‘rhetorical humour analysis’. From this, he argues that humour is a form of rhetoric because
it uses linguistic mechanisms that resemble
metaphor and metonym.
Where response by showing that humour, as a
form of rhetoric, has characteristics that mean it
is highly likely to provoke a response of a serious nature. “It is always very difficult to argue
that humour does something specific because
often it will do more than one thing in different
contexts. This is something that needs to be
accounted for when describing the harm that it
might cause.
He explains, “Often political correctness wants
to, but fails to, criticise humour effectively because there is little description of the mechanisms that make comic language work. “
Punching up/down
Responses to jokes about ethnicity and race
can depend on who is telling the joke. For example, it may be deemed offensive for a white
person to make a joke about Asians, whereas
it would be more acceptable for an Asian to
make a similar joke about their own culture,
or an Asian make a joke about white people
can be variously funny or offending to some
extent. Many comedians from diverse ethnic
backgrounds do this on a regular basis, about
whites, other groups and themselves.
Impersonations
Philip Bell’s observation, ‘The comic stereotype
looks good-natured, even affectionate; yet...
it ‘ infantilises’ the ethnic group, portraying its
members as abnormal and ridiculous, and
thereby undermines their chances of being taken seriously’.
But upon reading this observation, one must
ask if being taken seriously is the goal of the
comedian in the first place. Punching up and
punching down or punching at all is a question
of status. As an ethnic minority, the notion of
being infantilised or looking ridiculous could be
a device to get the audience on side. However,
they walk a tight rope.
Shield and sword- punching up
Examples of punching up
‘One of the many facets of humour has always been its ability to be used as a defensive
weapon- ‘that great spear of humour’, as it was
described by the American jazz comic, Lord
Buckley. Even within the darkness of the holocaust oral accounts tell jokes shared and created and preserved with in the hell-on- earth of