RELIGST 2H03 Lecture Notes - Lecture 4: Amorality, Ingroups And Outgroups, Russell Peters
31 May 2016
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Humour is primarily a source of social information about the norms that govern the cultures that we inhabit -- the cultures that are us. Humour, and the comic amusement that attends it, alerts us to the relevant social norms and corrective. That is not, of course, to claim that humour is either the original or the sole source of this information, but only that it is a particularly cogent source, undoubtedly because its lessons come wrapped in pleasure. Laughing together signals membership in a community bound together by the norms presumed by the humour at hand. Humor is a transaction in an exchange between the presenter and the audience. Jokes about religion, etiquette, hygiene depend upon us sharing ideas about appropriate behaviour: Comic amusement depends upon shared norms against which the pertinent incongruities take shape. Very often those shared cultural norms are standards of right thought and right a(cid:374)d right (cid:271)ehaviour .
