Joke booth: Full-time whistle

Marie Gillespie Marie says

Jokes that play with boundaries between life and death, and threats to life, are quite common in our survey. They are similar to disaster jokes. Anthropologists, who have studied humour and joking relationships in different cultures, show how jokes are very common at boundary points – especially at rites of passage like birth, adolescence, marriage and death.

Their studies give us fascinating insights into how jokes comment on the nature of life and death. Death, disease and dying are universal joke themes. Death jokes are usually anonymous and about people or subjects not too close at hand.

But more specific subject do come up, such as Auschwitz, Diana and Challenger, and these have also been subjects of scholarly enquiry.

The psychoanalyst Sigmund Freud believed that jokes, like dreams, satisfy unconscious desires and release us from our inhibitions, allowing us to express sexual, aggressive, playful or cynical instincts, including the death instinct, that would otherwise go unspoken.

Sociologists tend to disagree with such theories, finding them unverifiable and merely speculative. There are many competing theories about the social and psychological nature and functions of jokes and humour but what we can say for sure is that jokes do sneak around inhibitions. People are afraid of death. There are rules about how we talk about death and when we joke we like to break those rules.

Disaster jokes are often seen as sick, aggressive or as a way of coping. But, like popular jokes about sex and death, this kind of joke is perhaps better understood as playing with the forbidden and flouting the rules of conventional ways of talking about disaster and death. We enjoy escaping from the the restrictions of social rules and conventions - saying the unsayable. People who tell these jokes don't necessarily find some perverse pleasure in disaster. Rather, jokes provide light relief from the serious, dangerous and difficult things in life. Princess Diana jokes originated in the UK and were very popular here and in the English speaking world. People don't tend to tell jokes about disasters that are very close to them personally, but jokes about death, disaster and stupidity are among the most commonly told jokes across the world.