Laughing matters.(The Mirth of Nations)(Book Review)

Christie Davies The Mirth of Nations. Transaction, 360 pages, $35.95

"I like jokes" remarks the hero of Peter Ustinov's play Romanov and Juliet, alerting the audience at once to the fact that he has no sense of humor. Liking jokes doesn't exactly prove you have no sense of humor, but most social theorists won't give you the benefit of the doubt. Humor is a broad-spectrum concept and jokes are only one of its departments. The progenitor of a recent mathematical formula for happiness has incorporated a variable "H" standing for "higher order needs," and humor is taken to be one of these. A sense of humor is the thing women say they most like in a man, but that certainly doesn't mean that they want to marry a stand-up comedian. What they mean is someone who doesn't explode in rage at their latest adventure with the joint credit card.

Jokes are under suspicion for many reasons. Not only are they a rather plebeian form of jocularity, but the theorists are busy looking for the passions--probably deplorable--concealed beneath the guffaw. The philosopher Hobbes was one of the first. He defined laughter as "sudden glory," assimilating it no doubt to our amusement at seeing people slip on banana skins. Freud thought that a joke was a sneaky way of defeating repression, of saying what was otherwise unsayable. It has been the direly literal-minded twentieth century that took these possibilities to heart. Ethnic jokes seemed to insult other races, and perhaps, under a light dusting of laughter, that might be their point! Thus did political correctness add another province to its empire.

It is indeed true that aggression sometimes clothes itself in pretended laughter. Human beings are both laughing animals and also creatures that delight in a sense of superiority, and the one characteristic can conceal the other. Poor James Bond had a little finger broken by a torturing brute in a early novel; as Bond cried out, his tormentor sneered: "Where's ya sensayuma?" The political activist in London who recently took a bat to a statue of Margaret Thatcher and lopped off its head described his act as a piece of artistic expression adding: "We can ill afford to ever lose our sense of humor. I was left with no choice other than to do this act of satirical humor."

These are the considerations that set Christie Davies, a Welshman who is professor of sociology at the University of Reading in England, towards writing The Mirth of Nations. Davies is a veteran investigator of jokes, and broadly speaking, he takes his business here as being to save the joke from the message-mongers and restore it to harmless play and laughter. He recognizes as a widespread tendency the confusion between playing with aggression in jokes on the one hand, and real aggression on the other. There are plenty of jokes recounted in the book, but its basic purpose is to undermine misplaced profundity in joke studies.

All those jokes about dumb Polacks, for example--"How do you catch a Pole? By slamming the toilet lid on him as he's taking a ...