The appreciation of humor often comes down to differences in taste, and a common response to humor that one does not find amusing is to deride it as being in bad taste. When it comes to art, music, literature, even furniture, no one would be surprised to learn that taste varies by socioeconomic status. Especially since Bourdieu’s seminal work on the subject, taste is also recognized as an important mechanism for creating social distinctions. With this book, sociologist Giselinde Kuipers breaks new ground in humor research by investigating the relationship between humor appreciation and the variables of age, gender, and social class. She asks, does taste in humor resemble taste in art, music, and furnishings? The answer is yes, but with a significant difference.
The main part of this study was conducted in Holland. Kuipers interviewed seventy people, about half of whom identified themselves as joke lovers. She also asked informants to rate a battery of thirty-five jokes (included in an appendix) that are representative of the Dutch joke repertoire. To provide a cross-cultural dimension to the study, she replicated this study with a sample of twenty-eight people in Philadelphia, although the IRB would not allow her to use some of the ethnic and sexual jokes in the original set.
In Holland, people differed according to age, gender, and especially social class in their ideas about what constituted good and bad humor and their preferred humor styles. Educated informants disparaged all canned jokes as loud, unoriginal, and disruptive of cooperative conversational discourse. Indeed, this group thought that jokes had little to do with humor at all. Instead, they preferred humor that was creative and intellectually challenging, even at the expense of being offensive. In contrast, the less-educated informants valued the joke as a genre very highly. They saw the goal of joke telling as enhancing sociability and creating a good atmosphere, and so for this group it was more important to avoid offense than to be original or complex.
Gender also produced clear differences in attitudes toward jokes. Both men and women viewed joke telling as a male domain, because it was too loud, rowdy, and competitive to suit the cooperative communication style preferred by women. More than one woman loved jokes and knew a lot of them, but preferred to leave the performance of them to her husband. The content and communication style of most jokes have a male heterosexual perspective, and performing jokes is a way of performing masculinity. Humor preferences are thus an explicit marker of gender differences.
Apart from gender, Kuipers found that the Dutch do not use tastes in humor as an explicit marker of social distinction. Although tastes in humor fall along the same lines of social stratification as those for music, art, and literature, the social significance of these differences is very different for humor. As Bourdieu points out, taste in music and art is not only a marker of class boundaries but also a method of distinction and social exclusion. Everyone acknowledges highbrow standards of taste as the ones that count. For humor, in contrast, Kuipers found two separate and mutually incompatible standards of taste (“lowbrow” and “highbrow”) among the educated and uneducated classes in her Dutch sample. Lowbrows did not view highbrow humor tastes as superior to their own or wish to emulate it. Instead, they failed to see highbrow humor as humorous at all and pitied highbrows for their seeming inability to enjoy jokes.
Kuipers argues that humor, unlike other aesthetic domains of culture, is almost always used as a method of inclusion. Whereas art and music can be enjoyed in isolation, humor is usually shared with others. Since all humor is transgressive in one way or another (“good humor always implies some bad taste” [248]), successful humor performances create what she calls a “tiny conspiracy” between performer and audience, as both join in accepting the transgression.
The Dutch study was originally published in Holland. For this English translation, Kuipers added a chapter reporting on the relationship between humor styles and social background in the United States. Although the American sample size is small, this addendum offers an interesting cross-cultural dimension to the study. Not surprisingly, she found that the relationship between social class and tastes in humor is much less marked in the United States than in Holland. Unlike the Dutch, Americans of every educational level in her sample evaluated jokes from a moral perspective, which overrode both aesthetic and social considerations. The Americans tended to associate having a sense of humor with being a good (moral) person, constructing bad humor as immoral and condemning it in stronger terms than the Dutch. However, the specific limits of what constitute good and bad humor were much more variable among the American group.
My final comment is addressed to Mouton de Gruyter rather than the author, because the book appears not to have been copyedited. Some endnotes do not match the text, and there are numerous typographical errors, some of them serious enough to interfere with the sense. In a book that retails for $132, one expects better production values. That said, this is a valuable and insightful contribution to the scholarship on jokes and humor that opens up many possibilities for future research.
References Cited
Bourdieu, Pierre.
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[Review length: 888 words • Review posted on February 20, 2008]