COMEDY

140 CONCLUSIONhuman imperfection. When we consider the ways in which comedy isused for hostile and aggressive purposes, or as a means of deridingothers and labelling their behaviour unacceptable, perhaps theseimpulses are not so hidden. From Donatus to George Meredith, comedyis employed as a form of castigation, a means of imposing normativevalues on those who deviate from agreed standards of citizenship withincommunities whose membership is well defined. Traditional finales likethe marriage are indicative of the conservative and conformist roots ofmuch comedy, reinforcing the homogeneity of the community after aperiod of uncertainty. Instances of comedy that openly deride ethnic,gender, or physical attributes are acts of aggression that indicate a fearof difference and a desire to present oneself as more roundly humanthan those in the target group. While Hobbes’s superiority theory oflaughter has been largely discarded, his view that it amounts to‘pusillanimity’, or cowardice, represents the first ethics of humour tocouple the urge to laugh with a responsibility to think throughlaughter’s moral implications. In this we can see that comedy is atroubled form, attending to social anxieties and imposing a fictionallogic on ill-fitting or contested world views. How else might we explainthe constant worrying or fetishizing of questions of identity and place,and aspects of existence like the fragility of the body, the obsession withreproduction and scatology, and continual tests of the properties of theoutside world?We must also emphasize the fact that comedy is contradictory and itfrequently works in a way that is apparently antithetical to themaintenance of the status quo. Through joking and scenarios, or states ofbeing such as folly or tricksterism, comedy opens up the possibillty ofan additional dimension of understanding, one in which language orperception are not rational meaning-oriented systems but haveunpredictable applications. Take the joke, “‘Doctor, doctor, I feel like abridge.” “What’s come over you?” “Two trucks and a motorbike.’” Inthis, admittedly lame, example, the punchline explores the possibility ofretrospectively reading the set-up against the grain of conventionalsense, most obviously in the question ‘what’s come over you?’, whichis both a proverbial enquiry about one’s health, and, we discover, aliteral request to ascertain the volume of traffic that has passed over thepatient. While the humorous effect of this joke is negligible, it revealsfor us the fact that jokes are often a formally structured means ofrevealing the susceptibility of language to alternative interpretations, theimportance of contextual referents in meaning, and the coexistence ofviable interpretations. Medieval concepts of folly understood this and