Joking Asides: The Theory, Analysis, and Aesthetics of Humor by Elliott Oring (review)

In Joking Asides: The Theory, Analysis, and Aesthetics of Humor, Elliot Oring scrutinizes accounts of why we laugh at jokes. His collection of essays is direct and businesslike; his style is appreciably analytical and critical, and his sharp intellect is engaged whether he is dissecting joke theory or the composition, semantics, or performance of a joke. Although the book seems to say “all joking aside, let’s get to work,” it is not a humorless text. It can serve as a bold, fun introduction to layfolk and deserves the attention of humor scholars familiar with the major theories in the field.

Each of the book’s first five chapters presents a contemporary theoretical account of humor, which Oring then critiques. Chapter 1 sets the tone for the whole work, reminding the reader that the relief in Freud’s so-called relief theory of laughter is the release of the energy used to repress sexual or aggressive desires. The subsequent chapters covering the general theory of verbal humor, blending theory, benign violation theory, and false belief theory are all incisive, finding weaknesses but also offering ways either to bolster them or to move on to other theories that can explain particular instances of laughter they fail to address. More often than not, it is Oring’s theory from his earlier book Engaging Humor (2008)—namely, that we laugh upon perceiving an appropriate incongruity—that he offers as a point of comparison and as a better explanation.

Chapters 6 through 10 focus on particular historical and culturally contextualized instances of humor, including the 2006 film Borat: Cultural Learnings of America for Make Benefit Glorious Nation of Kazakhstan, lists of jokes on the internet, “narrative” jokes, and Jewish humor. The last two chapters consider the place of jokes in the realm of aesthetics: chapter 11 details important similarities and differences between works of art and jokes, and chapter 12 elaborates how different joke-telling styles bear on a teller’s own aesthetic experience.

For my taste, the first five chapters and final two make this text an indispensable asset. The first third of the book models an analytic and critical approach to thinking about humor that makes Oring’s dive into joke aesthetics possible, a scholarly space where the theoretical, aesthetic, and practical relationships we all have with laughter, jokes, and humor become blurred: are we thinking, feeling, or evaluating when we laugh? As he writes near the end of Joking Asides, “Prejudgments about the ethics of laughter and humor influenced attempts to understand the phenomena themselves. Even today, it is difficult to find a paper written on jokes by a philosopher that does not have a substantial section devoted to ethical considerations” (218). Such a redirection of attention to the phenomena of joking in all its dimensions—and the demonstration of a careful way of paying such attention—is a rare and valuable contribution to the field.

From beginning to end, Joking Asides negotiates the relationship between feeling and thinking and joking. It compiles and transcribes Oring’s analytical and critical engagement with what makes for laughter. These are typically intellectual affairs, and Oring insists on a number of occasions that the phenomenon of laughter is a matter of intellection. He makes this claim directly in chapter 4, “On Benign Violations,” arguing against benign violation theory, which he calls an “emotional theory of humor” (60). Oring insists that “emotion is not irrelevant to the perception of humor” (61); it can “quash” or “enhance” a laugh. But humor “is not at root an emotional process” (61). Bergson’s famous phrase regarding laughter as a “momentary anesthesia of the heart” guides Oring (61) as well as generations of humor scholars to see mental clarity or lucidity as one of the boons of joking around. Indeed, the role of cognition in perceiving and enjoying jokes propels Oring towards a fascinating question: what relationship(s) does perception have to both intellectual analysis and...