Steven Pinker -- How the Mind Works - Hampshire High Italian ...

548 HOW THE MIND WORKSbutt of a joke has to be seen as having some undeserved claim to dignityand respect, and the humorous incident must take him down a fewpegs. Humor is the enemy of pomp and decorum, especially when theyprop up the authority of an adversary or a superior. The most invitingtargets of ridicule are teachers, preachers, kings, politicians, militaryofficers, and other members of the high and mighty. (Even theSchadenfreude of the Ye'Kwana feels more familiar when we are toldthat they are a diminutive people and Hames is a strapping American.)Probably the funniest thing I have ever seen in real life was a militaryparade in Cali, Colombia. At the front of the parade was an officerstrutting proudly, and in front of him was a ragamuffin of no more thanseven or eight strutting even more proudly, his nose in the air and hisarms swinging grandly. The officer tried to take swipes at the urchinwithout breaking his stride, but the boy always managed to skip a fewsteps ahead and stay just out of reach as he led the procession throughthe streets.A descent in dignity also underlies the universal appeal of sexual andscatological humor. Most of the world's wit is more Animal House thanAlgonquin Round Table. When Chagnon began to gather genealogicaldata among the Yanomamo, he had to work around their taboo againstmentioning the names of prominent people (a bit like the sensibilitybehind our own forms of address like Sir and Your honor). Chagnonasked his informants to whisper the names of a person and the person'srelatives into his ear, and clumsily repeated it to make sure he had heardcorrectly. When the named one glowered at him and the onlookers giggled,Chagnon felt reassured that he had recorded the person's truename. After months of work he had assembled an elaborate genealogy,and during a visit to a neighboring village he tried to show off by droppingthe name of the headman's wife.A stunned silence followed, and then a villagewide roar of uncontrollablelaughter, choking, gasping, and howling. It seems that I thought theBisaasi-teri headman was married to a woman named "hairy cunt." It alsocame out that I was calling the headman "long dong," his brother "eagleshit," one of his sons "asshole," and a daughter "fart breath." Blood welledin my temples as I realized that I had nothing but nonsense to show formy five months of dedicated genealogical effort.Of course, we would never laugh at anything so puerile. Our humor is"salty," "earthy," "bawdy," "racy," "raunchy," "ribald," or "Rabelaisian." Sex