Lockyear, Sharon and Michael Pickering, Eds. Beyond a Joke. New York: Palgrave, 2005.

This book aims to investigate the line between offensiveness and humour. Citing several examples, from Berlusconi's comparison between a German MP and a concentration camp guard to an MP who made not one but two racist jokes at public functions in Britain, the editors suggest that there is a certain line between humour and offensiveness. Unlike Ted Cohen, who argues that the debate around offensive jokes should not revolve around whether or not they are funny, the editors suggest that some jokes, including Berlusconi's, are "desperately unfunny" (3). Teasing out additional strands to describe this split, the editors describe the "negotiation" that takes place in the creation of humour, often implicitly and quickly, sometimes in the length of time it takes to tell the joke—by the time the punchline occurs, we've decided whether or not to laugh (9-10).

The editors don't believe, as they say Howard Jacobson does in his book Seriously Funny, that there are no lines to be drawn within humour (11). They balk at the assumption that to consider such lines paints one as humourless or anti-humour; instead, they suggest more carefully analyzing the relations between the aesthetics and ethics of humour and a prominent theme in their analysis is the line between offensiveness and funniness (12). The line here, they argue, becomes very clear in jokes that revel "violent racism" or physical violence (13). More often, however, they recognize that the line between offense and humour is blurry and in flux, not to mention the face that "who 'we' might be is heavily burdened with political as well as moral issues" (13). The complications, they suggest, have lead critics like Jacobson to argue instead for a line between so-called "make believe" or fiction in joking as opposed to "real" life. The editors, however, recognize that humour is as much a part of real life as it is a kind of fiction, as well as noting that make believe precisely makes one believe, or constructs reality.

The editors position their project in terms of building tolerance in an increasingly multicultural world (14).The question of which "we" is the source of laughter and the rationale of ethical values makes up the core project of this collection. The editors write, "One of the aims of this book is to explore this tension and the question as to where the limits of humour might lie in order that 'we', in the multicultural sense of the word, may come to laugh together on a much wider basis and without the unexamined prejudice that allows for humour calculated to do little else than cause deep offense in others" (14). In accomplishing this goal, however, they don't aim to create an "absolute evaluative template" by which to measure humour, but rather to recognize the way in which the ethics and aesthetics of humour are "inextricably entwined" (15). In this way, they work with humour in a way that recognizes and accepts its slipperiness, its ability to be read and misread in multiple ways, to confirm prejudices or defy conventional wisdom, to posit ambiguity or to create the impression of certainty.

Cohen, Ted. Jokes: Philosophical Thoughts on Joking Matters. Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1999.

In a book that includes more jokes than many on the topic, Cohen offers an accessible and readable a description and analysis of joking, with chapters entitled, "Jokes Are Conditional," "When Jokes are Assymetrical," "Problems and Occassions for Joke-Making," "Jewish Jokes and the Acceptance of Absurdity," and "Taste, Morality, and the Propriety of Joking." In his introduction, Cohen limits his object of study to two specific joke forms: short story jokes and formula jokes. Though in a less specific manner, he reinforces Douglas's point that jokes work because their audience brings certain awareness or assumptions to the joke (3). Unlike some others, Cohen begins by asserting his belief that no comprehensive theory of jokes is possible (10). He does suggest understanding jokes as a form of "performance" (11), a position which his text, rife as it is with jokes, reinforces. In this, he offers perhaps the most explicit linkage between performativity and humour studies.

His last chapter, "Taste, Morality, and the Propriety of Joking" offers an explicit consideration of black humour and dark jokes. He asks,

Do I think we should joke about absurdities? Should we be laughing at the fact of death? Death is a bleak topic. Jokes about death can be bleak. But apart from all that bleakness, joke-telling about death has a special dark side, which it shares with much joke-telling.

Though this statement is provocative, Cohen does not go on to suggest what this "special dark side" of jokes around death might consist of. However, he goes on to offer a discussion around contentious issue of morality and ethnic or other jokes often considered objectionable. At the beginning of this chapter, Cohen posits a line determining when a joke is "out of place," at the question of avoidance. He suggests a joke is objectionable when it is a mechanism used to avoid, rather than address a topic head on (69). At the same time, Cohen goes on to suggest that ethnic jokes are not necessarily objectionable because they "purvey stereotypes" (78). All jokes, he argues, portray fictions and falsehoods. With ethnic jokes, Cohen acknowledges there may be something "especially disagreeable or obnoxious in this particular idea's being believed" (79). However, he stops short of condemning jokes that take African Americans, for instance, as their butts because he believes making moral declarations on jokes is an impossible task. In trying to imagine the moral response of an "ideal observer"—a figure often used in analytical moral theory—to ethnically-charged jokes, Cohen argues that one cannot definitively say whether such a creature would object or welcome such jokes (81). So far, he goes on to argue, it cannot be shown that such jokes produce genuine harm to someone (81). Thus, rather than arguments over whether jokes are good or bad, funny or unfunny, Cohen argues that analysts should be interested in the fact that even objectionable jokes can be funny and wonder why this might be so (84).

Morreall, John. Comic Relief: A Comprehensive Philosophy of Humour. Wiley-Blackwell, 2009.

The latest book from a man who has made it one of his academic missions to establish the parameters of the philosophical understanding of humour. The first part of the book summarizes work he has done in the past to collect and name the three central theories of humour: 1) superiority theory, which Morreall describes as seeing humour as anti-social; 2) incongruity theory, which he describes as the view of humour as irrational; and 3) relief theory, which sees humour as a kind of pressure valve that releases social or psychic tension. He adds to these the minority view of Aristotle and Aquinas and, more recently, Robert Latta, which sees humour as playful relaxation.

In "That Mona Lisa Smile: The Aesthetics of Humour," one of the more interesting chapters in the book for the purposes of this work, Morreall describes humour as an aesthetic experience aligning it with the Kantian notion of disinterestedness (or suggesting that the goal of aesthetic humour is disinterested, focused only on providing amusement), adding to his description of the aesthetic of humour the elements of surprise or a shift in perspective, which contribute to its aesthetic appeal or pleasure (70). He distinguishes this from "non-aesthetic" humour on the basis of the motivation behind the joke, with jokes focused on superiority, for instance, falling into the latter category (72). Morreall wants to distinguish humorous amusement from similar kinds of cognitive shifts at work in tragedy, horror, the grotesque or macabre, suggesting, "humorous amusement, by contrast, is by itself a positive state with no negative emotions" (74). He also separates the fantastic or bizarre from humour, citing the Surrealists as an example and suggesting that these elicit cognitive rather than emotional shocks and thus cannot be considered humour. In his effort to delineate a unique kernel that is humour, however, one wonders at the exceptions to these rules: black humour, Holocaust jokes, killing jokes or nervous laughter, and how these would be accounted for in terms of their aesthetic function.

In the chapter, "Laughing at the Wrong Time: The Negative Ethics of Humor," Morreall goes on to describe 8 basic moral objections to humour, which he claims as the most common objections; that it is: insincere, idle, irresponsible, hedonistic, reducing self-control, hostile, anarchistic and foolish. In each case, Morreall cites examples to debunk each claim, though, equally, in each case, some example could be offered in support of the initial objection as well. Overall, however, in his effort to defuse these negative objections, Morreall wants to get past an ethical argument against humour that focuses on its phthonic element (Ronald de Sousa), or malicious attitude (98). Instead, Morreall describes humour as offering a "practical disengagement" (101), in this separating laughter and humour from emotion (101). In support of this division, he writes, "when we want to evoke anger or outrage about some problem, we don't present it in a humorous way, precisely because of the practical disengagement of humour. Satire is not a weapon of revolutionaries" (101). Though unclear on how someone like Swift fits into such a claim, Morreall moves on quickly from this claim to suggest in this context that the negative implications of humour are better viewed as stemming from this practical disengagement. He describes three such negative ethics in the bulk of the chapter: irresponsibility, the blocking of compassion and the promotion of prejudice, each of which is relatively self-explanatory.

In the following chapter, entitled "Having a Good Laugh: the Positive Ethics of Humour," Morreall counters the negative ethics of humour by describing the "intellectual virtues fostered by humour" (112). THeseinclude: fostering open-mindedness and spurring critical thinking (113). Here, he cites Jon Stewart and Bill Mahar (sic) as examples of political satirists who "encourage us to think twice before accepting any political message" (113).

The descriptions Morreall offers of both the negative and positive attributes of humour seem anecdotal and heavily tied to whichever example he chooses to illustrate his point. For instance, humour can be said to promote prejudice when the example cited is Don Imus's "joke" about the Rutgers women's basketball team, but political (perhaps even revolutionary?) when referencing Jon Stewart. While Morreall's work reinforces the idea that critical analysis should be applied to the topic of humour, his approach is largely anecdotal and relies heavily on generalizations that don't hold when applied to a range of examples.

Lewis, Paul. Cracking Up: American Humor in a Time of Conflict. Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 2006.

Lewis's main contribution in this book is his effort to delineate two prominent modes of humour in popular discourse: 1) healing humour and 2) killing jokes. The first he traces alongside the development of a view of humour and laughter as healing alongside the growth of new age and self-healing movements in the chapter "Red Noses at the Ready!" In this chapter, Lewis remains relatively sceptical of the idea that so-called "destructive" modes of humour should be disavowed (as is the call of the "positive humorists") and the concomitant idea that the healing mode of humour should be celebrated unquestionably. However, ultimately, Lewis locates positive humour as a response to a sense that existence is dark and meaningless (107). This sense of nihilism, for Lewis, elicits two responses: either the denial of pleasure or to protest this so-called "enemy" by taking "comfort in a life of simple pleasures" (107). Clearly, Lewis privledges the latter tack over the former.

The bulk of his book takes up the idea of the "killing joke," which he describes as a mode of joking in which "neither the speaker nor the creator of the joke is only kidding." Killing jokes "depict not only death but a more or less total destruction of the recognizable human identity (shape, form) or their victimized butts" (41); thus, as opposed to the positive humor folks, the killing joker uses "humor not as comic relief but as comic intensifier" (40).

Lewis summarizes his analysis of killing jokes and their cultural role in the following passage:

"By allowing us to shift from impotence to power, from victim to predator, killing jokes can provide distance from both vulnerability and guilt. By bringing audiences to the moment of danger and then adopting a playful attitude, they assume a willingness to reject or repudiate humanity. The multiplication of this humor, the resonance of these jokes through the past decades, suggests that they are performing what Frederic (sic) Jameson describes as 'transformational work' on social anxieties and what Philip Fisher has called 'cultural work,' that is, they are contributing to changes of consciousness by 'massing small patterns of feelings in an entirely new direction" (62).

He goes on to describe killing jokes "as gallows humor for a poisoned planet, killing jokes are an understandable response to the human—indeed planetary—predicament two millennia after Christ" (62).

Thus, with both positive humour and killing jokes, Lewis ends up at a similar diagnosis: seeing these as symptomatic of a late-capitalist moment he sees as existentially, ethically and morally dark, if not diseased.

Lewis's delineation of and description of "killing jokes" as a prominent feature of the current pop cultural mediascape is useful in underscoring the central role occupied by humour, particularly dark humour, in contemporary cultural production. Likewise, his recognition of the proximity of multiple "negative" emotions: fear, anxiety, cynicism alongside a mode that offers, even in its darker incarnations, pleasure and relief, complicates any easy understanding of humour as wholly negative or positive, instead pushing discussion towards the function of such a concatenation of seemingly contradictory feelings. However, his work in situating this mode of humour in terms of a broader cultural moment returns to a binary between fear and pleasure, with the latter implicitly priviledged as desirable in overcoming the former. At the same time, his suggestion that contemporary modes of humour are symptomatic of our cultural moment is a rich observation that calls for further work.

Lewis, Paul. Comic Effects.

Lewis, Paul. Comic Effects. Albany, NY: SUNY Press, 1989.

Lewis explicitly situates his critical method within the social-scientific field of ‘humour studies,’ in contrast to classical approaches. In his account modern humour research and criticism rejects any clear distinction between or adherence to these formulae, treating humour as a complex “whole made up of many parts, many variables, many potential topics of inquiry” (6), rather than as a unified abstract entity. Despite his espoused hostility towards systems, Lewis's account of humour is based in notions of incongruity, which he argues is not a sufficient condition, but instead needs to be the subject of emperical research in order to determine the other parameters.

For Lewis, Humour is an exercise of power, with the implication that it is correct, appropriate and ethical to find the posited incongruity amusing (13). He therefore offer sa negative assessment of the politics of contemporary humour in his declaration that while traditional comedy was anarchic and subversive, modern sitcoms function to perpetuate the status quo and are therefore conservative and sterile (65). For Lewis, humour can act as a means to evade reflection, implying value judgements in a “seductive” fashion (67), which recalls Marxist complaints about the function of culture more generally. In a manner that recalls both Freud’s tendentious joke and Bergson’s notion of “social nagging,” Lewis argues that humour can act as a means of socially sanctioned aggression, a struggle for supremacy, which does not liberate, but punishes (34-7). Beyond Bergson and Freud, though, Lewis rejects previous theories based upon unitary explanations and assumptions, which he suggests must be replaced by a critical social scientific method (2-4), and an evaluation of the assumptions that underpin any declaration as to what exactly counts as humour (14).

While beginning with a broad focus, the later sections of Lewis's book are a series of close readings of literary texts, in particular Gothic texts, combined with assertions as to the desirability of neuropsychological cognitive analysis. The literary is put forward as a central means by which to assess this cognitive functions.