National and Ethnic Differences

This entry outlines differences in the status, content, and form of humor of groups defined by their nationality or ethnicity. It also presents perceptions about the humor styles of some national or ethnic groups known for their particular sense of humor, for example, British humor, Jewish humor.

People produce, communicate, and react to humor in different ways. Even though researchers have maintained that personal differences in the use and appreciation of humor outweigh national and ethnic differences, the observations about group differences have a long history. Recent studies about the effects of globalization describe the intertextuality of humor that translates across borders with greater ease than ever—though carrying an inherent incomprehension that accompanies the dissemination of humor to different audiences with various tastes in humor, as explained in the last section of this entry.

National and ethnic differences within the universal phenomenon of humor should be explained in the light of the sociocultural background of particular ethnic groups. To start with, the social value of humor differs among nations. In Europe and North America, humor has been highly valued as a character trait. East Asian countries (e.g., China), however, regard having a sense of humor as a much less important personality characteristic.

Differences arise from the social salience of topics for a particular group of joke-tellers and the social order or the position of the group joked about. For instance, one can find many jokes about drinking and fist fighting in Irish jokelore, whereas these jokes tend not to be found in Jewish humor. Christie Davies’s models about target choice in ethnic jokes about stupidity explain the prevalence of certain butts and subjects over others through dichotomies created by center versus periphery, monopoly versus competition, and mind over matter in these cultures.

Forms of humor are also culture- and language-bound, which is why different genres emerge in different cultural contexts. For example, the tall tale of the “new continents” of North America and Australia is often connected to the spaciousness of the land and pioneering attitude of the settlers. Similarly, Japanese subtle puns, Dajare, differ from the Western loud and boisterous humor as they aim to give insight into the surrounding reality while avoiding impolite bursts of laughter.