ellauri030.html on line 916: Tendentious humor involves a "victim", someone at whose expense we laugh. Non-tendentious humor does not require a victim. This innocuous humor typically depends on wordplay, and Freud believed it has only modest power to evoke amusement. Tendentious humor, then, is the only kind that can evoke big laughs. It's the only kind to be found in religious works.
ellauri030.html on line 918: However, Freud believed a mixture of both tendentious and non-tendentious humor is required to keep the tendentious humor from becoming too offensive or demeaning to its victim. The innocent jokework of the innocuous humor would mask the otherwise hostile joke and therefore "bribe" our senses, allowing us to laugh at what would otherwise be socially unacceptable. Therefore, we often think we are laughing at innocuous jokes, but what really makes them funny is their socially unacceptable nature hidden below the surface.
ellauri192.html on line 111: So the choice has fallen neither on Tolstoy, nor Ibsen, nor Björnson, nor Mommsen, nor Swinburne, nor Zola, nor Anatole France, nor Carducci, nor Mistral, nor Hauptmann, nor even Echegaray—it has fallen on Sully-Prudhomme [sic]. It is some satisfaction, however, to find that Francois Coppée is not the winner; in view of his innocuous sentimentality, he might well have been considered the best of all by the present Swedish Academy.
ellauri270.html on line 317: The children’s activities—gathering stones—have a false innocence about them. Because this resembles the regular play of children, the reader may not assume gathering stones is intended for anything violent. The word “raids,” however, introduces a telling element of violence and warfare into the children’s innocent games. Similarly, the reader is lulled into a false sense of security by the calm and innocuous activities and topics of conversation among the adult villagers. We see the villagers strictly divided along gendered lines, even as children.
ellauri270.html on line 321: Because of the innocuous nature of Mr. Summers’ other community activities, the lottery is assumed to be something in a similar vein. He is a successful businessman, but pitied because he can have no children—clearly this is a very family-oriented society.
ellauri270.html on line 403: By having children (even Tessie’s own son) involved in stoning Tessie, Jackson aims to show that cruelty and violence are primitive and inherent aspects of human nature—not something taught by society. Tessie’s attempts to protest until the end show the futility of a single voice standing up against the power of tradition and a majority afraid of nonconformists. Jackson ends her story with the revelation of what actually happens as a result of the lottery, and so closes on a note of both surprise and horror. The seemingly innocuous, ordinary villagers suddenly turn violent and bestial, forming a mob that kills one of their own with the most primitive weapons possible—and then happily going home to supper.
xxx/ellauri123.html on line 1013: offset by more innocuous puns ("We had breakfast in the township of Soda, pop
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