Humour is serious business. Humour scholar Marcin Napiórkowski tells Jan Pelczar about the evolution and nature of humour, and explains how we know when it’s appropriate to laugh.

I interviewed Marcin Napiórkowski, a semiotician of culture and an expert on contemporary mythology, over the phone. Given the ongoing coronavirus pandemic, we both took the stay-at-home orders seriously. We didn’t know if this interview would ultimately be published in a more familiar world of in-person meetings, stand-up comedy nights and jokes over the barbecue, or during a continued period of lockdown and memes and jokes sent via instant messengers, but we agreed that in any event humour would certainly survive – after all, it can be quite contagious.

Jan Pelczar: I’m aware of the changing canons of beauty, but what about humour and its cultural canons? Do they change?

Marcin Napiórkowski: How much time do we have? If less than 60 lecture hours, then my short answer is: “Yes and no.” For that matter, the same response could be used to answer virtually any question about humour. On the one hand, if we look back at the ancient Greek comedies, such as those written by Aristophanes, we really have to strain ourselves and have an amazing sense of humour and a vast knowledge of the reality of ancient Athens to laugh even once. On the other hand, if we break such a comedy down into its basic parts, we’ll see that what made people laugh in those days were the same things as today. There are satires on celebrities such as Socrates. There are jokes about people who eat too much and pass wind. Someone is flying on the back of a huge dung beetle, without worrying that the beetle might get hungry, because there’ll always be something to feed the beetle with. So, on the one hand, nothing changes as fast as comedy, and jokes are like supermarket bread – always a little stale the next day…

So jokes that are no longer funny are