Editing Joke (section)

== Joke cycles ==
{{main category|Joke cycles}}
A '''joke cycle''' is a collection of jokes about a single target or situation which displays consistent narrative structure and type of humour.<ref name="Attardo2001">{{cite book|author=Salvatore Attardo|url=https://books.google.com/books?id=ZT4MBxNnYA8C&pg=PA69|title=Humorous Texts: A Semantic and Pragmatic Analysis|publisher=Walter de Gruyter|year=2001|isbn=978-3-11-017068-9|pages=69–}}</ref> Some well-known cycles are [[elephant joke]]s using nonsense humour, [[dead baby jokes]] incorporating black humour, and [[light bulb jokes]], which describe all kinds of operational stupidity. Joke cycles can centre on ethnic groups, professions ([[viola jokes]]), catastrophes, settings ([[Bar joke|…walks into a bar]]), absurd characters ([[Wind-up doll joke|wind-up dolls]]), or logical mechanisms which generate the humour ([[knock-knock jokes]]). A joke can be reused in different joke cycles; an example of this is the same [[Head & Shoulders]] joke refitted to the tragedies of [[Vic Morrow]], [[Louis Mountbatten, 1st Earl Mountbatten of Burma|Admiral Mountbatten]] and the crew of the [[Space Shuttle Challenger disaster|Challenger space shuttle]].<ref group=note>How do we know that ___ had dandruff? They found his/her head and shoulders on the ___.</ref>{{sfn|Gruner|1997|pp=142–143}} These cycles seem to appear spontaneously, spread rapidly across countries and borders only to dissipate after some time. Folklorists and others have studied individual joke cycles in an attempt to understand their function and significance within the culture.

[[File:Why did the chicken cross the road?.JPG|thumb|Why did the chicken cross the road? To get to the other side.]]
Joke cycles circulated in the recent past include:
{{Columns-list|colwidth=22em|
* [[Conditional joke]]s
* [[Bar joke]]s
* [[Bellman joke]]s
* [[Blonde joke]], [[lawyer joke]] and [[Microsoft joke]] cycles
* [[Burgenland#Culture|Burgenland]] jokes (Austria)
* Challenger (space shuttle) jokes{{sfnm |1a1=Smyth |1y=1986 |2a1=Oring |2y=1987}}
* Chernobyl jokes{{sfn|Laszlo|1988}}
* [[Why did the chicken cross the road?|Chicken jokes]]
* [[You have two cows|Two cow jokes]]
* [[Dead baby jokes]]{{sfn|Dundes|1979}}
* [[East Frisian jokes]] (Germany)
* [[Essex girl]] joke cycle (United Kingdom){{sfn|Davies|1998}}
* Helen Keller joke cycle{{sfn|Hirsch|Barrick|1980}}
* [[Irish jokes]]
* [[Desert island joke]]s
* Jew and Polack joke cycles{{sfn|Dundes|1971}}
* Jewish American Princess and Jewish Mother joke cycles{{sfn|Dundes|1985}}
* [[Knock-knock jokes]]{{sfn|Weeks|2015}}
* [[Lightbulb joke]]s{{sfnm |1a1=Dundes |1y=1981 |2a1=Kerman |2y=1980}}
* Little Willie and Quadriplegic joke cycles{{sfn|Davies|1999}}
* [[Manta joke]]s (Germany)
* [[NASA]] joke cycle{{sfnm |1a1=Simons |1y=1986 |2a1=Smyth |2y=1986 |3a1=Oring |3y=1987}}
* [[Newfie]] joke cycle (Canada){{sfn|Davies|2002}}
* Persian Gulf War jokes{{sfnm |1a1=Kitchener |1y=1991 |2a1=Dundes |2a2=Pagter |2y=1991}}
* [[Polish joke]]s
* [[Redneck joke]]s
* [[Riddle joke]]s
* [[Sardarji jokes]] (India)
* [[Said the actress to the bishop]] jokes
* [[Viola jokes]]{{sfn|Rahkonen|2000}}
* [[Wind-up doll joke]] cycle{{sfn|Hirsch|1964}}
* [[Maternal insult|Yo Mama]] jokes
}}

=== Tragedies and catastrophes ===
{{Main|Black comedy}}
As with the [[9/11]] disaster discussed above, cycles attach themselves to celebrities or national catastrophes such as the [[death of Diana, Princess of Wales]], the [[death of Michael Jackson]], and the [[Space Shuttle Challenger disaster]]. These cycles arise regularly as a response to terrible unexpected events which command the national news. An in-depth analysis of the Challenger joke cycle documents a change in the type of humour circulated following the disaster, from February to March 1986. "It shows that the jokes appeared in distinct 'waves', the first responding to the disaster with clever wordplay and the second playing with grim and troubling images associated with the event…The primary social function of disaster jokes appears to be to provide closure to an event that provoked communal grieving, by signalling that it was time to move on and pay attention to more immediate concerns".{{sfn|Ellis|1991}}

=== Ethnic jokes ===
{{main|Ethnic joke}}
The sociologist [[Christie Davies]] has written extensively on ethnic jokes told in countries around the world.{{sfn|Davies|1990}} In ethnic jokes he finds that the "stupid" ethnic target in the joke is no stranger to the culture, but rather a peripheral social group (geographic, economic, cultural, linguistic) well known to the joke tellers.{{sfn|Davies|2008|pages=163–165}} So Americans tell jokes about Polacks and Italians, Germans tell jokes about Ostfriesens, and the English tell jokes about the Irish. In a review of Davies' theories it is said that "For Davies, [ethnic] jokes are more about how joke tellers imagine themselves than about how they imagine those others who serve as their putative targets…The jokes thus serve to center one in the world – to remind people of their place and to reassure them that they are in it."{{sfn|Oring|2000}}

=== Absurdities and gallows humour ===
{{see also|Anti-humor}}

A third category of joke cycles identifies absurd characters as the butt: for example the grape, the dead baby or the elephant. Beginning in the 1960s, social and cultural interpretations of these joke cycles, spearheaded by the folklorist [[Alan Dundes]], began to appear in academic journals. Dead baby jokes are posited to reflect societal changes and guilt caused by widespread use of contraception and abortion beginning in the 1960s.<ref group=note>[[Combined oral contraceptive pill|Contraceptive pills]] were first approved for use in the United States in 1960.</ref>{{sfn|Dundes|1987|pp=3–14}} Elephant jokes have been interpreted variously as stand-ins for American blacks during the Civil Rights Era{{sfn|Dundes|1987|pp=41–54}} or as an "image of something large and wild abroad in the land captur[ing] the sense of counterculture" of the sixties.{{sfn|Oring|2008|p=194}} These interpretations strive for a cultural understanding of the themes of these jokes which go beyond the simple collection and documentation undertaken previously by folklorists and ethnologists.