dehumour1-10, Exercise 2: Comedy as a historical source

Model answer (check the details), using whispered jokes under dictatorship (Chapter 6):

What it tells a historian:
- What people were anxious about and what they could not say publicly.
- That private dissent existed, and that people took risks or used humour as a safety valve.
- The tone of daily life under the regime, in a way official records do not show.

What it cannot tell them:
- How many people told or believed such jokes.
- Which jokes are authentic and which were invented later, since they were passed on by word of mouth and collected afterwards.
- Whether joking was a form of resistance or a way of coping that left the regime untouched.

Method: set the jokes beside court records, diaries, reports and the memories of those who lived through the period.

Alternative choices: Loriot as a record of postwar manners; the Böhmermann affair as a record of an argument about the law.