using “wild” laughter using “wild” laughter to explore the ... · seldom look at why these...

© The Author 2014. Published by Oxford University Press on behalf of the University of North Carolina at Chapel Hill. All rights reserved. For permissions, please e-mail: [email protected].

Social Forces 00(00) 1–25, Month 2014doi: 10.1093/sf/sou106

The author would like to thank three reviewers, Mary Good, and members of the University of Chicago Semiotics Workshop, the 2009 ASA annual conference session on Culture and Microinteraction, the University of Pennsylvania Sociology of Culture Workshop, and the Swarthmore College Junior Faculty Writing Workshop for invaluable support and comments. He would also like to thank all of the interviewees who graciously gave their time to the project. The empirical research in this paper was supported by National Science Foundation dissertation improvement grant SBR 9731162.

Using “Wild” Laughter

Using “Wild” Laughter to Explore the Social Sources of Humor

Mike Reay, Swarthmore College

Analyses of the multiple cognitive structures and social effects of humor seldom look at why these tend to center on particular topics. The puzzle of how humor can be highly varied yet somehow constrained by its source

“material” is explored using a corpus of over 600 incidents, not of deliberate jokes, but of the “wilder,” unplanned laughter that occurred during a set of interviews with economists— professionals who at the time (1999–2000) enjoyed an unprecedented degree of status and influence. The analysis finds that the source material for this laughter typically involved three kinds of socially structured contradiction: between ideals and reality, between different socially situated viewpoints, and between expe-riences occurring at different times. This illustrates how particular kinds of content can have a special laughter-inducing potential, and it suggests that wild laughter may at root be an interactional mechanism for dealing with social incongruity—even for members of relatively powerful groups. It is argued that this could not only help solve the larger puzzle of simultaneous variety and constraint in deliberate comedy, but also explain why the characteristic structures of humor are associated with a particular range of social effects in the first place.

IntroductionHumor is a highly varied phenomenon. It plays a wide range of social roles in daily life, and seems derivable from almost any subject or experience. In George Carlin’s (1990) words, “you can joke about anything. It all depends on how you construct the joke.” Conversely, however, humor is clearly constrained and channeled in particular directions. Different joke topics are popular to differ-ent degrees in different cultural and social settings, and some experiences seem to generate especially suitable “material” for amusement, constituting comedy “gold mines” compared to more barren alternatives.

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How can humor be both creative/flexible and limited by its social sources? Past studies have generally explored only the first half of this paradox, that is, how the contradiction-based structures of joking can be used to affect com-munication, identity, and power in various ways. Work on the second half is by contrast rare, and typically considers only large-scale phenomena such as national, ethnic, and religious differences. The following discussion redresses this imbalance by searching for a more general understanding of patterned sources that could be applied at multiple scales of analysis. It takes an unusual, indirect approach, turning away from deliberate humor (such as jokes, teas-ing, and witty repartee), and exploring the laughter that occurs in reaction to “wilder,” unplanned experiences.

The analysis considers a corpus of over 600 laughter incidents taken from interviews with economists—professionals who at the time (1999–2000) enjoyed an unprecedented degree of status and influence. The incidents all involve “own-serious-statement laughter” (OSSL), that is, interviewees laughing at something ostensibly serious that they themselves said. Looking for humor-like contradic-tions, the analysis finds that over two-thirds of the incidents invoke one or more of the following: ideals being refuted by practice, people in different situations having incompatible perspectives, and people experiencing change over time. All three of these are likely to be socially patterned rather than random, and they can in fact be thought of as aspects of a single underlying structural phenome-non: the distribution across time, space, and/or attention, of contradictory expe-riences such that they are “insulated” from each other except during unusual moments of reflection. If wild laughter is especially likely (though not inevi-table) during such moments, this would indicate at least one source of system-atic yet non-deterministic constraint at multiple levels of experience, that is, a pool of especially amusement-fertile latent contradictions. It might also explain what OSSL actually is, namely, part of a double shift in awareness: first from a habitual state of not noticing social contradictions, to recognizing an overview that is potentially problematic (even for relatively powerful social groups), then back down again to a reassuring immersion in the present communal context of “laughing off” problems with the approval of others.

While this interpretation concerns wild laughter rather than deliberate humor, it is clear that distribution and insulation could also produce especially rich material for the latter, providing one possible solution to the puzzle of simul-taneous creativity and multileveled constraint. Furthermore, the double-shift mechanism closely fits the general nature of humor in terms of both structure and function. With respect to structure, it is logically similar to typical joke sequences, where initial assumptions are suddenly overturned by a “trigger” experience that highlights a hitherto unnoticed, contradictory alternative. With respect to function, it invokes precisely the range of power, communication, and identity effects found in more planned comedic performances, since it neces-sarily combines social problems, implicit avoidance, and communal solidarity. Given these similarities, systematic distribution and insulation might therefore help explain not only why source material varies in its richness, but also why joke structures are associated with a particular set of social effects.

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The analysis is presented in four stages: a summary of the puzzle produced by existing work on humor and laughter, a background description of the inter-views and the nature of professional economics, an elaboration of the three typi-cal sources of OSSL, and a discussion of the possible implications.

Looking for the Social Sources That Constrain HumorThe Structures, Functions, and Sources of Deliberate HumorThere are many studies of the cognitive structure of humor, that is, the character-istic ways that amusing texts and performances combine cultural, linguistic, and logical elements. Most of these studies suggest that humor always involves some kind of contradiction, with recognizable jokes exhibiting a typical sequence of obscuring and then suddenly revealing incompatible ways of seeing the same thing (Koestler 1964; Raskin 1985; Davis 1993). More specifically, it seems as if most jokes involve an initially salient, taken-for-granted interpretation that is then upset by a “disjunctor” or trigger, bringing to mind an incompatible alter-native understanding that was hidden in the original text behind an unnoticed common element or “pivot” (Attardo 2001; Coulson, Urbach, and Kutas 2006; Ritchie 2006; Brône 2008).

There are also many studies illustrating humor’s wide range of social func-tions/effects (Apte 1985). Some of these identify its usefulness for sending risky messages in a deniable way, for example when raising taboo topics (Emerson 1969; Schegloff 2001), managing face-threatening actions (Zajdman 1995; Jorgensen 1996), or exploring group norms (Coser 1960; Eisenberg 1986). Other studies note a strong connection between humor and group identities, as a refusal to share in humor can push people apart (Drew 1987; Mulkay, Clark, and Pinch 1993), while shared mirth can increase solidarity and help deal with adversity by emphasizing common values, problems, and attitudes (Coser 1959; Hay 2000; Robinson and Smith-Lovin 2001). The bonding effect of sharing humor with people can also involve directing it at others, hence reinforcing or subverting various collective identities and patterns of domination—again in deniable ways (Martineau 1972; Holmes and Hay 1997; Downe 1999). Finally, humor can also relate to power by testing or displaying linguistic ability and cultural knowledge (Sacks 1978; Davies 2003), as well as disrupting conversa-tional sequences, introducing potentially unwelcome frames and interpretations, and imposing a playful rather than serious attitude (Coser 1960; Norrick 1993). Humor may also help establish the relative standing of actors within a group (Hay 2000), and discipline lower-status members through ridicule (Collinson 1988; Billig 2001).

In these structural and functional studies, however, the social sources of potentially amusing material are typically treated as something of a residual category. Joke models, for example, often go no further than simply noting that humor depends on cultural competencies, or on habits that make particular interpretations salient (Attardo 1994; Giora 2004). Studies of social functions, on the other hand, often downplay sources by simply positing a non-serious

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“mode” of discourse/interaction that can contain virtually anything once it has been successfully signaled and accepted (Mulkay 1988; Fox 1990; Cowan 2001; Bell 2006).

This bracketing creates something of a puzzle, however, because it is clear that humor is typically constrained and channeled by its material. Even if any-thing can be made funny given sufficient creativity, the uneven popularity of dif-ferent joke genres reveals that people tend to find some topics to be much richer “comedy gold mines” than others. As Christie Davies (1998, 2011a) shows, this is especially apparent if one compares different communities and cultures, since certain joke contents that are wildly popular in some places are entirely ignored in others.

Davies notes, however, that few analysts attempt to explain this in terms of systematic patterns of social behavior and experience, as opposed to just invok-ing unique cultural quirks or different “senses of humor” at the psychological level. In taking the more sociological route himself, he argues that prevailing comic stereotypes and joke cycles tend to build on phenomena that particu-lar cultures at particular times experience as being especially contradictory. For example, jokes about “dirty and stupid” minorities seem to be most popular in urbanized capitalist nations with identifiable rural peripheries, that is, com-munities where there are strong potential conflicts between stable rural ways of life and capitalist ideals of social mobility (Davies 2002). Elliott Oring (2003) similarly suggests that “blonde” jokes are popular in societies experiencing increased participation of women in the paid labor force, as this brings to the fore latent contradictions between the image of women as primarily domestic and sexual, and the reality of their presence in the workplace.

These arguments are fairly specific, but they can perhaps be read as examples of Mary Douglas’s (1999) more general assertion that jokes respond to con-tradictions in the “total social situation,” that is, the prevailing cultures, social structures, institutions, and practices that define people’s lives at any given time. While this provides a potentially wide-ranging model of social sources, however, it also suffers from two important shortcomings. First, it is somewhat inflexible, given how Douglas simply insists that structural contradictions inevitably lead to appropriate humor. Second, it seems to work only at the relatively large scale of the society, nation, region, or cultural group, so it is unclear just how it might connect with the more detailed analyses found in the structure and function lit-eratures. Despite the plausibility of the basic notion of social sources, then, there is still a need for a theory of the social situations at various levels of experience that can produce material especially apt—though not necessarily destined—for humorous treatment.

Laughter and Humorous Material “In the Wild”In pursuing such a theory, it is worth noting another feature of past studies of social sources: like the overwhelming majority of humor analyses, they focus on behavior where potentially amusing material has already been consciously recognized, processed, and deliberately presented as comic banter, texts, images,

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and performances. This means that it pays little attention to the nature and origins of “rawer” or “wilder” material that people find amusing when they encounter it in daily life. This may be a serious limitation, however, insofar as diary-based studies suggest that stereotypical jokes and comedy may represent as little as one-third of the experiences that people find funny on a day-to-day basis (Graeven and Morris 1975; Martin and Kuiper 1999).

This oversight may simply be due to the difficulty of identifying amusement outside obviously humorous “modes” of behavior. One possible response would be to use laughter as an indicator of mirth, and a number of past studies have indeed found that laughter can involve humor-like phenomena such as signaling interactional mode shifts (Jefferson 1979; Glenn 2003; Norrick 1993), express-ing hostility and censure (Freud 1993; Billig 2005), fostering solidarity, well-being, and peaceful interaction (Collins 2005; Provine 2000; Scheff 1994), and deflecting identity threats (Katz 1999; Goffman 1967; Davis 1979).

More importantly, there are also studies that explicitly try to explain what makes something especially “laughable.” Some of these focus on disappoint-ments, such as the buildup and sudden letdown of expectations (Kant 2000), the conflict between reality and conceptual representations (Schopenhauer 1958), the exposure of hidden “flaws” in ideal situations (Propp 2009), and the sud-den contrast between assumed human agency and obviously habitual behav-ior (Bergson 1956; Goffman 1974). Others suggest that laughter comes from people’s perceptions of inferiority, either in others, or in their own behavior (Hobbes 2010; Gruner 1999). Another idea is that laughter feeds on situations where people feel themselves to be superior to social constraints (Freud 1993; Davis 1993; Kotthoff 2000), or where their own experiences break through habitual patterns of thought (Darwin 1955). Finally, some analyses emphasize the importance of situations where people either suffer from or recognize false impressions of identity (Plato 2012; Katz 1996).

These proposed sources of amusing material are more varied than those found in the sociological studies of deliberate humor. They are also not so exclusively large scale, so they could conceivably apply more easily to a variety of levels of experience. At the same time, however, they represent a highly disparate set of experiences, and it is unclear how they might be connected, reducible to each other, or systematically patterned according to social practice. Thus, while the study of laughter does seem potentially useful for exploring social constraints, work still needs to be done to produce a more general and flexible understand-ing of patterned sources, and to connect this to the structures and functions of deliberate forms of humor.

Unfortunately, however, laughter studies tend to be treated as anachronistic, inferior rivals to structural and functional models of humor (Attardo 2008). One possible justification for this attitude is that humor obviously does not always involve laughter, though a more typical strategy is to point out the oppo-site: that not all laughter is related to humor (e.g., Pinker 1997). This is often done by invoking a study by Robert Provine (1993), although this study actu-ally uses a very narrow definition of humor, counting only stereotypical jokes or utterances whose amusing nature could be fully understood out of context. If a


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broader definition were used—for example, anything involving joke-type con-tradictions—the connection between laughter and humor might appear much stronger. One could then perhaps accommodate the obvious fact that laughter is often closely associated with amusement, and that “making people laugh” is both a major aim of humor and a common measure of its success (Oring 2003; Kuipers 2008; Kozintsev 2010).

Such an approach would not necessarily preempt structural models by pro-posing a set of topics with irreducible laughable essences. In other words, it would not have to result in a “substantive” theory that treats sex, defecation, politics, or any other issues as intrinsically funny simply because people laugh at them (Attardo 1994). An understanding of laughability could instead be just as “relational” and contradiction-based as joke models, but focused on pat-terns found in the wilder world of everyday serious experience—a world that of course ultimately supplies all that goes into deliberate comedy (Davies 1998, 2011b).

The following investigation pursues such a relational understanding by search-ing for humor-like conflicts in a textual corpus of relatively wild, unplanned amusement—something still surprisingly rare in humor or laughter studies (Partington 2011). While it relies on just one specific case—economists laugh-ing at their own statements during interviews with a sociologist—it neverthe-less provides some intriguing hints as to how especially laughable experiences can arise, how they might be systematically patterned at various levels of social experience, and how they might help resolve the paradox of simultaneous cre-ativity and channeling/constraint in humor.

A Corpus of Economists’ Wild LaughterOwn-Serious-Statement LaughterThe analysis considers transcripts from 50 audio-recorded interviews, each around 75 minutes long, conducted by the author in 1999 and 2000 with experi-enced economists in a range of different settings in the Chicago and Washington, DC areas—18 academic and 32 nonacademic (Reay 2007a, 2012).

The transcripts indicate points where anyone audibly laughed. As in the detailed conversation analyses of Jefferson, Katz, and others, these included short, usually expiratory elements such as “hn,” “huuu,” “ha,” “nyuh,” and “nyuk,” as well as Provine’s more prolonged, fully vocalized “classic ha-ha” sounds. Unlike in conversation analysis, however, no attempt was made to interpret the precise positioning and turn-signaling function of these noises, as opposed to the semantic content of the surrounding utterances.

The transcripts include 914 incidents, 778 of which involved the interviewee laughing first. This was not a result of the interviewer being funny, however, as around 85 percent of the interviewee-led incidents were in reaction to something they themselves said—the same proportion Glenn (2003) reports for dyadic conversations (see also Vettin and Todt [2004]). At the same time, only about 5 percent of these interviewee “self-laughter” incidents involved obvious jokes,

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clichéd witticisms, or puns. This means that even within speaker-initiated inci-dents, the percentage of deliberate joking was much lower than the 33 percent found by Graeven and Morris (1975) and Martin and Kuiper (1999), and lower even than the 10–20 percent seen by Provine (1993).

Overall, then, nearly 70 percent of the incidents involved interviewees initiat-ing laughter in response to something ostensibly serious that they themselves said. The analysis focuses exclusively on this “own-serious-statement laughter” (OSSL), not only because it makes up the majority of the incidents, but also because it excludes contagious or confirmatory laughter that might have had little connection to the content of discussions. It also excludes direct responses to interviewer statements that might have been laughably naïve or ignorant.

Figure 1 shows the incidents per interview ranging in a right-skewed distribu-tion from 0 to 53, the mean being around 12.5 and the median 8 (c.f. Vettin and Todt [2004], who found similarly high variation between individuals). The inci-dents were first coded according to the general topic or question being discussed at the time, then more subjectively for the presence and possible experiential sources of joke-type contradictions and reversals. Before laying out these inter-pretations, however, it is important to explain something of the study’s context, both in terms of the nature of the economics profession, and in terms of the interview situation.

American EconomicsEconomics at the time was the most successful and influential social science in the United States, with a much larger overall social presence than sociol-ogy, anthropology, or political science. American-trained and American-style economists also dominated the staff of numerous transnational organizations, and were becoming increasingly important in other countries, such that the

Figure 1. Incidents of own-serious-statement laughter per interviewee

54

32

10

Numb

er of

Inter

viewe

es

Incidents of Own–Serious–Statement Laughter0 5 10 15 20 25 30 35 40 45 50 55


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discipline seemed destined to become one of the premier global professions of the information age (Fourcade 2006).

As in other professions, the academic branch of economics was the central source of training and new discoveries, supposedly advancing abstract scien-tific knowledge by building up a body of objectively correct ideas via unbiased peer review (Reay 2007a). Frequent publication in the most prestigious jour-nals could win academics a place in the highest-ranked departments, and those individuals judged the absolute best could be awarded a number of prestigious honors, topped by the Bank of Sweden Prize in Economic Sciences in Memory of Alfred Nobel.

Methodologically, academic work focused overwhelmingly on mathematical models and complex statistical tests (“econometrics”). This was often presented as a reassuring sign of the discipline’s scientific credentials, indicating that it was a neutral, “positive” body of knowledge as opposed to a morally driven “nor-mative” one based on unsystematic, ad hoc arguments and merely “anecdotal” evidence. Accusations of relying on the latter rather than properly “rigorous” analysis were a familiar feature of disputes within the discipline, and of negative assessments by economists of other social sciences (McCloskey 1996; Backhouse 2010).

In terms of theoretical content, economics was dominated by an approach covering two broad topics: the decisions of individuals, families, and corpora-tions (“microeconomics”), and the large-scale interconnections between technol-ogies, policies, financial systems, industrial outputs, and employment conditions (“macroeconomics”). In both of these areas, the focus was on understanding economic activity in advanced industrialized nations, primarily by treating actors as if they made narrowly defined “rational” decisions to maximize their benefits through market transactions (Samuelson and Nordhaus 1998).

This mainstream orthodoxy was not a static body of knowledge, however. In the 1960s, it had been characterized by widespread acceptance of the mac-roeconomic theories of John Maynard Keynes, which suggested that govern-ments could stabilize an economy by using central bank lending, public works, and unemployment benefits to make sure that people kept buying goods dur-ing downturns. In the 1970s and 1980s, however, a contrary “New Classical” approach coming out of the universities of Minnesota and Chicago argued that employees and consumers would come to expect governments to add cash to the system, thus making interventions less and less effective over time (Landreth and Colander 2001).

This highly mathematical “rational expectations” approach was often billed as simply making macroeconomics more rigorously scientific and consis-tent with the rational actor and market models of microeconomics (Sheffrin 1996). However, it was also associated with normative calls to reduce govern-ment intervention and increase the role of markets. While the profession was never reshaped entirely in the New Classical image, by the late 1990s there was nevertheless a widespread impression that scientific economics was dominated by the “Chicago School” and prevailing “neoliberal” policies of welfare-state

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reduction, global capitalization, economic deregulation, and supposedly free trade (Fukuyama 1995; Held et al. 1999).

At the time of the interviews, then, American economics was commonly thought of as a highly scientific discipline that used rigorous mathematical tech-niques to show how rational economic action generated optimal outcomes in a free-market system. Major challenges to this image lay in the future, most nota-bly the collapse of the dot-com stock bubble, the fiasco of Californian energy deregulation, and the financial meltdown of 2008. The main question then is: What did economists find funny about their professional experiences in this, their apparent hour of expert triumph?

Interviewing EconomistsTo find an answer, one must also consider the nature of the interviews. These were dyadic, face-to-face, and confidential, conducted in private rooms at the subjects’ workplaces or homes. They were part of a project investigating the nature and authority of the economics discipline, using a series of 37 questions to generate open-ended discussions about what kinds of work people did, how they used academic theories, what their training and career trajectories had been like, and what they thought about the scientific status of their discipline. The results inevitably focused on professional life, and it is easy to see how they generated precisely the sorts of reflective statements discussed below concerning ideals, misrecognition, and change over time.

It is also easy to see that the humor in the interviews was having several of the effects found in previous studies. Many of the OSSL incidents implied criti-cisms of particular social groups, such as econometricians, academics, economic educators, government forecasters, lawyers, and laypeople. In these cases, the laughter could have been functioning either as hostile ridicule, or as a “nervous” defense, the latter triggered perhaps by discussing professional problems with someone of superior status, that is, a male academic from the famous University of Chicago. However, the interviewees were all participating voluntarily, and there were no statistically significant differences in the average number of laughter incidents between groups varying on the relevant dimensions, that is, men and women, academics and nonacademics, and those at top-10 academic departments and others.1

The opposite effect, in fact, seemed more likely, with subjects in some way laughing at an interviewer with lower status, that is, someone 20 years younger, without a PhD, from a less prestigious discipline, and from a school that crit-ics might disdain for its association with free-market ideology. Any such effects were subtle, however, as the interviewees came off as uniformly polite and sup-portive. There was also no difference in average amounts of laughter between those who did or did not include Chicago figures among their “most admired” economists, and only eight laughter incidents were explicitly connected to either Chicago or sociology, none of which seemed particularly mean spirited.

Overall, then, the humor seemed most consistent with informal solidarity-building in a low-stakes confidential setting, where people might have been


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admitting more self-doubt to a stranger than they would to closer associates (c.f. Reinharz 1992, 26). The interviewees certainly discussed many shortcom-ings of their profession, but these expressions of dissatisfaction seemed to come from a perceived position of security, without any fear of exposure or dele-gitimizing consequences (Reay 2007a). It is possible, however, that less laughter was on average initiated by people who claimed that economics is definitely a science (p = 0.055), who made statements strongly in favor of free-market policies (p = 0.051), and who were among the top five most prolific publishers (p = 0.033). Interviewees more committed to a positive image of the profession may therefore have experienced fewer problems, or were somewhat less inclined to notice them, flag them with laughter, or (according to the model developed below) dismiss them as unproblematic.

One final consideration is the interviewer’s own sense and use of humor. As noted above, he initiated less than 15 percent of all the laughter incidents himself, but these plus several humorously worded questions (such as “Do you ever see supposed economic experts on TV who make you roll your eyes and go ‘Oh no!’?”) could have pushed the humor in a particular direction, even though they were excluded from the main analysis. Furthermore, when the interviewer did initiate anything, it was done with an eye to improving rapport, once again increasing the likelihood that solidaristic effects would prevail. It is also possible—though not perceived at the time—that the interviewer’s nonver-bal reactions to interviewee statements (smiling, frowning, opening his mouth in astonishment, etc.) could have encouraged laughter simply in response to things that he personally found funny (c.f. Hay 2001, 60).2

In summary, then, the interviews seemed particularly conducive to producing the kind of phenomena discussed below, that is, people discussing potentially problematic contradictions that are normally ignored, and reacting to them with solidaristic laughter. In the absence of comparable corpus studies, one must therefore accept that the results could be unique to low-stakes interview settings, high-status social groups, American economics, or even the personal biases of the investigator. Even so, the analysis at least illustrates the possibility of find-ing systematic patterns in potentially laughable material, and connecting these to the structures and functions of humor in a useful way. Furthermore, with as much as two-thirds of all humor lying in the essentially unexplored wild realm, the unusualness of interview reflections in this regard is hard to gauge. The contradictory but stable nature of economics may be more typical of contem-porary professions than is usually acknowledged (Reay 2007a, 2007b, 2012), and it is clear that experiences based on ideals, situated perspectives, and tem-poral changes are fairly general phenomena. The biases of the current study may therefore turn out not to be limiting and misleading, so much as fortuitous and especially fruitful in terms of exploring the nature of humor.

Three Sources of Especially Laughable ExperienceTable 1 breaks down the OSSL incidents according to the topic being discussed at the time. It shows the typical order of the topic in the discussion, the number

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Tabl

e 1.

Top

ics

of D

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42.9

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9

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of incidents, the percentage of subjects who initiated OSSL, and the mean per-centage that each topic contributed to a person’s overall number of incidents. For example, “Did you always want to be an economist?” was usually question 25 out of 37, gave rise to 15 incidents spread across 22.4 percent of the subjects, and represented on average 4.5 percent of each person’s total laughter.

According to the average laughter measure, there were four statistically signifi-cant differences between the academic and nonacademic subjects. Nonacademics initiated a greater percentage of their OSSL during discussions of whether they always wanted to be economists (7.4 versus 0.4 percent), and whether they had to use cutting-edge journal articles in their work (3.1 versus 0.9 percent). This fits the following analysis, given that nonacademics could easily encounter more contradictions to the assumption that they use complex theories, and more changes in their career plans over time. The two other differences were that non-academics laughed proportionally more when considering how academics and nonacademics differed (7.6 versus 1.8 percent), and less when discussing where they got their ideas from (0.1 versus 4.5 percent). These differences may, how-ever, simply reflect the fact that the nonacademics had more experience bridging the academic divide, and less experience developing new theories.

The more interesting results came from coding for what people could plau-sibly have been finding laughable within any given topic, especially in terms of the kinds of contradictions and incongruities found in previous structural analyses of jokes. For almost 30 percent of the incidents, it was hard to say what was going on, for example when laughter followed short, standalone statements such as “I’m going to turn up the air conditioning” or “The interview was fun.” For the remainder, however, it seemed possible to fit the nature of laughable material into one or more of three general categories of conflict: refuted ideals, different perspectives, and change over time (figure 2).

Figure 2. Percentage of incidents based on different types of conflict

Situated Perspectives

Different Times

Ideals vs. Realities

No Clear Conflict/Source

20%4%

14%

20%3%

9% 30%*

*1 incident coded with all three conflicts, < 1%.Note: Complete circles are to scale, but overlaps are imprecise compared to actual percentages.


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Conflict Between Ideals and RealityOver one-quarter of the incidents involved statements implying that reality is different from ideal images or common beliefs. The refuted images included intellectual work being especially fulfilling, journalists pursuing unbiased truth, and political leaders having the interests of their constituents at heart. Given the focus of the interviews, however, it is hardly surprising that most of the ideal/real conflicts concerned features of the economics profession that supposedly legitimized its status as an objective science. A typical example was the reaction of a corporate forecaster contemplating changes in statistical techniques over the past 20 years:

I could see people applying these very stringent, uh, formulas—or, or new techniques, let’s say—to, uh, forecast data, and I see the da[ha], the data[ha] come outta the government! . . . And I worry about that. Severely [hu hu]. Because there’s—a lot of the budget cutbacks and, uh, I think that hurts the data.

The interviewee elaborated further when discussing the need for more careful choice and assessment of the information used in analysis:

If you look at employment data, well, do you look at establishment employment, or do you look at the household survey? [Mike: mhm] Um, they never usually go into that, that question in graduate school. And here, y’know, I remember sitting in a lot of meetings with the, with the [Federal Reserve Bank staff], and we were trying to figure out, “well, is the econom[ihi]y gro[ho]wing or not gro[ho]wing?” And they look at, “well, survey data shows this, and uh, establishment data shows this,” y’know, a[ha]nd, somet[uh]imes they go in opposite [Mike: aha!] directions [Mike: Wow. Hm].

The laughter in these passages seems to involve several different conflicts between ideals and reality. For one thing, sophisticated statistical methods are supposed to indicate scientific rigor, but according to this subject’s experiences they are often unthinkingly applied to potentially flawed data. Furthermore, supposedly objective economists sometimes have to make significant ad hoc judgments concerning which data to use, and while academic training is sup-posed to produce analytically superior scientists, it can in fact fail to inculcate the most elementary habits of examining where data come from. At the same time, while Federal Reserve economists are supposed to help make some of the nation’s most important policy decisions, they can actually be in the dark with respect to basic issues, essentially because of the same problems of data unreli-ability and subjective judgment. Finally, while economic indicators produced by the government are supposed to be authoritative, they can in fact be fundamen-tally inconsistent at even the most fundamental level.

Other interviewees laughed at similar ideal/real conflicts when recounting how peer review was not in fact unbiased and objective, but driven by fashion-able topics and unnecessary mathematics. They also laughed at academia being highly political and nepotistic rather than meritocratic, and at academic theory

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apparently stagnating rather than advancing in recent years, with high-profile theories like Rational Expectations having little effect on policy. Some then laughed when concluding that academic economics might therefore be more of a self-indulgent game than a science that improves the human condition:

It’s kind of like: What’s the point of academic economists talking to aca-demic economists? Y’know, how do those things get outside. . .in a sense, how does it get outside the profession? Because what’s the good of hav-ing theoretical or empirical, new empirical, economic, uh, constructs that this little group can agree on and think are wonderful and think are right, without it sort of going forward and having some impact—either in terms of policy development or, I dunno, social welfare? [hhuh] I’m not sure i[hh]f you wanna go that far exactly, but er—how one does that or how one measures it—but um, sort of, y’know, say, talking heads talking to other talking heads [h h] doesn’t do anything except maybe entertain [h h] some small audience, or, y’know, those particular talking heads.

Overall, then, even within the narrow confines of discussions of the economics profession there seemed to be a wide variety of ideal/real conflicts associated with OSSL. It is at least plausible, therefore, that such conflicts represent a fairly general, socially patterned source of experiential material with a high potential for prompting humor “in the wild.”

Conflict Between Situated PerspectivesJust over one-third of the laughter incidents seemed to involve a second source of joke-type contradictions: people in different social positions having differ-ent perspectives on the rest of the world—perspectives that could result in sur-prising levels of ignorance, misperception, or simply disagreement concerning what other people know and do. These conflicts came up most frequently when interviewees discussed lay impressions of the discipline, the disappointments of students and clients with economic expertise, and the differences between aca-demics and nonacademics. A typical example of the first of these came from an economist in a government oversight agency talking about how laypeople reacted to them being an economist:

Some of them they say “wow,” OK, and then they give you the impression that they see it as complicated and puzzling. And [Mike: Mhm] and I once had a couple of historians, professors, visiting here say, “oh, economics: it’s really a philosophy” [hehehehyea] [Mike: yeah] [heh], right. So, um. But then other people, I think there are some people admire that to be an economist is to sort through some of these, ah, y’know, ah, sophisticated phenomena. I often get people asking me, “What do you see about the interest rates? Should I refinance?” [Mike: yeah] Yeah[ahuhuhuhuhuh]. [Mike: And did you give them advice?] I did! I did! [Mike: aha!]

Here, the laughter seems to respond to lay-people thinking economics was a philosophy rather than an empirical science, and thinking that economists were primarily national-level forecasters and financial advisers. Several other


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interviewees laughed at this latter assumption as well, since relatively few mem-bers of the profession in the late 1990s played those roles.

Other subjects in fact laughed at how people they met in everyday life some-times had essentially no idea at all of what “economist” meant, beyond some-one who “does economy,” or who could perhaps start a restaurant (i.e., a home economics expert). Others, by contrast, laughed at how even supposedly knowl-edgeable clients could exhibit strangely inaccurate assumptions about the scope of economic expertise. As one congressional researcher observed of politicians: “Oh yeah . . . sometimes they want us to model [uh hn] [Mike: yeah heh] things that are just impossible to model!” A financial-market administrator laughed at the even more general gap between what economists and laypeople take for granted, as contemplated during a discussion of “what we know that others don’t”:

Well, I’d say, um, in a way it’s just, it’s sort of common sense of, of eco-nomics, it’s not the, uh, you know, the fancy cutting edge [Mike: yeah] piece but it’s just, uh, you know, the idea that people, erm, y’know, buy less of something if the price is higher, that kind of [Mike: yeah] thing seems pretty obvious, but, in a lot of contexts, surprisingly to me, it isn’t obv[uhu]ious [Mike: yeah] to a lot of other people [hh hh hh].

While these examples implicitly denigrate non-economists, the tone of the laughter and the surrounding discussions did not usually seem hostile so much as philosophical or simply surprised. Furthermore, some interviewees explicitly expressed sympathetic understanding of others’ misperceptions, and still others laughed at themselves this way, for example when a government regulator noted how he viewed economic arguments about deregulation differently depending on his immediate situation:

There’s been an awful lot of. . .ah, um, spread of free-market kind of ideas, um, already. How much more? I think the results have not been totally, um, positive [Mike: Mhm]. If you think of the [deregulated] air-lines, I mean, I, ah, think we’re better off than we were before [Mike: yeah], but, um, I don’t always think that when I’m stuck in some [Mike: Yeah] [hh Hhh ah] waiting area [ah hhhh]. So it’s not been absolutely smooth and positive.

Just like ideal/real conflict, then, incongruity arising from different perspectives was a fairly general source of laughable material based on a range of different experiences at a number of different scales—from general public ignorance of a discipline, down through differences between professions and subfields, and even to intra-individual conflicts when people engage in different activities.

Conflict Between Experiences at Different TimesAround one-quarter of the incidents of OSSL seemed to involve contradictions that depended on things changing over time, that is, conflict between what peo-ple used to experience and take for granted, and what they later learned or did. Almost a quarter of incidents of this kind occurred during discussions of how technology had changed the work of professional economists over the past

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20 years. A typical example came from a researcher at a major transnational organization:

I’m doing stuff on mortality in the—by wealth in these different coun-tries. And some of the surveys, well, the China survey had 500,000 observations. My research assistant has it on her desktop and just sort of . . . chc . . . chc . . . chc . . . gives the answer right away [M: yeah]. Uh, things that would take weeks and weeks [ehuh] to go through, she can do in uh, an hour, two hours—an afternoon [M: yeah]. Um, so there’re some things that’re just, from raw facts, that’re real different now than, uh, before.

Here, the laughter seems to come from noticing how one’s past routine behav-ior is unthinkable by today’s standards, that is, from seeing incompatibilities in one’s own viewpoint as a result of the passage of time. Other interviewees similarly laughed when recalling the relatively large size of old floppy data disks, the previous dependence of academic writers on typists, and the former prac-tice of using mainframe computers programmed by paper punch cards. The latter was again linked to changes in speed of analysis, as when an academic in a low-ranked economics department noted that “now I can just do . . . fairly sophisticated things in, like, one minute [he he he] [M: yeah] [hu hu] — [h] it’s amazing!”

Relatively large-scale historical contrasts like this also prompted laughter dur-ing discussions of what people thought had been the most important theoretical developments over the past 20 years. Examples included laughing at suppos-edly progressive theory not really changing at all, at no longer being allowed to teach using tried-and-true methods, and at the impossibility of predicting which fashionable theories will eventually turn out to be useful. There was certainly an overlap here with contradictions between scientific ideals and practical realities, but experiences at different times were clearly central to any sense of incongru-ity involved.

Temporal contradictions also came from shifts in experiences, opinions, and expectations at a more individual level, for example when discussing how peo-ple ended up doing the work they did. The academic just quoted above provided one example of this:

M: Have you kind of ended up somewhere very different from where you thought you might be when you started?

Of course I didn’t think I’d be in a university [he he he]! [M: Yeah?] So that’s a big difference [M: where did you think . . .] Well, when I was finishing grad school, ah, in my area, y’know, it was well known that there were like . . . a hundred people for every job. So I didn’t even look for an academic job . . . and ah, eventually I had this postdoctoral fel-lowship for a while. So then I was coming back here and I was looking for something temporary just so I could look for a job, so I came here to do poverty on an opening for a visitor [M: yeah] and that’s how I ended up be[he he]ing an academic.


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A similar pattern could also be seen in laughter based on whether or not interviewees had false impressions of economics when they were in graduate school. People laughed, for example, at how they incorrectly used to think it would be easy to get published, how they wrongly assumed that in the future they would spend all their time “thinking great thoughts and producing great empirical tests or something,” how they had no idea of the importance of mun-dane data-gathering in nonacademic settings, and how they underestimated the importance of simple “understanding about the world” versus formal economic training. According to one business school professor, it was also laughable to remember how much they used to think getting a PhD mattered for proving their intellectual status: “it’s something you work so hard for, and then you’re so proud of, and then you realize after just a short while, it’s like . . .’ah, big deal!’ [phuh kyuh].”

Other temporal sources of laughter were noticing how apparently devastating career reversals turned out to be ultimately irrelevant, how long-term employ-ment decisions were regretted for years before coming to fruition, and—on a much smaller scale—how assessments of economic arguments could depend simply on the heat of the moment. One expert witness, for example, laughed at how he tended to think his opponents were “cheating on the analysis” dur-ing an actual courtroom confrontation, but had a much more sympathetic impression later on when he was “out of the fight fo[ho]r instance.” At such a scale, of course, situational and temporal conflicts overlap, and perhaps become indistinguishable.

Overall, then, conflict between things experienced and taken for granted at different times seemed to be another fairly open ended—but clearly socially patterned—source of especially laughable material, coming from a variety of different situations defined at a number of different scales: from aggregate his-torical conditions, to long-term biographical and career-based shifts, and per-haps down to the level of daily or even hourly changes that interviewees could laugh about with hindsight.

Discussion and ConclusionsThe foregoing analysis suggests that own-serious-statement laughter can indeed involve humor-like contradictions, even though it occurs “in the wild” rather than in deliberate, planned performances. It also suggests that the source of these contradictions can be a variety of experiences occurring at different scales, many of which seem likely to be socially patterned rather than random.

Taken together, these sources of contradiction can even be thought of as com-ing from one particular, inherently structured feature of social life: the uneven distribution of experiences across different activities, and the resulting poten-tial for conflicts between them to lie unnoticed simply because they are habitu-ally “insulated” from each other (Reay 2010). This obviously makes sense with respect to spatial and temporal contradictions, as different people at different times are clearly exposed to different parts of the “social stock of knowledge”

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(Schutz and Luckmann 1973). But distribution and insulation can also be thought of as the source of unnoticed contradictions between ideals and reality, if one accepts that talking, thinking, and theorizing about particular activities do not necessarily coincide with actually seeing or doing them. So while profes-sional economists may discuss ideals of scientific practice when being trained, when responding to critics, or when justifying their status, they may not be used to comparing these discussions to their regular activities at other times and in other places. Segregation within individual consciousness may in fact be even more general than this, with arguments, ideals, and interpretations fre-quently occupying distinct “mental spaces” or stages in conscious deliberations (McKinley and Potter 1987; Billig 1996[1987]; Fauconnier and Turner 2002).

Distribution and insulation may in this way represent an underlying and uni-fying explanation of the wide range of phenomena that have previously been identified as strongly connected to laughter, for example suddenly highlighted flaws, false expectations and identity images, and conflicts between reality and perception. Distribution and insulation would never necessarily produce amuse-ment along these lines, however, so much as provide a structured pool of avail-able experiences with especially amusing potential. They could therefore shape and constrain laughter in a highly contingent rather than mechanically deter-ministic way.

Distribution and insulation also suggest what OSSL might actually be. If conflicting experiences are usually distributed and insulated from each other, talking about them in a reflective interview might shift awareness away from normal, unproblematic immersion in particular thoughts, at particular times, and in particular places, toward a less familiar overview highlighting not- usually-dwelled-upon contradictions. Such a shift, however momentary, could be experienced as problematic and uncomfortable for a number of reasons, for example if it produced a threat to belief in the logical consistency of meanings or identities, a disruption of attention and conversational flow, or a challenge to moral imperatives to solve problems (Raskin 1998; Stets and Carter 2011; Russell 2000; Cohen 1999). Laughter might then be particularly suited to man-aging such feelings, partly because it is contagious and hard to resist or ignore, involving as it does an involuntary “flooding out” that demands or overwhelms conscious attention (Goffman 1974; Katz 1999). Perhaps more importantly, though, laughter’s potential for fostering social solidarity means that it can func-tion as an immediately immersive, Durkheimian ritual of collective reassurance (Collins 2005). In other words, in response to a shift of awareness that problem-atically emphasizes contradictory situated experiences, laughter could embody a strongly compelling second shift, away from the uncomfortable synopsis, and back to an immediate, insulated situation: the familiar collective experience of “laughing something off” as inconsequential.

If this picture is right, OSSL would be closely related to the nervous laugh-ter described by Goffman (1967, 102–6), in which people are flustered by an unsuccessful self-presentation when incompatible—but normally segregated—roles and/or audiences are brought together.3 However, OSSL suggests that role and audience conflicts are not the only potentially problematic contradictions


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“located in the social system” (108). It also suggests that the basic function of laughter may not, as Goffman suggests, be to signal contrition and future good behavior, but to establish a more conspiratorial solidarity that directs con-cern away from any danger. In fact, although OSSL could result from threats to the self, when shared with an immediate audience it would not necessarily be directed at that self. Rather, the particulars of the source material could place the “blame” for incoherence on a range of different targets, such as the economics profession, laypeople, academics, or even the ironies of life in general.

As noted earlier, the interviews in this study were particularly likely to empha-size ideal, spatial, and temporal contradictions, as well as the solidarity-building effect of laughter. It is unclear, then, whether they fortuitously reveal a general social phenomenon, illustrate something peculiar to American economics, or simply bring out the interviewer’s own unique sense of humor. That being said, they do suggest at least one way in which laughter could be constrained but not determined by its source material. They also demonstrate the usefulness of laughter as a tool for identifying stable social contradictions and exploring how social groups—even relatively powerful ones—can at some level be aware of these incongruities, but prepared in some situations to ignore them (c.f. Davis 1979). Low-stakes interviews with high-status subjects may be the richest con-texts for this kind of analysis, but without more investigation of the vast realm of wild humor it is hard to say how much they differ from more public and confrontational interrogations, casual conversations, or even the solitary expe-riences of both high- and low-status individuals as they traverse the everyday world of socially distributed and insulated phenomena.

But can this model be extended to shed light on deliberate humor? One can certainly imagine that material especially conducive to triggering wild laugh-ter might also be especially useful for consciously generating humorous effects. Beyond this, however, the double-shift mechanism of OSSL seems connected in suggestive ways not only to the structures of deliberate jokes, but also to the specific kinds of effects humor is known to have.

With respect to structures, the sudden synoptic emphasis of distributed and insulated contradictions bears a strong resemblance to models involving initial interpretations, disjunctors revealing incongruity, and pivots enabling a switch to alternative interpretations—if one accepts that unusual moments of reflec-tion can be “practical” disjunctors, and actors themselves can be “bodily” piv-ots connecting latently conflicting experiences. This similarity suggests that the OSSL model could indeed be used to help extend joke analysis in a “relational” rather than “substantive” way, beyond the realms of logic, language, and short texts, into those of longer cultural repertoires, situations, practices, and social structures. This might in turn help sharpen currently nebulous ideas about jokes relying on cultural competency, “relevance,” or habitually salient interpreta-tions, and it could even help clarify some of the confusion over whether or not incongruities are “resolved” by jokes (Hempelmann and Attardo 2011), split-ting the issue of tension in the immediate social situation (which is resolved/managed by solidaristic laughter) from the issue of contradictions in the source material (which are laughed off rather than resolved).

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Turning to functions, if OSSL invokes solidarity in order to sidestep social contradictions rather than fully recognize and solve them, it clearly has an inherent humor-like potential for reinforcing group identities and inequalities, since laughing off a social problem with one’s compatriots always works at the expense of anyone for whom the contradiction is more serious. Furthermore, if OSSL works by directing attention away from explicit contemplation, it clearly has an unavoidable implicit communicative dimension, and hence could be used to produce humor effects such as establishing taken-for-granted cultural compe-tence, demonstrating the unreliability of explicit claims, and either reinforcing or undermining power relations in deniable ways. The fact that these humor-type potentials are built into the very heart of the double-shift mechanism clearly adds to the impression that OSSL is similar to deliberate joking, and in combi-nation with the inherent structural parallels it even suggests that wild laughter may ultimately help explain why the characteristic logic of humor is so strongly associated with a particular range of social functions in the first place.

Overall, then, in this case the analysis of laughter “in the wild” fulfills at least some of its promise as a strategy for investigating the social sources of humor. Although it considers only a limited corpus of incidents biased in a par-ticular direction, it still shows how laughter could be a response to patterns of contradiction at a number of different levels of social experience. It also shows how this response is closely analogous to the structures and functions of more deliberate humor. One can reasonably argue, therefore, that the material used in joking, teasing, and comedy might be similarly constrained by patterns of contradictory experience, that is, divided by distribution and insulation into landscapes where some areas are richer than others in latent conflicts. This chan-neling could furthermore operate at a number of different scales, providing pat-terns in the potential of different material for humorous treatment, rather than mechanically determining which jokes have to be made, or even can be made. It therefore suggests at least one possible aid to conceptualizing the simultane-ous flexibility and constraint of humor in all its richness and variety, and it may even show how that richness and variety is in fact an inevitable result of humor’s basic nature.

Notes1. t-tests for groups with unequal variances, using Welch’s approximation and looking

for p ≤ 0.05. The outlier laughing 53 times was excluded.2. This possibility in fact receives little consideration in the audio-based humor litera-

ture, but Katz’s (1996) analysis of people using funhouse mirrors shows how it can be addressed.

3. Many thanks to a reviewer for pointing out this important parallel.

About the AuthorMike Reay is assistant professor of sociology at Swarthmore College. As well as researching humor, he works on the sociology of knowledge more gener-ally; the identity and influence of economic experts; the nature of embodied


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skills in art, sports, and music; and the misperception of income inequality. With Stephen Golub and Ayse Kaya, he also analyzes documents to explore how orga-nizational routines affect decision-making at the US Federal Reserve and the International Monetary Fund.

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