If You Don't Laugh You'll Cry: The Occupational Humor of White Wisconsin Prison Workers by Claire Schmidt (review)

In multiple ways, working in a prison is horrible; Claire Schmidt argues, however, that humor provides a line of defense against the tensions inherent in the work. The rural areas where most Wisconsin prisons are located offer few other job opportunities, and the pension and health benefits of working for the state make prison jobs worth considering. Yet, by dint of their employment at Wisconsin's thirty-six mostly overcrowded adult prisons, almost ten thousand workers, primarily white doctors, cooks, correctional officers, social workers, maintenance staff, psychologists, probation and parole agents, pharmacists, and teachers employed in those prisons, are all bound "to this flawed and unjust system" (5). This is particularly true for the uniformed correctional officers, the COs, whose work stress is enormous. Schmidt correlates their divorce rates (twice those of other blue-collar workers) and a suicide rate that is almost 40 percent higher than the national average with stress resulting from shift work, forced overtime, and regularly enforcing norms with which COs disagree. COs in particular do not necessarily agree with the management and administration of the prison system; nonetheless, for the most part they do their jobs, and prisons could not function smoothly without them. The book's title points to one of its central tenets: that prison workers are employees of rather than advocates for the system. Humor enables them, however, to survive the ambiguity of their positions.

The book's introduction and final chapter lay out Schmidt's argument that prison workers' humor at once supports and subverts the system; the book's organization into three sections of three chapters each supply details to support her argument. Part 1 details how prison workers use humor to negotiate the built-in tensions of balancing personal lives with the work itself. Part 2 focuses on how "humor makes prison work itself possible—how humor upholds and maintains actual institutions as well as more abstract social institutions" (78). Prison workers maintain order within prisons; that order in turn bolsters the sociopolitical order of the larger society. Part 3 sheds light on ways in which prison workers use humor as a means of resistance to actually "undermine the institutions they serve" (154). The book's last chapter serves as a summary.

Schmidt's subject and her approach are singular. On the one hand, Laugh/Cry is a solid academic work published by the University of Wisconsin Press, and on the other hand, it is a highly personal work, influenced by stories she has heard since childhood. Her approach involves sociological and ethnographic study as well as serious research on the uses of humor as social control and as rites of passage in a particular work environment. Throughout the text, she makes a generalization, illustrates the generalization with anecdotes, analyzes the anecdote's meaning in her own words, and cites other humor research to fit the incidents into the larger field of humor studies.

Many readers will probably find the workers' humor generally lacking in subtlety, usually crass, coarse, and often juvenile. However, its purpose is not wit. Rather, it is forged for the workers' personal and communal defense as well as offense against what they perceive as oppressive administrative and political structures. Humor calls attention to the "uncomfortable disconnect" between occupational and personal lives, so sometimes practical jokes may involve jejune (and socially taboo) tampering with the food of other workers such as licking the gum another worker intends to chew. Another form of comic entertainment is telling stories of witless prisoners who, through ignorance, sabotage their own escapes. Much of one chapter involves the use of verbal humor in dealing with inmates. A later chapter devotes pages to descriptions of COs in particular acting as tricksters, "playing the fool" and thus resisting institutional authority by taking the rules literally. For example, one CO wore a tux to work after a...