Escolar Documentos
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JAMES A. THORSON
University of Nebraska at Omaha
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Body Humor
Undertakers
Our peculiar cultural obsession with the body is personified in
death by the funeral director, who has been the popular butt of
wit in our literature and folk wisdom for centuries. Dickens and
Twain in particular saw undertakers as absurd. Much of this humor
is biting and is used as a weapon against the person who will lay us
in our grave.
An illustration of humor holding the mortician up t o ridicule
is found in the contemporary anecdote about a widow who is
dispIeased to find her husband laid out in a brown suit; she
insists that the service be delayed so the undertaker can change
the dearly departed into the preferred blue suit. (The reader will
recognize that these examples can be stretched out for better
impact at cocktail parties.) The body is wheeled back into the
chapel after only five minutes; sure enough, the husband is now
in blue. After the ceremony the widow compliments the mortician
on his efficiency, and he replies, Oh, it was less trouble than we
thought. There was another guy in the back laid out in a blue suit,
and all we had t o do was switch heads.
Funerals
Closely related to the first category, traditional funeral ceremonies
are seen as odd if not absurd by at least a minority of our
population; hence, they are a ready target for humor. As noted,
this is not necessarily a recent phenomenon; a hundred years ago,
Mark Twain had Huckleberry Finn attend a hilarious funeral as a
part of his travels down the Mississippi River. More recently,
editorial cartoonists have had a field day with the former
astronaut who has proposed disposal of cremains in earth orbit, a
real-life realization of a scene from the film adaptation of Waughs
The Loved One. The tastelessness of rocketing ashes into space
thus is emblematic of the tastelessness and resultant humor that
some people associate with the entire funeral industry.
A different kind of humor is found in the well-used funeral
joke wherein a golfer stops and holds his cap over his heart as a
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Necrophilia
Moving on from body humor associated with undertakers,
funerals, and burial, there is a category of body humor,
necrophilia, that has the potential of not only being used as a
weapon against death itself but also against the body as a symbol
of death. Necrophilia jokes are so aberrant and tend to be in such
remarkably bad taste that even we will confine ourselves to but
one illustration.
A womans body washes up on the beach on the French
Riviera. The lifeguard, seeing that the possibility of resuscitation
has passed, runs to notify the authorities. An amorous Frenchman
passes by, sees the woman lying on the beach, introduces himself,
and sits down next to her. Proceeding to use his seductive line
and finding no resistance, he finally is found by the returning
lifeguard making love to the body.
Lifeguard: Pardon, sir, but did you realize that this poor woman
has died?
Frenchman: My God! I thought she was an American!
Cannibalism
Our visions of Jack the Ripper types engaging in murder, mutilation, necrophilia, and cannibalism are repellant; they tend to be
such a wide deviation from an accepted social norm that,
paradoxically, cannibal jokes usually are rather light as death
humor goes. There is a distancing strategy that is often used here
in an attempt to show that persons who would do such a thing
are not like us. Not only is the practice foreign, but the people
engaging in it are foreign as well. Because we hate t o think of
cannibalism in our own culture, our humor about it is transplanted
to other groups. There often is an undercurrent of racism to these
jokes. An example is the Charles Adams cartoon of the black
African looking woefully into the stewpot: Not anthropologist
again. A variation has his wife saying to him, NOW,dont tell
me that you had missionary for lunch. Another cannibal joke
has the captive explorer feeding the natives pieces off of his
wooden leg to demonstrate how bad he tastes. A final variation
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Personality
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In the words of John Gacy, may all your troubles be little ones.
Why did Begin besiege Beirut? To impress Jodie Foster.
Whats white and flies across the ocean? Lord Mountbattens tennis
shoes.
Gallows Humor
Humor associated with executions is more socially acceptable
than most of the humor in other categories for two reasons:
First, the individual about to be executed is almost by definition
a member of an outgroup; and, second, like Freud, we can admire
courage and wit in the face of the gallows. Raleighs last words as
well as Freuds anecdote about the neckerchief serve as examples.
Another fine illustration of the wit of the condemned can be
found in a short story from the 19th century, Parker Adderson,
Philosopher, by Ambrose Bierce, as cited by Wilcox and Sutton
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Death Personified
The final category in our brief taxonomy of death humor has to
do with the personification of death: the Grim Reaper or the
Angel of Death. It is here that we can see most clearly the use
of death humor on the offensive, making fun of Death personified.
The recent film Monty Pythons The Meaning of Life has a scene
of Death coming to a dinner party (the diners have all partaken
of a bad salmon loaf). None of the guests take him seriously,
much to his frustration. More widely seen, perhaps, are the recent
television commercials for the Prudential Insurance Company
featuring two angels in white suits. One ad has a recently departed
policy holder ascending the celestial escalator while still holding
his bowling ball. The Carl Reiner and Me1 Brooks comedy routine
of the 2000-year-old man gives this secret for long life: Before
going t o bed, I eat aclove of garlic. Then, when the Angel of Death
comes for me, I breathe into his face: Whos there?
The alpha and omega of life are personified by newspaper
cartoons of the New Years baby and the death of the past year
characterized by the Grim Reaper. A final illustration comes from
a recent cartoon: A man at a doorway confronts a short, fat, Grim
Reaper and says, Somehow, I always expected someone tall and
thin. Being abIe to tweak the nose of Death can be seen, variously, as both false bravado and admirable courLge in the face of the
Destroyer. We cannot destroy Death, but can give Death a hot foot.
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References
1. Pirandello, L. On Humor. Chapel Hill, NC: University of North Carolina
Press, 1960.
2. Keith-Spiegel, P. Early conceptions of humor: Varieties and issues. In
Goldstein, J., & McGhee, P. (Eds.), The Psychology of Humor. New
York: Academic Press, 1972,3-39.
3. Goldstein, J., & McGhee, P. An annotated bibliography of published
papers on humor in the research literature and an analysis of trends:
1900-1971. In Goldstein, J., & McGhee, P., The Psychology of Humor.
New York: Academic Press, 1972, 263-283.
4. Mikes, G. Humor in Memoriam. London: Routledge & Kegan Paul, 1970.
5 . Obrdlik, A. Gallows humor-A sociological phenomenon. American
Journal of Sociology, 1942,47, 709-716.
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1973.
20. Slater, S., & Solomita, A. Exits: Stories of Dying and Parting Words. New
York: E . P. Dutton, 1980.
21. Donaldson, N., & Donaldson, B. How Did They Die? New York: Greenwich House, 1980.
22. Wilcox, S., .& Sutton, M. Understanding Death and Dying. Palo Alto:
Mayfield, 1985.
23. Lifton, R., & Olson, E. The nuclear age. In Shneidman, E. (Ed.), Death:
Current Perspectives (3rd Ed.). Palo Alto: Mayfield, 1984, 451-459.
Received January 30,1985