J ... for jokes

and humour, and no-joke dogs

Do you know this one?

What does the German Shepherd say to the guy who is being bitten?

Relax. I am just pulling your leg.

O—kay-y. That’s not how dog jokes go. At least not the ones dogs find amusing. Consider these, then, instead:

I am on a walk in the woods with a slightly nervous young bitch. Two other dogs approach, all low wagging tails but one of them is huge and fluffy, hence his body language is difficult to read for my dog. As she tenses up a bit, he bows in what is commonly referred to as a play bow. The dogs have never met and the atmosphere is not exactly relaxed. So, I would say the big dog is trying to dispel my dog’s concerns, kind of by joking about his own scary features and his goal is not (or at any rate not necessarily) to play. He is just giving her a bit of a goofy “lighten up, young girl”. And she does. She is not finding him overly funny but she relaxes.

A large Giant Schnautzer leisurely traverses an open space, approaching a cat who sits in the middle. The cat does not appreciate, gets up and leaves. The dog pursues her, but in what really is a most measured walk - if he wanted to chase the cat, he would have done that long before. He looks amused as the cat hurries off, not disappointed. I feel that is exactly what he wanted, just disturb her peace, not chasing, nor was he looking to play with her (he has other dogs to play with and has not been seen playing with the cat). Therefore, I want to say he made fun of her. He pretends to be violating a norm that he knows he must abide by and so is teasing her. The cat also does not run away in fear but looks back and gives him a bit of a “haha, funny, not funny” look over the shoulder.¹

I am walking with a dog who likes to have an agenda of his own. He trots about 3 to 4 metres in front of me, off lead, slowly increasing the distance with every step. He would come if I called but I don’t mean to call him, I just want for him to pay more attention to where I want to be going without me having to ask him to perform specific behaviours. I abruptly stop. The dog notices, looks back in surprise, and I take a few swift steps into a different direction. The dog chases after me to catch up, open mouth, tongue out, eyes squinted. I want to say I joked with him: “Gotcha” or “So you think you know where we are going?” I teased him a bit by breaking his expectation that we were just going to trot on. I did, however, not mean to offer play (for instance, I was not opening a running game, in which I let the dog chase me and then turn to chase him in return, the point really was for him to follow me and not the other way around).

A younger dog is putting his muzzle into the face of a senior dog leisurely posing like a sphinx. The younger dog is younger, but certainly not a puppy any more. He repeatedly pushes his muzzle into the thick fur of the senior dog who stoically looks on: “what a fool”. The younger jumps backwards, snorts and shakes his head. The older flops onto his side. It seems to me that, while likely interested in proper play, the younger dog is teasing the older dog but the older dog is not reprimanding him for this frankly impossible gesture because he can read it for what it is: a playful muzzle punch of a guy he knows. On another occasion, the senior will walk over to the younger dog and push him around a bit - which the younger one will delight in. I want to say these two dogs have a habit of joking about who is who to whom; perhaps not exactly locker room humour but there is an element of that. These two dogs never got into a fight but there is an element of competition and the dogs use what I want to call jokes to negotiate their relation.²

These are just a few instances of dogs showing a sense of humour that I can readily call to mind - and there are many more when I think about it. I take humour to be a quality of interactions that is not exclusively human but available to other sufficiently complex social animals as well. ‘Sufficiently complex’ just means that the animal must be an individual who is self-aware in the sense that she registers her position vis-à-vis other members of her community, that she has emotions, and that she more or less knows or feels that other members of her community are like her in these respects. Such animals - human or not - can use humour to evoke comic amusement by subverting their fellows’ expectations. Beyond sheer pleasure, this can contribute to negotiating social relations and norms - for better or worse, of course. After all, humour is not innocuous: jokes can both amuse and hurt and they can also entrench power asymmetries. However, for social beings who are (like dogs) or should be (like humans) generally interested in avoiding physical conflict, humour can be truly vital.

The situations described above meet these conditions. In each, a sufficiently complex social animal subverts the expectation of another social animal, thereby either negotiating social status or a norm. The big dog subverts the nervous dog’s expectation that he might aggress and reinforces the norm of keeping the peace in public. The Giant Schnautzer challenges the cat’s expectation that the no-cat-chasing norm will be abided by, thereby aggrandising himself at the cat’s expense. I am irritating the dog’s expectation that he will have it “his way” in this instance, thereby criticising him a little without, however, chastising him. The younger dog is challenging the norm of respect vis-à-vis senior dogs but the senior dog, in that instance, is not feeling challenged and his relaxed attitude about it reinforces his superiority.

This all needs much more thinking and refinement, but I feel I want to run with this because it might help us with those of our dogs who are “no joke” or who tend to take certain things too seriously, the one more so than the other. I have always admired our senior dog’s social skills AND loved his sense of humour. Now I think the two go together. The trick for our socially less skilled and/or not so funny dogs must be to help them take the things over which we arguably have a conflict, so “their bad ideas”, less seriously in virtue of taking our shared norms and what would be welcome ideas more seriously and do this by building (on) their senses of humour. This sounds awfully theoretical but the practical ideas are simple. Above and beyond working on ethograms of their respective senses of humour, I, eventually, want to be able to say two things to them:

1. “You must be joking!” Social feedback on a bad idea where the dog gets the opportunity to quickly come up with a better one.

2. “Not funny.” Social feedback on a bad idea that was out of line.

Perhaps this is entirely misguided. After all, our new trainer wants us to be more serious - he said that, in educating your dog, you can dial up two variables: intensity and seriousness. Intensity is what people often can’t help themselves to choose - they start yelling, or perhaps they even feel they have to physically hurt the dog. Seriousness, however, according to the trainer, involves putting the weight of your social status into conflicts of interests you have with your dog.

Sounds great! But enter these two dogs. It is not that we have never had the idea of “saying No” to a dog (on that, more soon, under N … for the N-word in dog training). Yet these two did not care; they both, evidently, have come with a history of not taking humans seriously and accepting few boundaries - one right off the euthanasia table after having tried his luck in three homes, the other out of rescue after having failed in two. How far can you dial up your seriousness without tipping into intensity? The trainer did, at one point, bang his flat hand onto the table to shut up one of our dogs who was … whining about the seating arrangement. The effect was … a joke. On the trainer.

Now, I am not going to spend my life banging any parts of my body against anything. So, do I instead turn to making fun of my dogs when they have a bad idea? Kind of, yes. Not just, but it’s worth an experiment. I appreciate that I run the risk of somewhat hurting their feelings, but I will do so to prevent other kinds of hurt. I also appreciate that I will be reinforcing my power over them - which I, however, think is the right thing to do in a situation in which the joke would be on an innocent and/or perhaps even less powerful other. Arguably, the effectiveness of this strategy will depend on the individual dog’s sense of humour. Yet humour straddles the space between play and aggression; so, if a dog can play and if a dog can aggress, then s/he should be able to get things in between. Obviously, jokes that hurt or reinforce power must grow out of interactions that grow and stress a shared sense of humour. And I can only say that we are currently delightfully busy working on that, seriously.

1. I don’t know cats very well and would not be surprised if they were generally more lacking in humour than dogs because humour is a capacity needed by creatures living in proper communities. I am told that cats, except for lions, are not really that social, not least because felines hunt alone. But I don’t know and there is arguably more to forming communities than just the joint hunt.

2. Not on a daily basis, and if one of the dogs is feeling under the weather or just a bit thin-skinned or if general circumstances do not allow for this fooling around to happen, then I tell them to cut it out. Being able to call both dogs out of unwelcome blokey joking is important not least because not all dogs will tolerate such behaviours. I also think it is important that the message to the dog to abort in such circumstances includes “not funny” and not just “here is a different kind of fun”, but more on that under N.