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The general pattern was similar to that of other earlier joke-cycles that have followed a well-publicized accident or shocking event. The Diana jokes also invite comparison with another very large genre of jokes, the political jokes of totalitarian countries such as the former Soviet Union and the formerly socialist countries of Eastern Europe. Some of the enthusiastic joke-teiiers were enemies of the regime but others among this group occupied privileged positions within it and stood to lose if the regime were overthrown or democratized. The Diana jokes, like the image of Diana herself and like the over-reaction to her death, are very much a product of the dominant position now held in society by the mass media and especially television.

Cumulative effects assessment (CEA) - a type of environmental appraisal - lacks effective methods for modeling cumulative effects, evaluating indicators of ecosystem condition, and exploring the likely outcomes of development scenarios. Random forests are an extension of classification and regression trees, which model response variables by recursive partitioning. Random forests were used to model a series of candidate ecological indicators that described lakes and rivers from a case study watershed (The Muskoka River Watershed, Canada). Suitability of the candidate indicators for use in cumulative effects assessment and watershed monitoring was assessed according to how well they could be predicted from natural habitat features and how sensitive they were to human land-use. The best models explained 75% of the variation in a multivariate descriptor of lake benthic-macroinvertebrate community structure, and 76% of the variation in the conductivity of river water. Similar results were obtained by cross-validation. Several candidate indicators detected a simulated doubling of urban land-use in their catchments, and a few were able to detect a simulated doubling of agricultural land-use. The paper demonstrates that random forests can be used to describe the combined and singular effects of multiple stressors and natural environmental factors, and furthermore, that random forests can be used to evaluate the performance of monitoring indicators. The numerical methods presented are applicable to any ecosystem and indicator type, and therefore represent a step forward for CEA.

The incessant telling of political jokes hostile to the regime over decades had no impact on the strength of the Soviet Union. If under these most propitious of circumstances jokes had no effect then Davies concludes that jokes never do have any macro-consequences. Abedinifard disagrees claiming, using Iranian jokes about the homosexuals of the town Qazvin as his example, that jokes can have consequences where they reinforce a growing local sentiment in this case Iranian homophobia. Davies’ reply is that in Iran as in the Soviet case jokes are a puny, unimportant and ambiguous force in a world of strong unambiguous forces, in this case punitive and lethal Islamic homophobia. Davies further points out that the Qazvin jokes are the same as the ones told in Pashto in Afghanistan about the city of Kandahar and refer not to gay men in the Western sense but to macho warriors who assert their dominance by penetrating young boys who are expected to submit to them. The rigorist Islamic Taliban used capital punishment to repress these pederastic same sex practices but failed. The Afghan jokes are very funny but utterly unimportant in such a world of strong forces.

The BBC has been justly praised and admired for the high quality of its humorous programmes on both radio and television. The BBC’s rule book of censorship guidelines covering comedy probably attained its fullest and most authoritative form in 1948 in the edition drawn up by Michael Standing the Head of Variety in July of that year. From the very earliest days of broadcasting in Britain concern was expressed about the broadcasting of vulgar humorous material on the radio. The censorship in the BBC of jokes and humour about ethnic and racial groups or about handicaps has followed in some respects a curiously similar trajectory to that of the censorship of vulgarity. The BBC’s censorship of comedy probably served only to limit and restrict the level of pleasure enjoyed by the individuals who listened to or watched its comedy shows.

This chapter surveys the wealth of humorous tales told about British judges and advocates from the late eighteenth to the late twentieth century, particularly in the criminal courts over which the judges presided, where humour either designedly or inadvertently could provide a disruption of the normally solemn proceedings. Published and archival collections of such humorous anecdotes largely refer to what happens in open court, including witty remarks by the judges and impudent ripostes by barristers. Lawyers collected and treasured such interchanges, together with tales of judicial eccentricity, as part of the folklore of their profession. Published as anthologies, they found a popular audience as well. In the last half of the nineteenth and the first half of the twentieth centuries, trials were extensively reported in the press and judges became part of an Establishment celebrity culture. Some judges were tempted to play to this press gallery by producing witty bons mots. Other anecdotes deal with mishaps in court. Some are apocryphal, or else floating tales ascribed to legal figures known to be humorously acerbic. The distinctions between formal set-piece jokes about judges (of which in contrast to the United States, there is no discernible body in the United Kingdom) and humorous anecdotes (which purport to be true stories full of accurate detail) are analysed and discussed. Over time, anecdotes evolve variants and are switched to new settings and targets. Anecdotes are becoming more portable and context-free and thus increasingly taking on much of the structure of jokes. The boundary between the two categories is becoming porous.

Throughout Europe and North America Jews probably figure more frequently in jokes than any other ethnic group and there are three sources of these jokes. They are Jewish Jokes, Anti-Semitic Jokes and Hebredonian Jokes. Jokes that can also be told in much the same form about, say, the Scots, the Netherlanders or the Cardis, who are not the victims of anti-Caledonian, anti-Dutch or anti-Cardi hostility are probably not anti-Semitic. Anti-Semitic jokes about Jews committing arson are a very specific metaphor of the general anti-Semitic belief in secret Jewish conspiracies that destroy people, economies and societies so that the Jews may prosper. The Jewish pride in and preoccupation with cleverness takes many humorous forms that are much less common in other people's jokes. The affinity of Hebredonian jokes with Scottish/Dutch ones indicates both that they are not specifically Jewish and that they are relatively unlikely to be rooted in the hostile prejudices of others.