While comedy’s primary goal is to make people laugh, humor can also be a window into understanding different societies.
“Every culture that I’ve ever seen, they all have their own comedy,” said Chuck Coletta, an instructor in pop culture. “Everyone has their own sense of humor.”
One of the reasons anthropologists are so interested in humor, according to the essay “Humour, Laughter and the Field: Reflections from Anthropology,” by Henk Driessen, is because humor allows insight into what mattered to a specific society and culture.
“Humour often mirrors deeper cultural perceptions and offers us a powerful device to understand culturally shaped ways of thinking and feeling,” Driessen stated.
Coletta said he thinks American humor is trying to accurately portray the current issues. He has students who get their news from The Daily Show and The Colbert Report because while they are comedy shows, both still discuss topics important to the viewers. And both mock the government.
“It’s good to knock the president or Congress down a peg,” Coletta said. He explained it’s good to show sometimes that “nobody is above being mocked.”
He said this kind of humorous political commentary is working its way through TV into even comic books.
“People are looking for ways to reflect the culture now,” he said. “Even Obama and Sarah Palin are popping up in Archie Comics.”
Becca Cragin, an associate professor in pop culture, said that’s one of the most consistent reasons for comedy. While culture shifts affect what American society as a whole laughs at, humor has, for a long time, been used to keep people in power in check.
“There’s that really strong American tradition of using humor to deflate power… It goes back a long, long way,” she said. “We laugh in the middle for the people at the top.”
Cragin teaches a class about sitcoms, and she said this shift began in the 1970s, when shows became much more political than they had been, and even than they are today.
“Most sitcoms are not explicitly political the way All in the Family was,” she said.
But even though they might not be as political, most sitcoms try to tackle real issues, Cragin said. And pop culture shows how and why comedy has changed, sitcoms are also a reflection of how what matters to Americans has changed.
“It shows how a lot of issues have changed over time,” she said.
Also, American culture is becoming more post-modern. Americans as a whole prefer comedy to be more subtle, which is why shows like “Modern Family” and “The Office” are popular.
“Something like the Brady Bunch definitely would not work today,” she said.
Coletta also teaches a class about sitcoms, and he said the change in sitcom humor reveals a general cultural shift.
“Some topics that were taboo are now acceptable,” he said, explaining that the network didn’t allow the word “pregnant” to air on “I Love Lucy.”
But while Coletta said humor is fairly culture-specific, he said many comedy shows are broadcast throughout the world, illustrating that humor is still a universal idea. The Office, for example, he said, was a British show that became an American show that’s shown in still more countries.
“Everybody has a boss like that,” he said.
And American humor at least, Cragin said, will probably stay on this subtle, post-modern path for a while.
“Once you kind of go in that direction, it’s hard to go back,” she said.
