Prisons, Performance Arena, and Occupational Humor

Abstract

Prisons, Performance Arena, and Occupational Humor Claire Schmidt (bio) Q: What are the first three things you get when you become a correctional officer? A: A car, a gun, and a divorce (Conover 2001:89) As the preceding joke suggests, prisons are stressful, exhausting, low-paying, and dangerous places to work, and correctional officers must find ways to negotiate their multiple occupational stressors. Humor thus becomes an essential multi-tool for correctional officers and, as such, merits serious study. Not only do correctional officers use joking behavior to disavow and mask such seriousness under the cover of frivolity and laughter, but they also employ occupational humor to communicate nuanced meanings that may not be effectively expressed in any other mode. Correctional officer (CO) occupational humor is therefore traditional, specialized, and highly dependent on context and insider status. Though rarely, if ever, studied in detail, the messages communicated through occupational humor are often essential to occupational and institutional well-being. This note focuses ultimately on a single joke that illustrates the broader range of CO humor, which also includes practical jokes, formal jokes, observational humor, conversational humor (as proposed by Neil Norrick [1993]), mimicry, and parody. As opposed to the many studies of prison life that focus on inmates, my own ethnographic research is with largely white, generally Midwestern, correctional officers, social workers, and medical and administrative staff working within a space that can usefully be understood through what Richard Bauman (1977) calls an “interpretive frame” or John Miles Foley describes as the “performance arena” (1995:47). To illustrate the insights that can be gained from this particular approach, I offer first a general discussion of the CO performance arena based on my own research and fieldwork and conclude with a more focused analysis of a specific example of CO humor taken from literary journalist Ted Conover’s ethnographic book, New Jack: Guarding Sing Sing. In my ethnographic research, my collaborators1 emphasize the importance of humor; they assert that a successful CO must have a sense of humor in order to tolerate the job. The ability to speak the occupational language, to “speak the job,” as Tim Tangherlini describes it in Talking Trauma (1998), is necessary for occupational success. This success encompasses the worker’s ability to perform the job while maintaining sufficient job satisfaction (including self-respect and manageable stress levels) to ensure they can remain in the job without burnout, and even advance within the institution. Successful long-term employees must be able to interpret the verbal register of the community, and part of this occupational literacy involves being fluent in occupational humor. CO humor takes place within a physical and social space I refer to here as the “performance arena.” The performance arena, according to Foley, is “the locus where the event of performance takes place, where words are invested with their special power” (1995:47). The performance arena may be located in a correctional facility, or it may just as easily be in a bar, on the telephone, or in a state van while transporting prisoners. Therefore, when one CO mimics a supervisor for the amusement of another officer, the performance and its reception take place within a specialized context that endows the mimicry with heightened communicative power. As Foley notes (1995:28), “to be situated within the performance arena is to be alive to the metonymic referentiality that the given register institutionally encodes.” Thus, the mimicry is performed in a traditional register and carries the gravitas of tradition. The audience understands mimicry as part of their shared occupational life, and the performance communicates complicated issues of power differentials, institutional health, and moral ambiguity; at the same time, the mimic demonstrates individual skill and comedic talent. Since this “richly contexted array of meanings . . . can be communicated only through the special, ‘dedicated’ set of channels that constitute the multivalent experience of performance” (Foley 1995:28), the audience and the performer collectively construct an occupational arena that makes the multiple meanings possible. CO humor is a form of immanent art. Immanence, as Foley defines it, is the “set of metonymic, associative meanings institutionally delivered and received through a dedicated idiom or register either during or on the authority...