Page 70 - The Language of Humour

‘MY MOTHER-IN-LAW…’ 57
Commentary
The butt in the first extract, from a Victoria Wood television sketch, is a
working-class northern female, laughed at for being so ‘common’. The
caricature is created by the choice of name: ‘Kelly-Marie Tunstall’, and
the reference to ‘tattoos’, ‘a pint of Babycham, some pork scratchings’,
‘love bites’. There is a parody of register in the conversational refrain:
‘You didn’t.’ ‘I did.’—which leads up to the reversal in the last lines—
and the use of present tense for relating a past event: ‘So he puts down.’
Whether this is seen as cruel mockery depends partly on the stance of
Victoria Wood. Is she laughing at the butt for being working-class and
northern? She has a sharp ear for the speech patterns of many social
groups—particularly northerners like herself—and also def lates the
pretensions of middle-class speech in her sketches. It is easier to
determine the response of the tellee, i.e. whether your group found this
funny without any reservations.
The device of irony is used in the second extract, from the Comic
Strip film Five Go Mad on Mescalin, where the butts—representing
racist attitudes—represent these views in an apparently self-
congratulatory way.

POWERFUL GROUPS AS THE BUTT OF
HUMOUR

As this last example shows, the butt of humour is not always in an
inferior position. Much humour is an attack on people in superior
positions of power and inf luence; in a sense, it is the fight-back of the
victim, who has only words to use against money, might and status.
Political satire is an example of this in the public domain—on radio,
television and in the newspapers. People who don’t have access to the
media collect and spread jokes by word of mouth. There is a consensus
among the joke-tellers that they have suffered, in some way, at the
hands of these people: social workers, lawyers, celebrities like Paul
Daniels. It doesn’t seem to matter how corny the jokes are, they are
exchanged and capped with yet another. Established joke formulas are
used, like ‘How many x does it take to change a light bulb?’ and the
punchline is altered appropriately.