Chapter 7: The cases that should break it

I owe the reader the cases that should break this.

I have been keeping a separate list, in a separate note, for almost as long as I have been keeping the main one. The main list is the reason this book exists. The separate list is the reason I have not stopped scrolling on the main list. On the separate list are the jokes that should have travelled and didn't, the jokes that travelled and shouldn't have, and the jokes whose travelling is the heart of the problem. There are eight items on it.

The eight are the cases that, on every reading I had access to before I started, should have falsified one or another piece of what the previous chapters have argued. Several of them gave me trouble for months. One of them gave me trouble for the better part of a year. I am going to walk them in roughly the order I came to terms with them, and tell you which of them held, which qualified, which broke locally, and what the chapter is left with afterwards.

I will say this once, here, before any of the cases. The chapter does not pretend the cases all hold. The fourth case in the order is the one I have to concede. I am going to concede it where it sits, in the middle of the chapter, not at the end. It is honest to put the concession where the case sits and not at the bottom of the page where the reader might miss it. I have done what I can to write the rest of the chapter on either side of the concession without softening it.

The cases run, roughly, from easier to harder. The easier ones are the ones where the reader will feel the move without resistance. The joke is locked at the surface; the engine that powers it is recognisable everywhere. The harder ones are the ones where the engine is recognisable everywhere and the engine is doing something other than uniting people. I am not going to pretend the second is the same problem as the first. It is not. The chapter ends, in the section after the eighth case, on what the second kind of problem leaves the reader with.

I want to start with a Soviet joke. I am starting there because the Soviet joke is the easiest of the eight, and easy is what I want under my belt before the harder ones land.

The train, and the four men on it

The joke is one of the most copied anekdoty of the Brezhnev era and runs, in the form Ben Lewis collects in Hammer & Tickle (Lewis 2008, pp. 192–197), like this. Lenin, Stalin, Khrushchev, and Brezhnev are riding a train. The train stops because the rails have run out. Lenin proposes a subbotnik — a "voluntary" Saturday work-shift to lay more track. Stalin orders the engineer shot. Khrushchev says: take up the rails behind us and lay them in front. Brezhnev draws the curtains and says: Comrades — let's pretend we're moving.

A reader who has not lived under a regime that called the work voluntary on the morning the foreman knocked at the door, has not been to a show trial, has not had to listen to the General Secretary on the radio at the moment the irrigation district was reorganised for the third time in a decade, and has not heard the term stagnation deployed by people who were experiencing it firsthand, will read those four lines and recognise that something is supposed to land. Something does land. The fourth man is an old man in a curtained train pretending the train is moving. The picture is funny. The reader has not, however, just laughed at the joke. The reader has laughed at the shape of the joke.

I want to be precise about what is locked and what is not.

What is locked is the vocabulary. Subbotnik is a piece of Soviet labour-policy slang that names a particular kind of state-organised "voluntary" weekend work, instituted in 1919 and retained in various forms until the dissolution of the Soviet state. Stalin's order to shoot the engineer is a piece of historical compression that requires the listener to know that the executions of the Great Purge of 1936–1938 produced, on direct order, not just political opponents but technicians whose incompetence was held to indicate sabotage; train-related sabotage was a recurring charge in show-trial transcripts. Khrushchev's instruction to take up the rails behind and lay them in front compresses, into one image, the entire mid-1950s and early-1960s style of frantic improvisation under restructuring pressure that produced the Virgin Lands campaign, the corn-everywhere program, the Sovnarkhoz reforms, and the partial de-Stalinisation that nobody was sure how to measure. And Brezhnev drawing the curtains is the term stagnation — zastoy, the standard Russian-language descriptor for the late 1960s into the early 1980s — performed as a single physical gesture. To get all four punchlines, you need to know all four eras.

What is not locked is the engine. The shape of the joke is a procession of leaders, ranked in time, each of whose response to the same problem caricatures the era he ran. Suetonius records exactly this kind of ranking-joke about the Julio-Claudians under whom whisper-gossip thrived: the Lives of the Caesars preserves several of them, and even when the historical material is patchy, the form of the joke is unmistakable. Augustus deified, Tiberius indulgent, Caligula incomprehensible, Claudius slow, Nero ablaze. Romanian bancuri of the Ceaușescu years ran the same shape — a line of leaders, each responding to the failed shipment, the broken meat queue, the empty shelf. Defectors from North Korea have produced, in interviews and memoirs, samples of the same form keyed to the Kim dynasty. The form is not Soviet. The form is what an authoritarian system grows in its mouth as a coping mechanism. Seth Graham's Resonant Dissonance (Graham 2009, pp. 87–94) makes the structural point in the most academic English available: the anekdot as a genre is a mode of context-bound political joking whose specific vocabulary is era-keyed and whose structural shape is intra-genre. The vocabulary is the vehicle. The shape is the engine. The vehicle is locked. The engine runs everywhere a population has to bury its laughter.

The chapter's working distinction shows up here for the first time. I am going to use it for the rest of the resolution path, so I want to plant it cleanly. When a joke fails to travel, the failure is sometimes at the level of the vehicle — the specific cultural or linguistic apparatus the joke is built out of — and sometimes at the level of the engine, the comedic mechanism that makes the vehicle move. Vehicle locks are common. Engine locks are vanishing. The Soviet train is a vehicle lock. The vehicle does not cross. The engine has been crossing since the Roman emperors were a fresh subject for whisper.

I want to try a quick test of the distinction by walking the joke into a register where the vocabulary has been replaced and the engine is still doing its work. The American comedian John Mulaney, in his 2018 special Kid Gorgeous, had a long bit about the previous month of American politics that compressed two years of news cycles into a single image: a horse loose in a hospital. The horse was not a particular horse, the hospital was not a particular hospital, the engine was the same engine — a procession of administrative responses to a problem that the room did not know how to define, ranked by their relative absurdity, ending in the punchline that named the ambient one. The American audience laughed before the bit was over. They were laughing at the shape the Soviet audience had laughed at on a kitchen-table whisper in 1972. The vocabulary had been swapped out for animals and a hospital. The shape had not moved.

The Soviet anekdot holds. I will say it like that, because the case slate I am working from describes its thesis status as holds. It holds because the surface lock is real and the structural form is universal. A reader without Soviet vocabulary does not laugh at the punchline; a reader without Soviet vocabulary does laugh at the shape, in any era's clothes, in any language's vocabulary, anywhere a state has produced a leader whose response to the problem is to draw the curtains.

One small thing before the next case. The Soviet anekdoty were, in the strict sense, illegal. To tell them out loud at a dinner party was to bet your career or, depending on the era, your life. The catalogues we have — Lewis's, Graham's, the older anthologies that smuggled the jokes out of the bloc through the émigré press in the late 1970s — were assembled in part from samizdat notebooks, in part from defector debriefs, in part from collections compiled by Russians who got out. The jokes were dangerous. People told them anyway. People told them because there was no other technology in the room that could carry the load. The joke, in conditions where the joke could cost you, is the load-bearing form. That fact does some of the work the rest of this chapter is going to need.

Futon ga futtonda

I want to take a sharper case of the same distinction, because the next case is sharper at the linguistic axis.

There is a Japanese joke called Futon ga futtonda — 布団が吹っ飛んだ — and the translation is the futon blew away. That is the translation. The translation is, on its face, a sentence about a futon. There is no comedic content visible in the English. If you read the English aloud at a party in Brooklyn, the room will assume you are starting a story about the time the futon blew away, and they will wait politely for the rest of it. There is no rest of it.

The joke in Japanese is the entire content of the sound. Futon is the noun for the bedding — the thick padded mat that sleeps a guest in a Japanese house, traditionally laid on the tatami and rolled away in the morning. Futtonda is the past tense of the verb futtobu, "to be blown off," "to be sent flying." The two words rhyme in a way English cannot fake without distorting the consonants — fu-ton ga fu-ton-da. The noun appears to generate its own predicate. The sentence is a sound that sounds like itself. The shock of the rhyme is the joke.

The standard Japanese name for the form is dajare (駄洒落), and the standard sub-genre name is oyaji-gyagu — oyaji-gag, "old man's gag." The English equivalent is dad joke. The Japanese form is older than the English form by about a thousand years. The kakekotoba of Heian-era waka poetry — pivot-words in which a single phonological sequence carries two meanings at once, hinging the poem on the syllable that does both jobs — is the classical ancestor; the Kokin Wakashū, the imperial poetry anthology of around 920 CE, is the standard textual anchor. Gōichi Mitsuhashi's Nihon no Share (Mitsuhashi 1979, pp. 134–147) is the survey-of-record on Japanese wordplay; Heather Inwood's Asian Ethnology paper on oyaji-gyagu (Inwood 2017) traces the descent from kakekotoba through the dajare of the postwar Japanese household to the contemporary oyaji on the morning commute, telling his daughter a pun about a futon at the breakfast table, his daughter rolling her eyes, his daughter, on the inside, secretly delighted.

Inwood is direct on what does not survive. The comedic content is one hundred percent in the phonology. Move the joke into another language and the joke does not survive the move. There is no equivalent English sentence that uses the same noun for its predicate; you can fake it with the duvet's done or the blanket got blown away or the futon was undone, but the fakery shows. The original joke is one of those small specific things a Japanese-language speaker can do that nobody else can.

The vehicle is locked. The lock is total.

What is not locked is the pleasure of phonological coincidence. That pleasure runs everywhere literate. It runs in Sumerian, where the Old Babylonian scribal tradition included puns serious enough that the modern subliterature on identifying them in cuneiform is itself substantial. It runs in Greek, where paronomasia is a stock figure in the rhetoric handbooks. It runs in Latin, where Cicero's chickpea bit — the family-name pun that built him his brand — is the canonical specimen and is exactly old enough to qualify the dajare as a junior cousin. It runs in classical Chinese, in the layers of meaning Hou Bai's three bald-heads can't beat one Lu exit line carried in the seventh century. It runs in Shakespeare, who is a punster of considerable density (the gravedigger in Hamlet alone has six in the same scene). It runs in modern English, where the dad joke is alive enough that an entire genre of weekend-newspaper-column writing rests on it. The pleasure is universal. The specific puns are not.

The distinction the train made is what this case sharpens. The vehicle of Futon ga futtonda is locked. The engine — the human pleasure of catching language in the act of falling over its own sounds — is not locked at all. A reader who cannot understand a single Japanese word, on having the joke explained, can recognise the kind of pleasure the joke is built to produce, because the same kind of pleasure is built into a hundred jokes the reader knows in their own language. The reader recognises the move without being able to play it.

So Futon ga futtonda qualifies. The case slate calls the qualification cleanly: the specific pun is unrecoverable in any other language; the pleasure of phonological coincidence is documented in every literate language with a pun tradition. The vehicle locks. The engine runs everywhere.

I want to take the qualification seriously, because it is not, on the engine side, a victory I have purchased by redefining what the joke is. The Japanese listener, hearing Futon ga futtonda for the first time, laughs at the same kind of thing a hearer of make like a tree and leaf laughs at: the moment language catches itself out. Both are bad. Both are loved. The badness and the lovedness are the same thing in two languages. What does not survive translation is the specific noun-to-verb match. What does survive is everything else: the setup, the timing, the eye-roll registered as affection, the speaker who knew it was bad and said it anyway, the listener who pretended to be exasperated and was secretly delighted. The dajare survives at every layer except the surface. The surface is the joke. The vehicle locks; the engine runs everywhere.

The page, and the wall

Now I want to flip the axis from linguistic to technological. The next two cases are jokes that fail to travel when you change the medium. Both qualify, in the same sense the dajare qualifies — the surface is locked, the engine runs everywhere — and the second of the two is the cleanest version of the qualification I know.

Let me start with the page.

In April 1918, the Mercure de France press in Paris published Calligrammes: Poèmes de la paix et de la guerre 1913–1916, a book of poems by Guillaume Apollinaire that collected, in one volume, the typographical experiments he had been turning over since the technopaegnia of his late symbolist period. The most-quoted of the calligrammes — Il Pleut, "It Rains" — is on page 203 of the first edition, retained in the same position in the 1925 Gallimard reissue, and reproduced in Anne Hyde Greet's bilingual edition (Greet 1980, pp. 100–101). Willard Bohn's The Aesthetics of Visual Poetry, 1914–1928 (Bohn 1986, pp. 12–34) is the standard critical apparatus.

Read aloud, Il Pleut is five sentences about rain. The first, in Greet's English, is it's raining women's voices as if they had died even in memory. The second is about cities and rivers. The third is about the marvellous encounters of one's life. And so on. Five sentences. Read aloud, the poem is a lyric in the late symbolist register, at the upper edge of melancholic, and it is humorless.

On the page, the poem is something else. The five sentences are typeset as five oblique columns of letters, each column slanting diagonally down the page in a thin streak. The letters are the rain. The page rains. Words about rain are sliding diagonally across the paper as rain. The typography is doing the metaphor the words are about. The page itself is the visual gag, the kind of joke that has an oh — there it is recognition at the centre of it, half melancholy and half delight at the writer for having pulled it off.

Read the typography off, and the joke is gone before you finish the first comma.

I want to be precise about the lock. The vehicle is the page. Strip the page and you have the lyric. The lyric, performed, is the lyric. The visual gag is not recoverable from any non-visual transcription. There is no way to read Il Pleut over the radio. There is no audiobook of Il Pleut that can do the work the page does. The lock is medium-total: at the level of the gag, the calligramme cannot leave the page.

What I want to say, however, is that the form — typography clowning through its own subject — has been alive across every culture with a writing surface to play on, and has been alive for a very long time.

The earliest documented examples are the technopaegnia of Hellenistic Greek poetry. Simias of Rhodes, around the third century BCE, wrote a poem called Wings, the lines of which are arranged on the page in the shape of bird wings, with the longest lines in the middle and the lines tapering toward each end. There is also an Egg and an Axe attributed to Simias, in the same form. Late Hellenistic readers would have understood themselves to be looking at a sub-genre. The Greeks had a name for it.

In English, the canonical specimen is George Herbert's Easter Wings (1633), in which the lines of the poem are arranged in two pairs of wing shapes, the lines shortening as the speaker speaks of his fall and lengthening as he speaks of his rise, the page itself performing the spiritual movement the words describe. Lewis Carroll, in Alice's Adventures in Wonderland (1865), has the Mouse tell its long tale in a column of type that tapers and curls down the page in the shape of a tail; the joke is the pun on tail / tale, and the joke is the typography. The twentieth century has Dadaist typesetting, the visual poems of Ian Hamilton Finlay, the Brazilian poesia concreta group; the twenty-first century has xkcd hover-text strips, where the gag depends on the reader's mouse hovering over the panel to reveal the second-level joke; it has the r/typography subreddit; it has memes whose entire comedic content is the specific font choice. The specific Il Pleut does not cross media. The form does. The form has been crossing media for two and a half millennia. What Apollinaire did in 1918 was a node in a long tradition that any culture with a writing surface produces independently, because the move — let the typography do the metaphor — is structurally too good not to be reinvented by anyone who has paper.

The case qualifies. The medium-lock is real. The lock is narrow.

I want to put the next case against the same template, because it is the cleanest version of the qualification I know.

In the spring of 1928, on a backlot of a Sacramento River shoot for Steamboat Bill, Jr. (Charles Reisner, dir.; United Artists, 1928), Buster Keaton stood, dazed, in the middle of a street, hands at his sides. Behind him was the two-storey wood facade of a frame house, weighing approximately two tons, supported by a single hinge along its base. On Reisner's cue, the facade was released and toppled forward. The upper-storey attic window, framed by the facade and open at the top, passed cleanly over Keaton's standing body. The lower edge of the window cleared his shoulders by approximately two inches per side. The shot was an unbroken take. Keaton's deadpan was unbroken.

The setup of the shot is the part Keaton's biographers will not stop telling. Marion Meade's Buster Keaton: Cut to the Chase (Meade 1995, pp. 191–195) is the standard account: a single nail driven into the street to mark the spot; the facade released by stagehands stationed off-camera; the only mark on the ground for Keaton to stand on, the nail; Keaton stood on the nail and did not move. The clearance, by Meade's count, was about two inches per shoulder. James Neibaur (Neibaur 2010, ch. 2 background) records that several members of the crew refused to be on set. One of the camera operators is reported to have looked away at the moment of release. Daniel Moews's Keaton: The Silent Features Close Up (Moews 1977, pp. 308–323) places the shot inside the cyclone sequence and notes that it is one of the few moments in Keaton's entire silent-feature output that gets a laugh that is also a held breath. Keaton, in interviews afterwards, said he had not been particularly worried, which I am willing to record as a thing Keaton said and not as a thing it would be sensible for any of us to believe.

The shot is medium-locked at the level of the gag. There is no description of the shot that produces the laugh the shot produces. A two-tonne false front of a frame house topples onto a dazed young man, and an open second-storey attic window passes cleanly over his head, clearing his shoulders by two inches on either side — that is the description, and the description does not produce the involuntary intake of breath the shot produces. Try describing it on radio: a wall fell on him and missed. The radio listener will agree that this is in principle interesting and will not laugh. The shot has to be seen.

The lock is real. It is also — and this is where Keaton is the hinge of the chapter — narrow.

The shot has been alive across every visual medium since 1928. It was reshot, in homage, by Jackie Chan in Project A Part II (1987), with a different second-storey window and the same physical setup. It has been reframed in animated cartoons; the Looney Tunes shorts of the 1940s and 1950s return to it more than once. Dick Van Dyke restages a near version on his series. Stage clowning has it. Advertising has it; a Levi's commercial of the early 2000s uses the same physical setup at television-spot length. The various TikTok and Vine reproductions that the streaming era has piled on top of one another have it. The gag is a constant in any visual medium that exists. A pratfall in 1928 is recognisable as a pratfall to a viewer in 2026 with no historical context. The viewer in 2026 will laugh in the same beat the audience at the Music Hall theatre laughed in 1928.

The lock is narrow because what is locked is non-visual transcription. Every visual medium opens the lock. The medium-lock binds the gag to vision; vision is portable. The vehicle locks at the medium level; the engine — the visible coincidence of two precisely measured objects in space — runs in any medium that supports the visible.

This is what qualifies means in the chapter's working sense. A case qualifies when the surface vehicle is medium-locked or language-locked or culture-locked, and the engine that powered the vehicle runs in any medium, in any language, in any culture, that has the substrate the engine needs. Il Pleut qualifies because the page is locked and the form runs anywhere there is a page. Keaton qualifies because radio cannot carry the shot and every visual medium can. Futon ga futtonda qualifies because the phonology is Japanese and the pleasure-of-phonological-coincidence is human. The Soviet anekdot holds because a reader without the vocabulary still laughs at the shape of the joke.

I want to mark, before the next two cases, that this is the kind of resolution the easy half of the chapter does. The cases I am about to walk are not like this.

The cross, and the turban

The chapter pivots, now, to the axis the case slate calls belief.

On 17 August 1979, in cinemas in London and New York, Monty Python's Life of Brian opened to audiences who, in the typical case, did not yet know what they were about to see in the last reel. The film follows Brian Cohen, a young man born in the manger next door to Christ and mistaken, throughout the film, for the Messiah he is not. The closing scene is a mass crucifixion. Brian is on a cross. So are several other condemned men. So is Eric Idle's character, in the cross next to Brian's. Idle's character looks across at Brian, decides the moment requires music-hall, and begins to whistle. He starts singing. He encourages the others to join him. Always look on the bright side of life, the row of crucified men sings, in pleasant unison, swinging their feet to the metre, while the credits roll.

The reaction was substantial. Norway's censor, under §142 of its constitution, banned the film for blasphemy; the Swedish distributor, sensing an opportunity, advertised it as "the film so funny it was banned in Norway." Ireland's chief censor Frank Hall banned it through 1987. In the United Kingdom, Mary Whitehouse's Nationwide Festival of Light organised protests; thirty-nine local councils — Glasgow among them, Cornwall and Harrogate among them — banned screenings. On 9 November 1979 the BBC2 programme Friday Night, Saturday Morning (kinescope at BBC Genome, programme b007884k) staged a televised debate between John Cleese and Michael Palin, on one side, and Malcolm Muggeridge and the Bishop of Southwark on the other; the debate, by general account on both sides, did not go well for the bishop. Robert Sellers's Very Naughty Boys (Sellers 2003, chs. 7–9) is the production-history standard; Robert Arp's chapter in Decker and Eberl's Monty Python and Philosophy (Arp 2006, pp. 161–178) walks the blasphemy reception.

The film, by the framing of the protesting clergy, desecrated the central image of Christian theology — the crucifixion of Jesus rendered as a music-hall singalong, with the Jesus-substitute character mistaken for the Messiah, on a cross beside him, whistling. Inside the film's own belief-frame, the closing number is absurdist comedy of resignation, the Pythons' chosen punctuation on the long argument the film has been making about the absurdity of mistaking the wrong man for the saviour. Inside the framing of the protesters, the closing number is desecration. Same scene, two incompatible reads. The boundary between them is the belief-line.

The case looks like a counterexample, in the strict sense the chapter has been working from. A joke that is comic on one side of a belief-line and blasphemous on the other has not crossed.

But the case slate calls the case holds with a time delay, and the time delay is the part I want to spend a paragraph on, because the time delay is the case.

The bans were time-limited. Ireland's lift dates to 1987. Norway's de-facto lift in the early 1980s. The local-council bans dissolved across the 1980s. By the early 1990s, screenings of Life of Brian were a normal part of British and Irish cinema repertoire. By 2000, the song was being sung at football stadiums across the United Kingdom; by the 2012 London Olympics' closing ceremony, in front of three-quarters of a billion viewers, Eric Idle himself sang it on stage. The song became, by an organic process the Pythons did not engineer, the standard British secular hymn at funerals: it has been sung at the funerals of public figures, in the same Christian-majority country whose local councils had banned the film a generation earlier. The song was sung at Graham Chapman's funeral in 1989. The song was sung at the funeral of Eric Sykes. Always look on the bright side of life now does, in the 21st-century British register, work that it could not have done in 1979.

The boundary was real. The boundary moved. The joke, on the slow timescale, crossed.

The case holds, by the chapter's working standard, because the belief-line a joke fails to cross at one moment is sometimes a belief-line that, at a later moment, has shifted enough that the joke crosses cleanly. Life of Brian in 1979 did not cross. Life of Brian in 2026 has crossed, and is doing so to standing ovations at funerals in the same towns whose council halls had banned its screenings. The medium of the change is generational; the people who were offended in 1979 have, on the timescale of two generations, been replaced by people who were not raised inside the framing the offence required. The case is one in which the chapter's universal claim is rescued by the slow timescale.

I want to be honest that the rescue does not generalise. It rescues Life of Brian. It does not rescue the next case.

The next case is the case I want to put on the page now, because the chapter has to put it where the case sits and not at the bottom of the page where a reader could miss it.

On 30 September 2005, the Danish newspaper Jyllands-Posten published twelve cartoons under the headline Muhammeds ansigt, "The face of Muhammad." The cartoons had been commissioned by the paper's culture editor Flemming Rose, in response to the Danish illustrator Kåre Bluitgen's reported difficulty finding an illustrator willing to draw the Prophet Muhammad for a children's book. The most-recognisable of the twelve, drawn by Kurt Westergaard, showed the Prophet in a turban shaped like a bomb with a lit fuse, the shahada — the Islamic creed — inscribed in calligraphic Arabic across the front of the turban.

The Danish satirical-cartoon framing is a frame the paper had used many times before, against Christian and Jewish targets as well as Muslim ones. Within the Danish editorial-cartoon tradition the move is standard: literalise a stereotype to satirise it. Within the framing the cartoon was published into, the act being satirised was self-censorship, and the purpose of the literalisation was to test what the press could and could not say. The cartoon, in the framing the paper held, was a piece of satire about the conditions for satire.

That is not the only framing the cartoon can be received in. Inside Sunni Islamic frames where any depiction of the Prophet Muhammad is forbidden, regardless of the satirical or non-satirical posture of the depicter, the satirical wrapper does not legitimise the depiction inside it. The cartoon registers as blasphemy because the cartoon, by definition, is a depiction; the satirical purpose, however clearly stated, does not change what the cartoon is. The frame the paper imagined the cartoon being received in is not the only frame available, and inside the frames in which Sunni doctrine on iconography is the operative criterion, the cartoon is blasphemous in its existence.

By February 2006, the cartoons had triggered protests across at least forty countries. The Danish embassies in Damascus and Beirut were burned. Organised boycotts of Danish goods cost the Danish exporting economy in the hundreds of millions of euros. Roughly two hundred people died in the protests and the suppression of the protests. Westergaard lived under permanent police protection from 2006 until his death in 2021. Jytte Klausen's The Cartoons That Shook the World (Klausen 2009, chs. 1–6) is the most thorough scholarly account of the publication and the transnational reception; Flemming Rose's The Tyranny of Silence (Rose 2014) is the culture editor's first-person account.

I want to name the concession the chapter has to make and not soften the naming.

There are sacred lines that humor, in any framing acceptable to both sides, cannot cross. The Westergaard cartoon is the case. The cartoon is a joke in the Danish editorial-cartoon tradition. The cartoon is also, inside Sunni doctrine on the depiction of the Prophet, blasphemy. There is no framing of the cartoon under which both readings can be satisfied at once. The Danish satirical frame, however earnestly the cartoon's author and editor present it, does not change what the cartoon is in the receiving frame. The receiving frame is, by its own terms, not amenable to satire on the Prophet.

The thesis of this book qualifies sharply here. The book has been making the case that comedic structures travel — that the engine that runs a joke is portable across cultural, temporal, linguistic, belief, and technological boundaries. The Westergaard cartoon is the place where that case breaks locally. The boundary is not a vocabulary lock or a phonological lock or a medium lock. The boundary is a sacred line that sits, in the receiving frame, at the level of doctrine. There is no way to redraw the satire so that the satire holds and the doctrine is also respected, because the satire requires the depiction the doctrine forbids. The two requirements are exclusive.

What survives across the boundary is narrower than what was attempted. Humans, on either side of the line, recognise the attempt at satire as an attempt; they can identify what the cartoonist was trying to do, the kind of move he was making, the standard editorial-cartoon framing inside which he was making it. What survives is the recognition of intent. What does not survive is the laugh. There is no way to land the laugh across this boundary without giving up the doctrine on one side or the depiction on the other.

I want to be careful about what the concession is. The concession is not that the universality claim is wrong. The concession is that the universality claim is narrower than the unqualified version. There are belief-lines, this one in particular, that humor in any framing acceptable to both sides cannot cross. The book does not pretend otherwise. The chapter does not soften the case by claiming that everyone, in time, will come around. The Westergaard cartoon is just over twenty years old as I write, and the doctrinal frame that received it as blasphemy in 2005 receives it as blasphemy in 2026. Time has not done for the Jyllands-Posten cartoons what time did for Life of Brian. There is no reason internal to the doctrine to expect that it will. The concession is permanent.

What the chapter is left with, after the concession, is a thesis that holds for everything the rest of the book has documented and concedes the cases where it cannot hold. Some sacred lines cannot be crossed by humor in any framing acceptable to both sides. That is the sentence, and I want to leave it on the page where it sits, without softening, before the chapter goes on.

I want, before I go on, to say one more thing. The chapter is not making a moral argument about whether the cartoon should have been published. It is not making an argument about which framing is correct. The book has not been making moral arguments about which jokes ought to have been told. It has been making a structural argument about which kinds of comedic moves cross which kinds of boundaries. The Westergaard cartoon, on the structural argument, breaks at the belief-line. That is the structural fact. The moral fact is somebody else's argument; this chapter does not pretend to it.

The chapter goes on now to two cases that are harder than the concession.

The stage, and the radio

The last two cases are the cases where the engine the book has been tracking is doing a thing other than uniting. They are the cases where the same mechanism that lands a Sumerian fart proverb has been aimed, by humorists who knew exactly what they were doing, at a target.

I want to start in Louisville in November 1828.

Thomas Dartmouth Rice was, at the time, a young white American actor at the Louisville Theatre, working a circuit that ran from Pittsburgh through the Ohio River cities and down to New Orleans. The circuit was the engine of pre-bellum American popular theatre. The Louisville Theatre, by 1828, was one of its anchors. Rice, between scenes in a piece called The Rifle, walked on stage to fill time during a costume change, in burnt-cork makeup, performing what he called a song-and-dance routine in mimicry of an enslaved Black man he claimed to have observed at work. The routine was a shuffling limp punctuated by a high jump on the chorus. The lyrics — surviving in the broadside sheets W. T. Lhamon Jr. reproduces in Jump Jim Crow (Lhamon 2003, pp. 93–105) — included the chorus Wheel about and turn about and do jis so / Eb'ry time I wheel about I jump Jim Crow.

The audience laughed.

I want to spend a paragraph on what was happening in the laugh.

The laugh was not an in-group recognition of a structural move the way the deadpan-narrator move is recognised. The laugh was the bonding mechanism of an in-group that was bonding against an out-group whose embodied existence the in-group was watching mocked on a stage. The audience was white. The target was Black. The bonding agent was the burnt-cork makeup, the dialect, the exaggerated movement, the grotesque caricature of a body and a way of moving and a way of speaking — all of them, by Rice's own promotional account, traceable to a specific enslaved Black man whose work Rice claimed to have watched. The laugh was a laugh of solidarity, the kind that assembles a room around a shared posture. The posture, in this case, was contempt for the human in the caricature.

Eric Lott's Love and Theft: Blackface Minstrelsy and the American Working Class (Lott 1993, chs. 1–3, esp. pp. 17–62 on Rice's Louisville debut, pp. 111–135 on the routine's structure) is the standard scholarly account of what was happening in those rooms. Lott reads the minstrel show as a complex of envy, identification, and erasure, in which white working-class audiences worked out their own racial and class resentments by ventriloquising a Blackness whose actual referents — the actual people whose bodies and voices were being mimicked — were absent from the room and excluded from any laugh in it. The minstrel show was about Blackness and for white people. The laughter was bonding because the laughter assembled the room around a target it could not include. By the end of the 1830s the form was dominant in American popular theatre. By the 1840s it had spread to England. By the 1850s it was the most popular form of mass entertainment in the United States.

The shorthand the routine produced — Jim Crow — outlived the routine. Within a generation the phrase was being used as a casual derogatory shorthand for Black men generally; by the 1870s and 1880s, after the end of Reconstruction, it was being used as the popular name for the legal architecture of segregation in the post-Reconstruction American South. The Jim Crow laws — the body of state and local legislation that enforced racial separation in public facilities, transportation, schools, voting, and housing across the southern United States from the late 19th century into the 1960s — took their name, by general etymological consensus, from Rice's stage routine. A nineteenth-century stage joke became, within sixty years, the popular name for the legal framework under which an estimated four to five thousand Black Americans were lynched between 1877 and 1950.

I want to be careful about what the paragraph just claimed. It did not claim that Rice's routine in 1828 caused the lynchings. The lynchings have causes that historians have written extensively about, and no joke produced them. What the paragraph claimed is that the routine produced the shorthand under which the legal architecture was named, and the shorthand survived because the routine had assembled enough rooms to install itself in the white American vocabulary as a casual derogatory term. The shorthand is not the cause. The shorthand is the residue. It is residue from a stage routine that white American audiences laughed at because the routine assembled them around a target.

The case is not, in the chapter's working sense, a vehicle lock or an engine lock. The bonding mechanism of in-group laughter at exaggerated caricature is one of the oldest comedic moves in the human repertoire. The Sumerian fart proverb is in part a piece of in-group laughter — the eduba class laughing at the gendered embarrassment they all knew was a stock routine. The Cicero chickpea bit is a piece of in-group laughter in which Cicero installs his own family-name nickname as the brand. The Philogelos jokes about Abderites are in-group laughter at a stock regional out-group. The mechanism is the mechanism. What is different about Rice's Jump Jim Crow is that the target — the enslaved Black population of the United States in 1828 — was a population whose bodies were already chattel, whose laughter the routine could not invite, and whose claim to be present in the room had been settled by force decades before any of the audience walked into the theatre. The mechanism that united the room was the mechanism that excluded the target.

The chapter cannot get out of this with a redefinition. The mechanism is the same mechanism. The case is what the slate calls qualifies: the bonding mechanism is universal; the thesis must concede that the same engine that unites can be aimed.

I want to say what qualifies costs the thesis at this case. It costs the thesis the right to be sentimental about its own argument. The book has been arguing that comedic structures travel. The structures travel. They travel in clothes that include in-group laughter at out-group targets. The same engine that produces the Sumerian apprentice's grin at the fart proverb produces the white Louisville audience's laugh at Jump Jim Crow. It is the same engine. The mechanisms — the recurring bit, the broadside ballad, the host-with-audience tone, the catchphrase that becomes a brand — are mechanisms the rest of the book has been celebrating in other rooms. In the Louisville room they did the work of bonding an audience around a target.

I am not going to console the reader about this. The case is on the page where it is. The chapter is going to walk one more case and then turn the camera around.

The last case is RTLM.

Radio Télévision Libre des Mille Collines began broadcasting from Kigali on 8 July 1993. The format was commercial radio: pop music, banter, a young breezy on-air staff, the kind of presenter style any culture with a commercial-FM tradition would recognise. Several of the on-air animateurs had real broadcasting talent. Several came from established Rwandan broadcasting careers. They drew young listeners. By the autumn of 1993 RTLM was, in audience terms, the most popular radio station in Rwanda.

The station's most popular animateur was Kantano Habimana. The ICTR transcripts and the scholarship that has worked through them — Mary Kimani's chapter "RTLM: The Medium That Became a Tool for Mass Murder" in Allan Thompson's The Media and the Rwanda Genocide (Kimani 2007, pp. 110–124), with Kimani's English of substantial passages of Habimana's broadcasts; Linda Melvern's Conspiracy to Murder: The Rwandan Genocide (Melvern 2004, ch. 4), the synoptic history; the trial judgment in Prosecutor v. Nahimana, Barayagwiza, and Ngeze (ICTR-99-52-T, 3 December 2003, §§342–389), the record of the bench's findings — credit Habimana with around a third of total RTLM airtime by the early months of 1994. Habimana's on-air register was that of a late-night radio host telling his listeners a funny story. He used recurring bits. He had callbacks. He had a host-with-audience tone. He used mocking caricature. He named individuals on air, by name, with running gags about their physical appearance, their ethnic background, their political affiliation, their address. He addressed the audience in the second person. He used the listener-flattery posture that any commercial broadcasting tradition would recognise.

The recurring bits and the callbacks did the work of organising the murder of approximately 800,000 people in roughly a hundred days.

I want to spend a paragraph on what qualifies (hard) means in the case slate's terms, because the case is the hardest case the chapter has.

The mechanisms Habimana used — running bits, callbacks, mocking caricature, host-complicity-with-audience — are recognisable as comedy across any culture. That is why they worked. The audience listened because the broadcasts sounded like radio they wanted to listen to. The presenter style was the presenter style of commercial FM. The bits and callbacks did the things bits and callbacks do, which is build an audience around a shared frame of reference. The shared frame of reference, in Habimana's bits, was the dehumanisation of Tutsi Rwandans. The recurring labels — inyenzi (cockroach), inzoka (snake), in Kimani's English — were comedic labels in the host-audience economy of the broadcast. The physiological caricature — the recurring jokes about Tutsi facial features, the call-out about the small nose in the broadcasts of late spring 1994 — was the kind of mocking caricature the rest of this book has been describing as a recurrent comedic mechanism in cultures from the Philogelos onward.

The same mechanism. The same engine.

I want to be careful about what that sentence claims and does not claim. It does not claim that everyone who laughed at a Philogelos joke about an Abderite was on a path to organising mass killing. It does not claim that the mechanism of in-group laughter is a moral problem in itself. The mechanism is the mechanism. What the sentence claims is that the engine the book has been tracking, in cultures across continents and centuries, is the engine Habimana used. The audience that laughed at the broadcasts was using the same comedic apparatus the rest of this book has been celebrating in other rooms, in other centuries, in other languages. The apparatus does not, by itself, supply a moral filter on what the apparatus is laughing at. The apparatus laughs at what the speaker points it at. In the spring of 1994, in Rwanda, Habimana pointed the apparatus at his Tutsi neighbours.

I want to say the count again, because the count is the part of the sentence the rest of the chapter answers to. Approximately 800,000 people died, in roughly a hundred days, in part organised by a humorist's running bits.

The thesis the chapter has been building does not survive this case unaltered. It was never going to. The thesis the rest of the book has been building has had to make room, all along, for the fact that the engine that runs a comedic structure is morally neutral with respect to what the structure is pointed at. Universality is, structurally, a description of the engine. The engine runs in every culture. What the engine produces, when it is run, depends on what the speaker points it at. The book's case is that the engine is universal. The book's case is not that what comes out of the engine is, by virtue of being comedic, good. Habimana's broadcasts are the case the thesis has to take on board without flinching.

I do not want to editorialise here. The chapter is, on the case slate's instruction, not flinching and not celebrating. The dead are the dead. The engine is the engine. The two facts coexist on the page because they have to. The thesis the chapter is left with names them both.

The thesis the chapter is left with is the thesis the next section reaches for.

What the chapter is left with

The question the book has been working on for six chapters and the seventh has been honest about is whether humans laugh at the same things. The answer the case slate as a whole has produced is, as far as I can read it: yes, more than they were taught they did. A Sumerian apprentice, a Hyksos scribe, a Suzhou collector, a Hartford humorist, a Tokyo housewife composing a senryū, a Mexican comedian on a courtroom stand, a Beijing teenager with a meme template open on her phone, a Mandarin-speaking dissident with a children's chorus singing the obscenity she has hidden in an alpaca — all of these people are laughing at the same kinds of things, in the same kinds of beats, with the same kinds of mechanisms doing the comedic work. The mechanisms are reproducible. The mechanisms are teachable. The mechanisms cross every boundary the book has been able to put in front of them, with the qualifications the chapter you are reading has just walked through. The thesis, on the engine side, holds. It holds with the qualifications the chapter has named.

The question the book has not been asking, and that the chapter you are reading has just made unavoidable, is what we point this at.

The same engine that runs a Sumerian fart proverb is the engine Habimana ran. The same in-group laugh that bonds the boys in the eduba schoolroom around the impossibility-of-not-farting is the in-group laugh that bonded the Louisville theatre around Jump Jim Crow. The same recurring bits and callbacks and host-with-audience tone that built the audience for I Love Lucy on a Monday night in 1952 built the audience for RTLM on a Wednesday afternoon in April 1994. The mechanism does not, by itself, point itself at anything. The speaker points it. The audience receives what the speaker points at. The engine, in itself, is neutral.

That is, I think, the harder thing the book leaves the reader with. The case for the universality of comedic mechanisms is the case the chapter has just defended. The case for what the mechanisms are good for is a different case, which the book has not been making and which this chapter is not going to pretend to make. The reader has, by this point, the engine in hand. What the reader points the engine at is the reader's question. The book does not have a thesis on it.

A small room in northern Egypt

I want to take the camera back, now, to one specific scene. Not for the sake of closing on the scene, although the chapter does close on it, but because the scene is the one I started with, and because I have not been able to stop coming back to it across the years I have been writing this.

The scene is in a room somewhere in northern Egypt, sometime around 1600 BCE, in the late Hyksos period, the Second Intermediate Period of the Egyptian dynastic timeline. It is a room with a desk in it. The desk is low — Egyptian scribes worked sitting cross-legged on the floor or on a low mat, with the writing surface across the lap or on a small inclined board. The light is from a high small window or an open courtyard. The light is even. The scribe whose hand is on the brush is a man whose name we do not have. He is copying. The scroll he is copying from is older than he is. Behind that scroll is another scroll, older still. Behind that scroll is, almost certainly, an oral tradition of magician-tales told at court for centuries before any of the scrolls were written down. The scribe knows this. He has been trained on the tradition. He is one of the people the tradition has selected, by the literacy bottleneck of his culture, to copy it forward.

The scroll has on it, this morning, the line about King Sneferu and the boating party. The lector-priest is about to prescribe, in the clinical register of a court physician dispensing willow bark, the cure for a bored pharaoh. The cure is twenty of the most beautiful women in the palace, dressed in fishing nets in place of their clothes, with ebony oars, rowing the king around the palace lake. The line is on the scroll in front of the scribe. The scribe is about to copy it.

He copies it. The brush goes across the page. The hieratic signs come out of the brush in the ordered cadence of a man who has been doing this for years. He gets to the line about the nets. He copies the nets. He gets to the line about the women's hair, which the older versions of the tale specify as braided. He copies the hair. He gets to the line about the lost pendant. He copies the pendant. He gets to the line, the longest line in the scene, about the woman who refuses the substitute. He copies that line.

Somewhere in the copying — I want to think it is at the line about the nets, but I have no way to be sure, and I suppose it could be at any of the lines around it — he smiles.

The smile is what I have. There is no piece of evidence I can produce for it. The scribe did not record his smile. The scroll did not record his smile. The Berlin Museum's conservators have not located it on their highest-resolution imaging. What the scroll records is that the scribe copied the line.

The smile is not on the scroll. The smile is also not necessary to the argument.

It is, however, the part I cannot stop thinking about.

The line on the scroll is over three and a half thousand years old as I write. The scroll is in Berlin, on a shelf in the Egyptian collection of the Neues Museum, catalogued as Papyrus Berlin 3033, with a conservator's protocol that limits how often it can be unrolled. The line about the nets is on the scroll. Lichtheim translated it in 1973. I read it for the first time at a desk in the country I live in, on an afternoon I had not planned to spend on Egyptian frame narrative. I laughed at it.

The scribe smiled at the same line.

He copied it.

There is a person you want to send the line to. You already know their name.