Christie Davies, Emeritus Professor of Sociology, University of Reading, has been studying jokes for more than thirty years, and his latest book is nothing short of masterful. In it, he seeks to explain why some groups are targets of jokes while others are not, and why some jokes migrate from one society to another while others do not. He considers jokes in the aggregate, identifying patterns in which groups are targeted, and how. Davies asserts that these patterns are sociological facts and as such can only be explained by other sociological facts. He assembles large sets of jokes on similar themes, determines how long each set has existed and how far it has spread, and ties these data to history, material circumstances, and sociological contexts.
Davies demonstrates that jokes that depict target groups as stupid or oversexed are generic, migrating from one setting to another and changing targets along the way. This category, which includes most of the texts that are labeled “ethnic” jokes, he calls “jokes in search of a target” (253). Davies devotes his first chapter to these jokes, revisiting and revising the general theory he put forth in Ethnic Humor around the World in 1990. In the following chapters he applies his method to specific joke cycles about blonds, JAPs, men who have sex with men, lawyers, and finally Soviet jokes. In each case, he argues that the joke cycle arose in response to specific social and cultural contradictions and incongruities.
Davies observes that jokes are neither universal nor spread randomly. Why is it, for example, that the French are targets of jokes about their alleged sexual habits, but no other nationality is? Davies finds the answer in history, tracing the jokes back to the eighteenth century when the French court was a highly visible scene of hedonistic leisure, including sex. Jokes about blonds and sex date from the late seventeenth century, but the wave of stupid blond jokes only arose in the early 1990s because of tension between traditional sex roles and the instrumental demands of modern occupations. The comparative approach is similarly applied to JAP and JAM jokes, which Davies argues originated among American Jews as rates of intermarriage were rising, highlighting the conflict faced by American Jews between the American cultural preference for free choice in marriage versus Jewish requirements for endogamy. Davies argues that jokes about men who have sex with men are about masculinity and power rather than sex, and suggests that they express contradictions between power and status that are based on social class versus those based on masculinity.
Unlike the generic jokes in search of a target, lawyer jokes have not migrated. This cycle arose in the United States alone in the 1980s, and although they are told in other countries, they have not been adapted to their new locales but remain explicitly American jokes. Davies ties the rise of this cycle to the increase in the numbers of lawyers and civil law cases in the 1960s through the 1980s in the United States compared to other countries. The cultural contradiction in this case lies between Americans’ idolizing of their legal system and a reality that often falls short of their high expectations.
Finally, Davies turns to Soviet jokes and the role that jokes allegedly play in bringing down repressive regimes. He finds that there were fewer jokes in the period from 1928 through the death of Stalin in 1956 than in the relatively relaxed period from 1956 to the fall of the regime under Gorbachev, which contradicts the thesis that such jokes are the direct product of repression. In Davies’ opinion, it is “a foolish sentimental myth” (246) to believe that jokes could bring about the fall of an entire political order like the Soviet Union. "Jokes are a very, very, weak force in a world of much stronger forces," he states, and those who emphasize the power of humor are merely trying to make their own work look more important (246).
“Jokes are the aspirin of the people,” Davies avers (248). That is not to say that jokes are unimportant—they are, as witness the terrible risks that people in the Soviet bloc took to tell jokes that mocked the regime. Jokes are generally not profound or socially significant, he says, but it is still important to study them because they are so widespread, afford so much pleasure, and exhibit such orderly patterning without any institutional shaping. Davies is scathing about political wickedness and scholarly humbug equally. In addition to the “wit as a weapon” ideology, he roundly criticizes those who explain jokes as expressions of anger or anxiety, without providing independent evidence of those feelings. It is refreshing to encounter such direct criticism of shoddy argument.
This is a quantitative study, but readers will find no bristling statistical apparatus here, only rough approximations that describe a set of jokes as being rare in one place or before a certain date or very common in another place or period. Such rough numbers might mislead the reader into thinking that the author is guessing, but the copious citations give the lie to that impression. Davies draws on folklore archives, websites, popular joke books, a voluminous bibliography of scholarly humor studies (twenty pages in a very small font), and decades of personal experience collecting jokes, a trove of data that uniquely qualifies him to say definitively how long a particular joke theme has been in circulation and how far it is distributed. He explains that "to specify actual numbers would be merely to provide a misleading pretense to a greater precision and greater sampling than is possible" (13), and this seems true. Jokes are so ubiquitous and at the same time so fleeting that it is impossible to obtain a reliable sample for a meaningful fine-grained statistical breakdown.
Davies deploys an impressive array of sources and scholarship to explain cross-cultural joke patterns, but he wears this erudition lightly—I counted just one footnote in 314 pages. The writing is crisp, clear, and frequently very funny, quite apart from the numerous joke texts themselves. Further study might overturn the particular explanations he provides for the rise of each of the joke cycles covered here, but any such study will need to follow Davies’ method. Not easy, but very worthwhile.
Works Cited
Davies, Christie. 1990. Ethnic Humor around the World: A Comparative Analysis. Bloomington: Indiana University Press.
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[Review length: 1064 words • Review posted on November 12, 2014]