When a joke is told, its audience is invited – or coerced – into supplying the background required for the joke to succeed. A joke can be very simple, or very complex. It can require a great deal to be understood, or it can require very tittle. But it will always require something, and the audience will have to supply that something if the joke is to get across. The very dynamics of joke telling and hearing require that these things be left unsaid, but that they be presupposed and that the audience supply them.
What are these things? Of course, you will have to understand the language in which the joke is told, and you may have to understand some other languages as well, if, for instance, the joke incorporates phrases in French or German or Yiddish. And if the joke makes references to certain kinds of people-say, astronauts, or Jews, or Republicans, or Poles-then you will have to be familiar with certain facts about these people and, perhaps, various stereotypes of such people. And you may have to know of certain locations and their characteristics.
In sum, there are a great many things you will have to know, or believe, or be familiar with, and possibly some prejudices you must entertain, in order for the joke to succeed with you. Some of these things you will have to supply just in order to understand the joke, and some will be required if you are to find the joke funny.
I will give just one example. It is a joke whose intricacies are rather simple but, in some respects, very complex.
Abe and his friend Sol are out for a walk together in a part of town they haven’t been in. Passing a Christian church they notice a curious sign in front saying “$1,000 to anyone who will convert.”
“I wonder what that’s about,” says Abe. I think I’ll go in and have a look. I’ll be back in a minute; just wait for me.”
Sol sits on a sidewalk bench and waits patiently for nearly half an hour, and then Abe reappears.
“Well,” asks Sol, “what are they up to? Who are they trying to convert? Why do they care? Did you get the $1,000?”
Indignantly, Abe replies, “Money. That’s all you people care about.”
I doubt that you have much trouble understanding this joke, but it is worth noting just how much you had to bring to the joke. In the first place, you have to recognize “Abe” and “Sol” as Jewish names. In the second place, you have to be familiar with a stereotype of Jews that assigns to them an overweening interest in money. And there is a further layer of complexity you may not yet have noticed. just what stereotype is this? Does Abe, now that he’s converted, hold a stereotype of Jews, that, presumably, he did not have before he converted? Or does Abe now think he is supposed to embrace a certain view because that is the view held by Gentiles, and he is now a Gentile? Understood in one way, the stereotype is one held by Gentiles about Jews, and in the other, rather more complicated understanding, it is a stereotype held by Jews about Gentiles (that is, it is a supposition Jews make to the effect that Gentiles have a stereotype about Jews).
However you understand the dynamics of this joke and however much you may like it (or not), you will agree, I hope, that a considerable background is required of all who get the joke, and that background is presupposed and invoked by whoever tells the joke.
If I am right about that, then it is not hard to argue that part of what happens when a joke succeeds is that its audience is brought to recognize that it shares certain things with the joke teller, and then indeed the teller and all who like the joke may be thought of as what I call “a community of intimacy.” And part of the kick in joke telling – a good part of the deep satisfaction available to people who traffic in jokes-is their implicit awareness that they are joined to one another.
This kind of communitarian response is scarcely the province only of jokes. It has a great deal to do with a number of human enterprises, conspicuous among which are religious occasions and the experience of works of art. Imagine yourself at the Lyric Opera, listening to Bryn Terfel sing Figaro in The Marriage of Figaro and thinking that you may be hearing the best performance ever of the best opera ever. It will mean a great deal to your sense of all this that you are aware of the rest of the audience as they join you in this unspoken response. Or think of the congregational responses and initiatives you may undertake in church or synagogue, and what it means that you undertake these recitations along with others, and how different it feels to be doing that from how it feels to be doing these things alone – not that solitary experiences are to be despised, but that they are different.
With jokes, this communitarian aspect is at the center of the dangers involved in joking. The two principal dangers are that (1) as a joke teller you may invite your audience to join you and they may not come in, and (2) as a joke hearer you may find yourself entering a community that you wish to remain outside. In the first case, it is instructive to ask just what is the significance of this kind of failure, the issuing of an invitation that is not accepted. In the second case, we find ourselves asking just what is wrong with jokes that are, as we say, in bad taste. The whole business of joking – the telling, the hearing, the creation of them, the performance of them-is very much like the whole business of art, where all these questions also arise.
To deal with the first danger, just what has happened when you tell a joke and it falls flat? Well, why have you expected the joke to succeed? Because it’s funny, you say, but what can that mean except that you yourself find it funny, and even if it is supposed to mean more than that, say, that the joke truly is funny, what evidence do you have for that besides the fact that you and maybe some other people find it funny? The person you’ve just told it to doesn’t laugh. What has happened, or not happened?
It must be this: You have presupposed something in that person on the strength of its being in you, and you’ve found that it isn’t there. Is this like showing a red object to someone who is color blind? The red color was seen by you, but it isn’t seen by that person. And that is because of a capacity you have that the other person doesn’t have.
Of course in the case of seeing colors, we are prepared to say that it is in some sense right or normal to see red when presented with this object, and so this person’s capacity is judged deficient. But what would justify ascribing a deficiency to someone just because the fellow didn’t laugh at your joke? Perhaps you will say, -He has no sense of humor.” But what makes you think so? Evidently he doesn’t have your sense of humor, but so what?
This question insinuates two specific questions, the first of which has already arisen. It is, Why do you expect us to laugh at what you laugh at? The other question is, Why do you care that we laugh when you laugh? The more general versions of these two questions are, Why do you expect anyone to feel about things the way you feel? And, Why do you care that others feel as you do?
It is not so hard to say why you expect others to feel as you do. It must be because you think that, at least in the relevant respects, the others are like you. When something funny or entertaining comes on television, you call to others to come and watch because you think that they will enjoy it just as you do. Why do you expect that? Because you think that they are like you, or at least enough like you to respond as you do to this bit of television.
It is harder to say why you care that others share your responses. It is extremely important to recognize that if they do not share your responses, you will not be able to indict them for some error. They will not have made a mistake. They would have made a mistake if, for instance, you had presented them with a sound argument and they had not acceded to your conclusion. But it is not like that with these affective responses to the world. People are not wrong because they don’t swoon, as you do, at a beautiful sunset. But then, to return to the question, why do you care whether they swoon? Why do you care whether they like the television program you’ve called them in to watch?
I have a guess: I think you want and need them to respond as you do because you need them to be like you, and you need that because you need some reassurance that your humanity is shared and not just an eccentricity of yours. One of the things accomplished when a joke succeeds is the creation of a community of people enough like one another to be laughing at the same thing. That is a precious achievement, certainly not to be despised, and miraculously available in such a small matter as the telling of a joke.
The second question is what to make of it when a joke invites you into a community you do not wish to join. It seems to me very difficult to say just what is wrong with such jokes. The standard explanations of what is wrong seem utterly unconvincing. The first is the complaint that such a joke says that Poles are stupid, or that Jews are immoral, or that black men are sex-crazy, or something like that; and the problem with this complaint is that it is false. It is false because the joke doesn’t say any of those things. It can’t, because a joke is a fiction, a very, very short story, and the competent reader (or hearer) of a fiction does not suppose that its sentences are meant to be – or pretend to be – true.
It would be an almost unaccountable conceptual error to object, say, to Moby Dick on the ground that there never was a man named Ishmael who went to sea on a whaling ship called the Pequod. And surely this would be the same kind of error as it would be to blame a joke for saying that last year in Warsaw a Polish doctor performed an appendix transplant.
The other standard explanation complains that jokes purvey and perpetuate stereotypes that are harmful to the people so stereotyped. This is a slightly more plausible explanation, but I find it unconvincing for two reasons: First, I’m not sure that the jokes do anything to encourage stereotyping. Indeed, it is only because the stereotypes are already there that the jokes can succeed. And second, it is not at all clear to me what is wrong with having these stereotypes exploited.
I myself am neither anti-Semitic nor anti-Polish, and yet I am fully capable of appreciating these
jokes. You must be familiar with the stereotypes if you are to understand the jokes, but you don’t have to believe anything. I am familiar with dozens of stereotypes –of Jews, of Germans, of French intellectuals, of British left-wingers, of American Irish, of Asian Indians, of American Southerners, of Southern Californians, and on and on – without believing any of them if they are taken as general propositions, which is virtually never how a stereotype is taken.
And yet there is something to the idea that the joke is somehow “anti-Polish” as there is something to the idea that Shakespeare’s play The Merchant of Venice is “anti-Jewish.” But what is there to these ideas? What is there to the idea-right or wrong-that it is somehow disagreeable to find the Polish joke funny, or to be moved by Shakespeare’s play?
I think that this is a way to begin to understand these ideas. There is something to the idea that a suitable audience for The Merchant of Venice would be people who think that Jews hate Christians, that Jews want to harm Christians, and that Jews are revenge-minded beyond all reason. And there is something to the idea that a suitable audience for that Polish joke would be people who believe that Poles are intellectually so misguided that one of them might think that the entire point in organ transplant is simply to substitute a healthy organ for a defective one, without regard to what good it might do the patient to receive the new organ.
So here I am, neither anti-Semitic nor possessed of a poor opinion of Poles, somehow feeling that in liking The Merchant of Venice or in laughing at that joke, I am joining a community made up of anti-Semites and anti-Poles. I do not belong in such a community, and I do not want to be there. Thus I find it unsettling to appreciate this play and this joke, because in doing so I am, seemingly perforce, joining these communities. Politics, they say, makes strange bedfellows. So do jokes. And there are people one would rather not be in bed with.
Sometimes you know exactly how the bed is made. I have friends who are strongly committed antiracists, who are fair-minded and generous people, and who have optimistic views of all kinds of people, of all races and ethnicities. And yet some of those friends and I do, from time to time, enjoy racist jokes, anti-Semitic jokes, jokes about women, and many other dangerous kinds of jokes. When we laugh together, there is no doubt that we are not a community of racists: We are just enjoying the wit and cleverness of the joke. But the same joke, with other audiences, may leave us feeling uneasy, because we are not so sure of just what the others are bringing to the joke, and what it may suggest about us that we are joining them.
This sort of possibility exists with regard to things besides jokes. For example, I am one of those who are sick and tired of all the loving attention lavished on the Notre Dame football team, and I very much enjoy seeing the Fighting Irish lose football games. And I’m glad to watch those losses in the company of others who want Notre Dame to lose. But what if some people in the company are viciously anti-Catholic, and enjoy Notre Dame’s defeat because they hate those mackerel-snapping, Pope-loving idolators? What then? Well, it may make me quite uneasy to suppose that I am being taken to be like those other fellows just because, like them, I want Notre Dame to lose.
And that’s the way it is- dangerous, without guarantees. You can offer a joke as a way of creating a community, or evincing one, that includes your audience and you, but there may well be the chance that the community has a foundation you don’t share. There is real delight in joke telling, and the rich reward of uncovering a common humanity; but there is always the chance that things will go wrong.
There is one final aspect of this topic I’d like to introduce: Someone who is upset by a joke, say even deeply offended, may well complain, “That’s not funny.” The question is, Is that true? Surely there are lame attempts at joking that result in things that just aren’t funny, but the case I have in mind is not like that, I’m thinking of some particularly vicious joke, say a racist joke, or a very unkind joke about women. Suppose that joke strikes someone so negatively that he or she is moved to say that it isn’t funny.
The first point to make is simply this: If the joke isn’t funny, then why do some people laugh at it? There seems to me no doubt that those people, at least, find it funny. Are they mistaken? How can people be mistaken about whether they find something funny? Is it, perhaps, wrong to find some things funny? Is it taking something that isn’t funny to be funny? This would be like taking something to be, say, red, when the thing really isn’t red. Then a person who finds the wrong things funny is like a person whose color vision is defective. I find it very hard to credit this.
There certainly are cases in which I am prepared to say that there is something pathological in someone’s sense of humor. Think of someone who finds it funny when others are in pain. Such a person is indeed defective.
But I’m not at all sure it’s like that with offensive jokes. Now this is not to say that you must tolerate jokes you find offensive – that you should think it a defect of yours not to be able to stand them. But neither should you be so quick to condemn someone who gets a kick out of such jokes. Why not just say that the joke is indeed funny, or at least it’s funny to some people, and indeed you may yourself be able to find the fun in it, but it also disturbs and distresses you, so much that you would rather not hear it and you certainly won’t tell it. It is, then, no more or less than a funny thing you don’t like.
This seems a little messy, and one might have wished for a sharper distinction, some mark that separates the funny from the not-funny, with the funny consisting of jokes we all like. One might wish for that, but, I think, one can’t have it. It just is messy: There are funny things we don’t all like, just as there are appreciable works of art we don’t all appreciate, and decent people some of us can’t stand. Messy, that’s what it is. And that’s what it should be, because it is part of life, and life is messy – messy, difficult, and dangerous. Find your fun where you can, and hope to be joined in the fun by others. I know of no better place to look than to jokes. A joke is a small kind of thing that stands for a very great deal.
