摘要：Though it might seem utterly innocuous, almost not worth considering, at the heart of my concern is whether humour can be considered to be something good. This probably doesn’t seem like a particularly controversial thesis, especially in New Zealand in the twenty-first century. For example, I would hazard an estimate that almost anyone reading this essay would like to be thought capable of humour in some form: whether this is understood as the ability to tell a joke, or make a comic observation, or, at the very least, to be seen to possess what is commonly referred to as a sense of humour. In our mediated culture, a sullen, unsmiling face is reserved for totalitarian authority figures, the po-faced, the earnest and the boring who feature as the recurring villains of television, film and advertising. In fact, I would even go so far as to suggest – in terms so broad and definitive that one would usually, and rightly, shy away from them – that as a society, we value humour. To push this claim even further, when I refer to ‘we,’ I am not restricting this definition to New Zealand, but rather I am expanding this pronoun to encompass other nations within the rich, English-speaking, liberal democratic world such as Canada, Australia, the UK and the USA (and I would probably open this already large tent even wider if encouraged or pushed to do so). Within these nation states, united by a common media culture borne by a common language, humour is desired, respected and valued
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