On Joking

This reading was extremely funny.  As I read it, I frequently found myself laughing out loud, and then sharing what I found funny with my roommate.  A few pages in, I realized that what I was doing proved a point that the author was trying to make: jokes are important to us, as is the sharing of them.

Why had I never realized this before?  Why had I never stopped to think about why we joke?  Perhaps it’s because joking is something I have always taken for granted.  I've always been surrounded by jokes.  Some of my earliest memories are of annoying my parents with knock-knock jokes.  As I grew older, I discovered stand-up comedians, who make an entire career of joking.  Jokes are everywhere, constantly being told and retold, constantly evolving as people come up with their own variations. While I was reading On Joking, I was amazed that I had never truly stopped to think about joking itself, what purpose it may serve, or why we even joke at all.

One interesting point that the book made was that when we hear a joke that we enjoy, we save it in our memory, and immediately think something along the lines of “Oh! So-and-so would love this!”  As I mentioned earlier, this desire to share jokes was exemplified by my showing portions of the reading that I found especially funny to my roommate and reading some of the little jokes at the bottom of the pages to her.  We do store jokes away in our minds.  We either put them away with a future recipient in mind, or we simply save them for a rainy day.  When we pass a joke on, we get a little amusement from the joke itself, but most of our enjoyment comes from making the other person laugh.

I think that I’m done with my not-quite-philosophical rambling for now, and I’d like to take a closer look at how On Joking differs from Morreall's book in its interpretation of the theories of humor.  The authors of this reading seemed to view the three theories as more of a spectrum than as three separate entities.  While Morreall sought to find one theory to explain all of humor, this reading showed how each can be used in examining a joke holistically.  A joke or instance of laughter may be caused in part by all or only one of the superiority, incongruity, or relief theories.  These reasons for laughter can be experienced one at a time, or simultaneously.  I feel like this way of looking at the three theories allows one to paint a more accurate picture of how humor is used in our everyday lives.

On Joking was both amusing and thought provoking; it forced me to step back and take a closer look at an aspect of my life that I’m not always consciously aware of.  It also gave me tools with which I could (assuming that I wanted to) accurately assess a joke and what exactly makes it funny to me.