What’s in a joke? An obligatory Shakespeare reference with any other noun would be just as cliche, overused and meaningless.
Dead linguistic tropes aside, it’s still a good question. Humor is ubiquitous, and what with identity politics, bigotry and whatnot, it can get heated. We use “joke” to refer to anything and everything that might produce laughter or polite chuckles, so contents may vary — but we can pick out the basics:
1. The punch line is where the funny is, whether it’s intentional, bloody, accidental or just really not that funny when you finally say it aloud.
2. The setup creates the proper conditions for the funny, but — and this is key — the setup is not funny. The “funny,” as such, is entirely exterior to the setup.
3. The last major feature of a joke is what we call “the butt.” Not every joke has a butt, not all butts are created equal and it’s not always clear what is or isn’t actually a butt in particular circumstances, but let’s put that on the back burner for a moment.
Bigger question: What do jokes do? Are they just meaningless, self-gratifying ends unto themselves, like masturbation or poetry? Self-deployed instruments of ideology for expressing and enforcing cultural mores? Crude interpersonal devices for forming self-contained social groups, marking boundaries of inclusion and exclusion with odd sociological phenomena we might call “inside jokes”?
Or maybe they’re just defense mechanisms for coping with the low-budget Adam Sandler film we call human existence — what’s the point? They’re all of these things at one point or another, but there’s more.
Jokes are made up of information — messages of a sort, made graspable by the easy, silly format that tells you how to deliver and receive the information. We laugh if the info meets expectations (Ralphie in second period is a sissy), and we laugh if it’s new to us (a truck driver in Utah ate a badger).
If you can avoid being creepy, try watching elementary school kids at play — human interaction rarely gets more elemental and uninhibited (even keggers have more normative social constraints).
Let’s face it: Kids aren’t given much help in the way of understanding the world. Parents help and kids ask questions, but there’s only so much time in the day — and the world is a fairly complex place (I’m still getting the hang of herbology myself). Jokes are the tools through which kids, (and everybody else), build an understanding of the world. It lets us play with the signifiers that make up our society, throwing them around and trying them on, breaking them down from every angle.
