Humor

While I was plaing around with the word *runar I began to wonder about humor and jokes in an oral culture. Do oral cultures have jokes as we know them? The closest I could get is either humorous stories or comedies (as in drama). Comedy doesn't really count because it is simply the movement from chaos to order (while tragedy is from order to chaos). Humorous stories, on the other hand, are like jokes but a think any presented in an oral culture will be much more like stories than like jokes. It also seems liekely that even the most dramatic piece had many elements of humor, laughter being one of the best ways of keeping an audience.