Person-Focused Joking: Pattern and Function

Abstract

Although humor, wit and joking have received the attention of such eminent scholars as Freud, Bergson and Radcliffe-Brown, they remain among some of those obvious, yet pervasive, phenomena that are relatively unattended to by social scientists. And the attention they have received has usually been on the form and content of humor itself, what humor does to individuals, the extent and impact of humor in mass communications media, and on the highly ritualized patterns of