Page 67 - The Language of Humour

54 ‘MY MOTHER-IN-LAW…’
any one moment and change over time. This partly accounts for varying
responses to humour. Modern audiences feel uncomfortable with the
bringing low of the characters of Kate in Shakespeare’s The Taming of
the Shrew and Shylock in The Merchant of Venice, for example, if
forthright women and successful Jews are not felt to be a threat.

Extension
Collect examples where the butt of humour is perceived as inferior in
some sense. See if some groups commonly recur. Do you agree that this
gives a snapshot of the attitudes of the society at that time?

WHICH SOCIAL GROUPS ARE THE BUTT OF
HUMOUR?

Representatives of lower social class groups are often the focus of
humour. They are also identified with a region of the country.

What do you say to a Liverpudlian in a suit? ‘When’s the court
date?’

In the film Brief Encounter the hero and heroine are securely middle-
class and the plot deals with their tragic romance; the light relief comes
in the characters of the railway porter and the woman serving tea, and
they are each given a marked regional dialect. The comic interludes in
Shakespeare’s plays revolve around characters whose language use is
clearly differentiated from those in the main romantic or tragic plot.
There is a tendency to find some accents of English intrinsically funny—
a’Brummie’ accent, for example. In Germany, the ‘Plattdeutsch’ (flat
German) accent, spoken by people in the north, has a similarly low
status. Exactly which group is considered to be ridiculous varies from
culture to culture. In Britain jokes with the Irish as a butt used to be
extremely popular: ‘There was an Englishman, a Scotsman and an
Irishman…’. In Germany there are jokes with a similar structure. The
butts of humour in these cases are always perceived to have some
language deficiency.
The group is further stereotyped with one single characteristic: the
Welsh and their affinity with sheep, the Scots with meanness, Essex
girls with stupidity. This trait can then become more specific: the
wearing of white high heels, dancing round handbags and the names
Sharon and Tracey are used to signify ‘thick’ or ‘common’. It is enough