Humour is imbued with social significance, despite its seemingly non-serious intent. In interactions among men, humour plays a significant part in the ways they relate to each other and can be seen to serve a variety of purposes in male peer group cultures beyond the obvious sharing of a joke. Humour provides men with a repertoire for conveying masculine identities. An obvious feature of this repertoire is the spirit of camaraderie that pervades everyday social interactions between men. These exchanges are commonly punctuated by moments of humour, often expressed in an exchange of banter resembling verbal tennis. Such exchanges can be seen as an expression of friendship, signalling support for one another and commonality—the recognition of a shared world-view.
Like other social practices, humour is context-specific and inevitably shaped by dynamics of social class, gender and ethnicity. In the academic field of masculinities, humour is most apparent in studies that focus upon adolescent males and young men. Schoolbased researchers noted the importance of humour to young men. Peter Woods (1976) described laughter as an ‘antidote to schooling’, claiming that it provided students with a form of escapism and a coping strategy that mitigated against the harsh realities of life within educational institutions. Paul Willis (1977), in a famous ethnography of workingclass young men, indicated that ‘having a laff was the most important feature of school life for the ‘lads’, giving them status and authority within their peer group. Willis argued that the counter-culture of resistance and humour developed by the ‘lads’ was a form of preparation for working-class jobs. The rough humour and horseplay of the lads was also a feature of shop-floor culture in the factories and manual trades that the lads moved into after school. From this perspective, having a ‘laff was instrumental and purposeful; a way of learning to labour that remained an important point of class-cultural reproduction. A further study elaborating upon some of Willis’ themes (Dubberley 1993) suggests that students use humour to resist the dominant culture of the school through forms of parody and subversion.
In a study of schoolboy humour carried out with Anoop Nayak (Kehily and Nayak 1997), we argued that humour is not an outcome or effect of working-class masculinity, but, rather, is constitutive of these very identities. Our study suggested that heterosexual masculinities were organised and regulated through humour. We observed humour as a style drawn upon by young men to consolidate heterosexual masculinities through game-playing, story-telling and the practice of insults. We noted that although male peer group humour may contain moments of subversion (aimed at teachers, bourgeois values or compulsory education), it can also be seen as a compelling mode of gender conformity. While humour involved resistance to the authority of teachers and the school system, young men’s humorous performances had oppressive effects upon other students. Significantly, young women were targets for male humorous insults, while young men who did not conform to dominant heterosexual codes of masculinity were also subject to adverse consequences.
The regulatory effects of humour among young men were most evident in relation to homosexuality. A rich vein of homophobic humour and accompanying gestures were used to enact a hyper-masculine identity that treated homosexuals as both fearful and laughable. Many features of homophobic humour were ritualistically rehearsed and performed, sometimes several times a day. We argued that these homophobic performances suggested the instability of gender categories wherein masculinity was asserted through repeated struggle. Our study concluded that masculine identities were sustained through fraught exhibition, in which the highly dramatised performance is, in itself, evidence of the insecurity and splittings within the male psyche.
The potential of humour to emphasise the power of dominant versions of masculinity has been explored in a number of studies. A striking feature of these studies is the overlap between the use of humour and verbal abuse leading to highly competitive forms of denigration. Lyman’s (1987) study of a US male fraternity focused upon the practice of ‘dozens’—the ritual exchange of insults. Lyman argued that ‘dozens’ served a range of functions. In particular, the battery of sexist jokes consolidated the bonds of the ‘ingroup’ through mutual hostility against an ‘out-group’. In these exchanges the ability to keep control of one’s emotions in the face of sustained abuse is seen as essential for group membership and the demonstration of a competent, socially validated masculinity. A similar practice can be found in Labov’s (1972) study of black vernacular among young men in urban USA. Labov describes ‘sounding’ as a form of verbal duelling involving the trading of ritualistic insults for prestige within the peer group. Those most skilled at employing sophisticated insults achieved higher status in the group. Significantly, most insults were based around the verbal abuse of an opponent’s mother. The invocation of a boy’s mother in the male peer group taps into the contradictory ‘private’ emotions of maternal affection and the public disavowal of the feminine. Despite the importance of humour to masculine identities, little attention has been paid to the humorous practices of subordinate males.
References and further reading
Dubberley, W.S. (1993) ‘Humour as resistance’, in P. Woods and M. Hammersley (eds) Gender and Ethnicit y in Schoo ls: Ethnogra phic Acco unts, London Routledge.
Kehily, M.J. and Nayak, A. (1997) “‘Lads and laughter”: humour and the production of heterosexual hierarchies’, Gender and Education, 9 (1): 69–87.
Labov, W. (1972) Language in the Inner City: Studies in Black English Vernacular, Pennsylvania, PA: University of Pennsylvania Press.
Lyman, P. (1987) ‘The fraternal bond as a joking relationship: a case study of sexist jokes in male group bonding’, in M. Kimmel (ed.) Changing Men, London: Sage.
Willis, P. (1977) Learning to Labour: How Working-class Kids Get Working-dass Jobs, Farnborough: Saxon House.
Woods, P. (1976) ‘Having a laugh: an antidote to schooling’, in M. Hammersley and P. Woods (eds) The Process of Schooling, London: Routledge.
