How does Nathaniel Hawthorne's ideas of femininity contrast with those of Fanny Fern?

Jokes as anti-rite

He says humor is a consolation rather than aggression, he presents humor as a philosophy, enabling profoundly cognitive relation to oneself and the world. Jokes are anti-rite as they parody, mock, or deride the ritual practices of a given society.

Step-by-step explanation

He says humor is a consolation rather than aggression, he presents humor as a philosophy, enabling profoundly cognitive relation to oneself and the world. Jokes are anti-rite as they parody, mock, or deride the ritual practices of a given society. A rite is a symbolic act that takes its meaning from a group of socially legitimate symbols, like funerals. Jokes play with society's symbolic forms- 'the bishop gets stuck in a lift, I apply margarine on the communion wafer.' These show jokes as anti-rite. Milan Kundera remarks that 'someone's hat falls on the coffin in a freshly dug grave, the funeral loses its meaning, and laughter is born. This means that people bring humor and laugh in serious situations, and where humor is not needed. They make jokes about serious societal matters, thus fail to respect the ritual practices of a given society.

When someone is interrupted when joking, the joke loses its meaning and the social contract of humor is broken. The bathetic shift suddenness produces humor which results in attention in the peculiar temporal dimensions of jokes. Timing is everything in telling jokes, with mastery in controlling aspects like pauses, silences, and hesitations. Jokes thus involve shared dimension knowledge. Accepting to be told a joke means one undergoes a quiet and peculiar distention of time where the joking process constitutes cumulative repetitions and needless circumlocution. We also undergo a specific experience of digression and repetition of time, stretched out like an elastic band.

Jokes tear holes in our usual world predictions. Jokes mainly occur when we expect one thing to happen then a different opposite happens. We are amused by different things, issues, and situations. A social world is shared when listening to a joke, and people have a different sense of humor (Critchley, 2011).

Reference

Critchley, S. (2011). On humour. Routledge.