Pure Jokes

Ted Cohen recounts that he began his research on Jokes by “dividing them into the pure ones and the conditional ones. A conditional joke is one that can work only with certain audiences, and typically is meant only for those audiences. The audience must supply something in order either to get the joke or to be amused by it. That something is the condition on which the success of the joke depends. It is a vital feature of much joking that only a suitably qualified audienceone that can meet the conditioncan receive the joke, and the audience often derives an additional satisfaction from knowing this about itself. A pure joke would be universal, would get through to everyone, because it presupposed nothing in the audience” (12).

He concluded that there are no pure jokes: “It is a kind of ideal, but it doesn’t exist. At the very least, the audience will have to understand the language of the joke, and probably much more. But even if all jokes are conditional, it is still useful to note just how strongly conditional a particular joke is, and just what kind of condition is presupposed” (12).

He distinguishes instead between “weakly” and “strongly” hermetic jokes. The first require limited background knowledge, like this philosopher joke: “The president of a small college desires to improve his school’s academic reputation. He is told that the best way to do this is to create at least a few first-rank departments. It would be good to work on the mathematics department, he is told, because that would not be too expensive. Mathematicians do not require laboratories or even much equipment. All they need are pencils, paper, and wastebaskets. It might be even better to work on the philosophy department. The philosophers don’t need wastebaskets” (14).

One of his “strongly hermetic” jokes is this: “A panhandler approached a man on the street outside a theater. The man declined to give anything, saying, ‘Neither a borrower nor a lender be.’ -William Shakespeare. The panhandler replied, ‘Fuck you!’ -David Mamet” (15).

One of the implications of this insight is that part of the pleasure of a joke is the pleasure of company: “you need to begin with an implicit acknowledgment of a shared background, a background of awareness that you both are already in possession of and bring to the joke. This is the foundation of the intimacy that will develop if your joke succeeds, and the hearer then also joins you in a shared response to the joke. And just what is this intimacy? It is the shared sense of those in a community. The members know that they are in this community, and they know that they are joined there by one another” (28).

It’s on this basis that Cohen suggests analogies between art and jokes: “There is no formula for making up jokes, and not everyone can do it. A joke cannot force everyone to be amused, and some people are unamused by some jokes. Some people are not amused by any jokes. These facts about jokes are interesting, and perhaps surprising. They seem to me exactly as interesting and surprising as the facts that there are no formulas or recipes for making up figures of speech, or for creating works of art, and the facts that not everyone can grasp every figure of speech, that some people don’t care for some art, and some people don’t much like art at all” (4).

In short: art is a joke.