INTRODUCTION: A BRIEF TYPOLOGY OF HUMOUR THEORIES, STYLES AND GENRES

A brief summary of the major theories and genres of humour needs to be broached prior to discussion and analysis of the plethora of COVID-19 humour on the World Wide Web. For the most part, these theories and styles should not be regarded as discrete categories, but rather as intersecting one another in complexly ambiguous ways. In the final analysis, humour resists all attempts at definitive accounts or explanation.

Tytułowy problem relacji oraz hierarchii wymiarów rzeczywistości zostanie przedstawiony na przykładzie wybranych kanonicznych Upaniszad. Wybór konkretnych tekstów nie został dokonany przypadkowo i zupełnie arbitralnie. Analiza tytułowych pojęć w całym kanonie na łamach jednego artykułu nie jest możliwa i właściwie niewiele by wniosła do uznanej już wiedzy na temat funkcji, jaką powyższe terminy mają w indyjskiej literaturze filozoficznej

It is largely accepted that humour, joking and comedy fall into four or five major theoretical categories, styles, genres, modes or approaches (see Venn Diagram for some of the major scholars and theorists in this field). The first of these is the Superiority theory in which people laugh at the presumed deficiencies and/or deformities of others. In the case of people with disabilities such “humour” can be toxic. The Superiority theory is one of the oldest (Western) theories of humour going back to Plato (thought to have lived c. 428/427 or 424/423–348/347 BC), later taken up by the Englishman Hobbes (1588–1679) and into the present day, often grafted onto the Incongruity theory.

Relevant here is also the German concept of Schadenfreude, a portmanteau word signifying the derivation of pleasure from someone else’s or a group’s misery, pain or misfortune.2 As with all of these theories, superiority and Schadenfreude are not necessarily humorous, but can often be malicious and very unfunny, especially from the target’s perspective. Sadly, this kind of humour has become increasingly prevalent. Such humour^[1] often overlaps with the Incongruity theory, discussed below.

There are numerous Australian examples of sexist and racist jokes that fall into the Superiority grouping. In jesting mode sexist jokes can be ways of “taking the mickey”3 out of the other gender. Such joking has been described as an “acculturating ritual” for some Australian men and women.4 Here is an example of a riddle posed by an Australian man to his mate, with three possible responses. The following discourse is underpinned by the unquestioned assumption of male supremacy and the objectification of women by some, but not all, Australian men: ^[2]

Fig. 1. Venn diagram. © Christine Nicholls, with thanks to Jessica Milner Davis

Here the relationship of humour to laughter needs to be canvassed in brief. Laughing is not an undifferentiated phenomenon. As Eagleton writes, in the English language a range of different words distinguish modes of laughter.12 He supplies examples that include, inter alia, cackling,chortling, snickering, guffawing, giggling, sniggering, chuckling and roaring [with laughter] (Eagleton 1–5). For example, in Schadenfreude jokes, laughter-related words with derisory connotations, such as “sniggering” or “snickering,” would normally be more apt descriptors than “giggling.”

PART ONE: ANALYSIS OF CARTOONS FOCUSING ON THE COVID -19 PANDEMIC

While this article features a selection of online humour, including jokes, memes, videos and cartoons in the epoch of COVID-19, the focus here is on cartoons. These exemplars are not only in recursive relationship/s with respect to the coronavirus itself and its ramifications, but recursion is integral to all humour, in that it needs an identifiable subject or a target.

This is equally applicable to inter- and/or intra-textual or inter-pictorial joking, whether of a political or other nature, or makes reference to literary or visual artworks, specific events, modes of discourse, or to several fields simultaneously. As the mathematician David J. Hunter so felicitously puts it: “Recursion, see Recursion” (494).

EXAMPLE 1: DAMIEN GLEZ’S CORONAVIRUS BIENFAITS

Damien Glez is a professional cartoonist and writer who lives and works in Ouagadougou,13 the capital of Burkina Faso, an impoverished country in west Africa, currently on the brink of an inter-ethnic war (Malley), adding to the ironic poignancy of the “joke’s” setting. In his intertextual, indeed, trans-textual cartoon Coronavirus Bienfaits (Coronavirus Benefits), Glez ingeniously filters the influence of the COVID-19 pandemic through the pre-existing model of the Nobel Peace Prize ceremonial awards evening.

EXAMPLE 2: ANDRZEJ MILEWSKI’S KOSTUCHA MAŁA

In contrast with Glez’s hard-hitting framing of the COVID-19 virus, the Polish cartoonist Andrzej Milewski offers, at least superficially, an apolitical, whimsical and lightly humorous take on the pandemic in his Kostucha mała (The Itsy-Bitsy Grim Reaper). In the first of the two frames, the diminutive Grim Reaper is recognizable by his symbolic cloak.

Christine Nicholls is an Honorary Senior Lecturer at the Australian National University, Canberra. She has been published in diverse areas including visual art, sociolinguistics, anthropologically-related topics, literature (including children’s literature), biography, information visualization and education. She has written more than 20 books for adults and children, published by commercial publishers, with many winning national prizes. For 14 years she was the Australian Contributing Editor of Asian Art News and World Sculpture News (Hong Kong). A good deal of her writing has been influenced by the time she spent working at Lajamanu, a remote Aboriginal settlement in Australia’s Central Desert. Over the years she has had a strong online presence, including writing for The Conversation, and writing reviews and obituaries for various Australian newspapers. This is her second humour-related article, with the first focussing on Warlpiri (Aboriginal) nicknaming practices. Currently she is writing a book on humour and rhetoric.
https://orcid.org/0000-0002-2470-2512