ABSTRACT
We don’t believe that La Fave intended to be humorous in penning the above and the fact that we found it so perhaps refl ects more on us than him. We contend, however, that there is something at least vaguely comical about two things: the language deployed and the obviousness of what is expressed by that language. The passage also, in a way, offers a reminder of a common folly that we, presumably the editors of this book, and many other scholars who venture into the fi eld experience: the potential absurdity of taking humour seriously and writing about it in a serious ‘academic’ manner. But we do – and we will …
Despite the folly, humour research is by now extensive, multidisciplinary and multifaceted, although, oddly perhaps, research on humour in organizational contexts and from a sociological perspective remains relatively impoverished. Further, despite recent attention on gender issues in humour, ‘The interfaces between women, femininity and comedy are desperately under-developed fi elds of research’ (Porter 1998: 67). While functionalist accounts dominate the literature on humour in organization, there have been a growing number of studies focusing on the relationship between humour and issues of power, control, resistance and identity in organization. More critical approaches have demonstrated the complex nature of humour as part of social interaction and have treated humour as a discursive practice. Considering humour as part of ‘naturally occurring’ verbal conversation, it is argued, construes it as implicated in the ‘performance of social identities’ (Erickson and Schultz 1982) such as, for example, class, race and gender (Holmes et al. 2003). Conceiving of humour as a discursive practice brings it into the ambit of the language games we deploy in mounting, sustaining, protecting and changing the (social) identities we adopt within the complex, fragmented and shifting social contexts with which we increasingly engage. Studies of humour have also focused on the resistive qualities of humour and how humour may function to challenge or even subvert existing power relations (Taylor and Bain 2003; Grugulis 2002; Rodrigues and Collinson 1995; Griffi ths 1998; Holmes 2000). These studies also tend to focus on aspects of identity and how humour may challenge perceived threats to identity via organizational control or be used to protect certain identity positions from such threats. For example, humour has been associated with practices of resistance among employees in relation to management. Thus, organizational humour studies have increasingly recognized the imbrication of humour within discursive practices and inevitably, then, with issues of power and identity.
