







































1 

 

 

Humor, life, and everything nice 

Review by Áron Bakos 

 

Humour, Comedy and Laughter. Obscenities, Paradoxes, Insights and the Renewal of Life  

by Lidia Dina Sciama, ed. 

Berghahn, 2016 

 

Considering its importance in our everyday existence, humor is an aspect of universal human behavior, 

that has not yet received the scientific attention it deserves. This alone could be a reason to warmly 

welcome a collection of studies that analyze humor and some closely connected phenomena from an 

interdisciplinary perspective.   

 

The volume, with its nine chapters, presents case-studies from a very wide range of topics, such as the 

childhood development of reactions to and performances of the comic, the role of the ludic element in 

fieldwork, an ancient Chinese physician’s memoir, a historical review of American comics, joking 

situations in an international work environment, humor in science fiction films, English pantomimes, 

Italian folksongs, and finally, one of Goldoni’s plays and its local reception. Such diversity of topics, 

combined with their different empirical background and the reflectively open, interconnected approach 

towards humor that does not intend to sunder the concept from synonymous constructs confers the 

volume a certain eclectic character.  

 

On the one hand, this eclectic character is a positive feature, as such an approach sheds light upon the 

different sides of the same phenomena and, with the consecutive reading of the chapters, one is able to 

see how backgrounds in different disciplines lead to different evaluations of humor. Ian Wilkie and 

Matthew Saxton draw an interesting parallel between adult humor, comic performances and the 

childhood development of humor, listing and analyzing the features of humor that appear in both 

contexts. Judith Okely points out how the ludic experiences during fieldwork – embedded in their 



2 

 

highly personal, biographic context – might lead to revelations that enable anthropologists to recognize 

aspects of the cultural Other that would otherwise be hardly accessible. A similarly cognitive-level 

approach is followed by Elisabeth Hsu, who, after a detailed theoretical introduction, presents a close 

and philologically precise reading of her ancient Chinese source and understands humor as a way of 

comprehending the ultimate mysteries of life, that is, the mysteries of birth and creation. Ian Rakoff is 

the only author of the volume who, instead of focusing only on the lighter side of humor, points to its 

darker aspects: through a detailed historical description of the early American comics he stresses how 

the humor of mid-20th century comics echoed and justified racial stereotypes and prejudices. Fiona 

Moore’s functionalist social analysis of an international company shows how jokes become tools for 

negotiating and reaffirming symbolic borders between ethnically different groups. Dolores P. 

Martinez’s study pairs the cognitive level with an emotional one, as her original and straightforward 

reading of humorous science fiction films illustrates the way in which the movies become a forum not 

only for dealing with the anxieties that we hold about the future, but also a space for redrawing images 

of masculinity. Shirley Ardener also presents a gender-focused understanding of humor when 

describing the English art form of pantomime with its carnivalesque elements and liminoid 

characteristics, and sees it as a forum for renegotiating sexuality, while laughter is depicted as a 

response to the comically dissolved anxiety and fear. Glauco Sanga’s paper on Italian popular songs 

with its detailed presentation and analysis of different texts in some sense points to the opposite 

direction of humor, that is, its ability to socially stigmatize deviances and overstepping of boundaries. 

Finally, Lidia Dina Sciama’s text leads away from popular culture to Goldoni’s comedy just to lead 

back to the question of its popular and local reception, describing how the parodic depiction of locals 

became a source of laughing at oneself and also a part of a reimagined local identity in the making. 

 

From a theoretical point of view, however, this eclectic character has negative aspects to it as well, 

most importantly, the fact that it lacks a commonly defined conceptual framework. While individually 

each of the studies is worth reading and is a valuable contribution to a more nuanced understanding of 

humor, it remains questionable whether the book becomes more than a collection of studies in an 

under-defined topic. Of course, it is arguable, and is pointed out both by Sciama’s Introduction and by 

Ardener’s paper, that humor is a topic that seems to resist definitions or a rigorous scientific approach. 

Although one would agree with this statement, it remains debatable whether we should simply accept 

this as a difficulty and move on, or rather, try to tackle it. The lack of definition holds the danger that 

our understandings differ not because of the fact that we share different views on the same theme, but 

because we might be talking about entirely different subjects. While this argument might seem 



3 

 

somewhat trivial, in the case of a volume in which the different topics belong to different times, 

different cultures, different mediums and different social settings it becomes important to question the 

ground on which the different phenomena become comparable. In my opinion, the present volume 

unfortunately lacks this cautiousness. Perhaps a more critical and reflexive editorial or theoretical 

approach in collecting these texts in a (not only seemingly) coherent volume would explain why this 

grouping is valid or preferable, without leaving the reader with an impression that one is able to 

understand their commonalities only instinctively. Of course, it would not be any more appealing if the 

volume followed a narrow outlook, without adding anything new to such an intriguing social-scientific 

subject as humor, but it is the coherence of the texts as chapters of a book that becomes questionable. 

Would it be any different if the papers appeared in an issue of any journal on the topic?  

 

Apart from reflecting on humor through very differing phenomena, the authors also approach the topic 

through different methodological tools, and more importantly, from different theoretical standpoints. It 

is definitely a valuable feature of the title that most of its chapters are able to step out of the boundaries 

of the Bergson-Freud-Bahtyin triangle, from which otherwise many papers cannot step further. Also, 

even the studies which build on these theories manage to use these creatively, without leaving an 

impression that they were trying to fit in a set frame.  Still, it is quite unfortunate that the 

anthropological theories on humor, that Sciama in the Introduction is able to review so mindfully and 

so concisely, are not tackled in the writings of this volume (apart from her and, to a smaller extent 

Hsu’s study). Whereas the Introduction presents the classic theories on humor and sets the tone for a 

fruitful dialogue on the topic, it seems as though the chapters of the volume do not truly engage in this 

conversation. One possible theory that the chapters could have engaged with, which could then have 

become a common denominator, is Mary Douglas’ general approach to and theory on humor. In the 

overview of the papers, I aimed to hint towards the different statements on the function of humor, the 

comic, or laughter that could be interpreted as questions of affirming, drawing or renegotiating borders. 

Therefore, it is most unfortunate that the potential that Douglas’s understanding of culture (as an 

amalgam of categories and boundaries) and jokes (as a questioning of rigid structures) might have 

offered, was not reflected on more in the individual papers. Both the heartening humor Sciama 

mentions and the ridiculing negative humor – on which (probably due to an idealizing tendency of 

culturally preferred states of being, such as play in its connection to childhood) there is less said in the 

present volume – seem to be connected to liminal phases. The statement seems to be true both for the 

liminality of changes of seasons (e.g. carnivals) and those of life stages (e.g. initiations). Thinking 

about humor in a Turnerian line of thought, it is not only the liminal, but the liminoid, with its 



4 

 

happenings, performances, the consuming of different arts etc. that seem to be a general flourishing 

ground for humor. The stress of most studies on renegotiations seem to point to this double fluctuating 

nature of humor, that is, its liminal or liminoid setting and its impact in the reaffirmation and 

renegotiation of boundaries. The cognitive boundaries are reflected in the context of performative 

boundaries, and it is humor that seems to flourish in this setting and reaffirm or rewrite the structures of 

everyday existence. In my reading of the topic, such a general idea might firstly point out why the 

majority of the papers of the volume are on different art forms, i.e. comics, movies, pantomime, 

popular songs and comedies, performed in a liminal, liminoid setting or consumed as a liminoid 

experience. It might also explain why humor becomes important in such a liminal state of being as 

doing anthropological fieldwork or early childhood, which are in a sense, both initiation stages into the 

social man’s world. Secondly, such a general argument might point out why most papers underline 

incongruity, the reaffirmation or remediation of categories as a notable aspect of humor, or why such an 

existential question as the creation of life, which is hardly touched upon in everyday conversations 

could be tackled with such contempt in comic context.  

 

All in all, the present volume is a notable contribution to understanding humor and comic 

performances. It clearly shows that humor is such a nuanced topic that in order to understand it in its 

complexity, one has to analyze it from a varied range of perspectives, sometimes through the study of 

seemingly unconnected phenomena. What however I miss, is a more reflexive and well-rounded 

definition of the concepts touched upon, and a common linking element for the studies. The reading I 

presented is an attempt to enter in a dialogue with the theories presented in the Introduction: another 

possible link between the studies, that not only tries to justify their collection in a volume, but 

hopefully also points toward a more rounded understanding of humor as an analytical concept for 

social sciences. Perhaps such a reading might contribute to more conversation on the topic. 

 

Áron Bakos is a PhD student at the Babeș-Bolyai University, Cluj-Napoca. He published papers on the 

humor of trolling in MMORPGs and among servicemen. His research interests include life histories, 

military stories, rites of passage, carnival and humor, gaming and the history of cultural anthropology. 

 

 

 

© 2017 Áron Bakos 


