Why is that funny? Stop laughing!

What is humor?

Analysis includes the use of specific ideology (often found in guiding principles used) to better understand the complex construction of a text, and to better articulate our view of that text.

Analyzing humor, for example, allows us to better understand our humanity! At least, we hope that it does. Furthermore, analyzing one's humor is a great topic because humor is a great example of how individual our ideologies may seem on the surface while united underneath.

Huh? Well, let's look at three large theories of humor, as described on the Internet Encyclopedia of Philosophy.

Superiority:

• Thomas Hobbes’ “Superiority Theory”: “The passion of laughter is nothing else than sudden glory arising from some eminency in ourselves, by comparison with the infirmity of others, or with our own formerly.”

• Eminency – having a higher status (for some reason)
• Infirmity – lack of strength, character flaw

Incongruity

• “Arthur Schopenhauer agreed in 1844, when he explained in The World as Will and Ideathat laughter is a way of acknowledging an incongruity between the conceptions that listeners or viewers hold in their minds and what happens to upset their expectations.”

Relief: see definition on IEP link

________________________________

Applying New Knowledge:

Connect to your texts (primary or secondary sources) through inquiry:

1. Which of the three general theories is most prominently used in this text?

2. Who is the intended audience for the humor? What might be some of the basic characteristics of someone who might find the text funny? (ex: gender, height, religion, race, orientation, the South, East Coast, urban, rural, 12-year-old/80-year-old?)

3. Where do your inferences come from in answering the above questions? Clarify your inferences by discussing the connections between joke content and plot, and the theory. To do so, provide detail that you would attach to the inference. (

Now, lets practice this by watching an episode of Flight of the Conchords.

• Record down important details that will help build context for your analysis. (Location; relevant details of person telling the joke; content of joke; theme of joke...)

• Record down your inferences for who the joke is meant for...and why you think this way.

_______________________________________

Homework Reminder:

• Translating Field Notes 1 is due Friday.
• Make sure to include a Work Cited page and in-text citation.
• Consult MLA guidebook for any confusion. I suggestion Diana Hacker's on-line resource.

Ethics Affecting Field Work

Ethical Code Repeated (from the American Anthropological Association):

1. R-E-S-P-E-C-T at all times during of research, both in collecting data, and in writing.
2. Privacy, safety & dignity: allow informants and individuals to keep it!
3. Inform & Get Consent from "central players" you are going to for information. Clarify PRIOR to starting research whether people want to remain anonymous or not. Perhaps they can/want code names!
4. Plan to Share your research, what you wrote and how you viewed culture.

Conundrums & Quandaries of Field Work

• Boring Events: What you observe might not involve the most exciting, crazy, subversive behavior. This does not mean that you need to embellish in you writing what actually was said or happened. If the events themselves are dull, then focus on making your analysis of events interesting.

• Passing Judgment -- Good or Bad: Do you think, before even doing field work, that this might be an issue? Are you close to people, or part of the culture? Do you find the culture "weird" and that is why you want to explore it? Do find things wrong within the culture that you would like to "fix"? Do you feel people don't understand the culture and you want to show how awesome they really are? We all have these feelings! The goal, again, is to work with these feelings and not FOR them --> taking guidance from secondary source material for analytical points, again, can help you get beyond your natural inclination to become too subjective. Find a guiding principle from a professional that will allow you to look differently at your culture/subject.

• Shutting Down: Again, the most difficult thing to do during research is to maintain interest all the way through, at the same level. What are some possible reasons you have lost interest? Answer this question when you feel yourself stuck in "I don't care anymore mode." Better yet, answer this question prior to research: make some predictions about what could cause you to shut down your own interests... (As TC states, self-reflexivity is the best way out of shutting down.)

• Lack of Detail: Did you not write enough down? Did you not document your culture using a camera or video recorder? No tape recorder? Or, simply, did you not get the kind of material you thought you would get? As the examples in TC point out, the journey into the culture is just as important and invaluable to your final essay as is your actual participation. What do you have to do to enter the culture? Don't wait until you get permission or until you go to that concert. Take notes on your process. One can get invaluable material for analysis from the struggles of just getting "into" culture. Rites of passage, accessibility, outsiderness, etc.

• Oversimplifying Culture: This partially relates to the fifth and first dilemmas in TC, but mostly from years of experience. Does the culture seem to doing nothing "new"? Are they fulfilling stereotypes? Or, are they completely "different" from what you expected and what was assumed? ... Either way, this proves nothing as far as any logically-driven professional is concerned. Don't resort to sound-bite rhetoric, and watch out for this in your writing and thinking.

Critical Writing & Thinking

Consider the five conundrums above. Considering the projects and sites chosen among the students in your class, begin to discern which sites might possibly lend themselves to the complications noted above. Are there things you might do or think about in order to avoid the stated pitfalls?

Homework:

• What are your goals for first "official visit" into your culture? (Some of you may have already started field work, unofficially.)
• Who are some informants that you plan to include in your research? How do you know them, and how will you (or did you) get their permission? Why these informants?
• From a secondary source text, what is one guiding principle you plan on applying to your primary research -- at least your first official "field work" visits?