Comments on: Lessons from sarcasm (so useful…)

By: Ariel

Ariel — Wed, 19 Aug 2009 16:04:01 +0000

I’ve read Hurley’s article and am also curious how culture can play a role in shaping a sarcastic sense of humor. I am American and my son and I have difficulty discerning sarcasm. We simply don’t get it. Neither one of us have dementia or brain injuries. My daughter has a very sarcastic sense of humor. I am wondering if there is a “sarcasm gene” that my son and I are missing?

By: Encephalon 47 | Channel N

Encephalon 47 | Channel N — Mon, 15 Jun 2009 05:58:04 +0000

[...] a NYT article that many bloggers have written about,The Science of Sarcasm (Not That You Care). In Lessons from sarcasm (so useful) he points out that the perception of sarcasm varies by culture and may be related to their style of [...]

By: SAM

SAM — Fri, 06 Jun 2008 12:47:28 +0000

I think that just like context is an important factor for sarcasm, it is important for understanding jokes.

When Brazilian comedy is shown on Portuguese tv (I might say I am in part Brazilian and I am currently living in Portugal), most of my friends don’t get the reason why I laugh 3 or 4 times more than they do. It’s a matter of context. If one doesn’t know the context where the joke was made, his right hemisphere will never grasp its plenitude.

By the other hand, until “My Family”, I never thought Brittish sitcoms funny. The thing is Ben Harper, the main character, is one of the most sarctastic people in the world. House, MD: he is not nice, he is not funny, but we laugh with him: he is sarcastic!

A 14 year old friend once told me the difference between classic and modern funny: the classic ones did something silly and said a joke, the modern ones are sarcastic and ironic. Maybe because we, nowadays, tend to valorize (even implicitly) “intelligence”…

Let me tell you that I’ve been reading this blog for a while and I am enjoying to read my first anthropologist. Thank you

By: Jovan

Jovan — Thu, 05 Jun 2008 07:49:31 +0000

As an Australian and frequent user of sarcasm (yeah, right!), I found your comments about Australian humour interesting. I’ve often wondered what it is about ‘American’ parody that makes it so damned obvious. I experience a loss of pleasure in the joke when it’s made too obvious but I hadn’t reflected on my own preference for ‘unresolved’, ‘ambivalent’ parody. True enough, though, the pleasure I experience arises because I bring something to the humour. To ‘get’ a joke is an act, not just a reception of a message. This is extended in banter, where the goal is not simply to understand the joke but to throw back further ironic elaborations. You indicate you’ve got the joke not by laughing, which punctuates the joke and brings it to an end, but by extending the humour and delaying resolution. Actually, the term ‘joke’ isn’t really adequate because it suggests a bounded entity with an obvious punch-line and conclusion. Some people expect humour to be contained in ‘jokes’ – discreet packages of humour. In the ‘Australian’, laconic, mode, the ‘joke’ isn’t so easily separated from regular discourse. Instead, there’s an ironic edge given to normal conversation which is probably the source of the ambivalence you’re referring to, Greg.

I come up against this constantly with my (German) wife: I make an ironic comment and expect her to return an ironic elaboration. The ‘joke’ mostly falls flat though. Often she doesn’t realise that what I said was ironically intended. I often feel like I’ve thrown her a ball, but instead of catching it and throwing it back to me with a slightly different ‘spin’, she lets it drop to the floor and looks down at it with disdain. I would hesitate to generalise this out to a national trait though, although it does seem to fit the stereotype of the ‘humourless’ German. I have had plenty of German friends with a healthy sense of irony and who could banter with the best of them. But it is interesting, isn’t it, that it is in the moments of failed humour that the foreignness of others becomes more palpable and we are ‘struck’ by difference.