forgiveness

joke

journal writing

is the act of admitting we are like other people.

is neither a means of political dissent nor a safety valve through which authoritarian regimes defang resentment.

It is often stated that jokes in an authoritarian society are one of the few avenues of political criticism open to people and that jokes are a way of expressing political resentments, grievances and grumbles (Larsen 1980). At this point the argument often dissolves into a sterile wrangle as to whether political jokes are a means by which political dissent is kept alive and the morale of the dissenters maintained or a safety valve which protects authoritarian regimes by channelling political resentments into a harmless form. The purpose of this chapter is to try and get away from the pointless debates of functionalist and conflict theorist and to look at the actual content of the jokes as a form of implicit politics.

Christina Baldwin

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Christina Baldwin