But I like the rape jokes best of all!

[slemslempike]

I 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.

Comments

[edithmatilda.livejournal.com]

That does seem to apply across the board. You can make jokes about your own ethnicity, for example. Of course, it usually helps that they are funnier than the Bernard Manning type.

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.

[slemslempike.livejournal.com]

I'm just copying my notes on that!

"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)

[edithmatilda.livejournal.com]

Arabs need better self-mocking jokes. Or maybe I am but a half-breed and not allowed to play.

[slemslempike.livejournal.com]

Possibly they don't tell them to you because they think you're too attractive to laugh? Or you could develop your own line of mixed-race nonsense jokes and tell them at right-on people who will not know whether or not to laugh. Go on.