Dissecting the Croak, Part II

Four Theorists Deconstruct a Joke

I will number each sentence or unit of meaning in the following joke so it will be easy to identify it in the discussion to follow.

The Tan

1.  A man goes to Miami for a vacation.
2.  After a few days there he looks in a mirror and notices he has a beautiful tan all over his body, with the exception of his penis.
3.  He decides to remedy the situation, and have a perfect tan all over his body.  So the next morning he gets up early, goes to a deserted section of the beach, undresses, and starts putting sand over his body until only his penis remains exposed to the sun.
4.  A couple of little old ladies happen to walk by shortly after the man has finished shoveling sand all over himself.
5.  One notices the penis sticking out of the sand.  She points it out to her friend.
6.  "When I was twenty, I was scared to death of them."
7.  "When I was forty, I couldn't get enough of them."
8.  "When I was sixty, I couldn't get one to come near me."
9.  "And now they're growing wild on the beach!"

So why is this amusing?

Superiority theorists:  We feel superior to various characters in this story.  The punch line (#9) can be taken as a revelation of ignorance.  And the segments preceding it reveal a good deal about her sexuality and frustration.

Incongruity theorists:  The fundamental absurdity of a penis sticking out of the sand instead of being between a man's legs, where it belongs (in the first place) and of a person thinking that penises can grow wild on the beach, like wildflowers (in the second place) is the source of the humor.  One expects penises to behave and to stay shielded from public scrutiny.  The punch line (#9) reveals the incongruity.

Psychoanalytic critics:  The humor generated from the joke stems primarily from its sexual content.  The humor is related to sexuality and the matter of sexual development in people and, in particular, to sexual hunger.  The punch line (#9) represents a kind of wish-fulfillment, a sexually paradisiacal state for this woman where penises grow wild on the beach and are thus easily attainable and in as great a quantity as may be desired.  Sexual repression, which Freud postulated as being the price we pay for civilization, is no longer a dominating force.  The man, it could be argued, also has unconscious exhibitionist tendencies.  There may also be a regressive aspect to the woman, who does not seem to know that penises always come attached to men - a means, a good Freudian might argue, of escaping from penis envy.

Cognitive perspective:  The jokes establishes a play frame which is generated by the man's bizarre behavior - his desire to tan every inch of his body.  This play frame allows us to view the crazy notion that penises might grow wild on the beach as humorous, something not to be taken seriously.  The semiotic analysis of this joke shows something else.  The punch line (#9) sets up a paradigmatic opposition which contrasts nature with culture.  It is this set of polar oppositions that gives us an insight into the real meaning of the joke.  Whether people realize this at the conscious level is beside the point.

This entire blog post is an excerpt from the Introduction chapter, pages 5-7, of "An Anatomy of Humor" by Arthur Asa Berger.

Link:
http://books.google.co.in/books?id=aZkRJJnc6BUC&pg=PA57&dq=Davies,+Christie.+Ethnic+Humor&source=gbs_toc_r&cad=0_0#v=onepage&q=Davies%2C%20Christie.%20Ethnic%20Humor&f=false
http://www.amazon.com/Anatomy-Humor-Arthur-Berger/dp/0765804948