“Good humor” does not mean the same to everyone. The previous chapter showed that different humor styles underlie taste judgments about the standardized humor of professional humor producers such as comedians, comics and television makers. In this chapter I investigate the scope of these humor styles. Are the criteria of highbrow and lowbrow humor only applied to standardized humor? Do people have the same expectations of good humor in daily life as they do of stage or television humor? How can this be related to the genre that is central to this book: the joke?
Spontaneous humor in everyday life is difficult for a researcher to grasp. But humor styles can be retrieved indirectly, by distilling them from descriptions people give of good and bad humor. Just as communication styles can be typified by using preferences for certain forms of communication, and objections to others, as criteria for good and bad communication, humor styles translate into criteria for good and bad humor.
During the interviews, two terms kept returning when people expressed their preferences in the area of humor, “(good) sense of humor” and “coarse” humor. These terms were used both for standardized and spontaneous, everyday humor. People use these terms in order to distinguish between the humor - and the humorists - that they find attractive, funny, pleasant or, indeed, irritating, corny and unamusing. Some advanced their ability to tell jokes well as evidence for their sense of humor; others were of the opinion that telling jokes has nothing to do with sense of humor; and still others regarded jokes by definition as “coarse”. “Sense of humor” and “coarse” are thus ascribed very different content by different people. In this chapter, I will use the meanings that people attach to these two expressions for judging humor, to uncover the logic underlying different humor styles.
“Sense of humor” and “coarse” are not the only terms used by people to pass judgments on humor. There is a well-developed vocabulary to describe and typify humor: insipid, dull, dirty, coarse, piquant, vulgar, hard, sharp, dry. (It is striking how many of these descriptions refer to taste and tactility.) Most of these words are specific designations of one sort of humor. “Coarse” and “sense of humor” are relatively empty terms indicating general judgment rather than describing content. “Good sense of humor” is first and foremost a description of a person: it indicates that one appreciates that person’s humor without indicating what the nature of that humor is. “Coarse” (plat or platvloers in Dutch) indicates bad taste or lack of taste; a negative judgment unconnected with a specific objection to content, as is the case with words like rude, hurtful, superficial, difficult or forced.
In the second series of interviews I asked directly about the meaning people ascribed to these two terms. In the interviews with the joke tellers these terms appeared regularly, but at that time I did not explicitly ask informants what they meant when they used them. It did strike me, however, that the joke tellers gave these concepts different connotations than I would myself. Later on it became apparent that the use of these concepts corresponds with the preference for either popular or highbrow humor.
People who do not appreciate the genre often dispose of jokes as “coarse”. One of the people who described jokes as coarse was English teacher Louis Balde. In the interview, he also provided a sort of definition of “coarse”: “I think insipid, childish, not in the least funny. I mean the van Duin-like genre. Coarse or zilch. Laugh or I’ll shoot humor, that’s hateful.” Other interviewees who, like Balde, preferred highbrow humor, also named popular comic André van Duin as representing “coarse” humor.
The description of jokes as “coarse” is in keeping with the meaning more highly educated people generally give the term. In essence, for lovers of highbrow humor, coarse means “easy”. All the objections made to popular humor can be summarized in that one word, for instance in the following fragment, already quoted in part, in which Marijke van der Moer (34, high school teacher) enumerates her objections against cabaret artist Bert Visscher:
That’s an absurdism that makes me think: yes, prrt [raspberry], search me. It’s too easy or not deep enough. Too simple. But then I’m also saying that humor should be complicated sometimes. It’s just too easy. It’s too self-evident. Just like André van Duin. Sometimes I can laugh at it if indeed something just goes on and on, then you can’t really escape getting caught in the joke too. But very often - well, then it is simply too coarse, let’s say. Too easy.
Van der Moer here specifically objects to Visscher here and, once again, van Duin. But in fact she gives a verdict applicable to all humor: for her, humor “should be complicated”. It must challenge, stimulate or surprise.
“Coarse” for highbrow humor lovers does not only mean simple and predictable, but also corny, consciously naughty or “mischievous” in an imposed way. This also has to do with easiness: the boundaries that are transgressed in the joke are too self-evident. As Bart Winia (33, graphic designer) says:
You can score easily with coarseness but in a vulgar way. For instance in ’Allo ’Allo they are continuously talking about “me sausage”. Then I don’t like it; they should make one show and use that stuff up and then shut up about it [fake French accent] “I stuffed ze sausage down my pants”. After a while, you’ve had enough of it. And then every time the canned laughter on top. So it does have a certain vulgarity, but then in a very easy way.
Examples of coarseness that interviewees gave included jokes about burping and farting, jokes based on suggestive remarks and “spicy” allusions, or exaggerated imitations or accents. The main objection to these jokes is that they are not really shocking and scandalous, because the transgression is too transparent. For this type of humor that is too simple, the Netherlands has the unsurpassed term flauw (“corny”, but in Dutch literally “unsalted”, insipid, without spice).
In addition to these two meanings - simple and corny - there is also a third element in the highbrow meaning of coarse: exaggeration or “affectation”.
Sylvia Millecam. Oh yuck, yes. At the beginning I liked her a lot when they were sitting there, all four of them, in that program [Ook dat nog]. Yes, then I really liked her. But later on, that often happens with programs like that, they can’t seem to leave well enough alone and then they go on and invent all sorts of new things and they start dressing up in costumes and things like that. I like it best if they just sit there and talk, but if it gets all complicated and they go and portray those exaggerated types, no. Then I don’t like it anymore. Awful.
You find her exaggerated?
Yes! Horribly exaggerated. Yes, real affectation. (Lotte van der Lans, 84, homemaker, university educated)
The fixed phrase in the humor vocabulary is “they’re laying it on thick” or, as van der Moer phrased it: “It has to be appealing. It is too contrived, too forced, too pretentious and it zeros in on a popular sort of humor.” This, too, is a variation on “too easy”: the joke maker is trying to be too emphatically funny. The objection to coarse humor refers thus to three sorts of “easiness”: too easy from an intellectual viewpoint; too easy as far as boundary transgressions go; too easily recognizable as humor.
While I am primarily citing objections to coarse comedians here, all these same objections were mentioned to all sorts of forms of spontaneous humor. In daily interactions as well, people can make jokes that are not surprising enough, too corny or too emphatic. As we saw in Chapter 3, to a significant extent, people used the same terms to explain their objections against jokes: predictable, easy, forced and exaggerated.
An interesting example of jokes as a coarse genre, fitting for coarse situations was given by Marga van Stolwijk (48, nurse). This smart lady with a schooled and rather highbrow taste, who was brought up in a farming family, answered my question whether she knew a joke as follows:
I could tell you a joke, I’ve known it for years and it is very popular in certain settings, including rather coarse events like a village festival or something like that, you know. It doesn’t amount to much, all it is is that someone throws pills into a chicken coop and the following day the chickens are going around clucking “piss poop, cha cha cha”. Now that is a pretty strange joke and it’s only really funny if you’ve already sunk below a certain level, that’s what I think is special about that joke. For instance: there was once a village festival and then you had a float with a lot of others and then what you did then is you named the names of the local farmers. And that’s what’s fun about it. The joke is not much but then you go and say “then we went on over to farmer Kremer’s and then...” Now, what happens is that everybody gets into it, that’s the good part. But I almost never tell a joke, because I usually start with the punch line.
Note that, in the end, she never told the joke. And in passing, she also says that she can’t really tell a joke: just like so many other women, she begins with the punch line.
What is also apparent from this quote is that, although coarseness is disapproved of, it can sometimes be fun. Two interviewees quoted above expressed their objections against coarseness eloquently:
Coarse humor is often fun if it crosses your path by chance. So you’re just having a chat with someone and suddenly something emerges that has a double meaning. Not when you first hear it but when the other calls your attention to it. And then you both have a laugh. That often has to do with coarse things.
(Marijke van der Moer)
I think vulgarity is coarse, but not the way Youp [van ’t Hek] uses it, something like him standing there with his hands in his pockets and then saying, “Indeed Madam, I am fondling my prick”. That is incredibly coarse but in an amusing way.
(Bart Winia)
People with a “popular” humor style, including all the joke tellers surveyed, gave an entirely different meaning to the same word. They did not in general object to simple humor, affectation or easy naughtiness. They tended to use the term “coarse” to mean the following:
Coarse, maybe I’ve got it wrong, but coarse, I’d put that in with the mean jokes actually. But you can interpret a coarse joke in another way. But that’s the first thing I think of: a filthy joke or a dirty one.
(Jaap van Noord, 49, janitor)
Coarse is vulgar. Course is just plain vulgar. Look, at a certain moment you get these theater programs that use a whole lot of obscene language that plays a certain role within the framework of the performance. So you can’t really always say that either. But I find coarse just plain vulgar. If it’s too much about the people, people personally. And certainly about people who can’t defend themselves. That’s what I think coarse is all about.
(Wouter Koeman, 51, police officer).
In this perspective, coarse is not easy but vulgar or rude. Coarse humor is humor that transgresses a boundary. People’s first association often was language use: smutty words and obscene language: “If they start carrying on swearing, I think that’s so incredibly common. Vulgar is how I see it.” (Claudia van Leer) Or: “Yeah coarse, then I think about coarse language. A bit, well like talking dirty. What you, say you’re talking to someone that you don’t know, you just wouldn’t use words like that. I mean drunk people or people like that who’ll just say anything.” (Anna Pijlstra, 45, unemployed)
All needless hurtfulness or vulgarity counts as coarse for this group: coarse humor was defined as “common, ugly, mean”, “nasty little jokes”. Paul de Leeuw or Youp van ’t Hek are often named as exemplifying coarseness: humorists who use rough language, consciously transgress boundaries and openly insult others. Coarse here is almost synonymous with “hurtful” (kwetsend).
“Hurtful” was a word much more often used by lower educated informants than by those with higher education. It was their standard objection to bad humor. “Coarse”, on the other hand, was more commonly used by those with higher education. It is also a word consistently connected with the attempts of higher classes to distinguish themselves in domains other than humor (e.g. “coarse manners”).
Humor at the expense of others is not by definition hurtful or coarse. In the eyes of lovers of popular humor, jokes about others are not hurtful if certain boundaries are clearly respected. Television programs in which unprepared people are embarrassed, such as a candid camera show, or Over de Roooie, in which people were made to do unpleasant or degrading things for 1,000 guilders, were not found to be coarse either. After all, it has been indicated clearly here that boundaries exist: the victims have given their permission for the program to be broadcast. Often they are portrayed laughing: by doing this they make it obvious that they “can take a joke”. Think of Ivo Engelsman from the previous chapter, who found Kan more coarse than Banana Split. Kan made dignitaries look like fools, without their permission, and that was “affronting”. In candid camera shows like Banana Split, people are also made to look like fools but with their own approval. But seen from a highbrow perspective, candid camera-type programs are coarse, because the jokes generally entail simple and “predictable” boundary transgressions. On this point, the two meanings given to the same word are diametrically opposed.
The definition of “coarse” as vulgar and hurtful was observed not only for lovers of the popular humor style, but also for people who didn’t fit either of the humor styles. This meaning of the word “coarse” is related to educational level: all respondents who had had neither university nor post-secondary vocational training, with the exception of one, used “coarse” to mean “hurtful”. These respondents include not only those with a distinctly popular humor style, but also everyone who does not have a highbrow humor style.
Consequently, only people with higher education described “coarse” as “easy”. This does not mean that people from this group do not have a problem with hurtful jokes or vulgar language use. Rather, they would use other words: vulgar, hurtful, shocking, banal, revolting, offensive. Apart from that, educated people also denounce hurtful or offensive humor less emphatically. A certain sharpness is indeed appreciated in highbrow humor: with a slight hint of refinement and a clear aim, humor is permitted to be vulgar, or full of obscene language and hurtful references.
The way in which the more highly educated group defined “coarse” is connected with schooling: coarseness - associated with bad taste - is opposed to schooled, sophisticated, or cultivated taste. For this group, usually people with a highbrow humor style, coarseness has to do with lack of intellect and refinement. For those with less education, with or without a popular humor style, coarseness means something closer to a lack of decency and courtesy. “Good taste” in the area of humor is not connected with intellect, but with sociability: it is the opposite of uncivilized, impolite and unsocial behavior.
The meaning people attach to “sense of humor” is also related to humor style. I asked all 32 interviewees in the survey sample to describe someone they knew who had a good sense of humor. Three different types of answers were received, two of which were connected with humor styles. The third type of answer occurred less often: it did not describe a type of humor but a relationship. Someone with a good sense of humor, in this view, is someone with whom you share humor, with whom you are “on the same wavelength”:
We only need a couple of words to understand each other immediately. And with other you would think: what are they going on about? And he is also someone who thinks exactly the same way about that sort of joke. He doesn’t even really have to tell a joke, but he knows right off, if he were to tell me a joke: no, she won’t like that one or yes, she’ll like that one. Or crazy things that happen to you and then you blow them up a little and then start telling them in a really strange way. So that other people think: I can’t see what’s funny about that. But then I do see what’s funny about it. And so does he.
(Josien Muller, 37, homemaker, did not finish high school)
She is a very intelligent woman, right? I don’t think she would be described by everyone as humorous, because I think there would be occasions when she’d be called a dragon, but she and I put a whole lot into perspective by just laughing so hard that our backs hurt or we get sore stomachs. And we can talk seriously for hours and all of a sudden there will be a remark. We have a number of words, lacrimoso [not an existing word] for instance, thought up once upon a time during a game, the dictionary game. And we both know the meaning of the word that we once invented when we were playing the game. Then everything is put into perspective for me. For someone else that wouldn’t be funny, but for you - the way she roars with laughter is something fantastic. The twinkling is fantastic, you know, and then she’ll say, for instance, “oh don’t go on about that, because that’s just so lacrimoso.” That’s how it is. And you can have that with other people too. But not with men, now that I think about it. Men always find that confusing.
(Marga van Stolwijk, 48, nurse)
Here are two very different types of humor: Josien Muller likes jokes; Marga van Stolwijk prefers a sharp wit. “Sense of humor” says therefore very little about the type of humor that they appreciate, but quite a lot about the way in which these people deal with humor. Humor is for them an exchange, a part of a relationship. It is not coincidental that these people always name someone who is very close to them: their brother, husband or best friend.
This description of a good sense of humor primarily sheds light on the connection between humor and gender: with one exception, people answering in this way were all women. Chapter 3 has already described how women are more likely to use humor to express a personal connection. Here, too, it appears that women tend to see humor as an aspect of a relationship, while men tend to see it as a characteristic of a person.
There is a further way in which the answers to the question about someone with a good sense of humor said a lot about humor and gender. Of the 32 interviewees, only two named a woman as the person with the best sense of humor. In an American research study by Crawford (1989), people also named men much more often when asked to describe someone with a “sense of humor”. In another conspicuous gender difference, of the 32 interviewees, four could not think of anyone they found to have a good sense of humor: all four were women. Two of these were the women described in Chapter 4 who claimed to have very little humor in their lives. The answers to this question again produce the image of humor as a masculine characteristic - something more quickly associated with men - but also as a “masculine” strategy.
Perhaps the most revealing point when discussing humor and gender is that there were two people who felt that they themselves had the best sense of humor: both were men. When asked whether he knew anyone with a good sense of humor, one of these respondents first defined “sense of humor”, then went on to describe himself:
With sense of humor what you’re talking about is that you can appreciate the sunny side of life. Nice things, that you also see and notice them... I sometimes see these situations where one person begins to crack up and the other thinks, now what’s going on this time? Now that’s something I’ve got, I do see things happening. Some people don’t see that at all. I see, I think of the humor in things more often than others. And I can laugh about it, the first time really hard and the next maybe just a smile.
(Kees van Dokkum, 52, doctor)
The other respondent was somewhat humbler. First he said that his female colleagues had a good sense of humor because “they understood his humor”. “And”, he continued, “because they can understand mine, you really get the feeling that they could be pretty humorous themselves too”. Then I asked:
And do you know someone who often makes you laugh?
Well, I can laugh at anyone and everyone.
At one specific person...
Well, no, not at one person, eh? [to his wife] Do I sometimes feel like someone makes me laugh? Yes, often children, they can do such ridiculous things from time to time. But it’s, um, men, no not men. Not women either, much.
Wife of the interviewee: You simply think you’re the funniest.
Exactly. And that’s just what I was trying not to say. Yeah, in company I often play the first fiddle. Yes, that could sometimes, now and then that could be negative, I guess. But okay, as long as people aren’t prepared to say anything about it, I won’t be able to change it, will I?
(Jaap van Noord, 49, janitor)
His wife didn’t mean anything biting by this. It characterized the way they behaved during the interview: he monopolized the conversation; she filled in the blanks now and then with a few well-chosen remarks. Mrs. van Noord was also one of the women who fed jokes to her husband so he could tell them.
The two other types of description of someone with a sense of humor were connected directly with humor style. These did not concern relationships, but a certain type of humor. People with a highbrow humor style tended to describe someone with a sense of humor as follows:
We have a woman friend who is often extremely sharp and knows how to describe things so concisely and succinctly in such a way that you can’t do anything but laugh. She is in her nineties and can be extremely witty. Yes, witty. Every shot goes home. But that’s pretty much what it’s about, not so much in the sense of telling jokes, but simply the fact of making a telling retort and being able to say things in a way that you think, “Oh yes, exactly”. Not really that you think, oh that’s a real joker or anything like that. No, not that.
(Cornelis Blom, 56, high school teacher)
A good sense of humor. Yes, what I like about it is the surprise in it, the unexpected. What I also feel with cabaret artists. That cool type of humor, with an almost British tint. I’m always attracted to that in people. And, yes, that’s something completely different from telling jokes, something more like a really deadpan grasp of situations. Well, look, you have to distinguish, of course, people aren’t playing a role then. I mean it’s no longer in the context of “Hoorah, now we’re all going to spend a whole evening sociably telling jokes”. No, what I find surprising is exactly the fact that it’s completely built into the personality. And that at any random moment, if there’s a conversation going on about almost anything at all, that just pops out completely unexpectedly. Because that is, of course, much much nicer than saying: well, now, why don’t we just have a little session of joke telling. No, for me it’s precisely the way that people express themselves about certain things, things they’ve experienced, and the way they weave it into the conversation, without it being deliberate. It just comes out.
But it is not deliberate. So these are not people who are very on the ball,
Well, that does play a role in it too. I do find being on the ball, having the ability to react immediately to situations, yes, that is part of it. People with that sort of sense of humor can often react to a remark right on the spot. A nice example of that, linked to the shocking jokes that I experienced in a circle of friends, really did happen. Friends of friends of ours were about to go on holiday and everything was ready. In the car. And then you’ll often see people going: now did I forget to do that, or that? That’s really familiar. So at a certain moment the wife was still standing in the hallway, saying: “I think I haven’t turned off the gas tap yet.” To which he said: “Why are you Jews always the first ones to smell that?” I mean, they’re married [laughs] so I guess you can assume that he’s not an anti-Semite but I know him, I mean, that’s the sort of thing he’d say. I mean if you were to go and write that down on paper, it would be shocking, but in the context and, of course, considering the timing. He isn’t thinking about timing naturally because he didn’t rehearse the thing, but splat bang, right on the spot. Yes, then you’ve got humor [laughs].
(Louis Balde, 50, English teacher)
In these answers we hear the echo of the highbrow humor style. The same criteria are being used - sharpness, originality - but applied to spontaneous humor. These criteria are the opposite of the highly educated understanding of coarseness: not simple, not too emphatically humorous, no easy boundary transgressions. The following pithy summary shows how good humor for this group reverses all objections against coarseness. According to Lotte van der Lans, the 84-year old university-educated homemaker, someone with a sense of humor was “someone who thinks fast in the domain of humor, who makes connections quickly and who is a bit original. And therefore not laughing about Laurel and Hardy or something: that’s a bit childish and a bit naive.”
For people with a highbrow humor style, someone with a good sense of humor is witty or nimble-minded: good with language, on the ball, quick with spontaneous witty or humorous remarks, preferably with an ironic, not too emphatic tone. Humor is connected in this perspective with creativity, observation and analysis - and thus absolutely not with jokes. It is
an ability to observe, to analyze, let’s say, to make connections and to do something with them. The humor is what the person does right on the spot and then that’s what makes it funny. And a joke, yes, with a joke if you’ve heard it twice it’s not even funny anymore and then the humor has flown, hasn’t it.
(Corine Steen, 40, marketing researcher)
People who adhere to this view of good humor often emphasize self-mockery and the capacity to “put things into perspective”. Vincent Zwagerman (the 37-year-old university student turned carpenter) described his friend with a good sense of humor as a melancholy man with a huge ability to put things into perspective: “I have laughed a whole lot with Jan and that was more about the ludicrousness of life itself.” Zwagerman’s wife added to this: “He is actually very gloomy. He has a heavy, heavy weight around his neck.” And Zwagerman: “Yes. And that’s where the humor comes from.” According to this definition, a sense of humor can then also be connected with less pleasant emotions or characteristics: sadness, bitterness, sharpness.
While “sense of humor” for my informants was a positive qualification, they did not always think the people they described were nice: witty, but not necessarily sympathetic. Maria Romein (27, architect) describes someone she admires for his humor, but someone who often makes people feel defensive:
I had a colleague and I really thought he was very funny. He was terribly banal, not in a sexist way, he could just be extremely crude, but very precise in aiming at the sensitive points, you know what I mean? Which meant that people were often quite shocked and then later actually very glad that something like that had been said, you know. But still, he’s someone who makes a lot of enemies too. He no longer works with us because he and his wife started their own architectural agency and it’s going reasonably well and he wrote too - that’s a very good example of his sort of humor [laughs]. We had phoned him to see if he had any documentation about his new agency. And he said he did and sent it to us. And he’d inserted a letter with it that really annoyed some people. Something like: okay, here is the agency documentation - a young architectural agency with one woman and one invalid, because one of his hands has only stubs of fingers on it. And on request we can also show ourselves as black, he wrote [laughs]. I really liked that [laughs]. I thought it was great. And it is actually really pretty vulgar or something. Lots of people couldn’t appreciate it at all. There were really pretty angry about it.
Anke Vermeer (52, freelance writer) found her nimble-witted acquaintance distinctly unsympathetic and intimidating:
Yes, this one boy in my circle of acquaintances is actually fatally funny. And in an analytical, straightforward way. And I never know how to react. I can’t react - yes, I can react to it, but it all falls flat on its face and then, in response, I am absolutely not funny or even nice. I think part of it is that he just doesn’t hear you. But he can paralyze you with his wit. So much so that I just slump there limp in my chair. But it is, of course, more fun if there’s an exchange of humor.
Informants with a popular humor style, on the other hand, always liked their friends and acquaintances who had a good sense of humor. For them, a good sense of humor was not so much a question of wittiness or creativity as it was of sociability. Claudia van Leer (62, homemaker), for instance, thought that her son had a good sense of humor. This is what she meant:
He can immediately sense it, if it’s fun. He also always knows how to present it. If he comes in somewhere and he feels that everybody’s down, he knows how to turn that around right away. He can feel it so well and then he throws in a couple of small jokes. Really funny, things everyone can laugh about. And not insulting either and then the atmosphere brightens up. He does that very well.
Hanneke Meertens (38, planner) describes her brother-in-law’s brother:
My brother-in-law’s brother is someone who has a real sense of humor, believe me. He’s a joke teller, always up to something. You always end up thinking: how did he ever come up with that? There’s always something. It’s continuous, yeah, God, continuous laughter, nonstop craziness. He’s always got jokes, and they’re always ones you haven’t heard before. And yeah, he’s always got some trick up his sleeve. He makes complete idiots of everyone and of his parents, who don’t realize it. And, you know, he’s always at it, always the clown, keeping his end up. He doesn’t bore you either, not really. He’s someone who makes you think: yes, I could spend the whole day with him. That’s fun, real fun. Sociable. Always cheerful and always, well...
These people “with a good sense of humor” are the life of the party. Their humor is described as playful, pleasant, never really hurtful: “small jokes everyone can laugh at”. The descriptions show these are often joke tellers. Additionally, their humor is often described as somewhat teasing. Many descriptions include the mutual exchange of humorous insults as an important element: a form of communication, as became apparent in Chapter 3, very popular with joke tellers, and generally more popular with men. Sometimes it is very close to acting the clown:
He’s always going around needling, let’s say, being a bit of a rabble-rouser. And also with a whole lot of practical jokes. He often makes the boss look like a twit and I really like that. And he doesn’t do that in a secretive way but in a very open way, with everyone around. So the boss is also a bit of an idiot. Just a while ago he had to, they had to start finding wood for the dock. And then the boss said that wood has to be locked up otherwise someone’s going to pinch it. And he made a big fat deal of it. Okay, so, the boss he’s got a small office, so the guy had stacked up all that wood inside that little office and of course the boss couldn’t get into his office anymore. See, that’s what I really like. And so the boss started to screech about that. And the guy said: “well, that’s easy as pie, just go get a saw and make a hole in it.
(Harm Arends, 52, shipwright)
These descriptions are always about people who are sociable and in high spirits, “always cheerful”: “An acquaintance of ours, Karel, an amazing sense of humor. Laughs a lot. Light-hearted man.” (Jan Jurriaans, 72, retired director of a sports organization) Just as for the arguments in favor of popular humorists, these are not only descriptions of likable humor, but also of sociable, pleasant, exuberant persons.
Someone with a sense of humor is, in this interpretation, not only funny and sociable, he (and in this group, people only mentioned men as having a good sense of humor) is also able to take a joke: to respond well to jokes at his expense. The latter was often emphasized - again, only by men: “He can also take a joke” (Jaap van Noord). “And he’s someone who can also put up with humor, when it’s aimed at him” (Harm Arends). It is striking that this proviso comes precisely from the people who equate coarseness with vulgarity. The question of joking at someone else’s expense, and the connection between humor and the maintenance of good relations is central here, both in the negative and the positive delimitation of humor. Humor here is inseparably connected with social situations: a good humorist is social and knows how to use humor without disturbing relations: he may tease and mock but knows the limits, and knows how to deflect the impact of the jokes of others; a bad humorist disturbs the good relationships.
The highbrow and popular humor styles we found in the judgments of professional comedy, are echoed in the expectations regarding people making jokes in one’s own surroundings. Not only do the different meanings of coarseness and sense of humor correspond with the humor styles from the previous chapter, it was also the women here who showed an anomalous pattern. The use of the concepts “sense of humor” and “coarse(ness)” offers insight into the types of logic upon which humor styles are based. These logics are not only the foundation of the judgments of standardized humor but of all humor. The question is now: why are such logics so strongly connected with social class?
Of the interviewees with a highbrow style, all but one, who dropped out of university to become a carpenter, have a college level education. Generally, they do not like jokes or are indifferent to the genre. Interviewees with a popular style usually have an education below college level, although this category is more mixed, and they tend to like jokes. Also, they rated the jokes in the survey significantly higher.
People with a highbrow humor style always equated coarseness with easiness; they defined a good sense of humor in terms of wittiness. These are complementary arguments: if good humor is unexpected, creative and intellectually challenging, then simple or predictable humor is bad. Ideal and objection function here as opposites. The people who preferred sociable joke makers to witty humorists generally loved the popular humor style - and also loved jokes. Here too we see that objection and ideal are connected: bad, coarse humor was vulgar and hurtful to them. And someone who is vulgar and hurtful is certainly not a sociable joke teller.
In the use of these terms, we recognize the arguments for highbrow and popular humor styles, as described in the previous chapter. The sociable joke makers are gregarious, playful, focused on creating a feeling of fellowship and preferably not hurtful. Their humor resembles the sociable humor of popular humorists and television programs: it creates a pleasant, exuberant atmosphere. Professional or amateur humorists alike are judged on their personalities and performance rather than on content.
For the witty humorists preferred by highbrow humor lovers, content is more important than atmosphere, personality or performance. These people are on the ball, intellectual, witty, sharp rather than playful; at times they are unpleasant and not in the least sociable. Easy or corny they are not. The highbrow humor style can again be recognized in this description: quick-witted humorists, like highbrow cabaret artists, offer an intellectual stimulus that does not only have to be pleasant. Jokes at the expense of others were less problematic to highbrow humor lovers than to popular humor lovers. The central theme for the highly educated respondents was creativity and intellectual refinement. Humor, in this view, is more of an individual affair than a social event: something that, to be sure, is shared with others, but in the first instance originates from the joke maker’s individual creativity.
The place occupied by jokes in this dichotomy is obvious. Jokes are sociable rather than creative; it is easier to object to jokes because of their simplicity than because of their vulgarity. Someone who tells a joke is neither on the ball nor quick-witted - he did not think up the joke himself – but he is sociable. The telling of jokes can be disposed of as too easy - not creative, too exaggerated - but not all jokes are vulgar. The logic of the highbrow humor style thus leads its followers to reject the genre as a whole. The logic of popular humor, on the other hand, leads to the appreciation or rejection of a specific type of joke: hurtful jokes.
I am now a step closer to answering the central question of this book: where do differences in the appreciation of jokes come from? People have different expectations with regard to good and bad humor. The joke satisfies popular expectations of good humor better than it does highbrow explanations. These humor styles, like communication styles, are connected with differences in class culture. People who emphasize wittiness are more highly educated, while people who prefer sociable humor usually come from the working or lower middle classes.
The relationship with education is clearly visible here: the highbrow interpretation of coarseness and sense of humor is founded upon an appreciation of intellect and intelligence. These are arguments for “schooled” humor. In the popular understanding of humor, intellect barely plays a role. Instead, the emphasis lies on sociability: someone with a good sense of humor uses humor to be sociable and friendly, and knows how to respond in kind to jokes made by others. Someone who is coarse is unsocial, hurting others and transgressing social boundaries. The distinction between good and bad humor is seen here from a completely different perspective.
The distinctions between sociable and quick-witted humor fit, broadly speaking, with prevailing distinctions between highbrow or elite culture and lowbrow or popular culture. Comparable distinctions can be recognized in taste distinctions in the areas of art, literature, interior design and music: the contrast between simple versus intellectually challenging; original versus accessible; innovative versus conventional; upsetting versus pleasant; ironically distant versus exuberant. While the appreciation of humor cannot be equated completely with the appreciation of beauty, the aesthetic logic lying behind it seems comparable.
Highly educated people with large amounts of cultural capital test humor against the prevailing standards for High Culture. They regard humor with a keen eye that strongly resembles the aesthetic disposition. That highly educated people have a similarly distant and cerebral attitude when watching jokes in live performance and on television was already clear from the previous chapter. Now it seems that jokes in daily life are subject to a similar distanced, intellectual and aestheticized gaze. Jokes judged according to this logic fail rather quickly: the pleasure of jokes is too direct, the provocation to laugh too unambiguous„ too unchallenging, too congenial. The joke is too easy, too “coarse”.
One of the distinguishing characteristics of humor is that is always has a strong affective as well as cognitive component. A joke, or any attempt at humor, is always based on the partial resolution of an incongruity (cf. Raskin 1985; Attardo 1991; Ruch 1998): a mental switch, or shift, from one frame of reference to another. Thus, it is easy to picture humor as a purely individual mental operation, a trick of the mind.
This mental operation has a peculiarly affective and social effect: it leads to a direct and highly visible emotional response - laughter - that directly reflects and affects social relations. Moreover, whereas the exchange of humor usually has the effect of drawing people together, at the same time it often creates a certain distance vis-a-vis the topic or butt of the joke, by “not taking it seriously”. Highbrow logic tends to stress the cognitive and distancing aspects of humor, whereas lowbrow logic tends to downplay these aspects, focusing on the sociable and cohesive aspects.
Class logic à la Bourdieu can also be recognized among less educated groups. In Bourdieu’s eyes, such groups judge humor in the same way as they also judge art, music, or photography: less distantly, or more focused on the direct pleasant sensation that can be induced by something. Jokes are perfectly suited to this: the joke is an effective way to create a pleasant, humorous atmosphere. In this sense, jokes are linked to what Bourdieu terms the “popular aesthetic”, which, he argues, is “based on the affirmation of the continuity between art and life, which implies the subordination of form to function, or, one might say, on a refusal of the refusal which is the starting point of the high aesthetic, that is, the clear-cut separation of ordinary dispositions from the specifically esthetic disposition” (Bourdieu 1984: 32).
The highbrow aesthetic refuses to participate in the gratifications that the popular aesthetic instead embraces: things directly connected with daily life that yield a direct, unambiguous pleasure. In the popular humor style, standardized humor and the humor of daily life follow naturally from each other. Professional humorists are described as people, not artists. For highbrow humor lovers, the distance between the humor of daily life and standardized humor is much larger: cabaret artists are judged more as artists and less as people. Moreover, even in everyday life, the sense of humor can be uncoupled from personal value: someone with a good sense of humor may well be an unpleasant person. Art and the individual are analytically separate.
If the criteria applied by those with low and middle education to good and bad humor are seen solely in terms of their contrast with highbrow humor, an important aspect of this popular humor - and perhaps all humor - will be disregarded. Lovers of popular humor do not at all see humor as a sign of intellect, sophistication, or originality. They place their account of humor in a very different domain: the social. Both the ideal manifestation and the ultimate delimitation of humor are described in terms of their social effect. The idea of what good humor is is thus directly connected with the idea of what good communication is: once more, communication style and humor style are closely linked.
These differences between popular and intellectual styles have a significantly larger scope than just humor, or even the appreciation of everything subject to taste. The definitions of good and bad humor are connected with ideas about persoonhood, and are linked with a theme that came up in almost all the interviews: authenticity. In Western societies of the late twentieth and early twenty-first century, in which identities are not given but created and recreated all the time, authenticity, or “being yourself” has become a central theme and mission for everyone (Giddens 1991; Inglehart 1997; Wouters 2007; Aupers et al. 2010). Individuals must “express themselves”, through style, taste, as well as everyday behavior.
For all the interviewees, humor had to do with “being yourself”, expressing “who you really are”. The joke tellers saw telling jokes as something directly connected with their character - social, sociable, spontaneous, open - and saw the jokes as mirroring their personality. “You tell a joke because you like it yourself and you want to share it with everyone. I think that - yes: that you’re born with it” (Alfred Kruger, 61, sound technician). “I think that in the first place you have to like the joke yourself. If you try to tell a story that you can’t identify with then you won’t tell it well” (Otto van der Meijden, 40, wholesaler). Joke tellers too thus want to “reveal something of themselves”, both by telling jokes and through the jokes themselves.
In the descriptions of people with a sense of humor, the appreciation of humor was often directly connected with the judgment of the humorist’s personality, and the way in which their humor reflected their “self”. Anke Vermeer’s “paralyzingly witty” acquaintance is also “someone who doesn’t hear you” (and therefore not a very nice person). The sharp sense of humor of Louis Balde’s acquaintance was “built into the personality”. The humor of Zwagerman’s acquaintance has to do with the fact that he is “a very melancholy man”. Lovers of popular humor also equate humor with personality: Hanneke Meertens’ and Jan Jurriaans’ funny acquaintances are “always cheerful”. Claudia van Leer’s son always wants to “turn the atmosphere around if everybody’s down”. Evident from the quotes in the previous chapter is that humorists like van Duin are much appreciated for “how they are”.
Humor is seen as an important component of how someone is, as a part of someone’s being. Some informants used the word “authentic”, while others used related words like “spontaneous”, “original”, “creative”, “sincere”, “direct”, and “honest” - all words that point to the idea of authenticity. These characterizations suggest that people show something of themselves in their humor.
People with different humor styles, however, have different ideas about where this authenticity lies. For lovers of intellectual humor, authenticity is related to the originality of the humorist: good humorists reveal their quick, nimble-witted, sharp mind in their humor. This understanding of authenticity is close to the Romantic ideal of the creative, unique individual: one’s taste and style crystallizes in an artistic “product” outside oneself. Thus, lovers of the highbrow humor style, to some extent, also judge their peers by artistic standards.
The authenticity of the joke teller, the life of the party and of humorists like van Duin lies in their sociability and their sense of social relations. A popular humorist shows his “self” by being involved, friendly and sociable, and by contributing to a sociable atmosphere. A word much used by joke lovers was “spontaneous”: unaffected, social, not aimed at self-edification but at boosting the atmosphere. “Spontaneous” reveals a specific understanding of authenticity. Creativity does play a role in this definition, but this creativity lies in an aspect of humor not much appreciated by highly educated informants - the art of “presenting” the joke. The joke tellers always seriously prided themselves on their “own style” of telling jokes. In his narrative art, the joke teller reveals something of himself.
Thus different ideas of authenticity, spontaneity and “being yourself” flow from the popular and the highbrow humor style. To express authentic humor, those with low education use, among other things, an already existing repertoire, while the highly educated create their own repertoire - or at least, want to maintain this illusion. The fact that these gauges differ so much points once more to a cultural difference between social layers: people with different levels of education are employing a different cultural logic in their understanding of the relation between sense of humor and the self.
These ideas about authenticity relate to more general cultural differences between highly and less highly educated people. My informants without a college education spoke of people in more relational terms. Self-image, self-awareness and presentation of self were primarily discussed in terms of groups, relationships and social networks. The more highly educated respondents spoke of themselves and others primarily as individuals, set apart from social situations and relationships.
In other words: more educated informants are more individualistic than less educated people in their understanding of the sense of humor. In the literature, the social structure of the working and lower middle classes is described as closely knit and more social, whereas the culture of the (upper) middle classes is described as more individualistic (Collins 1988: 214-219, 2004; Gans 1962; Straver 1994). This leads to different understandings of personhood: as more connected with others - including through humor - or as more separate individuals whose humor springs from their individual wit.
The different humor styles are connected with a different habitus that reaches far beyond the domain of humor. Ideas that play a role in judging humor have a bearing on all social interaction. This is not a gradual difference: humor is placed in a completely different framework. For joke lovers, good humor and good interaction are part of the same domain: the domain of the sociable. The joke suits a worldview that sees relationships as central. The criterion of individual creativity and “artistic” authenticity by which more educated groups tend to judge jokes is of little value to joke lovers. Individual creativity is simply not what a joke is about: it is a form of humor with a different aim, expressing a different notion of not only good humor, but also a good self.
“The joke is a placebo”, said Freek de Jonge in his program De Grens [The Border] (1999). De Jonge, the favorite comedian of lovers of highbrow humor, thus also objects to jokes’ lack of authenticity. He sees the genre as fake or inauthentic: a substitute for real humor, humor without the active ingredient. “Placebo”, elucidates de Jonge further, “means: I will please”. For joke lovers and others with a preference for popular humor, humor must indeed be pleasant. For people with a highbrow humor style, humor does not have to please, it has to challenge.
The objection that jokes are not creative and original (already discussed in Chapter 2), dates from a later historical period than the other objections to bad humor that emerged in the course of the past centuries: lack of restraint and civilization, and lack of refinement and intellect. The origin of this criterion of personal, authentic, individual creativity lies in 19th century Romanticism. In the West, it came to dominate understandings of good personhood - particular among the higher middle classes - after the 1960s (Giddens 1991; Aupers et al. 2010).
Yet this is the objection that has definitively discredited the joke from a highbrow point of view. The emergence of the idea of authenticity as the most individual expression of personal creativity can be connected with a broader social shift that took effect primarily in the twentieth century: individualization. This broader process includes constituent processes like the “emancipation of the emotions” (Wouters 2007), and the psychologizing of one’s own, and of others’, viewpoints - processes by which the individual’s interior world was explored in greater and greater depth (Elias 2012; Wouters 2004; 2007).
Interestingly, however, the criterion of authenticity is also present among joke lovers, albeint in a different form. People who like popular humor also value professional and amateur humorists who “show something of themselves” in their humor. The cultural meanings attached to humor and authenticity are therefore not exclusively related to a “trickle down” of individualization. They are also connected with the structural conditions of the upper middle classes versus the working and lower middle classes: schooling, organization of work, and social networks. Class culture is not only related to processes of cultural distinction and the related mechanisms of status decline and social trickle down, but also to the structural realities of work, school, and everyday life. These structural conditions show markedly different levels of individual versus collective activity and engagement.
For instance, the sort of work done by college graduates generally requires more intellectual effort, as well as more independence and individual responsibility, leading to a higher degree of individualization and reflexivity (Giddens 1991). Working and lower middle class jobs often require more teamwork and cooperation as well as more, and more visible, hierarchy and less autonomy. Such structural differences are likely to lead to divergent perspectives on individuality, sociability, and personhood. Moreover, as a result of structural differences, the same process of individualization may lead to quests for very different types of authenticity and individuality.
Class cultures within one society are not separate from one another, but neither do they develop themselves purely in contrast with, or in imitation of, one another. Different class cultures have their own cultural logic. This leads to the same phenomena and processes acquiring different meanings in different groupings. This counts for a concept like authenticity, spontaneity and “being yourself”: the same concept, presumably arising under the influence of the same process of individualization, acquires different implications. The cultural logic of class cultures is not only connected with further and further advancing processes of social change, but also with tenacious, surviving, social structures related to concrete everyday social relations and realities.
The discovery of such a sharp distinction between Dutch class cultures is one of the more unexpected results of researching jokes. It is not so much the existence of the distinction that surprises as its scope: fairly fundamental differences in cultural logic apparently underlie these cultural differences. This is not to say that an absolute division into two class cultures exists in the Netherlands - two groups within one society with totally separate tastes and ideas about good, bad, funny, vulgar or corny humor. But it does seem that seemingly small social differences can have significant consequences: even small distinctions in sense of humor can have large effects on social relationships.