Volume 15, Issue 4

This study explored relationships between sense of humor, stress, and coping strategies. Undergraduate students (N=258) from introductory psychology courses completed a perceived stress scale, an everyday problems scale, a state anxiety inventory, a sense of humor scale, and a scale assessing their preferred coping strategies. High and low sense of humor groups were determined by selecting participants with self-reported sense of humor at one standard deviation above and below the overall mean on the sense of humor scale. The high sense of humor group appraised less stress and reported less current anxiety than a low sense of humor group despite experiencing a similar number of everyday problems in the previous two months. The high humor group was more likely to use positive reappraisal and problem-solving coping strategies than the low humor group. A weaker relationship existed between appraisal of stress and number of problems in the low humor group because this group perceived greater stress at low and average number of everyday problems than the high humor group. The results were discussed as supporting the role of humor in restructuring a situation so it is less stressful, and the relationship of humor to both emotion-focused and problem-focused coping strategies.

Laughter has achieved special significance within some of the more radical postmodern, and especially poststructuralist, discourses as an icon of liberated desire. Yet there is a sense in which laughter is anything but the expression of libidinal force, in which it can be seen to reflect a momentary subversion of desire. To understand this, poststructuralist linguistic theory itself can be employed (against itself), because in the linguistic philosophy of Jacques Derrida in particular there is a unique acknowledgment of the temporal dimension of communication and thought, and of the relationship of this to human desire. Such a model of communication provides insights into the way in which laughter is produced through the subversion of the human experience of temporality — and of desire, an effect of delayed satisfaction. The present article draws widely on the comic theoretical heritage, seeking to synthesize existing theories into a time-based model of how, and why, laughter is produced.

Taking two moments from literature as a starting point and touchstone, this paper examines the kind of human laughter that is not associated with mirth, or even with humor. There are a number of medical cases in which pathological laughter has been identified as a side effect or symptom of neurological disorder; this paper considers these and other cases, where unexplained pathological laughter seems to be not a symptom of the disease, but the disease itself. Most theorists of laughter inevitably associate it with mirth, joy, moments of rebellion or of “sudden glory.” The paper considers the work of those philosophers and psychoanalysts who believe laughter to be more troublesome than many of us tend to assume, concluding that most human laughter may be as much about neurosis as catharsis, partaking less of the carnival than the apocalypse.

Three texts about comic duos are compared. Foma and Yerema (F&Y), characters of a 17th-century Russian folk poem, are twins. Being harmless idiots, they suffer endless failures, are regularly beaten and eventually drowned. Two other brothers, Max and Moritz (M&M), heroes of a quasi-didactic German poem for children written and illustrated by Wilhelm Busch (1865), play ruthless tricks on their neighbors. Eventually they are caught and ground in a mill. Beavis and Butt-head (B&B) are heroes of American animated cartoons by Mike Judge (1993). These juvenile imbeciles are intermediate between F&Y and M&M in terms of mischief and are centered on sex, never realizable. Despite understandable differences between the texts, numerous similarities are evident. All the three duos resemble twin clowns, fools, jesters, and mythical tricksters. F&Y are “dupes”, M&M are “knaves”, and B&B are ambiguous. Archaic parallels include interchangeability of characters, consonant names, grotesque appearance, violence, obscenities, connection with birds, etc. Whether these parallels are “archetypical” or derive from some common source, is not clear. In all cases, the potential moral response evoked by the description of quasi-dramatic events is cancelled by comic devices aimed at dehumanizing the characters and making them similar to puppet-like characters of folk theatre.

Bruce Michelson: Literary Wit . Amherst: University of Massachusetts Press, 2001. 191 pp. $35.00. (Paul Lewis) Beatrice K. Otto: Fools Are Everywhere: The Court Jester Around the World . Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 2001. 404 pp., 49 illus., 1 color. $45.00. (John Morreall) Salvatore Attardo: Humorous Texts: A Semantic and Pragmatic Analysis . (Humor Research 6.) Berlin/New York: Mouton de Gruyter, 2001. 238+xiv pp. $88.00. (Christie Davies)

Humor in the news Judging by recent news stories, including the June demise of England's Punch magazine (a ghost of its former glory is still available on its website http://www.punch.co.uk), people worldwide are apparently losing their ability to recognize, much less to appreciate, satire. Perhaps the shocking nature of the September 11th terrorist attacks on New York's Twin Towers made people ready to believe anything, or maybe it is just that we are all so busy multi-tasking that we no longer pay close attention to what we are reading. Or what is even more likely is that in today's deconstructed society, educated people can know a great deal about many things while still missing the details that would allow them to recognize the ridiculousness of what they are reading.

The editors gratefully acknowledge the generous help provided by the colleagues who read articles for the journal in its fifteenth year. The following list includes the names of those who read the articles published in Volume 15 or rejected as of May 1, 2002. The readers of those articles on which an editorial decision has not been made will be listed in Volume 16, Number 4.