The Consolations of Humor and Other Folklore Essays

The Consolations of Humor by Elliott Oring is a collection of nine essays, most of which were published between 2014 and 2021. Two of the essays are new, and two have been revised and expanded. The book also includes a preface and an afterword. The book’s title, which is also the title of the lead essay, is likely a reference either to Boethius’s De consolatione philosphiae (On the Consolation of Philosophy) or to Alain de Botton’s The Consolations of Philosophy. In both cases, philosophy is deployed to help solve (or at least console readers over) problems of life; in de Botton’s case, issues include unpopularity, frustration, and a broken heart. One of the most compelling ideas of Oring’s book is that a joke can be likened to philosophy.While the book is not formally divided into sections, the essays are arranged in a way that suggests four groupings. The first three address different kinds of jokes and joke content. In the first, Oring discusses the jokes and comical anecdotes of the so-called swearing apostle, J. Golden Kimball. Born in 1853, Kimball was a mule skinner who became a general authority in the Church of Jesus Christ of Latter-Day Saints. He was famous for his foul mouth, love of coffee, and folksy resistance to authority. The second essay asks what is Jewish about Jewish jokes, the answer to which, according to Oring, is not much. In the third essay he explores dirty jokes, offering an overview of propositions about them that have been made in the literature and then refuting them. The main strength of this group of essays rests on Oring’s ability not only to conduct comparative research but also to illustrate that his method of comparing commentaries on “the arts and traditions of life,” not just the arts and traditions themselves, remains appropriate for many critical inquiries within and beyond folkloristics (ix). Another strength is his command of the literature, especially his nuanced understanding of Sigmund Freud. I particularly appreciate his long-standing distaste for release and aggression theories as they have been applied to jokes. It is in this sense that Oring conceives of jokes as more akin to theorizing and philosophizing than releasing pent up tensions or relieving oneself of forbidden thoughts and feelings.The next set of essays addresses joke mechanics and joke construction. The first, entitled “Incongruous, Appropriate, Spurious,” will be of particular interest to folklorists. In it, Oring details his well-known idea of appropriate incongruity and postulates that the incongruities found in humor must not only be appropriate but also “reconciled by utterly spurious means.” That is, a joke represents an ur-form of humor’s illogicality and dubiousness, revealing and reveling in both what it purports to be and not what it purports to be, thereby making it “doubly incongruous” (175). The second essay tackles these notions in relation to the general theory of verbal humor, a linguistic approach to humor that attempts to parse out how it operates. Here, in a familiar argument for him, Oring illustrates the weaknesses of some of the main components of the theory.The next two essays cover Richard Dawkins’s idea of a cultural meme, the theory of mimetics, and how they might be applied to folklore. Mimetic theory is not new for folklore studies (the widespread belief that jokes are fundamental cultural units has long made it an attractive idea), but these essays are useful for those wanting a history of the idea and of the biological and evolutionary implications of the original framework. The final two essays address issues in folklore studies more broadly. The first asks why folklorists are no longer interested in stipulating universal laws, as Axel Olrik did in outlining the epic laws of folk narrative and Arnold van Gennep did in characterizing the rules for rites of passage. The final essay exhorts scholars to explain how or why a particular tradition fails or succeeds using empirical, ideally testable, evidence.The essay, “Incongruous, Appropriate, Spurious,” is especially useful because it very much describes the way in which humor operates in “real life.” Spuriousness acts as a mechanism through which everyday presumptions and propositions about the world are suddenly upended, revealing the social construction at work in personal biases and ordinary ways of thinking and likewise illustrating that things (words, the world, etc.) do not have to be the way they are. In this way, jokes are like philosophy or commentary; they reveal hidden dimensions of lived experience that might otherwise get lost in the surface features of existence.I have one critique that pertains to the analysis of dirty jokes. In the first essay, Oring contests the idea that sexual jokes exist solely to disparage or sexually expose women, and he bases his argument on a content analysis of a randomly selected portion of Gershon Legman’s materials in order to prove that point in an objective fashion. That is fair, and I agree that not all sexual jokes necessarily disparage women. But given that humor is socially situated and that the meaning of utterances in large part derives from the context of a situation, content analysis is a limited perspective. In the afterword, Oring expands on this point for several more pages, discussing a US Coast Guard Academy dinner for cadets and their guests in the 1990s during which a captain told risqué jokes. It went very badly. Some women complained, there eventually was a military investigation, and the officer apparently committed suicide. Oring comments that it is difficult to regard these moderately risqué jokes as sexual harassment or as an assertion of male power. He further notes that the nature of the joke, the character of the teller, the audience, and the circumstances of its telling all contribute to determining whether a joke amounts to harrassment, yet he overlooks the formal, military, and highly masculine context in which these jokes were told. Interestingly, the epigraph to the chapter on dirty jokes is a quotation attributed to Oscar Wilde that reads “everything is about sex except sex. Sex is about power.” I can’t think of anything that represents male power and imbalanced gender dynamics more than a military dinner in which a senior male officer tells sexual jokes to a captive audience of cadets and their guests, who presumably were mostly young and female.This is an excellent book for those who want an overview of Oring’s ideas. Students and scholars alike will appreciate its thoroughness. As always, Oring asks pertinent questions, and he pushes for analytical rigor and scientific, objective approaches to scholarly inquiry. I agree with the back cover blurb that states he urges people to think better. I also appreciated the dedication, which appears to be a humorous exchange between the author and Inta Carpenter. Another of Oring’s strengths, then, seems also to be the private joke.