ABSTRACT
In the contemporary world, humour has become the focus of a culture war. In 2005, the Danish newspaper Jyllands-Posten published twelve cartoons depicting Muhammed, a move that triggered an uproar in Muslim communities and led to violence and deaths across the world. In 2012, the French satirical weekly Charlie Hebdo featured its own cartoons of Muhammed. The solemn itemising of taboo subjects is of course comedy gold, and Kisin mined it enthusiastically. As a potted history of the theories of humour shows, the issues of humiliation and pain have always shadowed debates about humour. In many ways, contemporary theories about humour are a series of footnotes to Plato. For Sigmund Freud too, humour expresses socially harmful impulses such as aggression or forbidden sexual urges. These are usually repressed in the interests of civilised coexistence, but find a cathartic release in laughter, particularly in response to jokes that treat taboo topics.
