"A society that does not laugh is one without an important safety valve, and a society in which people interpret crude humor not as the first step toward friendly relations, but as a mortal offense, is one in which ordinary life has become fraught with danger. Human beings who live in communities of strangers are greatly in need of laughter, if their differences are not to lead to civil war. This was one of the functions of the ethnic joke. When Poles, Irish, Jews, and Italians competed for territory in the New World to which they had escaped, they provisioned themselves with a store of ethnic jokes with which to laugh off their manifest differences.

"Ethnic humor has been studied in depth by the British sociologist Christie Davies, and his findings — in The Mirth of Nations — are a salutary reminder of the ease with which spontaneous social solutions can be confiscated by the po-faced censors who seek to govern us. The jokes and teases that Christie assembles are gestures of conciliation, in which difference is made harmless and set laughingly aside. Yet everywhere in the modern world a kind of puritanical vigilance is extinguishing the ethnic joke, condemning it as an offense against our common humanity. What was traditionally regarded as a way to prevent social conflict is now seen as a major cause of it: The ethnic joke is accused of "stereotyping," and so tainted with the indelible stain of racism."

Roger Scruton, sublime, em trecho de artigo publicado na The American Spectator (aqui, o texto na íntegra).

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Posted by: david at janeiro 17, 2008 12:21 PM

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