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Hello. In what I like to think of as a genetic aberration, my son specialises in man walks into a bar jokes.

You know the sort of thing. A white horse goes into a bar and the barman says we've got a drink named after you and the horse says what Eric or a bear goes into a bar and orders a beer and a bag of crisps and the barman says why the long pours.

Or a giraffe goes into a bar and says the high balls are on me.

All of which means that I experienced a pleasant sense of recognition when I opened up the latest edition of the journal

Sociology and found a paper there called A Sociologist Walks into a bar and other academic challenges

towards a methodology of humour.

But this was not, as I expected, an analysis of bad jokes, but rather a subtle argument, a very

subtle argument about the part that humour can play in sparking and delighting the sociological imagination.

And its author is Kate Watson,

who's professor in the School of Education at the University of Stirling,

and she's now with me.

You're talking about the role humor can play in prompting the

sociological imagination. All forms of humor, what sorts of humor are we talking

about here? Well I use the expression humour as an umbrella term to cover all

the categories of the funny including wit comedy and jokes but I guess the three

main tools for the humourist would be satire, parody and especially irony.

Now the problem is, as you say, is that sociologists who do go in for any of these forms of humour may or quite likely to be devalued.

Yes.

Expand on that a bit for me.

I mean, who has been devalued as a result of this attraction?

...