Comments on: Why Are Dirty Jokes Funny?

By: Stephen Thorn

Stephen Thorn — Thu, 09 Jul 2009 17:00:14 +0000

Having enjoyed looking at the pictures (and even reading articles!) in Playboy, as well as many other skin magazines, over the years I will agree that few of the jokes are funny. But then I would say the same thing about The New Yorker’s cartoons.

Humor is truly subjective — as the saying goes, “one man’s meat is another man’s poison.” What makes me laugh may make you cringe. Now I’ve read a lot of jokes that make me smile, or just give me a kind of “internal grin” that equates with thoughts like ‘oh, okay, that’s funny’ but never quite makes it to the surface of my face. Jokes that really make me bust a gut have to be new to my experience, as well as having inconguity. Even gags that made me guffaw once upon a time don’t even make me chuckle anymore.

By: Michael

Michael — Wed, 17 Dec 2008 03:56:58 +0000

Maybe some people feel it’s okay to be racist or sexist as long as they’re joking about it. As a writer, I don’t want to use humor like my friend the magician did, to distract people from what I’m really doing. In fact, I enjoy the humor that comes from bluntly telling the truth. What makes a humorist great, such as Mark Twain, is the ability to reveal truth that other people can’t or won’t. Somehow honesty has incongruity built-in.

By: Brad K.

Brad K. — Tue, 16 Dec 2008 15:27:10 +0000

Curious. Taboo means that something is avoided due to cultural or religious belief. But somehow we have come to treat “taboo” the way scofflaws treat exceeding the posted speed limit – it is wrong if you get caught. Or the way parents “lay down the law” and don’t actually enforce rules consistently.

Sexual taboos have almost come to mean “you gotta try this!”

So “taboo” as it is used today may be the reason for part of the interest in bathroom / juvenile humor. It may also be related to making potty-training interesting and fun for kids. Did you teach your kids to laugh and enjoy stuff in the bathroom?

By: Allan McDougall

Allan McDougall — Sun, 14 Dec 2008 20:51:02 +0000

I think the word you’re looking for is “taboo.” Dirty jokes allow an outlet for discussing taboo topics that don’t often come up in conversation. I think that in many ways they’re how people negotiate understanding social unacceptable topics of conversation (taboos) like masturbation, sex acts, racism, etc.

By: Michael

Michael — Sat, 13 Dec 2008 18:21:30 +0000

I don’t agree that all humor is based on pain or humiliation. Some is based on joy. But there are certainly a lot of jokes that try to humiliate people. Where I live, students at a particular university were long the butt of “ignorant rural person” jokes. My favorite turns the stereotype around: a professor hooked up a honor student to an experimental device that would lower his intelligence sufficiently to be admitted. However, the machine got stuck, and when the student was finally disconnected, he was so mentally deficient that his only words were – the rival university’s slogan!