John C. Meyer was interested in how people use humor – what their purpose is. Meyer’s first conception is that people can use humor to unite us or to divide us. Meyer is thus one of several critics who note a crucial distinction between laughing with and laughing at – when we laugh with people, we draw them closer, when we laugh at people, we push them away.
Humorous Modes
In looking at the traditional humorous modes, Meyer finds that each can be used in specific situations:
Relief humor for relaxing tensions during communication in disconcerting situations or relating to a controversial issue, incongruity humor for presenting new perspectives and viewpoints, and superiority humor for criticizing opposition or unifying a group (316)
However, each mode falls down when attempting to stretch to encompass all humorous instances.
Besides, he argues, wherever humor comes from, it depends on at least two other situational variables. First, it is dependent on its acceptability, given the audience and the context. Second it must surprise the audience, neither being too familiar nor too foreign.
Four functions
From this (and Martineau’s sociological model), Meyer finds four functions of humor, differentiating the major types (unifying/dividing) based on how sympathetic the audience member is to the target of the joke (its acceptability), and how familiar she is with the topic (its ability to surprise).
Identification
On the side of unification, he finds that humor can enact identification. When the audience strongly agrees with the target and is familiar with the issue, they can feel a sense of commonality and shared meaning. His example of this is when failed 1992 independent candidate Ross Perot, who was caricatured in political cartoons as having huge ears, quipped in a debate, “If there are some good plans out there, I’m all ears.” Audience members familiar with the cartoons and Perot, Meyer argues, could laugh with him at those caricatures. Notably, Perot denied knowing or noticing that what he said was funny (and Meyer mentions this).
Clarification
An audience who has slightly less agreement and familiarity will find that the humor clarifies the issue, social norm or the speaker’s position on it, “without a sense of correction or censure of anyone involved” (319). A number of examples are offered here:
Ronald Reagan, who was regularly criticized for his age in his second run for president, in a 1984 debate with Walter Mondale expressed that he had no desire to make age an issue in the campaign because of the “youth and inexperience” of his opponent.
Then there are “church bulletin bloopers”:
The Low Self-Esteem Support Group will meet Thursday at 7:00. Please use the back door.
The Rev. Merriwether spoke briefly, much to the delight of the audience.
During the absence of our Pastor, we enjoyed the rare privilege of hearing a good sermon when J.F. Stubbs preached last Sunday.
The choir needs eight new robes “due to the addition of several new members and to the deterioration of some older ones.” (320).
Meyer finds that in reacting to such messages – in laughing with the others in our group – we clarify social norms without correcting specific people, thus they help to unite groups.
Enforcement
An audience that disagrees slightly with the target or is less familiar with the issue will enact the enforcement of a social norm. Meyer refers to this as a delicate process that maintains some degree of identification.
Here he points to several examples of children’s questions, including:
A girl wrote she would like to ask god, “Are you invisible or is that just a trick?”
A boy wrote, “Why is Sunday school on Sunday? I thought it was supposed to be our day of rest.”
Another boy asked, “I went to this wedding and they kissed right in church. Is that okay?”
Another girl asked, “Instead of letting people die and having to make new ones, why don’t You just keep the ones You have now?” (320-321)
Meyer finds that in laughing at such statements, we are laughing at the children, who will soon be corrected – and our laughter serves as a form of correction that brings them back into the group.
Differentiation
Finally, the audience with a large amount of disagreement with the target, who are very familiar with the issue will differentiate themselves from that target. We laugh at them. When we unite in our laughing at, we identify with each other and stress the differences between us and those we oppose. His example here is Bob Dole’s failed 1996 run for president, wherein he said:
For the government cannot direct the people, the people must direct the government. This is not the outlook of my opponent [Clinton], and he is my opponent, not my enemy. Though he has tried to be a good Republican, there are certain distinctions between the two great parties that will be debated, and must be debated in the next 82 days. (Dole, 1996, p. 679 as cited in Meyer, 322).
In pointing out that Clinton was trying to be a “good Republican,” Meyer sees Dole highlighting the differences between the true Republicans and Clinton, and our laughter (if any) reflects our agreement with that critique.
Problems
However, Meyer falls prey to several problematic assumptions: the intentions of the speaker matter more than the power of the audience, laughter is separate from critique, and laughter is unifying.
Speaker intention
In characterizing the relationships between audience and target, he assumes that speaker and audience are one, that the speaker’s goals are clear and in sync with that of the audience – that the audience can and will “get it.” This is particularly clear in identification and differentiation, where Meyer relies on examples of bona fide political speakers, such as Ross Perot and Ronald Reagan, who wish to persuade us, not the unreliable and discordant narrators represented by stand-up comics. This is again the assumption of intentionality, and it is easily dismissed.
How do we know that the audience who laughed was laughing with Perot at his caricatures? Couldn’t they have just been laughing at him? Wouldn’t some audiences have laughed harder thinking that he said it un-self-reflexively (and even more, upon finding they were correct)? [I have a more developed critique of this through Script Theory.]
In the case of Dole, can’t we laugh at Dole for thinking Clinton is a “good Republican,” for being fooled (enforcement)? Can we laugh with the community and Dole at himself, clarifying the way we did with Reagan? That Reagan example is just weird.
Audience power
Why is it necessary that we get the speaker’s point? Meyer’s treatment of clarification and enforcement starts to get at this – the audience decides to laugh with, or laugh at.
We don’t have to laugh with the congregation at the bloopers, we could laugh at the congregation, or at those with low self-esteem, or the Rev. Merriwether, our usual pastor or the older members of the choir. Rather than censuring the children, we could laugh at the congregation that created rules that so baffle these children – for “From the mouths of babes…”
For stand-up comics, clarification becomes especially problematic; it takes a large amount of inference to believe that we know what the speaker “really means.” Comics are feel free to inject their own versions of social norms or reinterpret those in existence, thereby perhaps doing little to enforce such norms. Nevertheless, they leave the audience free to interpret in multiple ways.
Laughter is not critique
Further, Meyer’s functions of humor reinforce a laughing/critique dichotomy. While he differentiates between laughing with and laughing at, he’s only talking about laughing, thus implying that when the audience rejects the speaker’s message (when they heckle or boo), they have not received humor (though it may be too much to say they haven’t been subject to persuasion or rhetoric). Thus we still might note that for Meyer, expressions of critique rupture a humorous space.
Uniform laughter
Because laughter is assumed to be a sign that we’ve accepted the speaker’s message – that we “get it” – Meyer also does not break us away from the common notion that laughter is uniform. The four parts of Meyer’s model designate that humor works and the text is funny because it possesses some agreed upon meaning that we all share with each other, that it clarifies an unknown incident or condition via relation to one that is known by way of an (often hyperbolic) analogy, that it informs and thereby enforces social norms or that it possesses an agreed upon message through which we reject the target. However, individual audience members may read a joke in different ways.
The good news
However, Meyer does complicate the common interpretations of laughter. What Meyer introduces is a notion that laughter is not unconscious but thoughtful, and therefore not trivial but consequential. Further, while Meyer replicates several problems, he does provide us with a perspective that humor serves a purpose.
Meyer also breaks out of humorous modes argument, offering ways that his purposes can be explained via (or work within) multiple modes (317):
| Humor theory | Humor Function |
| Relief | Identification |
| Incongruity | Clarification Differentiation |
| Superiority | Identification Enforcement Differentiation |
There are still many reasons to question these relationships, even when both the humor and purpose work, but we’ll move on.
He further implies that physical and temporal presence is not necessary, as identification and differentiation have no time limit.
Questions? Comments? Thoughts? Additions?
References:
Meyer, John C. “Humor as a Double-Edged Sword: Four Functions of Humor in Communication.” Communication Theory 10.3 (2000): 310-331.
Wilson, Nathan. Was That Supposed to be Funny? A Rhetorical Analysis of Politics, Problems and Contradictions in Contemporary Stand-Up Comedy. Dissertation in partial completion of the Ph.D. August, 2008.
