Page 76 - The Language of Humour

‘CRIKEY, THAT’S A HARD ONE!’ 63
Commentary
The most common taboo area for humour is sex, as you can see from
the limited range of topics in these jokes. One-off jokes about death and
religion were harder to find.
Perhaps other subjects have replaced them in today’s society:
drugtaking has contemporary shock value. Sometimes the taboo word
itself triggers a laugh—it is direct and the response is immediate. In
these examples only the first one—not about sex—used the word
‘fuck’. Such direct taboo-breaking rarely gets into print or the media.
There has to be some sort of disguise, at least in the public domain. The
reference to ‘penis’ and ‘tits’ was caused by one character
misunderstanding. Other jokes alluded to a taboo word by the use of
ambiguity: ‘happiness’, ‘angina’, ‘pricks’, ‘organ’, sometimes at the
level of grammatical structure: ‘I felt rosy.’ There is a delayed response
with innuendo: ‘That’s a hard one’. This sort of coyness often makes it
acceptable. It’s OK to hint, but offensive to say it out loud. This, in
itself, says something interesting about our conventions of language
use.

Extension
The previous examples represent humour found by the author of this
book, in the 1990s. Collect examples of taboo-breaking humour current
in your social group, to see if there is a different spread of topics and
ways of creating laughter.

TABOOS: SEX AND EXCRETA

It is almost certain that the most common topics are still sex and excreta.
This taboo seems to be universal. Children’s jokes break the taboo of
referring to bodily functions, but with an element of disguise. This
tendency does not disappear with age.
What’s the difference between a bad marksman and a constipated
owl? One shoots but can’t hit.
‘We have to be able to mop, you see, with Dad’s habits…’
‘Dicky bladder?’
‘We call him Dad…’ (Victoria Wood)