Leticia Neria PhD thesis - Research@StAndrews:FullText ...

than just disjunctions in the narrative. There are different characteristics and elements
which must be recognised in order for an act to be considered ‘humour’, and which
indicate to us that it is safe to laugh at what we are witnessing. We turn to this issue
next.
Humour as a social construct
Don’t steal. The government hates competition!
The reason why one thing makes us laugh and another does not are diverse. Not
everyone laughs at the same things. This is because humour is a social construct.
‘Humour tells us something about who we are and the sort of place we live in’. 11
According to our social background we read the world in different ways, and that
changes the way in which we interpret it. We understand the world according to our
own experience 12 and discriminate in terms of what we find funny according to the
social groups we belong to. A sense of humour is shared by specific groups, it is
something that we have in common with certain people: ‘laughter always implies a kind
of secret freemasonry, or even complicity, with other laughers, real or imaginary’ 13
because we share the same code. In the joke about government corruption, if someone
has suffered the corruption of the authorities, then they may find the comment amusing.
Others may find it offensive (perhaps politicians themselves!). Humour depends on who
we are.
Humour also changes. It belongs to a specific group at a specific time; we do not
laugh at the things people laughed at one hundred years ago. Values, interests, and
perceptions change with time, and various social factors will affect the way we
11 Critchley, On Humour, p. 11.
12 On the way our background and environment influence how we understand the world, see Umberto
Eco, Limits of Interpretation Advances in Semiotics (Bloomington: Indiana University Press, 1990), pp.
64-67.
13 Henri Bergson, Laughter. An Essay... p. 6.
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