What's so Funny?: The Comic Conception of Culture and Society - Hardcover

Davis, Murray S.

Hardcover

ISBN 10: 0226138100 ISBN 13: 9780226138107

Publisher: University of Chicago Press, 1993

Synopsis

Jokes, puns, stories, tales, sketches, and shticks saturate our culture. And today the stuff of comedy is almost inescapable, with all-comedy cable channels and stand-up comics acting as a kind of electronic oracle. We're laughing more often, but what are we laughing at? Murray Davis knows. In this inventive book, he uses jokes (good, bad, offensive, and classic) to reveal the truths that comedians deliver. What's So Funny? is not about the psychology of humor but about the objects of our laughter—the world that comics turn upside down and inside out. It also explores the logic of comedy as a serious, critical assault on just about everything we take for granted.

Drawing on a vast array of jokes and the work of dozens of comedians from Jay Leno and Lenny Bruce to Steve Allen and Billy Crystal, Davis reminds us of the extraordinarily subversive power of comedy. When we laugh, we accept the truth of the comic moment: that this is the way life really is. The book is in two parts. In the first, Davis explores the cultural conventions that even simple jokes take apart—the rules of logic, language, rationality, and meaning. In the second, he looks at the social systems that have been at the root of jokes for centuries: authority figures, power relations, and institutions. Whatever their style, comedians use the tools of the trade—ambiguous meanings, missed signals, incongruous characters, unlikely events—to violate our expectations about the world.

Setting comedy within a rich intellectual tradition—from Plato to Freud, Hobbes to Kant, in philosophy as well as sociology—Davis makes a convincing case for comedy as a subtle, complex, and articulated theory of culture and society. He reveals the unsuspected ways in which comedy, with its spotlight on the gap between appearance and reality, the ideal and the actual, can be a powerful mode for understanding the world we have made.

About this title

About the Author

Murray S. Davis is the author of Smut: Erotic Reality/Obscene Ideology (The University of Chicago Press) and Intimate Relations. He lives in Berkeley, California.

Reviews

Did you hear the one about... ? (Fill in the blank with sex, death, children, work, bodily functions, or whatever is appropriate.) Why study humor? Can we truly pare it down to basics and expect to retain the comedic element, whatever that is? Davis, sociologist and author (e.g, Smut: Erotic Reality/Obscene Ideology, LJ 3/1/83), argues that humor reveals universal truths about people and society. Citing comedians from Aristotle through Mark Twain and Groucho Marx to Steve Allen and Garry Shandling (and many in between), and tapping a range of good through breathlessly bad jokes, he attempts to illustrate the idea that "comedy negates organization, structure, form, even clarity itself." Unfortunately, the general reader may skip the well-researched but dense explanatory notes and go right for the jokes, thus negating Davis's arguments. Recommended only for academic libraries.
- Nancy L. Whitfield, Meriden P.L., Ct.
Copyright 1993 Reed Business Information, Inc.

Edition details

• Publisher: University of Chicago Press
• Publication date: 1993
• Language: English
• ISBN 10: 0226138100
• ISBN 13: 9780226138107
• Binding: Hardcover
• Edition number: 1
• Number of pages: 400