Ancient Origins of Halloween

Halloween's origins date back to the ancient Celtic festival of Samhain (pronounced sow-in). The Celts, who lived 2,000 years ago in the area that is now Ireland, the United Kingdom and northern France, celebrated their new year on November 1. This day marked the end of summer and the harvest and the beginning of the dark, cold winter, a time of year that was often associated with human death. Celts believed that on the night before the new year, the boundary between the worlds of the living and the dead became blurred. On the night of October 31 they celebrated Samhain, when it was believed that the ghosts of the dead returned to earth. In addition to causing trouble and damaging crops, Celts thought that the presence of the otherworldly spirits made it easier for the Druids, or Celtic priests, to make predictions about the future. For a people entirely dependent on the volatile natural world, these prophecies were an important source of comfort and direction during the long, dark winter.

To commemorate the event, Druids built huge sacred bonfires, where the people gathered to burn crops and animals as sacrifices to the Celtic deities. During the celebration, the Celts wore costumes, typically consisting of animal heads and skins, and attempted to tell each other's fortunes. When the celebration was over, they re-lit their hearth fires, which they had extinguished earlier that evening, from the sacred bonfire to help protect them during the coming winter.

By 43 A.D., the Roman Empire had conquered the majority of Celtic territory. In the course of the four hundred years that they ruled the Celtic lands, two festivals of Roman origin were combined with the traditional Celtic celebration of Samhain. The first was Feralia, a day in late October when the Romans traditionally commemorated the passing of the dead. The second was a day to honor Pomona, the Roman goddess of fruit and trees. The symbol of Pomona is the apple and the incorporation of this celebration into Samhain probably explains the tradition of "bobbing" for apples that is practiced today on Halloween.

On May 13, 609 A.D., Pope Boniface IV dedicated the Pantheon in Rome in honor of all Christian martyrs, and the Catholic feast of All Martyrs Day was established in the Western church. Pope Gregory III (731–741) later expanded the festival to include all saints as well as all martyrs, and moved the observance from May 13 to November 1. By the 9th century the influence of Christianity had spread into Celtic lands, where it gradually blended with and supplanted the older Celtic rites. In 1000 A.D., the church would make November 2 All Souls' Day, a day to honor the dead. It is widely believed today that the church was attempting to replace the Celtic festival of the dead with a related, but church-sanctioned holiday. All Souls Day was celebrated similarly to Samhain, with big bonfires, parades, and dressing up in costumes as saints, angels and devils. The All Saints Day celebration was also called All-hallows or All-hallowmas (from Middle English Alholowmesse meaning All Saints' Day) and the night before it, the traditional night of Samhain in the Celtic religion, began to be called All-hallows Eve and, eventually, Halloween.

Halloween Comes to America

Celebration of Halloween was extremely limited in colonial New England because of the rigid Protestant belief systems there. Halloween was much more common in Maryland and the southern colonies. As the beliefs and customs of different European ethnic groups as well as the American Indians meshed, a distinctly American version of Halloween began to emerge. The first celebrations included "play parties," public events held to celebrate the harvest, where neighbors would share stories of the dead, tell each other's fortunes, dance and sing. Colonial Halloween festivities also featured the telling of ghost stories and mischief-making of all kinds. By the middle of the nineteenth century, annual autumn festivities were common, but Halloween was not yet celebrated everywhere in the country.

In the second half of the nineteenth century, America was flooded with new immigrants. These new immigrants, especially the millions of Irish fleeing Ireland's potato famine of 1846, helped to popularize the celebration of Halloween nationally. Taking from Irish and English traditions, Americans began to dress up in costumes and go house to house asking for food or money, a practice that eventually became today's "trick-or-treat" tradition. Young women believed that on Halloween they could divine the name or appearance of their future husband by doing tricks with yarn, apple parings or mirrors.

In the late 1800s, there was a move in America to mold Halloween into a holiday more about community and neighborly get-togethers than about ghosts, pranks and witchcraft. At the turn of the century, Halloween parties for both children and adults became the most common way to celebrate the day. Parties focused on games, foods of the season and festive costumes. Parents were encouraged by newspapers and community leaders to take anything "frightening" or "grotesque" out of Halloween celebrations. Because of these efforts, Halloween lost most of its superstitious and religious overtones by the beginning of the twentieth century.

By the 1920s and 1930s, Halloween had become a secular, but community-centered holiday, with parades and town-wide parties as the featured entertainment. Despite the best efforts of many schools and communities, vandalism began to plague Halloween celebrations in many communities during this time. By the 1950s, town leaders had successfully limited vandalism and Halloween had evolved into a holiday directed mainly at the young. Due to the high numbers of young children during the fifties baby boom, parties moved from town civic centers into the classroom or home, where they could be more easily accommodated. Between 1920 and 1950, the centuries-old practice of trick-or-treating was also revived. Trick-or-treating was a relatively inexpensive way for an entire community to share the Halloween celebration. In theory, families could also prevent tricks being played on them by providing the neighborhood children with small treats. A new American tradition was born, and it has continued to grow. Today, Americans spend an estimated $6 billion annually on Halloween, making it the country's second largest commercial holiday.

Today's Halloween Traditions

The American Halloween tradition of "trick-or-treating" probably dates back to the early All Souls' Day parades in England. During the festivities, poor citizens would beg for food and families would give them pastries called "soul cakes" in return for their promise to pray for the family's dead relatives. The distribution of soul cakes was encouraged by the church as a way to replace the ancient practice of leaving food and wine for roaming spirits. The practice, which was referred to as "going a-souling" was eventually taken up by children who would visit the houses in their neighborhood and be given ale, food, and money.  

The tradition of dressing in costume for Halloween has both European and Celtic roots. Hundreds of years ago, winter was an uncertain and frightening time. Food supplies often ran low and, for the many people afraid of the dark, the short days of winter were full of constant worry. On Halloween, when it was believed that ghosts came back to the earthly world, people thought that they would encounter ghosts if they left their homes. To avoid being recognized by these ghosts, people would wear masks when they left their homes after dark so that the ghosts would mistake them for fellow spirits. On Halloween, to keep ghosts away from their houses, people would place bowls of food outside their homes to appease the ghosts and prevent them from attempting to enter.

Halloween Superstitions

Halloween has always been a holiday filled with mystery, magic and superstition. It began as a Celtic end-of-summer festival during which people felt especially close to deceased relatives and friends. For these friendly spirits, they set places at the dinner table, left treats on doorsteps and along the side of the road and lit candles to help loved ones find their way back to the spirit world. Today's Halloween ghosts are often depicted as more fearsome and malevolent, and our customs and superstitions are scarier too. We avoid crossing paths with black cats, afraid that they might bring us bad luck. This idea has its roots in the Middle Ages, when many people believed that witches avoided detection by turning themselves into cats. We try not to walk under ladders for the same reason. This superstition may have come from the ancient Egyptians, who believed that triangles were sacred; it also may have something to do with the fact that walking under a leaning ladder tends to be fairly unsafe. And around Halloween, especially, we try to avoid breaking mirrors, stepping on cracks in the road or spilling salt.

But what about the Halloween traditions and beliefs that today's trick-or-treaters have forgotten all about? Many of these obsolete rituals focused on the future instead of the past and the living instead of the dead. In particular, many had to do with helping young women identify their future husbands and reassuring them that they would someday—with luck, by next Halloween—be married. In 18th-century Ireland, a matchmaking cook might bury a ring in her mashed potatoes on Halloween night, hoping to bring true love to the diner who found it. In Scotland, fortune-tellers recommended that an eligible young woman name a hazelnut for each of her suitors and then toss the nuts into the fireplace. The nut that burned to ashes rather than popping or exploding, the story went, represented the girl's future husband. (In some versions of this legend, confusingly, the opposite was true: The nut that burned away symbolized a love that would not last.) Another tale had it that if a young woman ate a sugary concoction made out of walnuts, hazelnuts and nutmeg before bed on Halloween night she would dream about her future husband. Young women tossed apple-peels over their shoulders, hoping that the peels would fall on the floor in the shape of their future husbands' initials; tried to learn about their futures by peering at egg yolks floating in a bowl of water; and stood in front of mirrors in darkened rooms, holding candles and looking over their shoulders for their husbands' faces. Other rituals were more competitive. At some Halloween parties, the first guest to find a burr on a chestnut-hunt would be the first to marry; at others, the first successful apple-bobber would be the first down the aisle.

Of course, whether we're asking for romantic advice or trying to avoid seven years of bad luck, each one of these Halloween superstitions relies on the good will of the very same "spirits" whose presence the early Celts felt so keenly.

The Comic Toolbox’s Lessons and Tools

Comedy is truth and pain . . . Religion, sex, and death are rich areas for humor because they touch some pretty strongly held beliefs.

The Rule of Nine . . . For every ten jokes you tell, nine will be trash . . . Depressing? Not really.  In fact, the rule of nine turns out to be highly liberating because once you embrace it, you instantly and permanently lose the toxic expectation of succeeding every time.

Lower your Sights . . . I lower my sights.  I concentrate on this chapter, this paragraph, this sentence, this phrase, this word.  Why? Because the hope of success can kill comedy just as surely as the fear of failure.

Okay, now we have two tools . . . the rule of nine and lowering our sights.

The better you imagine yourself to be, the better you become.

Change your focus.  Concentrate on the process, not the product . . . Concentrate on the task at hand . . . When you are concentrating on the task at hand, the outside world truly does not exist.

The comic premise is the gap between comic reality and real reality . . . Anytime you have a comic voice or character or world or attitude that looks at things from a skewed point of view, you have a gap between realities.  Comedy lives in this gap.

The comic premise exists in all comic structures.

Use the comic premise as a tool to create comic situations.

We start by looking for something unexpected to create the comic reality.

There are multiple gaps in a comic premise.  They all turn on conflict, and the deeper the conflict gets, the more interesting the premise becomes.

In classic dramatic structure, there are three types of conflict: man against nature, man against man, and man against self.

The first type of conflict, so-called global conflict, is the conflict between people and their world.

A normal character in a comic world stands in for the reader or viewer or listener and represents real reality.

Comedy is also created when a comic character appears in a normal world.

There are two types of local conflicts.  One pits a comic character against a normal character, and the other finds comic characters in opposition.

Not just in comedy but in all storytelling, the richest conflict is the conflict within . . . nothing beats seeing characters at war with themselves.

In on sort of inner conflict, a normal character becomes a comic character, and the comedy is rooted in the character’s change of state.

In the best comic storytelling, all three types [global, local, and inner conflict] are present in the same situation.

You may have noticed that I try to keep my comic premises short, the length of a sentence of less.  Like they say, brevity is the soul of wit.

To recap: The comic premise is the gap between real reality and comic reality.  Every form of humor, from the smallest jokes to the largest comic tales, has some sort of defining gap or comic conflict.  There are three types of comic conflict: Global conflict takes place between an individual and his/her world.  Local conflict us about people fighting people . . . Inner conflict features a character at war with himself./herself.  Inner conflict is always the richest and most rewarding.

The heart and soul of any comic character is his strong comic perspective.  I repeat these words—strong comic perspective . . . they [these three words] may be the three most important words in this book.

The comic perspective is a character’s unique way of looking at his world which differs in a clear and substantial way from the “normal” world view . . . The comic perspective functions in a character exactly as the comic premise functions in a story: it defines the gap that the laughs will spark across.

A character’s strong comic perspective is the motor that drives his comic engine.  Comedy flows from character.

Comic perspective is a new tool, a single, clearly defined way of looking at the world.

Virtually anything can be filtered through a comic perspective, and virtually any point of view can be a comic perspective.

Exaggeration is the tool that makes the comic perspective interesting.

The tool of exaggeration simply takes a comic perspective and pushes and stretches and accelerates it until it’s sufficiently so far from our [normal] perspective that it starts to be funny.

This tool, exaggeration, requires you to be bold . . .There’s no such thing as exaggerating too much.

Flaws are another tool in creating comic characters.  A comic character is funny as a function of his/her flaws.  Flaws are failings or negative qualities within a person’s attributes or aspects.

Flaws in a comic character work to open emotional distance between a comic character and viewers or readers . . . flaws work to make a comic character “the other guy” in readers’ and viewers’ minds.

The more flaws you can find for your comic characters, the more interesting and complex and funny those characters will become.

Find a flaw and you’ve found a comic character.

Here, then, is another comic premise you can exploit, the inner comic premise, the gap between how a character sees himself/herself and who he/she really is.

Flaws serve two purposes: they create conflict within characters, and they create emotional distance between character and audience.

Humanity is used to build a bridge between character and audience . . . a comic character’s humanity (identifiable sympathetic human qualities) create empathy.

Humanity, then, is the sum of a character’s positive human qualities that inspire either sympathy or empathy.

Comic perspective is the unique worldview at variance with normal reality; it is what drives the character’s comic engine.

Flaws are the elements of a comic character that separate him from “real” people.  If he has no flaws, he’s generic and not funny.

Humanity is the quality of a comic character that unites him with the audience, building sympathy and empathy.

Another tool is the clash of context.  Clash of context is the forced union of incompatibles.  Clash of context takes something from its usual place and sticks it where it doesn’t fit.

Clash of context is a surprisingly easy tool to use.  Stick a character in the opposite setting he/she is usually found in.

The wildly inappropriate response is another highly useful tool.

We want a wildly, not a mildly, inappropriate response.

The wildly inappropriate response is also pretty simple to use.  Just pick a situation and ask yourself what the logical response to that situation would be.  Then find the opposite (taking a cooler full of beer to a funeral).

The law of comic opposites seeks the diametric opposite of a comic character’s strong comic perspective and assigns that opposite to a second character.

The tool of comic opposites is one of the most common in comedy.

To find a comic opposite is to ask who could give your comic character the worst possible time.

Using tension and release is another comic tool.  You raise tension, and then you release it.

Allow tension (expectation) to build up.

Tension and release is not only a function of time, they are also a function of circumstance as well.

To make a joke funny, delay the payoff; to make a situation funny, create dire circumstances . . . maximum tension, suspended release.

Positioning the payoff: place the payoff at the end.

Tool: telling the truth for comic effect (stating the obvious).

Tool: telling a lie for comic effect  . . . Telling a lie for comic effect is like finding the wildly inappropriate response.  Simply locate the truth of a situation and then say the opposite of that.

Telling the truth and telling a lie for comic effect work well together.

Comic story: in the center-and-eccentric configuration you have a straight man/woman surrounded by comic characters . . .The comic premise of the center-eccentric story is found in the gap between the central character’s normal perspective and the uncommon comic perspectives of the surrounding eccentric characters.

Comic story: fish-out-of-water tale, a normal character in a comic world, or a comic character in a normal world.

Fish-out-of-water stories don’t require an actual physical change of place.  Often a character undergoes an internal change.

Comic story: Character comedy, the direct emotional war between strong comic opposites . . . law of comic opposites becomes the comic premise.

Character comedy is also often character romance.

Comic story: magical powers, the comic premise os the power itself.

Readers and viewers have tremendous tolerance for magic in comic stories, but give an explanation, establish your rules . . .readers and viewers will tolerate almost any stupid explanation.

Comic story: ensemble comedy, a group of people in conflict with each other and their world, a common storyline for TV sitcoms.

The trick to making an ensemble comedy work is to layer in sufficient lines of conflict within the group.

Comic story: slapstick, the easiest sort of comedy . . .you don’t have to worry about inner conflict of emotional core issues or any of the things that make writing hard.  All you have to do is to make it funny in superficial ways (slipping on a banana peel).

A slapstick character never experiences self-doubt . . .the comic premise of the gap between the slapstick character’s self-assurance and his/her manifest incompetence.

Because slapstick comedy denies self-doubt, it is physical comedy as opposed to cerebral/emotional comedy.

To create slapstick comedy, create a comic character with delusions of grandeur, and then put the character in a situation designed to torment those delusions.

Comic story: satire and parody, satire attacks the substance of a social or cultural icon or phenomenon from the outside.  Parody attacks from within.

The common denominator between satire and parody is this: both find their comic premise in the gap between the world as they present it and the world as their audience understands it to be.

The best parody and satire operate on two levels at the same time.  You might have a fish-out-of-water tale that involves a comic character in a new and challenging world that, at the same time, mocks a facet of that world.

A throughline is a simple, direct path from the start to the end of a tale.

The comic throughline:

1.     Who is the hero?

2.     What does the hero want? (inner and outer needs)

3.     The door opens (a new and challenging world—hero never the same).

4.     The hero takes control

5.     A monkey wrench is thrown in.

6.     Things fall apart.

7.     The hero hits bottom.

8.     The hero risks all.

9.     What does the hero get?

A monkey wrench is a new bad thing—a new screw-up, a new threat, a new character, a new complication.

In TV sitcoms, the monkey wrench is usually thrown in at the act break, the moment just before the commercial when the hero realizes things aren’t going according to plan.

The moment of maximum remove occurs when the her realizes just how distant he/she is from the goal.

You find the monkey wrench in your story by asking and answering the question: when does something go completely wrong?

In a comic story, the monkey wrench is usually thrown in when the hero falls in love.

The key word is loyalty.  A character always starts out with loyalty to himself and to his goal.  What happens when the monkey wrench is thrown is that the hero experiences displaced loyalty.

This new conflict between original loyalty and displaced loyalty turns the story on its head.

Create conflict between what the hero wanted originally and what the hero now wants.

The rule of three is a helpful tool that’s built on three iterations of an idea or theme.  The first iteration presents a theme.  The second iteration validates the theme.  The third iteration violates the theme/sequence.  The rule of three is thus: introduction, validation, and violation.

Another tool is the jokoid, something that looks and sounds like a joke but is not funny.  A jokoid is a placeholder in your story and can easily be revised.  It’s always easier to revise than invent.

The doorbell effect is a sudden unexpected complication.

The character has a certain expectation—the doorbell won’t ring—and then that expectation is denied/defeated—the doorbell rings.  As a tool, the doorbell effect can be a humorous way of complicating the character’s situation.

Avoid clichés, cheap worn-down lazy formulas that allow writers to take shortcuts.  Cliches risk alienating readers/viewers.

The running gag use the structure of a joke that never changes, while the substance always changes.

A close cousin to the running gag, the callback works by direct reference to an earlier joke or idea . . . callbacks are a marvelously effective way to finish, or button,  a scene or story.  End with your story’s beginning.

Morreal Notes 4, Negative Ethics

When joking we are disengaged, idle, distanced.

Deonotological ethics

Morreall’s 8 moral objections:

1.     humor is insincere

2.     humor is idle

3.     humor is irresponsible

4.     humor is hedonistic

5.     humor diminishes self-control

6.     humor is hostile

7.     humor fosters anarchy

8.     humor is foolish

Humor is insincere—

Humor is non-bona-fide communication, people ho joke do not mean what they say, “I was only joking.”

Proverbs 26:18-19: “A man who deceives another and then says, ‘It was only a joke,’ is like a madman shooting at random his deadly darts and arrows.”

Humor is idle—

Humor does not accomplish anything (disengaged play)

4^th century Bishop John Chrysotom condemned laughter as “a moment of indifference.”  His contemporary Gregory of Nyssa said that, “Laughter is our enemy because it is neither a word not an action ordered to any possible goal.”

7^th century John Climacus said that the mother of laughter is insensibility

20^th century Anthony Ludovici, “the humorous mind shirks the heavy task of solving thorny problems and prefers to make people laugh about them,” humor is cowardly and indolent

humor is irresponsible—

a form of play, humor keeps us from attending to our duties

in humor we suspend our moral concern (laughing at a friend too drunk to stand up)

17^th century William Prynne, comedy evokes laughter at some “obscene, lascivious, sinful passage, gesture, speech or jest the common object of men’s hellish mirth) [which provokes people to] wanton smiles and carnal solace

humor displaces or blocks our concern and action—But Morreall argues not all of the time

Satire corrects society by ridiculing vice and folly

Humor is hedonistic—

Humor is a form of play pursued for pleasure

Often, morality requires a curbing of desires, humor can lead to sexual license ????

The Church Fathers Jerome, Ambrose, and John Chrysotom warned that laughter could lead to illicit sexual activity.  John Climacus lumped the following together, “Impurity, touching the body, laughing, talking without restraint.”  Shameless wanton people “laugh immoderately”

Humor diminishes self-control—

Humor provokes a loss of self-control, the ideal of both religious and secular moral codes, a loss of self-control is a slippery slope leading to all manner of more degradation

Humor is hostile—

Laughter and a loss of self-control lead to the release of violent urges

Humor fosters anarchy—

Laughter and humor lead to the breakdown of social order, comedians mock political, intellectual, and religious leaders and institutions, mockery is a threat to religion and social order

Humor is foolish—

Laughing people are fools who are morally, intellectually, and emotionally defective

Ecclesiastes 7:3-4, “Sorrow is better than laughter, for by sadness of countenance the heart is made glad . . . the heart of fools is in the house of mirth”

Shortcomings in the Ethics of Humor--

Ronald de Sousa calls the phthonic element of humor the malicious beliefs and attitudes in racist and sexist jokes

Ethnic jokes depict an ethnic group as being stupid, lazy, and/or immoral

Ethnic jokes are expressions of hostility toward a “target” group

People tell ethnic jokes not about a group they despise, but about a familiar group, much like themselves, who live at the margin of their culture.  Joke tellers do not believe the characterizations in the jokes to be true. ?????????

What the joke tellers are laughing at is a different version of themselves. . .  When one group hates another, they express their feelings in more direct and damaging ways than by telling jokes. ??????????

Joke about a Polish astronaut flying in a rocket towards the sun: “Don’t worry, I’ll fly at night.”  “This joke did not express Americans’ contempt for Poles as stupid, but their fears about their own scientific and technological ignorance . . .???????

Joke about an Englishman murdering a Pakistani—the joke is not an expression of prejudice and hostility toward Pakistanis . . . ??????????

 The correct interpretation of a joke may not be possible to decide.  What is a racist joke to one person may be interpreted differently by another.   ???????????

Margaret Trudeau joke, bad on all levels!

The Ethics of Disengagement

Racist and sexist jokes: The central feature here is the playful disengagement of non-bona-fide language and actions. . . ????????

When joking we are disengaged, idle, distanced.

Henri Bergson, “Laughter is incompatible with emotion.  Depict a fault in such a way as to arouse sympathy, fear, or pity—it is impossible to laugh.” ?????????

Satire is not a weapon of revolutionaries.  ???????????

As in play and in aesthetic experience, the practical and cognitive disengagement in humor can have harmful effects.

First Harmful Effect: Irresponsibility

When disengaged, we neglect actions that are called for and do things that should not be done.

Sometimes we laugh off a problem, laughing can suppress legitimate concerns, and in doing so we treat serious issues as being trivial.

Joking suppresses acceptance of responsibility.

The disengagement fostered by humor is often deliberately used to deflect criticism.

Second Harmful Effect: Blocking Compassion

Humor can harm by displacing action and insulting those who are suffering, and thereby increasing their suffering.

Joking can be callous, insensitive, and cruel—laughing at little people, humiliating prisoners (Abu Ghraib)—it was a joke, “just for fun.”

Humor can promote insensitivity and lessen compassion—people become objects of humor, less human.  Humor can be cruel.  Humor can promote callousness or indifference to those being laughed at.

Desensitization—Grand Theft Auto

Violence on TV, “it does not seem clear that watching thousands of violent acts on tv each year makes viewers less upset by real violence and less compassionate”  ??????

Perhaps the most widely accepted moral rule is to not cause unnecessary suffering . . . we should not laugh at someone’s problem when compassion is called for.

Third Harmful Effect: Promoting Prejudice

Humor disengages us cognitively from the object of amusement, and thus humor blocks action and compassion

Sexist and racist jokes are based on sexist and racist beliefs, to appreciate the humor listeners/viewers must share the beliefs

Tellers of sexist and racist jokes promote prejudice

Yet ethicists “overlook the fact that sexist and racist jokes, like jokes in general, are known to be fictional by tellers and audiences alike.”  ??????????  Fiction less harmful?????????

The fantastic exaggeration found in so much humor is ignored by virtually all ethicists writing about ethnic jokes  ?????????

Polish astronaut joke:  “The stupidity of the character in this joke is not a piece of information being communicated, but a fantastic idea being presented for playful enjoyment.  What most people enjoy in hearing this joke is not a belief that they are superior to Polish people, but the mental gymnastics they go through in making sense of the line, ’I’ll go at night.’” ?????????

“Those who circulate sexist and racist jokes do it, I suggest, not by making truth-claims but by being indifferent to the truth.  They are disengaged cognitively and practically from the stereotypes in what they are saying, and they don’t care about the harm that circulating those stereotypes may cause.”

The fun in these jokes is based on stretching negative stereotypes.

Putting a “play frame” around stereotypes in a joke supposedly removes those joking from moral scrutiny

Humor’s “play frame” allows prejudicial ideas ro be slipped into people’s heads without being evaluated.  2006 film Borat, a fake Kazakh coming from the real Kazakhstan.  Why not create a fictitious name for the country?

Antique dealers collect racist memorabilia

What is objectionable about sexist and racist stereotypes is that they categorize all members of a group as being interchangeable

Stereotypes write off entire groups as being inferior, demeaning and dismissing them.  The individual is erased.

Such joking can cause malicious distrust, and when carried to extremes hatred and oppression.

“The objectionableness of jokes based on stereotypes, I suggest, is not all-or-nothing, but is proportional to the harm those stereotypes are like to cause.  Where a stereotype leads to little or no harm, a joke based on it may even be acceptable” ??????

 rednecks like redneck jokes, lawyers like lawyer jokes

but for others, blacks people, women, gays, mentally challenged, jokes that stereotype can cause real harm in reducing income, respect, status, and power.

The stereotypes perpetuated by jokes are more objectionable when they are about people who lack social status and power and when those stereotypes are p[art of a social system that marginalizes them—keeping them in their place

A general ethical principle—do not promote a lack of concern for something about which people should be concerned.

Intellectual Virtues Fostered by Humor

1.     open-mindedness

2.     creative thinking

3.     critical thinking

The humorous person may be irreverent and even disrespectful toward those in authority, but that can be beneficial

Humor provokes people to challenge, question, and think for themselves

Democracy requires critical thinking and discussion

Moral Virtues Fostered by Humor

Self-transcendence, rising above personal concerns, egocentric concerns, humor, as self-transcendence, liberates us from narrow perspectives and helps us to see ourselves as other people do

The ability to laugh at oneself not only fosters several virtues but also is essential to moral development

Seeing oneself objectively (??????) is important in being honest with oneself, thus humor can contribute to self-knowledge, integrity, and mental health

Humor contributes to patience, acceptance, and open-mindedness

A sense of humor makes us not only more tolerant of but also more gracious

Graciousness is kindness that allows the other person to relax and not feel threatened.

Humor not only reduces defensiveness but also defuses conflict

Lincoln challenged to a duel, “Cow s*** at five paces.”

Holocaust Humor: Three main benefits, 1. Critical function—focuses attention on what is wrong, sparking resistance, 2. Cohesive function, creating solidarity, people laughing together at an oppressor, and 3. Coping function, helping the oppressed go endure difficult situations

Laughter interferes with propaganda and brainwashing