Jokes: Philosophical Thoughts on Joking Matters
Ted Cohen
Language: English
Pages: 112
ISBN: 0226112314
Format: PDF / Kindle (mobi) / ePub
Sol sits on the sidewalk bench and waits patiently for nearly half an hour. Finally, Abe reappears.
"Well," asks Sol, "what are they up to? Who are they trying to convert? Why do they care? Did you get the $1,000?"
Indignantly Abe replies, "Money. That's all you people care about."
Ted Cohen thinks that's not a bad joke. But he also doesn't think it's an easy joke. For a listener or reader to laugh at Abe's conversion, a complicated set of conditions must be met. First, a listener has to recognize that Abe and Sol are Jewish names. Second, that listener has to be familiar with the widespread idea that Jews are more interested in money than anything else. And finally, the listener needs to know this information in advance of the joke, and without anyone telling him or her. Jokes, in short, are complicated transactions in which communities are forged, intimacy is offered, and otherwise offensive stereotypes and cliches lose their sting—at least sometimes.
Jokes is a book of jokes and a book about them. Cohen loves a good laugh, but as a philosopher, he is also interested in how jokes work, why they work, and when they don't. The delight at the end of a joke is the result of a complex set of conditions and processes, and Cohen takes us through these conditions in a philosophical exploration of humor. He considers questions of audience, selection of joke topics, the ethnic character of jokes, and their morality, all with plenty of examples that will make you either chuckle or wince.
character is inept or stupid or benighted. There is no doubt considerable significance in the fact of just which groups are chosen to be used in this way, and there may be moral, political, or social objections to using these groups in this way, but their ethnicity itself does not function in the joke. In other jokes, also deservedly called ethnic jokes, the ethnicity itself (or the religion or the nationality) is a substantial element in the joke. Here is an Irish joke (which is also an English
well defined). Each joke says that something happened, and in fact it didn’t. There was no man who called home for his wife, got the wrong number without knowing it, and commissioned the murder of two strangers. There is no annual prize for Polish medicine, and no Polish surgeon performed an appendix transplant. No group of black men was distracted from a criminal sexual assault by being given the opportunity to play basketball. But none of the jokes says that these things really happened. The
is not spelled with a gimmel. (Why should it be?) PAGE 68 In the story about the apikoros, ‘apikoros’ means an Epicurean, a skeptic, someone outside the faith who may be a danger to subvert it; treif is food that is not kosher; the siddur is the schedule of regular prayers and observances; and, of course, a goy is a non-Jew. INDEX OF JOKES BY FIRST LINE, PUNCH LINE, AND SUBJECT A “A boy owned a dog that was uncommonly shaggy,” “A couple of black guys running for the
particular cultures, one finds some of the best and worst examples among mathematician jokes. What’s round and purple, and commutes to work? An Abelian grape. The audience for this joke first needs some acquaintance with grape jokes, and then it needs to know, at least roughly, what commutativity is, and what an Abelian group is. (I suppose the audience needn’t already know that Abelian groups are commutative, but it is unlikely that it would know all the rest and not know that.) Sometimes
particular cultures, one finds some of the best and worst examples among mathematician jokes. What’s round and purple, and commutes to work? An Abelian grape. The audience for this joke first needs some acquaintance with grape jokes, and then it needs to know, at least roughly, what commutativity is, and what an Abelian group is. (I suppose the audience needn’t already know that Abelian groups are commutative, but it is unlikely that it would know all the rest and not know that.) Sometimes