Behind the scenes at Harris’ Idle Hour Moving Picture House, Sean and Adrianna work to repair an important piece of machinery for the night’s show.
“Ah ha… got it,” Sean says.
“You found the problem?” Adrianna responds.
“It is a snortblatern that was not twisted tightly enough around the galdemesh, resulting in the tortenumbers to vibrate out of sync with the floffenploffs.”
“What about the gotenhutentags?”
Sean becomes irritable. He knew that Adrianna just compounded the problem after he thought he had it figured out.
“No, it is a snortblatern.”
“The gotenhutentags are connected to the galdenmesh,” she sings in a childlike tune. “The galdenmesh is connected to the snortblatern, oh those skeleton bones. Oh mercy how they scare!”
Needless to say, this was a poor injection of humor and ended up pissing Sean off.
For the party host, humor can help to smooth a rough patch that might happen between people or to establish a setting and develop rapport with another person. In this story, Adrianna used an aggressive style of humor that belittled Sean. The aggressive style is one of four identified by research, but only two are conducive to building a positive party environment.
The two important styles are the affiliative and the self enhancing.
The affiliative style focuses on others and aims to build relationships. When joking with another person in this manner, it is easy just keep in mind that we are all human and have commonalities. The trick to using this style is to build upon similarities, which cuts down the psychological distance that is normal when two people are strangers and meeting for the first time or are friends going through moments of life’s tensions.
Affiliative jokes appear something like this.
One day, a fairy visits a lonely widow and says that she is there to give her three wishes.
”I wish I was 21 and beautiful!”
The wish is instantly granted.
”I wish I had a million dollars!”
The wish is granted.
”I wish that my cat here were the most handsome guy in the world and was madly in love with me.” The wish is granted. The now young lady and her man go inside. They start to cuddle, and the man looks at her.
”Aren’t you upset that you had me fixed?”
Joke destroyer ALERT- the geeky explanation: This joke is affiliative because it reminds the reader that he/she is human. The topic of this joke is universal to the human experience, sex. As the relationship starts heading to the height of intimacy, the punchline shatters expectation because the reader expects something else to happen. Not the fact the woman had overlooked the fact she had neutered her cat, and the fairy provides service equivolent to a used car salesman. It comes as-is.
On the flip side, it is important to keep in mind that this style has a way of alienating those who are not a part of the group. If the joke has a shared point of reference, it would leave people without a shared sense of history, which would result in a person being easily confused or lost. Try telling a blonde joke in a village in Mongolia; chances are that a villager has never seen a ditsy blonde. (A side note: the author of this blog is blonde and I do occasionally resemble the blonde in the jokes. But brunettes are much more numerous and have oh so many more ditsy moments.)
The second style of humor is self enhancing, which highlights ironies and how they work. It is a distraction technique that might be needed to diffuse tensions and remind people of the role that they play or proper etiquette. This style of humor appears when a person gets what they want finally, and decides that they don’t really like it. For example, Dave Berry shares the joke of a young boy who goes out fishing with his father, catches a fish, gets excited about the catch, and cannot draw up the will to hold his prize. When told from the son’s perspective, it is absolutely refreshing even 35 years after the event happened.
