Humour for Humanists

Talk given to Chester Humanists on Mar 17 2010 by Graham Mather and Allan Muir

The role of humour in human existence was the topic for discussion at the March meeting of Chester Humanist group.  Introduced by Graham Mathers and Allan Muir this was too vast a topic to cover fully so each selected a couple of themes which particularly interested them.

Graham chose to concentrate on two aspects: the evolutionary origins of humour and anti-religious humour.  Allan was interested in jokes and other humorous material which confront the dark sides of being human — which push us to gaze over some existential edge into our deepest anxieties.

To get quickly into the heart of such matters the meeting was billed thus:

Please come equipped with your most offensive and disgusting jokes — but be prepared to explain why they work for you nonetheless.

But as the Chair emphasised, we were not there just to tell jokes but to understand how they work on us and what we’re doing with/to others when we tell or laugh at them.  So no joke should be told, or humorous situation described, without the teller being prepared to explain why, despite any offence or disgust which might be caused, it was, nevertheless, useful to say it.

The faint-hearted need not stop reading at this point as very little of the material has leaked into this report; correspondingly we apologise to the harder-hearted who might be hoping for something gross to pass on to friends.  In summary of what was presented we will merely point to what, for Allan, was the best book he had yet encountered on the whole subject — “The Naked Jape” by Jimmy Carr and Lucy Greeves.

As a further pointer to the humour on offer, Shipoffools.com provided Graham with their top ten most offensive anti-religious jokes, as voted by their adoring public. He chose them precisely because he wanted to push the boundaries of acceptability; he wanted to push the personal boundaries of his audience, in seeing how they would react; and he wanted to push his own boundaries by seeing whether he could tell what are frankly disgusting “jokes”. They could not have been more topical: they were about priestly child abuse. He wanted to emphasise the abyssal moral squalor of religion generally, and Catholicism in particular, through the material.

Although none of us could claim sufficient expertise for a full presentation, some discussion of theories of humour was introduced, Allan having found a good account at http://www.iep.utm.edu/humor/.  Anyone wanting an expanded version of what he presented can obtain it from him at allan.muir1@virgin.net.

Graham chose to expound in more detail one of the leading theories, which he had found particularly exciting, seeking to explain the existence and universality of humour.  It has been developed by the writer and theorist Alistair Clarke: his Pattern Recognition Theory posits the idea that humour results when cartoons, stand-up routines and sit-coms, and even everyday life, conform to, and diverge from, patterns of thought with which the human brain organises the outside world. PRT is a work in progress, but it offers an intriguing line of inquiry.

A good discussion ensued, although very few further instances of jokes were told, those present preferring to focus on laughter induced by everyday circumstances of life.  One might summarise a few points of the discussion in the form of questions:

1. What determines socially when a joke may be told?

2. Are there intrinsic gender differences in appreciation of humour or are such differences mainly a social construct?

3. Suppose we can arrive at a good theory on the origins and function of humour; would humour thereby be changed?