Excerpts (Humor).

Directions. There are two excerpts provided: One from Sanders and one from Morreall. Choose one of the two excerpts and explain how that excerpt explains what you know about humor. In your response, you must address at least three of the following four questions associated with A-D below, noting what the excerpt says and what you believe about each of those three question in A-D. In other words, if you decided to answer A, B, and D, you’d tell me what the excerpt says about A, B, and D and what you think about A, B, and D. Do NOT use any outside sources (Sparknotes, Wikipedia, etc.). You have 2 hours to complete the exam, which is due by the last day of the semester. A. The ethical and/or moral role of joke producing and joke consuming. What should we laugh at? Why? What shouldn’t we laugh at? Why? What should and shouldn’t we joke about? Why? Remember to base your response on ONE of the theory excerpts and on your own experiences and observations. B. The psychological implications for joke producing and consuming. Why do we laugh? Why do we try to make others laugh? Remember to base your response on ONE of the theory excerpts and on your own experiences and observations. C. What makes humor writing humorous? Is it the unexpected? Is it its power to challenge people who have more power or status than we do? Its ability to illuminate through contrast and magnification? Something else? Remember to base your response on ONE of the theory excerpts and on your own experiences and observations. D. The value of humor. What good does humor do? Why is valuable for those who produce and those who consume? Define “value” in as many or as few ways as you can. Remember to base your response on ONE of the theory excerpts and on your own experiences and observations. Excerpt 1: From Sudden Glory: Laughter as Subversive History (1995) by Barry Sanders While theories of laughter have come from those in positions of authority, the laughs have come most powerfully, and thus most threateningly, from those who have occupied the underbelly of history, from those who have remained as historically anonymous as their laughs. So I ask you to listen in particular to those who have been denied access to writing…Every time someone like Plato advises against laughing to excess because it violates decorum or morality, imagine scores of common citizens cracking up for just those reasons. No sooner than the law tightens its rope, some smart alec will twist a noose into a loophole and make a clean getaway, laughing all the way to the border. [Those citizens are] best imagined as an ongoing carnival, a festival of fools, organized peasants, of the sort that constantly threaten to flip the world tupsy-turvy by sending boys to the throne as bishops, and by handing women the scepter as rulers of the realm…[by allowing the ‘inferior, less powerful’ member of society to ridicule the more powerful]. We begin to understand why people in positions of authority find laughter so offensive and threatening. By breaking the gestures of continuity and rhythm, both stumbler and cripple break something much more fundamental—the powerful and persistent grip that civilized behavior tightens around each and every one of our lives. Those breaks provide a vision, for the briefest moment, a glimpse of who we really are—not a robot, but just another animal, albeit with more intelligence and consciousness, [and one eager for freedom and equality]. Maintaining behavior stylized through social gesture requires effort; we must actively work at being graceful—not eat like pigs, rage like lions, or sneak around like sly and crafty foxes. We must be wary not to falter. We must hold ourselves erect. Bearing is all. Laughter thus arises, not merely from the delightful image of our unrestrained selves, but from the sheer relief that for the moment we can “let our hair down”—surely an animal image—and relax. At the same time, however, we also know that such exposure lays us wide open to judgment and possible ridicule. Stumblers and cripples often feel belittled; that’s Hobbes’ point [in the Superiority Theory]. So, if anyone has to fall, we would rather it be the other person, not us. We measure our own carefully articulated manners against their [the cripple/stumbler] failures; they let us know, not only who we are, but where we stand. In the modern world, we periodically envy those with more money or more status and pray for their downfall, their ultimate demise. Feeling that things are out of balance, we aim to get even, to set the pans of justice level again. What joy to see the other guy knocked down a peg or two. That desire to push our neighbor off balance is hinted at in the earliest philosophical discussion of the aggressive, hostile joke, with its punishing and painful punch line, a blow to the victim’s most vital parts—usually the ego—when he or she is least suspecting it. [L]aughter lightens the burden of reality. Laughter offers relief, at least for the moment, by allowing some breathing space, enabling the laugher to step back and to comment without uttering a single word, like a bear signaling displeasure with a growl, merely through the force of its own breath. That laugh holds the hope of political liberation; it suggests that the world does not have to be accepted at face value. Instead, it can be laughed off, turned aside, and kept at bay.