[lit-ideas] Re: Ethnic Humour: Us Laughing At Them, Us Laughing At Us
- From: David Ritchie <ritchierd@xxxxxxxxxxxxx>
- To: <lit-ideas@xxxxxxxxxxxxx>
- Date: Wed, 08 Sep 2004 21:43:51 -0700
on 9/8/04 9:20 PM, Jlsperanza@xxxxxxx at Jlsperanza@xxxxxxx wrote:
>
>
> In a message dated 9/9/2004 12:00:06 AM Eastern Standard Time,
> ritchierd@xxxxxxxxxxxxx writes:
> one of the issues will be the many ways
> in which people have considered otherness to be funny and us-ness to be a
> source of succor.
>
> Any help and guidance from this list will be welcome.
>
>
>
>
> ----
>
> I don't think I understand your point about 'succor'.
>
> I believe humour at oneself, or one's own ethnic group is _healthier_ (if
> more boring) than laughter at _other_ ethnic idiosyncracies.
>
> In general, the English find the English funny. They tend to find other
> nations as 'ridiculous', but the ultimate source of humour for an English
> person
> seems to be something _said_ by a fellow English person.
>
> Ditto for the French. They seem to have their own codes, and it's things the
> French say that the French find funny -- and only them, perhaps.
>
> It's this particular self-centred or self-referential type of ethnic humour
> that particularly appeals to me.
>
> The _other_ type of ethnic humour (e.g. Italians laughing at the Swiss)
> relate on at least _two_ different cultural norms, and so the mechanisms
> cannot
> be generalised.
>
> Romans laughing at the brutishness of the Neapolitans, though, is not
> strictly self-referential humour (even if both -- the laugher and the laughee
> --
> are Italians). And it may be that there's a type of Roman humour that only the
> Romans will understand.
>
> Cockney seems to work like that -- and there is a risk that this may become
> tautological. If you end up appreciating Cockney humour, it may well be that
> you have _become_ one.
>
> Cheers,
>
> JL
>
Point taken, but I think this is an urban and modern perspective. Your
French peasant four hundred or so years back--see, for example, "The Return
of Martin Guerre," book or movie--used Charivari to police signs of
otherness within the village and was immediately suspicious of travelers,
vagrants, ex-soldiers, protestants, people with ideas about how return on
land might be maximized. What's funny to him is putting a frog in the bed
of someone who is not providing the village with children, and the idea of
one among the villagers could travel to Paris.
David Ritchie
Portland, Oregon
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