Humour across cultures : an appetizer

Joking is universal behaviour. Jokes provide playful ways of addressing taboo subjects that relate to the basic drives of people for sexuality, affiliation, novelty and dominance. Telling jokes is a way to achieve status, which is more a male preoccupation than a female one. But aside from the gender difference, people do not make the same kinds of jokes across the world. There are differences both in the process of joking, in joke style, and in the content of jokes. Are jokes subtle or blunt, are they derogatory, what are the taboo subjects? These things vary. The article provides a tour d’horizon of cultural differences across the world. It does so using Hofstede’s five basic issues of culture: collectivity, hierarchy, aggression, otherness, and need gratification. At the hand of examples, it shows that humour does seem to vary with culture. It argues that this area could be fruitful for targeted research.