Metacommentary on Humour
Chair: Robert Phiddian
Early Australian Deadpan via Lectures on American Humour
Sarah Balkin, Melbourne
What We (Americans) Talk About When We Talk About Humour (Humor)
Moira Marsh, Indiana
“How did you get that?” Comedy as an Industry, Mateship and Australian Conversational Comedy Podcasts
Til Knowles, Melbourne
Comments 17
Welcome all, my name is Robert Phiddian and I have the good fortune to be chairing this extremely interesting session. Where I come from is an interest in written and visual satire, so the performance focus of these papers is tugging me a little out of my comfort zone – a good thing.
It seems to me that each of the papers touches on masculinity and aggression in humour – always something more palpable in performance, perhaps, and well worthy of further comment in discussion, I hope.
However, the particular thread I want to pick up from each of you for comment is the possibility of discussing national humour styles in a coherent way. For a long time, I have dodged such discussions because the nationalist discourses of my academic childhood played to self-congratulatory myths of national identity that were self-confirming at best, and exclusionary at worst. If a joke could be typically Irish, then another could be un-Irish; nothing said about the laconic larrikin Australian sense of humour was substantially different from the laconic Kiwi sense of humour – more dust, perhaps, less mud, but about the same number of sheep. And both Ocker and Kiwi were invisibly male and White.
Anyway, time moved on and I talked a publisher into letting me work on a book on Australian editorial cartoons. Moreover, journalists (on the odd occasion they pay me any attention) always want me to write on Australian humour. The national category keeps returning. How can we as scholars address a public desire to talk of American or Australian humour (other naitons can join in, of course) in an appropriately critical way? Without nationalist mythmaking or academic wowserism, tut-tutting at common errors and deplorable [sic] attitudes
Cheers,
Robert
Greetings Robert, and thank you for starting us off. Can we talk about national humor styles in a coherent way? I tend to doubt it, although many have tried. Certainly, vernacular belief in the existence of national styles of humor is widespread. In many nations, Australia and the U.S. among them, people have gone further and claimed that a certain style of humor is emblematic of the national character. However, from a scholarly point of view, both national humor and national character are problematic constructs. As you noted in your fine paper yesterday, any attempt to delineate a national humor style necessarily essentializes a part for the whole and obliterates the true diversity that exists in the material. Some excellent cross-cultural work has been done that compares jokes on the same topic over time and space (e.g. Galanter’s book on lawyer jokes), or using ethnographic research to discover the humor ideologies and tastes among different socioeconomic groups in the same country (Kuiper’s Good Humor, Bad Taste). Another good agenda for humor scholars is the critical unpacking of national humor myths–for instance, Elliott Oring’s history and critique of the Jewish humor concept.
Thanks for your question Robert, and also for your presentation yesterday!
To add a little to what you, Moira and Sarah have already said, I think it is helpful to look at why such narratives exist at all. Accepting that there is no coherent national “sense of humour”, yet also that there are dominant narratives about it (like those Jessica Milner Davis identifies), I am interested in how those narratives are used, upheld and challenged. As Richard White says in Inventing Australia, “when we look at ideas about national identity, we need to ask not whether they are true or false, but what their function is, whose creation they are, and whose interests they serve” (viii). The professional performance of an “Australian” humour sensibility, particularly larrikinism and mateship, can help reveal this in our contemporary context.
Hey Til, this was a fascinating look into what I think is a rich and expanding area for humour studies (since Covid lockdown means everyone and her cat seems to have a new podcast!) There is so much humour on display in this booming format and in what *seems like* a really raw form. I wonder if at some point that private, backstage feel that you talk about will be produced out of existence (as we’ve seen happen with “reality” tv over the years) and how higher production values might impact the performance of national identity and masculine mateship that you note.
(P.S. I remember you talking about your research at last year’s AHSN conference and saying: “I should present next year…” Great to see it come to fruition. Thanks and congrats 🙂 )
Thanks for your comments, Robert, which I appreciate! Those nationalist discussions of humor you point to were especially prevalent in nineteenth-century newspaper and periodical articles; one could even say they were a trope of such articles, many of which begin by saying (for example) that American humor has X characteristics of Irish humor, X of English humor, X of Native American humor, etc. They are cliche and stereotype-ridden in ways that were instructive for me because the more of them I found, the more clear it became that they were a normal and, at the time, unobjectionable way of thinking about things, as though different national humors were ingredients in the soup of American (and, later, Australian) national humor. As I sifted through early articles on Australian humor I became interested in what we might call its pre-nationalist phase, when many articles said there was no national humor yet and looked to American (and other nations) for models. I think that this kind of historicization of what Moira in her paper called “humor talk rather than humorous talk” is one way to approach national humor in a critical way.
I’m also interested in sites of analysis that complicate or don’t correspond to extant narratives about national humor, larrikinism, etc.–for example, Melissa Bellanta’s article, “The Larrikin’s Hop: Larrikinism and Late Colonial Popular Theatre” (Australasian Drama Studies 2008) talks briefly about Australian variety theatre’s seeming lack of interest in “Australianness.”
I reckon there’s a great one-day conference to be had based on Twain’s lecture tour of Australia and its coincidence with the 1890s invention of ‘Australian humour’. Especially now I know that lectures on American humour were so significant before Twain came. Literature, performance, journalism studies, cultural history… What do you think?
I think it would be fun! Though I don’t have new primary material or much of a new take on Twain specifically. But I do love lecture culture for its convergence of performance, literature, education, etc. Do you think there’s a narrative about the invention/emergence of Australian humor that is changed by thinking about Twain’s visit? I’d be keen to chat about that, if so!
I think it is a distinct possibility, though the timing might mean that some of the Twain influence might have had to have come before he arrived, as 1895 is well into the development of the Bulletin school. It wouldn’t be a simple add manganese to water story, but the trip might well have been a catalyst. this is worth chatting about, and worth looking for a proper colonial era AustLit person to inform us also.
And Moira, I was interested in your discussion of humorlessness as that’s something I’m also working on (in work on contemporary comedy, rather than what I presented in this paper, though I’m also thinking about deadpan as the performance of humorlessness). You mentioned the weaponizing of accusations of humorlessness (e.g., extremists have no sense of humor). This accusation is also often lobbied at the left (PC humorlessness) and of course at women. At the same time, I see what I am calling (after the famous nineteenth-century English attitude) a new earnestness among young people (who, for example, list social justice among their interests in online profiles). I’m interested in the ways these attitudes are reshaping comedy, as more and more comedians grapple with what isn’t funny and how or whether to make it funny.
I completely agree about the earnestness, especially on the white male left. While I find myself agreeing with just about every position Charlie Pickering takes on the Weekly, for example, I often wonder why it gets to be called humour, let alone satire.
Perhaps we are in earnest times and (an issue for Til perhaps) a lot of stand-up feels pretty exhausted as humour to me. This may just be that I’m getting older, but I need to be convinced that the professionalisation of the stand-up scene hasn’t led to a routinisation of stance and content. Obviously there are interesting exceptions, but they seem to me to be disproportionately female at the moment, despite the continued male domination of the comic demographic.
Looking forward to discussing these presentations online later today. Come and join the discussion!
1-2pm Perth
3-4pm AEST (Brisbane)
3.30pm Adelaide
4-5pm AEDT (Melbourne/Sydney/Canberra)
Zoom link https://us02web.zoom.us/j/83269611574 [Meeting ID: 832 6961 1574]
Hello Moira!
Thank you for your video-talk, which I enjoyed very much. I am a big fan of the idea of ‘unlaughter’ using it as part of my work on failed humour in interaction. In its original meaning would you say the term accounts for both rejected and unperceived humour (and everything in-between)?
Also, it may be my unfamiliarity with Google Books Ngram Viewer (this was the first time I heard of it actually), but isn’t it hard to differntiate between GB and US humo(u)r as it depends not necessarily on the writers but the publishers what kind of spelling is used in publications? Me being German, having learned British English at school and doing my PhD in England, I had to use the American spelling in a recent book chapter on humour, for example. Things like this may then distort the conclusions drawn from the Google Books Ngram Viewer data.
I am looking forward to further discussion!
Best wishes from Germany,
Sol
Hi Sol,
Good questions! I’m going to send you a reply directly from my regular email account, becasue I don’ty know how long this page will remain. More soon.
Cheers,
Moira
OK, so it appears I can’t email you directly–I don’t have your address! And the webpage seems to have rejected the detailed answer. If you write to me directly at molsmith@indiana.edu, we can talk.
Cheers,
Moira
Author
Kia ora Moira. We need to manually approve comments with links. I’ve done that now.
Ngā mihi, Lisa (admin)
Hello Sol!
Never mind—I see I don’t have your email address, so I will use this form. When you write back, please write to me directly at molsmith@indiana.edu.
As I said, these are good questions. The term “unlaughter” was coined by Michael Billig in his book Laughter and Ridicule: Towards a Social Critique of Humour (Sage, 2005). As he expressed it originally, I think he was mostly talking about responses to humor that has been recognized and understood (use the first 2 stages of Hay’s (2001) model). When I use the concept, it’s only for cases where people have recognized and understood the joke but don’t appreciate it, or are offended, or disagree with it in some way. As Hay points out, there can be both laughter and disagreement at the same time, which complicates the picture. There are various kinds of unlaughter—including ironic unlaughter (like the stylized groans that may great a pun; here a playful display of unlaughter is actually expressing humor support).
I try to avoid linking unlaughter with failed humor, necessarily. Sometimes, unlaughter from an outgroup is precisely what the humorist is looking for (I discuss tis I an article: Smith, Moira. “Humor, Unlaughter, and Boundary Maintenance.” Journal of American Folklore, vol. 122, no. 484, 2009, pp. 148-171, doi:10.1353/jaf.0.0080.
As for Google Books NGram Viewer, you can read all about it at https://books.google.com/ngrams/info#. You can search for Ngrams (single words r phrases of up to five words) in several language corpora (including German). There is a corpus for all English, and two others for US English and British English, based on the country where each book was published. I searched for both spellings of humor in both corpora.
So, the search string humor + humour: eng_us_2019,humor + humour: eng_gb_2019gives us this graph: https://books.google.com/ngrams/graph?content=humor+%2B+humour%3A+eng_us_2019%2C+humor+%2B+humour%3A+eng_gb_2019&year_start=1900&year_end=2019&corpus=26&smoothing=3&direct_url=t1%3B%2C%28humor%20%2B%20humour%3A%20eng_us_2019%29%3B%2Cc0%3B.t1%3B%2C%28humor%20%2B%20humour%3A%20eng_gb_2019%29%3B%2Cc0#t1%3B%2C(humor%20%2B%20humour%3A%20eng_us_2019)%3B%2Cc0%3B.t1%3B%2C(humor%20%2B%20humour%3A%20eng_gb_2019)%3B%2Cc0 .
To do it properly, I should add instructions to include only humo(u)r as a noun, thus eliminating false hits where it is a verb (to humor someone). The Ngram viewer permits filtering by parts of speech, but I ran out of time to do it.
Give it a try; it will eat up hours of your time!
Thanks all for a lively discussion. People should feel encouraged to keep in touch by email to pursue threads beyond the time of this excellent conference.
One thing I have particularly appreciated about this discussion of humour is the way it has stayed within culture as a necessary ground. There is a lot to be learned from the behaviourist turn in humour studies, but some fundamental things for humanities scholars to resist also.
Well done all.
Robert