Page 77 - The Language of Humour

64 ‘CRIKEY, THAT’S A HARD ONE!’
Nor is it a recent phenomenon. Carnival was traditionally a time of
crossdressing, outrageous behaviour and freedom from the usual,
social contraints—though only for a day or two. Sex has been a cause of
laughter for as long as written evidence exists: ‘If only it was as easy to
banish hunger by rubbing the belly as it is to masturbate’ (Diogenes the
Cynic). In Chaucer’s fourteenth-century ‘Miller’s Tale’ the young
lovers play a trick on Absolon, when he begs Alison for a kiss.

This Absolon gan wipe his mouth ful drie.
Derk was the night as pich, or as the cole,
And at the window out she putte hir hole,
And Absolon, him fil no bet ne wers,
But with his mouth he kiste hir naked ers
Ful savourly, er he were war of this.
Abak he stirte, and thoughte it was amis,
For wel he wiste a womman hath no berd.
(The Canterbury Tales)

In Seriously Funny (Jacobson 1997) Howard Jacobson emphasises the
origins of laughter in the ancient roots of civilisation, when we were
closer to our animal nature. He claims that we laugh at slapstick comedy
because the buckets of water and custard pies remind us of urine and
faeces. Mikhail Bakhtin, the Russian literary critic, traced this tradition
from the Greek satyr plays which originated in the phallic songs and
dances for the worship of Dionysus. Even at the height of Athenian
civilisation the performance of a great tragedy, like Oedipus, alway
ended with a rude comedy involving satyrs—the mythical creatures,
half-human, half-animal, notorious for their genital endowment and
insatiable sexual appetite. (In the twentieth century, Barry Humphries’
character, Les Patterson, is a leering, satyr figure.) This form of humour
does not have to exclude women: in Aristophanes’ play Lysistrata the
women mock men’s enslavement to their phalluses. Female comedians
today can be just as explicit in their sexual references.
All this suggests that sex, though a taboo, does not fall outside the
boundaries of socially acceptable humour. Yet limits are imposed. In
the USA, in the 1980s, the Comedy of Hate pushed the boundaries so far
that it could be broadcast only in a severely censored form, even on late-
night documentaries. However ‘free’ people consider themselves, they
still draw a line at some point and say: ‘That is not funny, but
offensive.’ It is not so much the topic itself as the treatment of it.