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tance to education, character formation, and sophistication, which were perceived
as constituting a difference between culture and nature.” Humorous representa¬
tions, for example, in the form of the satirical journals, provided a small part of
social life, and of the press that was then available. Moreover, they belonged rather
to the genteel than to the low sense of humor. Ridicule and mocking were treated
as disciplining tools, and as such, they were deeply rooted in the social processes
serving to reproduce and negotiate social hierarchies.
In this sense, humor was different, performing a different function and serving
purposes distinct from those it serves today. It embraced various notions, such as
humor, laughter, ridicule, satire, wit, mocking and making fun, rebellious humor,
and laughter at the expense of someone elses dignity or reputation. Each of them
provided separate connotations.
Following Billig, we can enumerate the characteristic acts of mutual interac¬
tions between humans—which served to drag dignity down rather than to elevate
meanness, to mock rather than to praise. Such a juxtaposition establishes a superior
person, or a person who pretends to be superior, through which someone gets their
comeuppance (Billig 2005), which is found to be funny.
The culture of refinement comprised—apart from the ability to control new
technologies —the issues of morality, rational self-control, proper behavior, and
good manners on the one hand, and it developed its shadow side associated with
control and surveillance, a sort of panopticon, on the Other. As a model of educa¬
tion, which worked using the standards of modernity, the ridicule functioned to
enforce group norms on the individuals in order to support culture over wildness.
This ideal found its expression in several visual representations that were char¬
acteristic of that period. Humor in its broader sense served a didactic function, as
one of the tools for controlling the process of education. Michael Billig clearly high¬
lighted this issue in his book. In its more detailed forms, people used a practice of
embarrassment, mocking, and teasing in order to keep social control on the level
of mutual interactions; downgrading or putting down the Others was a method of
placing them in their proper social group. In this sense, some ethnic jokes referred
to the social background, to a place within the social hierarchy that the object of the
joke tried to get away from. The collapse of the former social order, which used to be
based on social and class divisions, triggered social energies, initiated migrations of
people—most often from the countryside to the cities—and caused a blurring of the
old social divisions. Moreover, social advancement was perceived as a result of hard
work, good education, and the shaping of one’s character and morality.
In the worldviews, a separation was visible between paying attention to the nega¬
tive and positive sides. It appears that the humor and caricature of the time focused
on the negatives. As Billig puts it, they accentuate the positive, telling people to
?> Charles Taylor presents this problem thoroughly in his book, although his comments mostly relate
to the social changes taking place earlier (18 century) in western Europe (Taylor 2010).