I may just be pretending not to get it

Jokes have long been used as conversational tools to define in-groups and out-groups. If you want to know what 5th graders think is the most uncool thing to be, listen to the jokes they tell. When I was a kid we repeated a lot of jokes about "pollacks," though I would have been hard-pressed to explain what a pollack was, what a Polish name looked or sounded like, or even where Poland was on a map. Ten years later when I was a student at the Univ. of Texas, we made the same jokes about "Aggies," the students at the state agricultural school. The very same jokes. Which tells you that the jokes aren't really about people from any particular locale; they are just jokes about the stupid.

Then it got to be uncool to tell jokes about other groups of people; the sign that you were a politically correct, enlightened person was the ability to keep a straight face, if not a disapproving expression, if someone told, say, a blonde joke. This gave rise to another joke:

Q. How many feminists does it take to change a lightbulb?
A. That's not funny.

Flash-forward another couple of decades. I was a manager at a software company, and among my minions was a desperately untalented and frightened woman whose increasing anxiety about her job was expressed by making jokes at my expense. She took note of my failure to react to these sallies, and when a new director came along and took over my department, she used his welcome lunch to loudly remark, "Finally, someone with a sense of humor." I wanted to say, it's not that I don't have a sense of humor, you ass, it's that your efforts to ingratiate yourself at my expense are pathetic, not funny. But I didn't have to say that, because we got rid of her a month later. (Four months after that, the new director got rid of me, so maybe the joke was on me after all.)

This brings me to my older brother. When I was a little kid, I admired his comic ability, which I desperately tried to imitate. Since I was utterly unable to distinguish myself in other ways, I took it upon myself to be the class clown, with varying success.

Neither my brother nor I have ever ceased using humor as a way of making our way through social situations, though I feel he does it to keep everyone at arm's length, whereas I do it to disarm people and make them like me. The last time we encountered each other, at dinner at our mother's house several years ago, he kept trying to inject little jokes into everything. I sat there with a dismayed expression.

Thinking about all this today, I realized what a complex social intereaction joking behavior is, allowing people to demonstrate and sometimes re-negotiate their status in the group. If one person in the group is the butt of jokes, obviously he's of low status. But what if one person takes it upon himself to be the funny one? He might have medium-to-high status, if others find him entertaining; but if everyone pointedly refrains from laughing at his jokes, he's risked and lost status, an experience I've suffered many times. Unless a line is truly funny, most people can choose whether or not to respond with laughter, so that the attempt to be funny may be met with a reaction just as pointed.

Lately my brother's been sending me email, trying to convince me he is no longer the objectionable fundamentalist stooge he was twenty years ago. he's even offering to come to town to prove it to me. I just hope he doesn't try being funny.