Fun on the Rock: Toward a Theory of Newfoundland Humor

Beverly Rasporich is a professor in the Faculty of Communication and
Culture at the University of Calgary. She is the author of Dance of the
Sexes: Art and Gender in the Fiction of Alice Munro and Magic Off Main:
The Art of Esther Warkov.

Since the first man slipped on a banana peel and the second man laughed, a third man has speculated on the hows and whys of the event. In the modern age, indeed, in the last ten years, there has been a growing number of these third men (and some women) who, as interested amateurs or as serious academics from a wide range of disciplines, are researching and writing about humour. While Canadians are only just beginning to examine their funny bones, the Americans and Europeans are off and chuckling, meeting, forming societies, and comparing notes at international conferences in Tel Aviv and Cork or at Bulgaria’s yearly humour festival sponsored by a Bulgarian institute devoted to humour and satire and to the promotion of peace through the international language of humour.

The second devotion is actually a moot point for many third men and for Mr. Pottle who, while assigning universal qualities to humour, takes the position that “humour, of whatever mode or milieu, speaks for itself out of the peculiar conditions of the time and temper that produce it. Here we underline again the great extent to which any country’s humour tends to be privately national and rather exclusively cultural” (p.7). Mr. Pottle’s country is Newfoundland, and his theory, punctuated with Newfie jokes, is that Newfoundland humour is generated by the conditions of life in the region, conditions which stem from five broad areas: politics, religion, the sea, technological change, and the creative arts. Further, his intention is to consider “the uses which that behavior, popularly accepted as humorous, appears to serve” (p.7).

Mr. Pottle does not quite convince this reader of his theory, partly because the “institutional areas” are not exclusive to Newfoundland and partly because of the paucity of comic examples. In the section “Humour and the Sea,” for example, the author gives a splendid lengthy account of the serious love and the awe of the sea in the Newfoundland psyche, concludes that “there is apparently no limit to the volume of humour directed at the sea,” but then goes on to give too few examples to substantiate this claim. Despite the inconclusiveness of such arguments and, at times, a rather impenetrable Victorian prose writing style, he makes some intriguing points about the relation between Newfoundland humour and culture. The Irish heritage (and accent), for example, is paramount and Irish jokes, such as the following, abound: “…the Irish Newfoundlander is in a dentist’s chair and is told that the charge for pulling a first tooth was $2.00; and for the second, $1.00. ‘Then pull the second’” (p.39).

In the final analysis, this book is a respectable beginning as a full-length study in the area of humour scholarship in Canada. At the same time, it conveys the cultural ambience and texture of Newfoundland life.