Laugh now, cry later – Erma Bombeck
Laughter
is the most powerful weapon in our arsenal and I have written at length about
the benefits of laughter:
Indeed my day is not complete unless I have made at least ten people laugh.
Why? I don’t know. I guess I’m addicted to laughter and to seeing people
giggle. It’s one of the reasons I took up writing but I wasn’t the first person
by any means to write humour or to tell jokes.
People
have been writing jokes and telling funny stories for centuries. I was
astonished to discover even the Victorians, who I consider to be a pooh-faced
bunch told marvellous jokes: What is the difference between a tube and a foolish
Dutchman? One is a hollow cylinder and the other a silly Hollander. –
(See more
at: Historytoday.com ~ Best Victorian Jokes )
I
researched the history of laughter and humour before I set about my new challenge
as a stand-up comic and it is fascinating but too lengthy to document here in
one post. There are many who should be credited for this form of entertainment,
including the Greeks and Plato, and a virtual saunter around the internet will
provide you with much information. The earliest known joke is set some way back
in time—back to 1600 BC if my sources are accurate. The joke was a bawdy
one—they all were to start with—and involved a Pharaoh, some women and a
fishing line. I’m not sure how it went but I guess you could look it up.
As people travelled so too did humour. The bedrock of British humour,
sarcasm for instance, was actually brought to the UK by the Vikings, typically
noted for raping and pillaging throughout history, when they brought trade from
across the world to British shores. Sarcasm, irony and understatement are part
of the “common heritage” between Denmark and the UK. There are traces in comic
tales used in the later Old Norse sagas, such as Orkneyinga Saga where an Earl goes out disguised as a fisherman, to
help a farmer.
These sagas, largely from the thirteenth century and known for their
“laconic humour, detail examples of comedy in the face of adversity, and also
contain the roots of some Danish and English words showing more similarities in
how we communicate.
Humour
has been attributed to many story-tellers and writers such as Chaucer whose Canterbury Tales written and unfinished
in the late fourteenth century is full of wholesome bawdy humour but it is
Shakespeare who gets the prize for the first knock knock joke. It occurs in Macbeth, just after the scene in which
King Duncan is slain by Macbeth and his wife. Shakespeare juxtaposes the horror
of the murder with an amusing scene involving a gatekeeper. “Knock, knock,
knock. Who’s there I’ the name of Beelzebub? Here’s a farmer hanged himself on
the expectation of plenty. Have napkins enough about you. Here you’ll need them.”…
Okay, you and I might not “get” the humour there but trust me when I say an
Elizabethan audience would have been chortling merrily at it.
Knock
knock jokes are not as puerile or childish as you might think. The first
documented one was in 1934.
Knock
knock.
Who’s
there?
Rufus
Rufus
who?
Rufus
the most important part of the house.
Since
then, they have become more sophisticated and now are conduits for other forms
of humour such as anti-jokes, puns, the new interrupting knock knock joke, the
reverse knock knock joke and so on. I’ll spare you my routine at this point.
Humour
developed from bawdy into the more sophisticated forms we enjoy today. The
British are considered to have an advanced sense of humour. I suppose due to
the fact we are stuck on a windy, grey island full of potholes, we have to find
something to alleviate the situation. However, not all nationalities share the
same sense of humour. For instance, what a Brit might find amusing, an American
might not. (Although, in my opinion, we both seem to like puns and Monty
Python.) The French do not in general, have the same sense of humour as us, as I
discovered when I gave a talk to an ex-pat group in France. Little did I know
that secreted in the audience were several French teachers who had dropped by
to learn about humour in writing. After the talk, one of them came up to me and
said, “Eet was a verrey good talk but I did not understand your first joke.
What do you call a Frenchman in sandals? Philippe Fellop!” I had trouble
explaining it to him.
Many
jokes are at the expense of others. The French love jokes about the Belgians as
do the Dutch and people from Luxembourg. For the British that would be like
telling jokes about the Irish or for our friends across the pond, jokes about Bubba.
There is a famous joke about a Belgian truck driver getting stuck under a
bridge. I told it at a dinner party in France to gales of laughter yet the same
joke fell flat on a UK tour. On the other hand, that same UK audience laughed
like mad at the joke about Paddy and Mick in an aeroplane: Paddy says to Mick,
“If the plane goes upside down, will we fall out?”
“No,”
says Paddy, “We’ll still be friends.”
In
Norway, Denmark and Finland they laugh at the Swedes and vice versa. Jokes
about Dutch people being tight-fisted or scrooge-like with money tend to be similar
to jokes we tell about the Scots.
My
own love affair with laughter and humour began many years ago. A child of the
seventies, it appears I was born in the right decade. Evidence points to the
fact anyone who was a child in the seventies is more likely to be light-hearted
and enjoy a laugh. The 1970s were the golden age of sit-coms and comedy on
radio and television and as a young person, I recall watching endless comedy
and entertainment shows.
From
story telling to literature, art, music, radio and television, humour has
played a part in our lives, releasing tension and helping us to feel better
about ourselves. It will continue to develop, dependent on sociological views
and individual, reflecting our feelings and views about life and provide that
necessary antidote to life with its woes. So, if you are feeling down, drag out
an old comedy DVD or sing along to Always
Look On The Bright Side of Life. You’ll feel a lot better.
Carol E. Wyer
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Humorous Novelist/Blogger
"A laugh every turn of the page"
Signed author with Safkhet Publishing
Blogger for Huffington Post
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