“I like jokes” remarks the hero of Peter Ustinov’s play Romanov and Juliet, alerting the audience at once to the fact that he has no sense of humor. Liking jokes doesn’t exactly prove you have no sense of humor, but most social theorists won’t give you the benefit of the doubt. Humor is a broad-spectrum concept and jokes are only one of its departments. The progenitor of a recent mathematical formula for happiness has incorporated a variable “H” standing for “higher order needs,” and humor is taken to be one of these. A sense of humor is the thing women say they most like in a man, but that certainly doesn’t mean that they want to marry a stand-up comedian. What they mean is someone who doesn’t explode in rage at their latest adventure with the joint credit card.

Jokes are under suspicion for many reasons. Not only are they a rather...

 

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