Departments
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Week of 20 February 1998 |
Vol. I, No. 21 |
Feature
Article
History prof looks at America through the humor prism
by Cliff Bernard
Humor is a serious business, according to Joseph Boskin. A history professor at CAS and director of the Urban Studies and Public Policy Program, Boskin has spent a good part of his career tracking and documenting American humor and its relationship to historical events and social changes. One of his recent books, The Humor Prism in 20th-Century America, is a collection of essays -- including several he wrote or edited -- that examine American humor from a variety of perspectives. In his introduction he writes, "A study of humor is essentially an exploration of a particular type of cultural language. . . . Like all languages, humor organizes and correlates experience by seeking and creating order and meaning; it seeks to clarify the vague through analog conversion, and as different experiences are absorbed into social awareness, translates them into folk stories and tales. In doing so humor creates a communal consciousness while at the same time enabling each person a singular connection."
American humor, Boskin says, is tied up with group experience and identity. It's a way of defining who we are, and of expressing emotions that are otherwise inexpressible. This is especially evident in joke cycles connected with historical events. The jokes, say Boskin, emerge from "a vast sense of incongruity . . . from the disparity between the real and the ideal."
He explains that the nation was founded on lofty moral ideals that are not congruent with today's social reality, and that American technology moves forward on the assumption that nothing is beyond its reach. Such an inflated vision of our own abilities, he argues, is akin to hubris, and results in such appalling tragedies as the 1986 Challenger disaster and the joke cycle that emerged in response.
These joke cycles get their due in The Humor Prism. In
the 1950s, American industry and military might grew
exponentially. Hyperbole became a common part of American
idiom. "Super," "giant," and "jumbo" were the advertising
epithets of choice. In response, Boskin writes, we got the
"elephant" jokes: "How do you keep an elephant from
charging? You take away its credit card." The late 1950s and
'60s, he writes, brought a new material prosperity to
Americans accompanied by an "extreme emphasis on personal
striving and sacrifice." This had a damaging effect on
relationships, which was reflected in the "sick joke" cycle
focused on family members. Question: "Mommy, why are we
pushing the car off the cliff?" Response: "Shut up, you'll
wake up your father."
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Prof. Joseph Boskin, an
expert on American culture, history, and humor.
Photo by Kalman Zabarsky
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An essay contributed by Alan Dunes explores the versatile lightbulb joke, directed originally at the Poles in the 1950s, and applied to other social and ethnic groups, usually reinforcing stereotypes or responding to contemporary disasters. After the Three Mile Island nuclear crisis, for example, this joke emerged: "How many Pennsylvanians does it take to change a light bulb? None. You just hold it up and it glows by itself."
Despite what he sees as humor's value i