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

We might find this joke funny because we see the exaggeration – we know that
Fox knew how to read, and would not be colouring children’s books. Moreover, we also
see the incongruity – a Head of State would not be colouring childrens’ books. But there
is another factor contributing to its comic effect: we laugh because we have denigrated
someone in power, and that brings a feeling of superiority.
Superiority theory is the perspective most closely related to political humour,
and humour as a social function. According to the idea of superiority, laughing at
someone being denigrated, brings a sense of victory, even if the person is in a position
of power. We feel superior. ‘Such humour is not laughter at power, but the powerful
laughing at the powerless’. 58 For a moment, the joke makes us powerful.
Thus, humour can tell us something about who we are or where we belong,
because in what we find funny we discover what we consider to be inferior, ridiculous,
different, stupid, or unlikable. We also ‘laugh because we are troubled by what we
laugh at, because it somehow frightens us’. 59 Humour can reveal our fears. Hence, we
find something funnier when the butt of the joke refers to our antithesis, because in this
case, we can use the joke as a means of aggression, to ridicule our enemy. 60 ‘Humour is
a form of cultural insider-knowledge 61 and its acknowledgment and fragmentation can
be very revealing for understanding a social group. Lawrence Mintz proposes that
humorous expressions ‘are culture-bound-connected to realities of time and place’. 62
Humour might tell us who we are. 63 In other words, you are not only what you eat, you
are also what you laugh at. When laughter ends, we might realise that we are sexist,
racist, homophobic, cruel. And that is tough to swallow.
58 Thomas Hobbes mentioned by Critchley, On Humour, p. 12.
59 Critchley On Humour, p. 56.
60 Freud, El chiste y su relación… p. 100.
61 Critchley, On Humour, p. 67.
62 Lawrence Mintz quoted by Raskin, Semantic Mechanisms… p. 39.
63 Critchley, On Humour, p. 75.
27