the 1990s I first heard in the late 1980s as American jokes about blondes, but also about a more specific group: fraternity girls. These jokes were rapidly converted to the blonde jokes that would take the world by storm in the 1990s. In the Netherlands, these jokes usually explicitly refer to the protagonist as a dumb blonde. After the introduction of these jokes in the Netherlands, many jokes about Belgians were also converted into blonde jokes. In England, blondes have been converted into Essex girls, adding a class element to these jokes, Essex being associated with working-class culture (Davies 1998a: 182-187). It is telling that the British, who are more preoccupied with class than any other European nation, have given these jokes a class connotation. Apparently, each society adjusts jokes not only to local stereotypes but also local preoccupations.
For all its local adjustments and supplements, the joke has evolved into a global genre. The whole world can access the same repertoire of punch lines, characters and situations and recognizes roughly the same pattern for a funny story. Even before the Internet, jokes with the same pattern and punch line could be found all over the globe. Notwithstanding this, not all jokes are told everywhere. First, some jokes are specifically local, like the Dutroux jokes, which were limited to Belgium and the Netherlands. Often, international joke cycles have a local twist, as in the English transformation of the blonde joke. Moreover, each joke culture makes a selection from the global joke repertoire.
Davies sees the presence of jokes with certain themes as indicating the cultural meaning of these themes (1998b). Jokes about stupidity are the clearest example of jokes that have caught on all over the world, and Davies links this to the rise of modernity and the resulting imperative of rationality. He refers to stupidity jokes as “jokes from the iron cage”, in a reference to Max Weber’s metaphor of the iron cage of rationality (Davies 1990). However, Davies also cites examples of joke categories that stopped at specific cultural borders, or that migrated to new countries through translated joke books but did not catch on. Jokes about “dirty peoples” spread to the United States, the Netherlands and Germany but never caught on France and the United Kingdom (1998a: 166-176). Davies explains this from the importance of hygiene in these different countries. He shows how these jokes have been imported, mostly in translated joke books. However, such “dirty peoples” jokes never actually spread outside of these translations in either France or the UK. The critical moment for a joke is when it leaves a joke book and enters the oral circuit. A joke is only a joke if it is retold.
The success of a joke is always dependent on the people telling it. However, jokes are not exclusively passed on by word-of-mouth. While most joke tellers maintain with complete conviction that everything depends on the “presentation”, that a joke on paper is not funny, that it is simply a mnemonic device rather than an occasion for a laugh, jokes have nevertheless been written down from the moment people began to write. The oldest known joke book dates back to the fourth or fifth century: the Philogelos or Laughter-lover (Baldwin 1983).
While oral transmission is the natural medium of the joke, jokes in writing can of course be funny. The Internet, especially in the pre-YouTube days, gave a whole new impetus to the spread of jokes in written form. Interviewees have told me that they regularly had to laugh out loud at jokes on the questionnaire I circulated. However, they often said that they had also told the jokes on the list to others, copied the list and handed it out or fastened it to the notice board at work or circulated it at a party. A joke can work well on paper but everyone feels the need to return the joke to the sphere where it belongs: social interaction.
However, books containing humorous stories have formed a significant portion of literary production since the rise of the printing press. In the sixteenth and seventeenth century, “prose jest-books” were produced, which can be compared to present-day joke books (Brewer 1997; Dekker 2001; Verberckmoes 1999). These books constituted one of the first forms of “mass culture”. Today, inexpensively produced joke books still appear in huge editions.
There has always been a market for written jokes. In disseminating jokes in writing, the rules for oral literature are maintained; in many joke books, reference is made to the social context in which these jokes should be told (e.g. bars, parties). For these books too, it remains true that no one can claim the joke as his own property: jokes are stolen from others without scruple. I have spoken to various Dutch compilers of joke books and joke pages in magazines, who tell me that they get their jokes from English, German or American books. As one editor explained: “I just gave one of my secretaries a large stack of those little books [in English and German] and underlined the ones I wanted her to type over.”
The uninhibited copying of jokes from other sources partially explains the large international diffusion of the genre and its repertoire. Jokes in joke books do not, however, adequately reflect whole joke cultures. As Davies has demonstrated, only a portion of translated jokes actually finds its way into oral joke culture. Some recent Dutch joke books I have read show little correspondence with jokes I was being told. Additionally, a great deal of censorship takes place in joke books and columns: the language is cleaned up and certain joke categories are even completely excluded. In the Netherlands, this self censorship affects jokes referring to ethnic minorities, explicit sexual jokes and sick jokes. Editors of joke pages I spoke to, for instance at the Dutch edition of Playboy, notice the operation of self-censorship. For their joke pages, they relied on contributions by readers, but jokes from some categories were never even submitted. This process of (self-)censorship makes written sources a weak reflection of the oral repertoire.
Therefore, jokes do not spread internationally only through books, which contain only a censored selection from the repertoire. Many jokes circulating internationally are not published anywhere. A good example of this is the “holocaust joke” - sick jokes about the persecution of the Jews (I will later quote some examples). Exactly the same jokes about this topic circulate in Europe, North and South America and even Israel (Dundes and Hauschild 1987). These jokes are not deemed publishable in any of these countries. The wide international transmission of exactly the same jokes in the 1980s, so prior to the existence of the Internet, must thus have been oral. Another joke category that is not published but is present internationally is the “attitude joke” (Kuipers 2000), in which people are incited to murder or maltreat a certain group. The clandestine aspect of these joke categories ensures that they are almost never told except in closed circles, and thus are spread almost exclusively orally.
This has changed since the late 1990s with the rise of the Internet. Jokes are being spread in large numbers through the Internet and they travel significantly larger distances than ever before. Self-censorship hardly plays a role. Sometimes vehement discussions take place about the allowability of certain jokes, but mostly, consensus seems to exist that anything should be possible. However, we still see interesting regional differences in the spread and reception of online jokes. In the Netherlands, postings of racist jokes were much more contested than in the English-language Internet (Kuipers 2006b). Moreover, Internet jokes are also adapted to local circumstances, and they sometimes meet with firm cultural boundaries. For instance, Shifman (2007) found that a specific joke cycle about dating spread widely across the world, but never to the Arabic-speaking Internet.
The Internet as a medium escapes a number of traditional dividing lines: the boundary between public and private diminishes significantly and the distinction between oral and written is blurred. The language use and directness of the communication often more nearly resemble the spoken word. Especially since the launch of YouTube in 2005, Internet humor has become increasingly visual, which appears to have led to a decrease in purely verbal online humor.
The Internet has also greatly increased the tempo at which jokes diffuse through the world. This is probably true of all technical innovations: printing, radio, television, long-playing records, cassette tapes and the telephone have all hugely increased the rate of circulation of orally transmitted genres - before changing them forever or contributing to their decline. Nevertheless, no technical innovation has yet succeeded in wiping out the oral transmission of joke genres, even though the death of the joke has been announced many times. The fact that many jokes transgress boundaries dictates the need for a secluded private sphere. But most importantly, jokes are too strongly connected to the art of telling, the pleasure of listening and the atmosphere of an evening of joke telling to die out entirely.
The joke has become a global genre: everywhere in the world, humorous anecdotes are poured into the joke mold. Everywhere in the world, humorous stories with a clear punch line are told and everywhere in the world these stories are located in bars, on desert islands and at the doctor’s. In this section, I will try to trace the development of this genre: how has this specific pattern of humorous stories developed? The joke’s history can be retrieved only from written sources. The problem with joke books has already been mentioned: they are heavily censored, though unpublished collections do exist that have undergone only self censorship. It is also impossible to know for sure whether these jokes are actually told. That is not so important when tracing the form of the joke, however: regardless of content, it is possible to see into which “mold” punch lines have been poured over time.
The joke as we know it seems to be a relatively new genre: probably it is approximately one hundred and fifty years old. Wickberg (1998) and Röhrich (1977) date the origins of the joke to the nineteenth century: they connect the origin of the joke with modernity. Röhrich points to the fleetingness and changeability of the genre that he contrasts with the long-standing continuity of precursors such as the “jest”. He calls the joke the genre of “present-day, modern, industrial society”, belonging to “metropolitan surroundings” (1977: 10).
The dating of the genre is dependent on how it is defined. If “joke” simply means “humorous story”, the joke is many thousands of years old. The pattern presently called “joke” is subject to more stringent demands then those of a simple story that makes people laugh: there must be a punch line, recognizable personages and settings, and the composition too must conform to certain demands. The joke is a more tightly standardized genre that its precursor, the “jest”. A well-documented Dutch example of the “jest” genre is the collection of humorous “anecdotes” of the seventeenth-century Dutch lawyer, Aernout van Overbeke (Dekker and Roodenburg 1997; Dekker 2001; Roodenburg 1997; van Overbeke 1991). Van Overbeke did not concern himself much with genre conventions we distinguish: anecdotes, jokes, funny stories, witticisms, funny incidents, both self-made and heard from others, and stories with and without punch lines, are all mixed up together. Other formal conventions of the joke only sporadically appear in van Overbeke’s work, such as the thrice repeated event, the building block of the modern joke: a man goes to the doctor or visits the pub, and then again and he then does exactly the same thing again, building up an expectation that can be dashed the third time.
The Dutch word “mop”, denoting only this specific genre, has only had its present meaning since the nineteenth century. The Dictionary of the Dutch Language places the oldest mention in 1875. Of course, the fact that the term is new is not a decisive factor in dating the creation of the genre of the “mop”. In English a separate word has never been coined for the “mop”, but English speaking areas still have the same phenomenon and they distinguish it as a genre. The coining of the new word in Dutch does, however, point to a need that had to be met.
The determining difference between the modern joke and anecdotes, jests, and stories from before the nineteenth century is the punch line. The main demand made of the joke by modern joke tellers is that it have a denouement at the end that shows the preceding elements in a different light. Books of jests show that in the past this was not demanded of humorous stories: the denouement is usually followed by a number of lines containing a moral, a further elaboration or even what is presently a most grievous sin: an explanation of the punch line. In addition, many jests have nothing at all like what we call a punch line: they are simply a story that - as far as we are concerned - babbles on and then simply stops. That would be unacceptable at present. The punch line is a must for a joke.
How did this pre-modern, story-telling jest without a punch line give birth to the modern joke? Wickberg and Röhrich see modernization as crucial in the transformation of the jest into the joke. Modernizing influences transformed old, relatively unchanging, oral genres into a fleeting, sharp genre easily transplanted from one context to another. This was supported by the rise of new social institutions: the burgeoning urban culture of amusement following in the wake of industrialization played an important role in this transformation from old to new genres. One could say that this is where folk culture was transformed into popular culture, as standardized cultural production began to target mass audiences (cf. Schulze 1992; Reijnders 2006).
About halfway through the nineteenth century, a new amusement genre was born: “the first completely urbanized amusement appealing to a large audience of a new proletariat and lower middle class” (Senelick 1981: 2). In England it was called music hall, in America vaudeville and on the continent cabaret or revue (Ibo 1981; Senelick 1981; Slide 1994; Stein 1984; Wickberg 1998). These types of vaudeville were not exclusively for the lower social classes. However, they offered accessible, popular, and not highly refined amusement (Stein 1984). Even though a gentleman on a wild night might frequent vaudeville, the ladies of the bourgeoisie definitely did not.
Humor played an important role in vaudeville. While song, dance, magical tricks and juggling were also included, a large proportion of the performance consisted of sketches, comic songs, monologues and jokes with highly standardized form and content. In these genres that had so recently blossomed, new themes, types and forms of performance developed quickly as did new theatrical, musical and humorous forms. Vaudeville probably played an important role in “urbanizing” the jest. Peter Bailey describes how traditional song culture was transformed within the context of the music hall into a genre of humorous music hall songs called swell songs:
It marked a shift away from the leisurely narrative of the ballad tradition to a more episodic or situational representation.… The text was now less literary or poetic, and comes off the page poorly, relying as it did on performance and reception to detonate the changes that lie in the compressions and ellipses of its otherwise unremarkable language.... The swell songs exploited a range or cues that drew the audience into active recognition of its own various social selves, it directly exploited the sympathies and distances within and between them. As a genre, its form can only be satisfactorily defined in terms of performance and use.
(Bailey 1998: 123–4)
What Bailey describes here is also applicable to the joke, even though the joke has been less professionalized than the song. Vaudeville, music hall and cabaret probably set the tone for new standards in humor as well. Nineteenth-century popular amusement was a setting in which the old oral genres could be transformed into urban, fleeting, contextless, quick, in short: modern genres. Folk culture thus became popular culture.
The change in form of the joke into a more pointed and sharp genre is also in keeping with a change in all humor since early modern times: the increasing language-dependence of humor. In the joke, the humor is based on a sudden shift in perspective, brought about by the joke’s last sentence. While the situation or the character of the joke also contribute to the amusement, the ultimate laugh is consistently caused by the punch line: a cognitive shift, essentially brought about by language, not by situation or character. This is easy to see in jokes on a theme also very popular in the jests: stupidity. In jokes about Belgians, the magnification of the stupid behavior of the Belgian never directly provokes a laugh: the laugh always follows upon the punch line, upon an oral rendering of stupid Belgian behavior. In contrast, jest, and most early modern humor, is more like the humor of clowns - nowadays a “childish” sort of humor - where the laugh is directly provoked by stupid behavior: falling over one’s own feet, doing things backwards, inside out or upside down. In jokes, the emphasis is on the word not on the action.
Anton Zijderveld, following Weber, has described this development as the intellectualization of humor: a more general cultural process in which “all human impulses and emotions” - thus also play, amusement and humor - “are subjected to an increasing degree to cognitive capacities” (1982: 42). The shift from action to word fits this process well: the punch line is firstly a “cognitive” technique of humor, a change in perspective that can operate relatively detached from the affective content of the joke. This intellectualizing of humor has been linked to a broader civilizing process affecting humor (Elias 2012[1939]; Zijderveld 1982).
In the sixteenth century, the clergy, humanists and other moralists began a civilizing offensive against the laugh. Johan Verberckmoes (1999) has beautifully described how one tried to tame and discipline the “wild lack of restraint” inherent in the laugh. As this process continued, all those things capable of causing a laugh - jokes, jests, theater plays, satire - were increasingly restrained, refined and civilized (Thomas 1977; see also Burke 1978). While simply doing or saying something that was not allowed, or referring to taboos, were still very effective as humor techniques in the Middle Ages and early modern times, such simple boundary transgressions quickly began to be seen as too coarse, too unrestrained and unrefined. Boundary transgressions and taboos were increasingly obscured, “packaged” in humor techniques. This greatly increased the importance of oral, intellectual humor techniques that did not rely on the emotional content of the joke.
Perhaps the humor theory of Sigmund Freud ([1905]1976), with its emphasis on humor technique as a means to mislead the censor, can best be understood as reflecting a given moment in time. When writing Der Witz (interestingly, the German word for “joke” originally meant “wit” or “intelligence”), Freud described the culmination of a continuously increasing coercion to obscure the affective content of jokes through punch lines, plays on words and other cognitive tricks and techniques.
This is not the place to go deeply into the history of humor. I am discussing these two developments, civilization and intellectualization, particularly because they shed light on the present genre of the joke. It is not only the form of the genre that is connected with these processes but also its present low status. The criteria of refinement and emotional and moral restraint, the standards set by these processes, have ultimately turned against the joke. The joke has increasingly found itself on the side of wildly exuberant, unrefined humor: humor that is not civilized, not moral and not in the least intellectual. This has brought the joke “low”. Within the already not very elevated domain of humor, the joke is probably the genre with the lowest status.
Thus, over the past few centuries, the genre of the “short humorous story” has undergone many changes. The genre has become more pointed and concise, it has had to conform to new standards of content and the punch line has become a necessary ingredient. As time went on, in the Netherlands the genre even acquired a name of its own. Not only form and content have changed but also the way in which the genre is perceived. The social status of the joke (jest, pun, pleasantry, anecdote) has sunk lower and lower. The history of the joke is not only the history of the advancing intellectualization and standardization of a genre but, simultaneously, the history of a gradual decline in status of a cultural form.
The status of orally transmitted genres is not very high. In the modern Western world, other edifying and entertaining media have taken over many of the functions of the old oral culture (Reijnders 2006). Since the rise of the printed book, the art of telling stories has perhaps not disappeared, as so many had expected, but it has been discredited to some degree.
The death knell has been sounded a number of times for oral culture. The discipline of folklore is justified again and again as the savior of the old heritage: the capturing of folk forms before they disappear (Oring 1987; Meder and Venbrux 2000). In spite of all the expectations to the contrary, oral genres remain vigorous. The mop has arisen as a new genre, as has the urban legend (Oring 1987).
Orally transmitted genres are increasingly connected with groups having little status or power: with “the folk”, as is evident from the name of the discipline that has paid the most attention to oral literature, folklore. This (not completely accurate) association with not particularly dominant groups demonstrates that orally transmitted genres do not count as very important or respectable.
The joke has a double status problem: not only are jokes orally transmitted but the joke is also a humorous genre. Humor has always had a somewhat doubtful status: everyone loves its but no one sees it as completely respectable. Humor is always classified with the “lower” forms of amusement and diversion: it counts as exuberant, licentious, folksy, popular, superficial and frivolous. In the arts, comic forms invariably have less prestige than tragic ones (Davis 2002).
It says a lot that humor is often enjoyed in combination with other “animal pleasures”. Joke pages appear nowadays especially in men’s magazines such as Playboy. The name of the Dutch national humorous art form, the cabaret, still calls up associations outside the Netherlands with dingy nightclubs, frivolous amusement and scantily clad women. That is, indeed, the context from which the cabaret arose. The association of food with humor has diminished with time but the carnivals of the Middle Ages, much of whose symbolism was food-related, were occasions both to laugh and to gorge oneself sick (Pleij 1979). The association of humor with alcohol is undiminished and taken for granted and the pub still counts as the most natural environment for the joke and the guffaw. Humor is a frivolous, easy and particularly physical type of amusement (Bakhtin 1984; Verberckmoes 1999).
Ever since early modern times, clergymen and other moralists have attempted to restrain this physical, superficial phenomenon. The consequences of this were not limited to the shift towards more civilized forms of humor and laughing already mentioned. This process also led to an increased separation of “high” from “low” humor (Brewer 1997; Davis 2002). In general, from the seventeenth century onwards, higher social classes increasingly attempted to distinguish themselves on the basis of style, taste, and cultural consumption (van den Haak 2014). In the seventeenth century, Herman Roodenburg (1997: 126) writes, “social and esthetic standards began to coincide ... Under the influence of the newest codes of civility, the elite was no longer allowed to enjoy low comedy in all its physicality.” Differences in status began to be more and more clearly delineated within the domain of humor - just as they were within other cultural domains.
Since those times, high humor increasingly distinguished itself from low humor in three ways that are still in evidence today. Humor can escape the epithet “low” by becoming humor with a message or moralizing humor, humor with an aesthetically responsible design or refined humor, or humor restrained in its exuberance or civilized humor. But even cultivated humor has had to live to some extent in the shadow of “real” art. Only very recently has the profession of cabaret artist begun to be seen as respectable; humor is beginning to emancipate itself (Dekker 2001). As a consequence, there are increasing distinctions within the domain of humor: the low status of the joke and other lower forms of humor is delineated even more sharply than before.7
“High” and “low” are polysemic concepts in the domain of humor as they are everywhere. The fact that a cultural phenomenon has low status can mean that it principally manifests itself in low-status situations but also that it only appears in the presence of persons or groups with a low status. However, in a process of cultural “trickle down”, this means that its status in absolute terms continues to decrease: a cultural product originally popular in higher circles is gradually taken over by people from lower strata, whereupon those in higher circles turn their backs on it as a means of distinguishing themselves (Elias 2012; Kuipers 2013).
The low status of the joke and its precursors seems mainly determined by this process. Slowly but surely, the telling of standardized humorous stories actually began to disappear from higher circles. Only in the twentieth century does the joke seem to have sunk definitively, and the first to dissociate themselves from the low status of jokes were the higher classes. The following chapters aim to provide evidence for this assertion (at least in the Netherlands). In the remainder of this chapter, I will attempt to trace this process of sinking.
As far as one can determine, “jests” were told and performed everywhere around 1600: they were popular with the elite but also circulated among the common folk (Roodenburg 1997: 114). One famous collector of anecdotes, van Overbeke, was a lawyer and spent his time in the highest circles. “Popular culture includes gentlemen”, concludes Brewer (1997: 97) in his discussion of sixteenth and seventeenth century jest-books. Both Roodenburg and Brewer observe, as mentioned, that in this period the gap between high and low humor began to widen. High humor had to be refined and civilized, two demands very difficult to observe in an orally transmitted genre whose usual plot structure was by no means subtle.
In the eighteenth century, one more criterion for good humor was added to those of restraint and refinement: authenticity through personal inventiveness. This gave rise to new objections to humorous stories, used against jokes even to the present day: that they are not self-made. The earliest reference I know where this objection is stated explicitly is in a Dutch etiquette book from 1735, with the amazing title The book of ceremony comprised of civilized custom, courtesy, ceremonial and cultivated civilities. An instructional aid for everyone, in strict accordance with his gender, birth, status, fortune, servants, profession, riches, state, relationship to others, etc., in the etiquette of behavior with the object of making himself beloved and happy in this world. The writer of this book severely disapproves of telling jokes not invented by the teller; jokes must “spring in a fluid fashion from the stream of conversation, because without the self they are pusillanimous, arid and lack of the spark of life” (van Laar, quoted in de Man 1993: 107).
These exhortations began to be heard at the moment that the bourgeoisie, under French influence, started to define humor more and more in line with the concept of esprit, which corresponds roughly with English “wit”, German Witz or Dutch Geest. All of these terms used for humor arose in the eighteenth century. They place humor firmly in the domain of the intellect, in contrast with earlier terms which tended to categorize humor in the domain of play and unseriousness (the English word “joke” is related to the French word for play, jeu, as well as a Dutch word for lying, jokken) or emotion (humor is derived from a word used to describe the bodily fluids creating temper and temperament).
This influence of French humor styles leads not only to an increasing linguistic component to humor. It also led to an emphasis on originality, creativity and ready wit. Venting another’s felicitous phrases in the face of this demand for individual creativity amounts to an admission of weakness. One must demonstrate one’s own scintillating spirit through inventive witticisms and refined plays on words.
The criterion of authenticity is connected with the intellectualizing already mentioned. While the ascent of the punch line fits this development well - the punch line, after all, emphasizes cognitive humor - the joke otherwise falls far short as a display of intellectual refinement. The criterion of intellectual refinement thus disadvantaged the joke. The increasing emphasis on wittiness, nimble-mindedness and the art of conversation also demanded civilized humor. “Esprit” does not connote a guffaw or clandestine reference but restrained, disciplined little smiles. The fact that, for all its refinement, this type of joke could be rather sharp, points at most to an even more effective restraint on affect.
The most compelling report of this eighteenth-century humor is not provided by scientific research but by a film: Ridicule (France, Patrice Leconte 1996). This film beautifully sketches the French cult of wittiness. It concludes, aptly, with a Frenchman who, after his escape from France after the Revolution, devotes himself to learning English humour, a term that only conquered the continent in the nineteenth century.
Since the nineteenth century, the importance of authenticity was buttressed by another broad cultural shift: the rise of the ideology of artistic autonomy and art for art’s sake. This new artistic ideal, inspired by Romanticism, put individual expression at the heart of cultural expression, attempted to uncouple art from morality, and glorified artistic innovation (Bourdieu 1993; Lizardo 2008). This Romantic impulse was somewhat at odds with older understandings of civilized culture, particularly in its rejection of bourgeois morality. However, it did contribute to the rise of authenticity as one of the central criteria for cultural value.
During the second half of the twentieth century, this ideal of individual authenticity and self-expression became increasingly central to people’s understanding of personhood (Aupers, Houtman and Roeland 2010; Giddens 1991; Inglehart 1997; Wouters 2007). This growing attachment to authenticity as a criterion of personal worth is often seen as a symptom of wider processes of individualization (cf. Giddens 1991). While this embrace of authenticity may have boosted the status of humor and laughter in general, it was less beneficial for jokes: it privileges humor as the expression of one’s deeper self.
This piling up of objections to the tradition of jests and anecdotes thus led to a decline in status of the humorous narrative. The joke does seem to have become more and more a genre for low and licentious occasions but not necessarily for low and licentious people. The joke is, for instance, regularly mentioned in the context of nineteenth century university student culture, a phase of life in which members of high circles experimented with the lower aspects of life. An important part of the only nineteenth century “informal” joke collection in the Netherlands that I am aware of, that of the doctor Cornelis Bakker (Meder 1999, 2000), also comes from Leiden’s university environment. Jokes from this collection shed a very surprising light on the respectable nineteenth century: behind closed doors one could be quite foul-mouthed. This last collection in particular makes apparent how the joke in the nineteenth century must have been a clandestine genre and thus a genre for “indecent” events in “decent” environments.
Until the middle of the twentieth century, a joke could quite easily be “civilized”: maybe not chic but not exclusively vulgar either. The boundary between high and low humor was to some extent drawn within the genre of the joke. In spite of increasing objections to the joke - not refined, not authentic, not restrained - it gains more and more in visibility towards the end of the nineteenth century, both in low and more bourgeois environments, as written culture strongly expanded.
The status of the joke can be illustrated by its place in the twentieth-century popular press in the Netherlands. From the beginning of the twentieth century until the 1950s, almost every self-respecting illustrated magazine had a joke page or even a joke supplement. Until the 1970s, there was a genre called the “family magazine”, meant for the respectable middle classes, and presumably made defunct by television. Of the four important Dutch family magazines Panorama, Revue, De Spiegel [The mirror] and De katholieke illustratie [The Catholic Illustration], only the Protestant Spiegel lacked a joke column. These joke pages were usually at the back, in the light-hearted section, but were not placed on the children’s page. Jokes in these magazines were presented as a civilized form of amusement, alongside world news, photo-galleries, recipes and knitting patterns. In addition to these jokes presumably meant for the middle classes, there were also jokes in more lowbrow popular magazines such as De Lach [The laugh], which combined jokes and cartoons with risque pictures of ladies in bathing suits that became skimpier and skimpier until De Lach’s demise in the early 1970s. The joke, in short, was presented to the populace through many channels, some rather vulgar and others decently middle-class.
The aim of jokes in family magazines was clearly to amuse the readership in a civilized and refined way. The following account by the editor of Revue’s joke page in 1954 illustrates this objective:
Those of you who have already enjoyed his jokes in Revue can imagine his characteristic, mysterious smile. Herman Focke... is not the man for flashy fairground amusement... He sketches his little jokes with a subtle pencil or quick stroke of the brush and captures the gist, which usually causes a fine but especially pleasurable smile to light the face of the reader.
(Revue 1954, issue 5)
The criterion of authenticity always sits somewhat uneasily with the joke genre. However, this quote suggests that the other two demands, civilization and refinement, were adequately met: no “flashy fairground amusement” means no uncivilized humor. Likewise, the “fine smile” points to refined humor. Remember that the targeted audience was not the elite who had gone to university - these magazines were most likely aimed at the broader middle class - and that this was, of course, a specific sort of joke, a “decent” joke. What this quote does indicate is that the joke as a genre had a significantly wider range than it does at present. The possibility for “civilized jokes” existed.
Not until the 1960s did the joke begin to visibly lose ground. Jokes disappeared from the more proper magazines at a great rate. Nowadays in the Netherlands, jokes are only still published in children’s magazines such as Donald Duck and men’s magazines such as Playboy and Aktueel. Of the more mainstream magazines, only the Dutch version of The Readers Digest continues to publish decent jokes (but this magazine is attempting to keep alive the atmosphere of the 1950s in any way it can). So it was only towards the middle of the twentieth century that the joke concluded its trickle down. Until that time highly cultured objections to the joke built up steadily but the genre stood its ground, in the guise of the indecent pastimes of decent people, in the margins of high humor, in pubs and at parties and even in one of its decent facets: right at the center of middle-class “entertainment culture”.
What happened after the 1960s that caused the decline of the joke’s status? In the course of the following chapters, I will work out the answer to this question slowly but surely, as I discuss the objections of the highly educated against jokes and the arguments of the less educated for them. What happened to make it so difficult for the highly educated to appreciate a joke nowadays, even in low-status settings? Where did this rejection of the whole genre originate?
I will close my description of the slow demise of the joke’s status with an eyewitness account from the period during which the joke definitively disappeared from “decent” environments. Rinus Ferdinandusse, former editor of the prestigious intellectual weekly Vrij Nederland, and also the editor of the most successful Dutch joke book of the late twentieth century told me:
Jokes? At that time they were a dying race. We had progressed culturally in the sixties; we were all heading for a newer and a better world. All the humorists from the Tuesday evening radio entertainment program were disappearing, retiring... So then I thought, what we must do is collate a standard book with everything that’s left of this disappearing culture.
The thousand worst jokes in the world (De duizend slechtste grappen van de wereld), which had many reprints after its first edition in 1972, thus began as a memorial for a disappearing genre. A rescue operation, however, seemed premature. The joke pulled itself together and found a different niche. The “decent joke” though really died in the process; decent citizens went of in search of other entertainment.
This chapter was meant to do two things. First, it was meant to sketch a profile of the joke as an orally transmitted genre, a mold into which to pour jokes to be passed on orally. Second, after introducing the genre, it was meant to introduce an important ingredient of the argument to be followed in the rest of the book: the fact that the joke is a low status genre. The status of the joke, or any other humorous genre, is determined by criteria for good humor and objections to bad humor. This is exactly what the whole book is about. “Taste” amounts to nothing more that: criteria for what is good or beautiful and objections to what is bad or ugly.
This chapter sketches the historical origins of three criteria of taste that have become increasingly important in judging humor. The first criterion, intellectual refinement or quick-wittedness, is connected with a process of the increasing “intellectualizing” of humor. This process is primarily related to Weber’s (2002) understanding of modernization as rationalization. The second criterion, restraint or civilization, is connected with the continuous tightening of the fetters on affect and, as such, influences not just humor but the laugh as well. This development is linked with Elias’ understanding of modernization as a “civilizing process”. The third criterion, authenticity, demands that humor reveal something essential about the teller. This is related to the processes of “individualization” (Giddens 1991) and “informalization” (Wouters 2008). The increased emphasis on the criterion of authenticity or originality in humor seems to be of more recent date than the other two. I think that it was precisely this criterion that finally, definitively, sunk the genre.
It is at the concurrence of these three criteria that one finds what Bourdieu (1984) calls the aesthetic disposition: a distant, restrained and cerebral view of art and of other things subject to aesthetic judgment, like humor. According to Bourdieu, this disposition characterizes the aesthetic outlook of persons with legitimate “good” taste. This is the disposition essential to an appreciation of modern high culture. Beauty or aesthetic appreciation, in this vision, is not a question of direct sensual experience but a more distant and especially a more informed enjoyment of an “acquired taste”.
This disposition demands a large degree of intellectualizing: aesthetic beauty is subjugated to understanding. In modern times, to judge high culture aesthetically, one needs knowledge. A great deal of affective restraint is also required: Bourdieu’s aesthete actually looks down a little on things meant to elicit a direct, emotional response, unless this is negative, because that could be turned into a distanced, positive, appreciative reaction. The last demand, authenticity, has become the decisive criterion in art. The criteria against which people measure humor are therefore akin to those established for other aesthetic frames of mind - even though emotional reactions to art are less visible, less physical and less restrained than the laugh. This probably means that humor will never completely belong to the “elevated” arts: even the highest humor will always be a bit “low”.