Honors Collegium 128
Humor as Means of Social Control
Enrollment: Open to College Honors/College Scholars students
Course Description: Application of venerable humanist insights and social scientific thinking to contemporary social phenomenon of human laughter and humor. While Aristotle and Hobbes thought humor was bad for society, Locke and Bahktin would have disputed them for different reasons. Integration of their ideas and ideas of evolutionary anthropology and linguistics, as well as social and biological science, to critically evaluate how social scientists investigate mass media political satire of today.
Otto Santa Ana
Otto Santa Ana, Emeritus Professor in the César Chávez Department of Chicana/o and Central American Studies at UCLA, studies the social power of language in three strands.
One, he wrote award-winning books on how mass media validate social inequity. He (and his undergrad students) submitted a report on Trump’s anti-immigrant discourse that became part of the court filings in the 2020 Supreme Court decision to stop the president from reminding the DACA program.
Two, he is an empirical sociolinguist who has written about the languages of Latinos in a dozen articles, and a highly-regarded anthology: “Tongue-Tied: The Lives of Multilingual Children in Public Schools.”
Three, he is writing a monograph on the fundamental political nature of laughter tentatively called: “On the Humor of our Species: Toward a Consilience Model,” based on the thesis that humor is both a social formation and disciplinary tool.
Q & A
What is your home department at UCLA? Chicana/o and Central American Studies
How long have you been teaching your HC seminar? I’ve taught one or two times.
What is your favorite part about teaching this HC seminar? Helping motivated students learn how to ask pertinent scholarly questions, and then do original research on questions for which I don’t have an answer.
What do you find to be the most compelling about the subject matter of this seminar? Studying an aspect of human nature that has been debated for 2000 years, which to date has eluded deep understanding. Now with a research attitude of disciplinary consilience and new 21st century methods we might reveal what has been hidden about our nature.
What are the learning objectives for this course?
- To gain personal insight and an objective perspective on a feature of human nature that today is typically dismissed as frivolous, but which historically has been a topic of fierce debate in philosophy, and which wields subtle but cumulative psychological and social power.
- To recognize the differences and limits of different epistemological approaches to understand a feature of human nature. Twentieth century humanists and social scientists have expressed mutual disdain or disinterest about the others’ research, when addressing questions about human nature in my mind requires an approach based on consilience, by which I mean an approach that merges ideas and data drawn from all variety of scholarly disciplines.
- Developing and pursuing a line of research of the student’s choosing on the nature of laughter and humor that is framed in terms of traditional research, but which employs the latest internet and social media tools.