Approaching joking from an anthropological perspective, Mary Douglas situates joking among other social rituals: joking is a performance reliant on one’s social relationships and cultural milieu, which challenges the apparent inescapability of social structures. While a rite “imposes order and harmony”– upholding socially-accepted patterns– the joke confronts these patterns with “another which in some way was hidden in the first”, producing not order but disorganization (Douglas 95-6, 102-3).
I find Douglas’ account to be very useful when thinking about the role of joking as a discontinuity from the ‘usual’. This covers most of the occasions for jokes; whether told within real conversations or written into a piece of media, the joke acts as conflict towards an otherwise normative interaction.
Speaking of “norm” (oh god sorry), I couldn’t help but think of Norm Macdonald’s comedy. Douglas discusses how the joking allows for transgressions with social immunity, and we often see contemporary comedians revel in the idea of their role of acceptable transgressors– often to the detriment of actual comedy as these acts slide into regression and/or virtue signaling (Douglas 108). What appears to be confronted within this Norm joke is not external social structures, but the structures that shape the environment of talk shows, televised comedy, and the celebrity industry.
This is immediately clear from the first joke of the segment, where Norm admits to having stolen the joke from his driver. Conan’s response defends the structure and ideology of the celebrity-publicity industry, asking why not give the spotlight to the talent more-deserving of attention, in this case Norm’s driver. Norm’s justification, the stammering non-answer of “wait til you hear me do it”, unravels the authority of this structure. Jolles’ writing on ironic mockery fits this well, as Norm is without a doubt in “solidarity” with the arbitrary spotlight he has in this moment despite his deconstruction of it (Jolles 207). Norm doubles down on this challenge, interrupting himself to emphasize that he is not the first joker: “so the guy… he goes… I say… I’ll be the guy”.
The mass media industry surrounding comedy is a social structure where joking is not only accepted but expected. The transgressive possibility of jokes are absorbed and coopted into the dominant social structures (film studies student try not to mention capitalism), and the joker status is negotiated by the false promise of a meritocracy disguising the mechanism churning out celebrity in the attention economy. Norm’s preface alone unravels the structures that confine and shape the joking ritual within modern society, all before getting into the joke, itself a meandering, improvisational mess (respectfully) which contributes further to the challenge to the presentability of the structures of celebrity and comic.
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Douglas, Mary. ‘Jokes’. In Implicit Meanings: Essays in Anthropology, edited by Mary Douglas (London 1975): pp. 146–64.
Jolles, André. ‘Joke’. In Simple Forms, edited by André Jolles, Fredric Jameson, and Peter J. Schwartz (London 2017): pp. 201-12