ABSTRACT
We begin with a common assumption. This is that any attempt to question the moral proprieties of comedy is doomed to failure for the simple reason that it mistakes the very nature of the comic impulse. It fails to appreciate what is essential to the comic element in cultural performance and interaction. This apparent essence can be described in various ways, but what such descriptions usually share is the sense that humour and comedy work precisely by subverting moral proprieties, by challenging us to laugh at the seriousness with which we take our own codes, precepts, values and beliefs. Peter Cook’s statement that ‘one of the ways of getting out of anything which you find you are taking over-seriously at the time is to escalate it into comedy’ is based solidly on this conception of comic effect (Nathan, 1971:139). This view is sometimes extended to say that humour and comedy work by disturbing, by turning inside out, popular notions and shibboleths. They do so by delivering some unexpected take on what we normally take for granted. Joking as a form of human interaction plays disrespectfully on our sense of what is socially respectable or ethically correct. Some would go even further and say that all instances of the comic
are founded on the transgression of decorum, propriety, and gravity in human affairs, that this transgression is its very raison d’étre.
