But I like the rape jokes best of all!
Sep. 15th, 2006 03:45 pm![[personal profile]](https://www.dreamwidth.org/img/silk/identity/user.png){kind=small}
slemslempikeI am reading about humour at the moment. This is problematic because every now and then the authors will make jokes to illustrate a point, and they're never funny, and I waste time wondering if it's me or them. But the hilarity of the commentary more than makes up for this. My favourite to date:
"nonsense jokes were preferred by females, especially those with low intelligence".
There was an article that consisted, in its entirety, of a summarised paragraph of the time the author regaled a conference with funny things her au pairs had said. These were funny apparently both at the time, and then later once the girls had learnt English, and the family could throw their mistakes in their faces. There was also an article about Welsh jokes, that concluded that there was no staple stereotype used by the English when joking about the Welsh. I can think of one, and I bet most of you can too. Is it so recent? The article's from 1977.
Deserving of an extra special mention though, is an article called "Female Responses to Chauvinism". What I expected was a study on how women resisted sexist jokes. What I got was an article about how sexually attractive women were mattered for how funny they found jokes. The initial studies were criticised for how they decided the scale of attractiveness (they'd got some lecturers to compare notes on female students), which wasn't objective. There were also some whiners saying that perhaps judging women on their attractiveness wasn't quite on, and shouldn't it be how attractive they felt? So the authors did a new study, combining these! They used vital statistics as an objective measure of attractiveness (they went with the bust/waist ratio), and asked women to rate themselves.
It wasn't just seuxal attractiveness that was measured. "The girls were also assessed for their views on Women's Liberation." Interesting. "Those in sympathy expressed little amusement at cartoons involving rape", the humourless bitches. Furthermore, "they took special delight in the opposite, that is, jokes denigrating men". That was probably the start of when feminism started going Too Far.
Apparently plain girls are usually disapproving of sex because they don't get any and they're trying not to be jealous. They also laugh more at male chauvinist jokes becuase they are imagining themselves in the position of getting all that lovely sexual attention from men. Attractive girls are obviously very approving of sex, the dirty sluts, but they don't laugh so much at the jokes because they already have a surfeit of male attention. To be fair to the authors, they do momentarily wonder if using Freud as a basis for female sexuality is wise, but eventually conclude that:
Nevertheless, we are left with the finding that girls who are 'built; in the sense of having a desirable female shape expressed a relative liking for cartoons concered with intercourse and treating the female as a sex toy. Perhaps girls who are shapely but otherwise unattractive come into their own during sex play, that is, their shapely form will be most appreciated at this time.
"nonsense jokes were preferred by females, especially those with low intelligence".
There was an article that consisted, in its entirety, of a summarised paragraph of the time the author regaled a conference with funny things her au pairs had said. These were funny apparently both at the time, and then later once the girls had learnt English, and the family could throw their mistakes in their faces. There was also an article about Welsh jokes, that concluded that there was no staple stereotype used by the English when joking about the Welsh. I can think of one, and I bet most of you can too. Is it so recent? The article's from 1977.
Deserving of an extra special mention though, is an article called "Female Responses to Chauvinism". What I expected was a study on how women resisted sexist jokes. What I got was an article about how sexually attractive women were mattered for how funny they found jokes. The initial studies were criticised for how they decided the scale of attractiveness (they'd got some lecturers to compare notes on female students), which wasn't objective. There were also some whiners saying that perhaps judging women on their attractiveness wasn't quite on, and shouldn't it be how attractive they felt? So the authors did a new study, combining these! They used vital statistics as an objective measure of attractiveness (they went with the bust/waist ratio), and asked women to rate themselves.
It wasn't just seuxal attractiveness that was measured. "The girls were also assessed for their views on Women's Liberation." Interesting. "Those in sympathy expressed little amusement at cartoons involving rape", the humourless bitches. Furthermore, "they took special delight in the opposite, that is, jokes denigrating men". That was probably the start of when feminism started going Too Far.
Apparently plain girls are usually disapproving of sex because they don't get any and they're trying not to be jealous. They also laugh more at male chauvinist jokes becuase they are imagining themselves in the position of getting all that lovely sexual attention from men. Attractive girls are obviously very approving of sex, the dirty sluts, but they don't laugh so much at the jokes because they already have a surfeit of male attention. To be fair to the authors, they do momentarily wonder if using Freud as a basis for female sexuality is wise, but eventually conclude that:
Nevertheless, we are left with the finding that girls who are 'built; in the sense of having a desirable female shape expressed a relative liking for cartoons concered with intercourse and treating the female as a sex toy. Perhaps girls who are shapely but otherwise unattractive come into their own during sex play, that is, their shapely form will be most appreciated at this time.
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no subject
Date: 2006-09-15 02:54 pm (UTC)no subject
Date: 2006-09-15 03:03 pm (UTC)Possibly this is why another study claims that low-intelligence women like nonsense jokes. Because they break our brains with this stuff, and then all we can do is laugh helplessly at the absurdity of it all.
no subject
Date: 2006-09-15 03:07 pm (UTC)"What's the difference between a duck?" is a great joke. They oppress me!
no subject
Date: 2006-09-15 03:18 pm (UTC)That is a good joke. That is, in fact, a great joke.
no subject
Date: 2006-09-15 03:26 pm (UTC)Obviously I have no sense of humour.
no subject
Date: 2006-09-15 03:07 pm (UTC)no subject
Date: 2006-09-15 03:16 pm (UTC)Jokes are all about context, and whether or not you think someone believes that women are inferior, and how much their opinion matters will affect how jokes are received. There was actually a rather good article in the collection about jokes as social tool for controlling deviance talking about groups of feminist women laughing at chauvinism jokes when they thought that the teller agreed with them that they were wrong, and glaring when they thought the teller believed in the inferiority of women.
no subject
Date: 2006-09-15 03:17 pm (UTC)no subject
Date: 2006-09-15 03:21 pm (UTC)Today at the bus stop there were two guys gleefully exchanging racial slurs for fun. The black guy was getting the upper hand, the white guy said it was clearly because his brain worked better in this heat, and so forth. It was lovely. They were having fun. It was rather lovely.
no subject
Date: 2006-09-15 03:29 pm (UTC)"an ethnic joke, told within its own ethnic environment, strengthens the morale of the grup members and bolsters their sense of identity, but the very same joke may easily acquire a derisive and even insulting quality when told by an outsider who tried to imitate the tone and gestures typical of the ethnic group." (Zijderveld 1983)
There was an interesting (though outdated and therefore rather awful) thing I read about the reception of racial jokes. (Middleton 1959) found that black people enjoyed anti-white humour more than white people, but also that black people enjoyed anti-black humour more than white people enjoyed anti-white humour, and that there were more self-mocking jokes told in the black community than in the white community (although that's probably fairly obvious what with the blindess to white as a race thing).
"Yet, self-deprecating humour is not necessarily the result of such an instability of identity. When a minority has acquired a measure of self-consioucsness, self-deprecating humour may underscore its newly acquired identity and cn thereby strengthen its solidarity and cohesion" (Zijderveld again)
no subject
Date: 2006-09-15 09:23 pm (UTC)no subject
Date: 2006-09-15 09:45 pm (UTC)Yes, I am a humourless feminist, why do you ask?
Date: 2006-09-15 03:17 pm (UTC)*Okay, there are some men who really are really, really funny and are able to 'laugh women into bed' in spite of any obvious disadvantages. They are not in the majority
Re: Yes, I am a humourless feminist, why do you ask?
Date: 2006-09-15 03:22 pm (UTC)They used seaside postcards for the study, I think, and didn't think anything of it, although another article from the same proceedings points out that these were mostly drawn by men for a male audience. But they didn't mention the attractiveness of the people handing them the postcards, or look at their reaction to non-sex-joke funny postcards to see if there was a difference there. It is from 1977, which isn't entirely the excuse.
Re: Yes, I am a humourless feminist, why do you ask?
Date: 2006-09-15 06:40 pm (UTC)no subject
Date: 2006-09-15 03:22 pm (UTC)*offers mental floss*
no subject
Date: 2006-09-15 03:36 pm (UTC)They probably think that they covered "lesbian" in "women's liberation sympathiser".
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Date: 2006-09-15 03:43 pm (UTC)I've always assumed that they were trying to protect themselves from rejection by claiming that they meant it insultingly all along if necessary (though surely they get more rejections than men who rely on 'Hey, can you stand still so I can read your t-shirt'), or, conceivably, that they were trying to pick out women with low self-esteem, but I'm now wondering whether it's a clueless application of the idea that the way to woo women is with humour.
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Date: 2006-09-15 06:42 pm (UTC)Here is my totally hilarious steel toecap in the groin. Some men just can't take a joke.
no subject
Date: 2006-09-15 03:27 pm (UTC)Yes, indeed, and my (Welsh) grandfather has alluded to hearing it when he was studying in Birmingham in the 1940s, so it's not new.
no subject
Date: 2006-09-15 03:35 pm (UTC)It talks about the old sterotype in jokes being that the Welsh were boastful, which is in Henry V I think, and then sometimes being an alternative for Scotsman in the Englishman/Irishman/Scotsman jokes.
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Date: 2006-09-15 03:39 pm (UTC)no subject
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Date: 2006-09-16 01:54 pm (UTC)no subject
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