My child hood was littered with jokes. How do you keep an Irishman busy all day - put him in a barrel and tell him to micturate in the corner. The Germans bombed our chip shop and had no sense of humour. In France, the Belgians are the butt or "Irish" jokes; elsewhere the Poles. Jokes often rely on 'taking the Micky' - ridiculing someone else. In Englishmen, Scotsmen and Irishmen jokes it was common for the English and Scots to be the suckers to a sharp and cunning Irishman. Even the holocaust has been subject to joking - often by the victims.
I have taught Kierkegaard as an example of dark, lengthy Danish humour (and can point to books on same). There is an affinity in his work with the Monty Python poverty joke in which each in turn recalls a childhoods in greater poverty than the last. Eventually, just as one thinks the guy claiming to have lived in a shoebox on the central reservation of the M6 has 'won' the game another bloke says, "Shoebox? You had a shoebox. Luxury!" Kierkegaard does this with Christianity. My own humour is dark, but it's rare I mean anyone harm. I used to think that satire offered some hope of change, but in recent years have come to see it as merely part of the problems we have. It is of the Establishment and feigns resistance. I think humour might be part of a way out of chronic illusion; but it is often merely cruel and parochial.
