“I like jokes” remarks the hero of Peter Ustinov’s play Romanov and Juliet, alerting the audience at once to the fact that he has no sense of humor. Liking jokes doesn’t exactly prove you have no sense of humor, but most social theorists won’t give you the benefit of the doubt. Humor is a broad-spectrum concept and jokes are only one of its departments. The progenitor of a recent mathematical formula for happiness has incorporated a variable “H” standing for “higher order needs,” and humor is taken to be one of these. A sense of humor is the thing women say they most like in a man, but that certainly doesn’t mean that they want to marry a stand-up comedian. What they mean is someone who doesn’t explode in rage at their latest adventure with the joint credit card.

Jokes are under suspicion for many reasons. Not only are they a rather plebeian form of jocularity, but the theorists are busy looking for the passions—probably deplorable—concealed beneath the guffaw. The philosopher Hobbes was one of the first. He defined laughter as “sudden glory,” assimilating it no doubt to our amusement at seeing people slip on banana skins. Freud thought that a joke was a sneaky way of defeating repression, of saying what was otherwise unsayable. It has been the direly literal-minded twentieth century that took these possibilities to heart. Ethnic jokes seemed to insult other races, and perhaps, under a light dusting of laughter, that might be their point! Thus did political correctness add another province to its empire.

It is indeed true that aggression sometimes clothes itself in pretended laughter. Human beings are both laughing animals and also creatures that delight in a sense of superiority, and the one characteristic can conceal the other. Poor James Bond had a little finger broken by a torturing brute in a early novel; as Bond cried out, his tormentor sneered: “Where’s ya sensayuma?” The political activist in London who recently took a bat to a statue of Margaret Thatcher and lopped off its head described his act as a piece of artistic expression adding: “We can ill afford to ever lose our sense of humor. I was left with no choice other than to do this act of satirical humor.”

These are the considerations that set Christie Davies, a Welshman who is professor of sociology at the University of Reading in England, towards writing The Mirth of Nations. Davies is a veteran investigator of jokes, and broadly speaking, he takes his business here as being to save the joke from the message-mongers and restore it to harmless play and laughter. He recognizes as a widespread tendency the confusion between playing with aggression in jokes on the one hand, and real aggression on the other. There are plenty of jokes recounted in the book, but its basic purpose is to undermine misplaced profundity in joke studies.

All those jokes about dumb Polacks, for example—“How do you catch a Pole? By slamming the toilet lid on him as he’s taking a drink”—might suggest a background of ethnic conflict between Polish immigrants and other immigrant groups in America. Davies refutes this thesis by the simple device of showing that there’s no evidence from any other source for such conflict. In any case, the Poles are just as amused by them as others. Polish jokes are similar to the dirty Newfie jokes told in Canada. Perhaps these might be expressing genuine contempt and hostility towards the inhabitants of Newfoundland? Not at all, argues Davies. The Newfies tell the same jokes about themselves and they are part of the self-image of a rural tourist area.

Davies is particularly good on the ambiguity of jokes. The Scots and the Jews have in common a tendency to tell self-denigratory jokes. The Scots, for example, slyly reveal a character of canny meanness. Davies argues that in repertoires, what looks like self-denigration is actually a form of concealed boasting. The jokes tend to merge into mere wit and metaphor, and I have to say that at various points the sheer feebleness of some of the Scottish jokes gave me a deep respect for the scholarly dedication of the theorists. The jokes theorist is not an anthologist and is at the mercy of his archive.

Any Australian reading the Davies chapter on Jewish women and Australian men will probably find it depressing. Australia was long a largely bachelor society filled with men liable to drink to excess. The result was a plethora of jokes about vomiting that constitute a good reason for running a mile. Anyone seeking to understand why Australia is a world exporter of enraged radical feminists (Germaine Greer, et al.) need not go much further than jokes such as:

“I’ve got to dash—I’m on a promise to use the rodeo position.”

“What the hell is the rodeo position?

Well, you get her down on the bed and start giving it to her doggy fashion. As soon as she starts to enjoy it you whisper in her ear ‘that’s how Tracey at the pub likes it. Then you have to see how long you can stay on.

 

Awful though it is, this actually is funny, and the reason is, I think, that the humor arises from mocking an almost innocently mechanical reaction to a stimulus. And this suggests that one point of jokes is to celebrate spontaneity in human conduct. No real Jewish mother will burst into tears when she sees her son wearing one of the two ties she gave him. Jokes have taught her better.

We learn from jokes, as we learn from everything, and being mocked is an important part of growing up. “All too often,” Davies remarks, “humor scholars treat jokes as if they can be reduced to clear, serious objective statements which imply single meanings, and then analyze them in a way that is ambiguous, obscure, untestable and subjective—in a word, a joke.” The importance of The Mirth of Nations is that it takes jokes back from the theorists and returns them to the comedians. And that’s all of us.