Mind's Eye Having a larf? Is humour cruel?

My child hood was littered with jokes. How do you keep an Irishman
busy all day - put him in a barrel and tell him to micturate in the
corner. The Germans bombed our chip shop and had no sense of humour.
In France, the Belgians are the butt or "Irish" jokes; elsewhere the
Poles. Jokes often rely on 'taking the Micky' - ridiculing someone
else. In Englishmen, Scotsmen and Irishmen jokes it was common for
the English and Scots to be the suckers to a sharp and cunning
Irishman. Even the holocaust has been subject to joking - often by
the victims.

I have taught Kierkegaard as an example of dark, lengthy Danish humour
(and can point to books on same). There is an affinity in his work
with the Monty Python poverty joke in which each in turn recalls a
childhoods in greater poverty than the last. Eventually, just as one
thinks the guy claiming to have lived in a shoebox on the central
reservation of the M6 has 'won' the game another bloke says,
"Shoebox? You had a shoebox. Luxury!" Kierkegaard does this with
Christianity.

My own humour is dark, but it's rare I mean anyone harm. I used to
think that satire offered some hope of change, but in recent years
have come to see it as merely part of the problems we have. It is of
the Establishment and feigns resistance.

I think humour might be part of a way out of chronic illusion; but it
is often merely cruel and parochial.