In the Western tradition especially, humour and religion are widely assumed to be incompatible. Yet much research treats humour, exactly like religion, as an anthropological constant present in every documented human culture. Both are also paradoxical in the same way: both can liberate people from established social structures, and both can equally entrench those structures and deepen the differences between communities. This lecture course examines the intersection of the two in religious practice (rituals that use humour, festivals of laughter, ritual clowns), in symbolic thought (the creative role of laughter in cosmogony, trickster figures), and in social structure (joking relationships; humour and the feminine principle in patriarchally structured symbolic systems). It combines humour theory with case studies drawn from ancient Egypt, Greece and Rome, the Hebrew Bible, early and medieval Christianity, Hasidic Judaism, Morocco and Islamicate Central Asia, Hinduism, Zen, Shintō, West Africa, Amazonia, Tibet and Native North America. The psychological and cognitive mechanics of joking lie outside the course’s scope. The interest is in what humour reveals about the position of the individual inside a symbolic system.
Poslední úprava: Pehal Martin, Mgr., Ph.D. (10.09.2026)
Podmínky zakončení předmětu - angličtina
No attendance requirement and no written work. Assessment is by oral examination (approx. 20–30 minutes). Candidates answer two drawn questions: one on a single lecture topic, requiring the lecture’s argument and one case study presented in detail with its primary material; and one on a cross-cutting course question, requiring an answer that compares at least two lectures.
Poslední úprava: Pehal Martin, Mgr., Ph.D. (10.09.2026)
Literatura - angličtina
1. The false quarrel: why the West decided laughter and the sacred are enemies Required: • Gilhus, Ingvild Sælid. 1991. "Religion, Laughter and the Ludicrous." Religion 21 (3): 257–277. • Gilhus, Ingvild Sælid. 1997. Laughing Gods, Weeping Virgins: Laughter in the History of Religion, 1–6. London: Routledge.
L01 Slides: Presentation
L01 Study: Study text (AI generated based on lecture notes – only for study purposes, do not quote!).
2. The joke as anti-rite Required: • Douglas, Mary. 1999 [1968]. "Jokes." In Implicit Meanings: Selected Essays in Anthropology, 2nd ed., 146–164. London: Routledge.
3. Obligatory disrespect: joking relationships Required: • Drucker-Brown, Susan. 1982. "Joking at Death: The Mamprusi Grandparent-Grandchild Joking Relationship." Man n.s. 17 (4): 714–727 Secondary: • de Vienne, Emmanuel. 2012. "'Make Yourself Uncomfortable': Joking Relationships as Predictable Uncertainty among the Trumai of Central Brazil." HAU: Journal of Ethnographic Theory 2 (2): 163–187. • Radcliffe-Brown, A. R. 1940. "On Joking Relationships." Africa 13 (3): 195–210.
4. The trickster: does the category survive comparison? Required: • Hynes, William J. 1993. "Mapping the Characteristics of Mythic Tricksters: A Heuristic Guide" (33–45) and "Inconclusive Conclusions: Tricksters — Metaplayers and Revealers" (202–217). In Mythical Trickster Figures: Contours, Contexts, and Criticisms, edited by William J. Hynes and William G. Doty. Tuscaloosa: University of Alabama Press. Secondary: • Vecsey, Christopher. 1993. "The Exception Who Proves the Rules: Ananse the Akan Trickster." In the same volume, 106–121. • Doty, William G., and William J. Hynes. 1993. "Historical Overview of Theoretical Issues: The Problem of the Trickster." In the same volume, 13–32.
5. The female trickster problem Required: • Mills, Margaret A. 2001. "The Gender of the Trick: Female Tricksters and Male Narrators." Asian Folklore Studies 60 (2): 237–258. Secondary: • Camp, Claudia V. 1988. "Wise and Strange: An Interpretation of the Female Imagery in Proverbs in Light of Trickster Mythology." Semeia 42: 14–36. • Mills, Margaret A. 1999. "Whose Best Tricks? Makr-i zan as a Topos in Persian Oral Literature." Iranian Studies 32 (2): 261–270.
6. The ritual clown: made of the boundary s/he seems to break Required: • Handelman, Don. 1998. "Symbolic Types – Clowns." Ch. 10 in Models and Mirrors: Towards an Anthropology of Public Events, 2nd ed., 236–265. New York and Oxford: Berghahn Books. Secondary: • Hieb, Louis A. 2008. "The Hopi Clown Ceremony (Tsukulalwa)." American Indian Culture and Research Journal 32 (4): 107–124.
7. Carnival and the grotesque body Required: • Bakhtin, Mikhail. 1994. "Folk Humour and Carnival Laughter." In The Bakhtin Reader: Selected Writings of Bakhtin, Medvedev, Voloshinov, edited by Pam Morris, 194–206. London: Edward Arnold. • Sanford, A. Whitney. 2010. "Don't Take It Badly, It's Holi: Ritual Levity, Society, and Agriculture." In Sacred Play: Ritual Levity and Humor in South Asian Religions, edited by Selva J. Raj and Corinne G. Dempsey, 37–55. Albany: State University of New York Press. Secondary: • Smith, Jonathan Z. 2010. "Response." In the same volume, 205–216.
8. Cosmogonic laughter: the joke that makes the world Required: • Morris, Ellen F. 2007. "Sacred and Obscene Laughter in The Contendings of Horus and Seth, in Egyptian Inversions of Everyday Life, and in the Context of Cultic Competition." In Egyptian Stories: A British Egyptological Tribute to Alan B. Lloyd on the Occasion of His Retirement, edited by Thomas Schneider and Kasia Szpakowska, 197–221. Alter Orient und Altes Testament 347. Münster: Ugarit-Verlag. Secondary: • Aoyama, Tomoko. 2018. "Ame no Uzume Crosses Boundaries." Ch. 2 in Diva Nation: Female Icons from Japanese Cultural History, edited by Laura Miller and Rebecca Copeland, 34–50. Oakland: University of California Press. • Gilhus 1997, 15–29 and 35–39 (as above).
9. Laughter as insight, not release: Zen Required: • Hyers, Conrad. 1989. "Humor in Zen: Comic Midwifery." Philosophy East and West 39 (3): 267–277. • Liu, Pinghua, and Lizhen Ye. 2025. "Granny Chan in Zen Buddhism: The Historical Deposition and Cultural Manifestation of Buddhist Women's Zen Wisdom." Religions 16 (3): 331.
10. When the joke wounds: offence, blasphemy, and the limits of laughter Required: • Kuipers, Giselinde. 2011. "The Politics of Humour in the Public Sphere: Cartoons, Power and Modernity in the First Transnational Humour Scandal." European Journal of Cultural Studies 14 (1): 63–80.
Poslední úprava: Pehal Martin, Mgr., Ph.D. (08.10.2026)
