This is a revised and updated version of a book that appeared in 2006 in Mouton de Gruyter’s Humor Research series. This book, in turn, was a revised and expanded edition of a 2001 Dutch book, which showed how differences in sense of humor mirror and reproduce social divisions in Dutch society. The Dutch study looked in particular at the appreciation of the joke, a genre that is quite contested in the Netherlands and strongly demarcates boundaries of gender and social class.
In addition to this study of Dutch humor styles and joke telling, the English book presented the results of a similar, though smaller, study of social differences in the sense of humor in the United States. In the US, like in the Netherlands, the sense of humor is clearly related to social background. However, American humor styles mark different social boundaries, and they do so in in different ways. The joke genre is neither very contested nor associated in particular with a social group or boundary. While class divisions were less prominent, sense of humor was connected rather strongly to race, age and gender. In general, the comparison showed that Americans and Dutch have different standards for good humor. Consequently, they also have different understandings of bad humor, and bad taste.
Since the publication of the first English edition, there has been a growing interest in the study of humor and comedy in sociology and adjacent fields like media and communication studies. Moreover, increasing globalization has sparked interest in cultural differences in sense of humor, and the consequences of such differences. This interest was intensified through dramatic events like the 2006 global “humor scandal”, the wave of international indignation after the publication of twelve Danish cartoons (purportedly) showing the prophet Muhammad (Lewis et al. 2008). However, the rising interest in cultural differences in humor is inspired most of all by the increasing international flows of people, media, images and ideas. These confront us with other people’s senses of humor – sometimes causing bafflement or indignation, often provoking laughter and delight.
Good Humor, Bad Taste shows how, in the wide domain of things that potentially make us laugh, each culture and each group carves out a specific niche: some themes or forms of expression are identified as typically funny or humorous, whereas other attempts to induce laughter are deemed odd or off limits. In a surprising number of languages, including English and Dutch, this domain of “things that most typically make us laugh” is called “humor” (or something very much like that). But this shared label often refers to different things. As this book shows, even people living in one small and fairly homogeneous country may have very different – and quite incompatible – understandings of good humor. And although people from different countries like the Netherlands and the US may easily find common ground through humor, the differences in how they understand humor are considerable. Such cultural differences in sense of humor are subtle and sometimes difficult to grasp, but they reflect fundamental differences in worldview, and their consequences may be far-reaching.
This book engages with two very different strands of scholarly inquiry: the sociology of taste, and the study of humor appreciation and production. The latter has traditionally been studied by philosophers, and in the 20th century has become almost exclusively the domain of psychologists.
I argue that the sense of humor is not exclusively an individual characteristic, as philosophers and psychologists generally assume. While there are individual variations in both use and appreciation of humor, we need others to acquire and express our sense of humor. People learn how to laugh, and how to provoke laughter, from those around them. They are encouraged by their laughter, adapting their jokes and witticisms to suit the tastes of others. They shape their “invitations to laugh” into molds and forms invented by others, genres formed over the course of generations. Moreover, people are constrained by the rejections and objections of others, avoiding forms of humor that fall flat or meet with indignation. Some people’s attempts at humor are lauded, whereas for other categories of people - notably women - the use of humor is often discouraged. Thus, everybody’s sense of humor comes to reflect the standards of those around them. Rather than an individually unique personality characteristic, each individual’s sense of humor is simultaneously made possible and confined by social and cultural conditions and conventions.
Good Humor, Bad Taste also shows that many categories used in psychological research on the sense of humor are culture-specific. First, social background characteristics like age, gender or class (“SES”) are not universal categories: their meaning, importance and implications vary greatly across context. For instance, gender does not mean the same in the US and the Netherlands: gender differences in humor appreciation in the US are more pronounced, and expressed in different ways. This calls into question the many sweeping generalizations about male and female humor, often made on the basis of American studies.
Similarly, different standards in the field of humor may cause the same humor style or humorous expression to have different consequences in different contexts. Dutch informants were generally more appreciative of transgressive or “hard” humor than Americans. Consequently, the negative effects of “aggressive” humor styles reported in American and Canadian studies (cf. Martin et al. 2003) may, again, be culturally specific. In the Netherlands, transgressive and aggressive humor is likely to have fewer negative social consequences because it is not socially sanctioned, but instead appreciated.
This book also calls attention to the importance of genre in humor appreciation and production. Traditionally the domain of literary scholars, genre has been overlooked by the majority of humor scholars. Genre plays an important role in the creation and appreciation of humor: it communicates humorous intent to others, and provides templates for expressing humor. The joke genre, in particular, is an almost universally understood, flexible humorous form that can accommodate a virtually endless range of humorous themes and techniques.
However, as this study shows, genre is not neutral. A genre carries associations with certain groups and settings, and often has a particular social status or value. Jokes are the “fruit flies” of humor research (Kuipers 2008): they are often used in experiments and surveys. But culturally specific meanings of this genre may have affected the outcomes of research based on jokes. The joke is strongly gendered, and in the Netherlands as well as many other European countries is considered low status. Moreover, this study demonstrated that genre itself is an important factor in the liking of humor, in addition to more recognized psychological mechanisms like identification or transgression.
The second field with which this book engages is the sociology of taste. This is a well delineated field: strongly inspired by the work of the French sociologist Pierre Bourdieu, its central assumption is that taste differences demarcate and uphold social boundaries. This assumption also forms the foundation of this book. Good Humor, Bad Taste argues that humor, and its most coveted effect, laughter, are among the strongest markers of inclusion and exclusion. Who laughs belongs; who does not join the laughter is - visibly and tangibly - left out. To most informants, however, the inclusive effect of humor and laughter was more important. Rather than as marking boundaries with other groups, humor is experienced - and often intended - as a means to create a sense of belonging, togetherness, and sociability.
The importance of inclusion, rather than exclusion, through humorous communication may be related to the sample. In contrast with most sociological studies of taste, I started my interviews among people who were mostly of lower middle class or working class background: Dutch joke tellers. Moreover, I queried them at length about things about which they felt competent, qualified and even proud to speak: humor and jokes. Only later did I realize how unusual this sample was. Most sociological studies show an overrepresentation of middle class informants, who are interrogated by equally middle class researchers.
As Bourdieu has argued, and many studies have confirmed since then, good taste is an obsession of the (upper) middle classes: they most often reject and judge others on the basis of taste (cf. Friedman and Kuipers 2013; van den Haak 2014). The middle-class bias in sociological research therefore may overstate the distinctive effect of taste. Both in the Netherlands and the US, people with less cultural capital often judge people on grounds other than taste and style. Humor, to them, is not primarily a test of one’s cultural competence, but a way of relating to others. This shifts the focus from boundary-marking to solidarity and togetherness (although this may, of course, lead to many forms of exclusion).
This book therefore calls into question one of the central claims of Bourdieu’s Distinction, which is echoed in many later sociological studies of taste: the general acceptance of a “legitimate taste”. Dutch people of working class or lower middle class backgrounds are not necessarily convinced of the value of upper middle class tastes and lifestyles. Neither are they automatically inclined to adopt or emulate them. Although they sometimes may feel excluded or puzzled by “highbrow” humor, they are more likely to be indifferent to it. Instead, many Dutch interviewees of lower class background were proud of their sense of humor, and sometimes appeared to pity the “restrained” intellectuals with their “difficult” comedians. The politics of class distinction is countered by a widely shared belief, in the Netherlands as well as the US, that “common people” have a better sense of humor.
The Dutch research was carried out in the final years of the 20th century, a time of optimism and seemingly endless economic growth. It was easy to believe that Dutch society was classless then, as ever-growing prosperity had softened social divides. The American study was done only a few years later, but in a different time: in 2002–3, shortly after the attacks on the World Trade Center of September 11, 2001. The country was shifting from the intense period of post-9/11 solidarity to the social and political polarization caused by the impending invasion of Iraq and the person and the politics of President George W. Bush.
In hindsight, the interview and survey results reflect the period in which they were conducted. The Americans were maybe more a little more moral, more inclined to deny social divides in the aftermath of 9/11. But the interviews also show the rising importance of political humor as the marker of new social cleavages. The Daily Show, a late-night comedy show on a relatively small cable network (but with a good website) emerged as a focal point for critical politics. The Dutch, safe in their prosperity, relatively shielded from the influences of globalization, could easily discuss class differences as if they had no social consequences. Ethnic humor could still be banned from the public domain, including the internet, by force of consensus and moral pressure (Kuipers 2006b).
The times have changed, and so has the humor. Of course, this preface cannot give a full overview of changes in humor in the past ten to fifteen years. However, I will highlight some important new developments.
As I have not lived in the US for longer periods since 2003, changes in American humor styles are relatively difficult to trace for me. However, several authors have described how the increasing political polarization of American society in the early 2000s is reflected in humor (Lewis 2006; Gournelos and Greene 2011). The American study already foreshadowed this. Some political jokes were appreciated differently by Republicans and Democrats, and political humor appeared as a genre favored mainly by more educated (and more liberal) people.
The past decade has also brought a host of new “sophisticated” comedy and satire, which combines liberal politics with “clever” humor (cf. Gray et al. 2009). This suggests that the new political divide in American humor also has a class component, separating educated liberals from what seems to be a more diffuse group that is, on average, less liberal, less educated, but possibly also older and less urban or metropolitan. Evidently, more research would be needed to untangle the complicated intersection of social background factors here. Certainly, humor mirrors a significant cultural change here, highlighting both old and new social cleavages in American society.
In the Netherlands, the main trends in the field of humor since 2000 are probably the increasingly general acceptance of “hard humor” and the diversification of humor tastes. In general, Dutch humor styles have become more globally - or rather, American or British - oriented. Imported humor is increasingly integrated into existing humor styles. The intellectual humor style is an easy match with the American political humor à la The Daily Show, and some American comic movies fit seamlessly into the popular humor style. Thus, for most people existing styles appear to remain intact, but are supplemented with humor imported from the UK and the US.
This period has also seen a crystallization of a humor style specific to younger people. The beginnings of this style were already visible in the late 1990s, for instance in the preference for “hard” and short humor among the young. This style has become more firmly institutionalized, especially with the 1997 founding of BNN, a broadcasting corporation especially for the young known for its irreverent, transgressive, fast and internationally oriented humor. This youth-oriented humor style is neither particularly lowbrow nor highbrow, but distinguishes itself mainly on the axis of civilized and slow versus “transgressive” and fast humor. It is self-consciously international in orientation, and strongly connected with American and British comedy culture. Characteristic of younger people also is the mixing of mediated and spontaneous humor, and what appears to be a high valuation of “comedy savvy”, a wide knowledge of comedy and (international) comic culture.
The most striking development since the late 1990s has been the emergence in the public domain of ethnic humor targeting migrants and their descendants. While I found many ethnic jokes in the late 1990s they were hardly ever told in public. At times, the telling of such jokes was accompanied by more serious endorsements of the negative attitudes towards the groups targeted. But just as often, people (especially the less educated joke lovers) appeared to enjoy these jokes precisely because of their clandestine nature.
In the early 2000s, a series of rather drastic political shifts occurred in the Netherlands, including a hardening of the political climate, and the rapid rise of anti-immigrant and anti-EU political parties (for an overview and analysis see Kuipers 2012; 2013). This also entailed an attack on “politically correct” language, and a radical shift in ethnic discourse. Where circumspection previously was the norm, now the aesthetic of “hard humor” became applied to ethnic humor, also in the public domain, on the internet, and by young, critical comedians. The Dutch taste for “hard” humor was often cited as a prime example of Dutch national identity. People of ethnic minority origin were called upon to “take the joke” in order to prove their Dutchness - and their sense of humor.
In general, class divisions have become more visible and more widely debated in the Netherlands. The rise of anti-immigrant and anti-EU parties are widely interpreted in terms of class, as revealing a long suppressed opposition between cosmopolitan, educated intellectuals and less educated, nationally oriented locals. Attitudes towards ethnic and cultural difference are a central marker in this division. In this respect, the dramatic shift in the treatment of ethnic humor is telling.
In the 1990s, my less educated interviewees grudgingly accepted the strict regime regarding ethnic humor. But they did not subscribe to it, in the same way as they wholeheartedly subscribed to the regime of “being careful” around women. This grudging acceptance of a norm that was not theirs reflected the dividing line that has come to dominate Dutch politics since then. At the time, it was hardly noticeable: submerged sentiments, invisible in the public domain. The dramatic emergence of ethnic humor (and ethnic resentment) provides rather convincing evidence of the “barometer” thesis of humor. Jokes - and the discourse surrounding them - reveal what people care about, including the things that are not out in the open.