Exploring the structure, motives, and meanings of humor in everyday life

In Engaging Humor, Elliott Oring asks essential questions concerning humorous expression in contemporary society, examining how humor works, why it is employed, and what its messages might be. This provocative book is filled with examples of jokes and riddles that reveal humor to be a meaningful--even significant--form of expression.

Oring scrutinizes classic Jewish jokes, frontier humor, racist cartoons, blonde jokes, and Internet humor. He provides alternate ways of thinking about humorous expressions by examining their contexts--not just their contents. He also shows how the incongruity and absurdity essential to the production of laughter can serve serious communicative ends.

Engaging Humor examines the thoughts that underlie jokes, the question of racist motivation in ethnic humor, and the use of humor as a commentary on social interaction. The book also explores the relationship between humor and sentimentality and the role of humor in forging national identity. Engaging Humor demonstrates that when analyzed contextually and comparatively, humorous expressions emerge as communications that are startling, intriguing, and profound.

Elliott Oring is a professor emeritus of anthropology at California State University, Los Angeles, and is the author of Israeli Humor, The Jokes of Sigmund Freud, and Jokes and Their Relations. He serves on the editorial board of Humor: International Journal of Humor Research.

1. Appropriate Incongruity Redux
2. The Senses of Absurd Humor 13
3. Joke Thoughts 27
4. The Humor of Hate 41
5. Blond Ambitions and Other Signs of the Times 58
6. Humor and the Suppression of Sentiment 71
7. The Joke as Gloss 85
8. Colonizing Humor 97
9. Sigmund Freud's Jewish Joke Book 116
10. The Context of Internet Humor 129