differences in sense of humor, I will be looking at how people think about one specific humorous
genre: the joke. More precisely: the standardized or “canned” joke: a short humorous story, ending in a
punchline, of which the teller usually does not claim to have invented it himself.
There are three reasons to focus on this specific, and perhaps not very glamorous, humorous genre.
First, since jokes are primarily an orally transmitted genre, looking at jokes grant researchers a view of
the role, so difficult of access, that humor plays in normal, day-to-day interactions. In fact, jokes are
something of an intermediate form between standardized, commodified humor, only meant to be
consumed, and spontaneous humor that tends to evaporate a researcher appears. Thus, asking
interview questions about jokes open up communications about humor in everyday life, whereas jokes
can also be included in questionnaires, enabling a more rigorous study of social patterns. Second,
jokes are what Durkheim called “social facts”: they belong to everyone, since they are not thought up
by any one person, but are told again and again and continuously redesigned in the interaction. Finally,
the joke is a humorous genre that everybody knows, but that generally has a fairly low status. In the
Netherlands even more than in the United States, jokes are generally regarded as “bad taste”, a genre
inappropriate for serious occasions, or decent ladies. It is precisely the “low” and controversial genres
that evoke explicit reactions and thus make visible social distinctions. Social boundaries are most
sharply delineated by what seem to be trivial matters, in which “tastes differ”.
A sociology of humor is to be located at the intersection of two sociological fields: cultural
sociology and the sociology of humor. In its focus on the relationship between sense of humor and
social background, this research has obviously been inspired by the work on Bourdieu (1979; 1991) on
taste and social distinction and the work of Gans (1999) on popular culture. Moreover, the notion that
humor is a marker of “symbolic boundaries”, as well as its comparative perspective, both within and
between nations, is derived from the work of Michele Lamont (Lamont & Fournier 1992; Lamont
1992; Lamont & Thevenot 2000). Humor does not only mark social boundaries, but touches upon
moral boundaries as well. Jokes often deal with taboos or “painful subjects” (sex, gender relations,
ethnicity, religion, politics); this means that social and moral boundaries are often transgressed to
some extent. Thus, humor is closely linked with morality.
However, an attempt to understand and study humor only as yet another form of esthetic
appreciation that can be consumed conspicuously, enjoyed with distinction, and mark social
boundaries, would ignore the specificity of humor. As was mentioned above, humor is closely
connected with one of the strongest measures of social success: laughter. Laughing with someone is
one of the strongest signals of interactional “attunement” (Scheff 1990), that marks a smooth and
successful interaction ritual (Collins 2004). Thus, humor has a strong emotional component, which
determines many of the important but ambivalent social functions and effects of humor.
As a form of interaction, humor has peculiar contradictory meanings: a joke can be an invitation or
a signal of closeness (see Coser 1959), but it can also put people off and exclude them. Humor brings
people together but it can also emphasize and augment differences in status. Humor can shock, insult,
hurt, and consecutively be used as an excuse (“it was just a joke”) but nevertheless a sense of humor
3
Convention