Theories of Ethnic Humor: How to Enter, Laughing

ETHNIC HUMOR HAS ALWAYS FORMED A SIGNIFICANT PART OF THE WORLD OF American folklore and culture, partly because it provides pleasure, and partly because of its connection with mythical concepts of aggression, struggle, and our national passion play and ritual, Americanization. 1 Humor, moreover, is absolutely central to our conception of the world. Despite this fact, we tend to become suddenly solemn when we begin to write, particularly for scholarly journals and books. To be funny indicates a lack of seriousness. Perhaps for this reason, histories and studies of ethnicity, assimilation, and ethnic literature have frequently ignored a vital aspect of their subject; for although minorities have often entered into full citizenship through long and arduous struggle, this procedure has sometimes been both shortened and sweetened when they have made up their minds to enter laughing-using the more delightful aspects of ethnic-generated humor to win friends, acceptance, and material success. This happens in spite of, and in reaction to, the darker, better-known side of ethnic humor: jokes directed against the out-group by the in-group, or by one out-group against another, or self-deprecating jokes told by members of the group itself.