Comment on Priest's Article: “Election Jokes: The Effects of Reference Group Membership”

Abstract

Priest maintains that all relevant studies prior to his own support a reference group theory of humor. However, only La Fave's experiment does unequivocally. Both the Wolff, Smith, and Murray and the Middleton experiments make methodological errors, acknowledged by the authors themselves, which render a reference group interpretation of their data debatable. However, these authors also furnish perceptive, post mortem analyses which suggest that, were their methodologies less inadequate, the reference group construct would have won support