Symbolic Interaction, Vol. 29, Issue 3, pp. 331–348, ISSN 0195-6086, electronic ISSN 1533-8665. © 2006 by the Society for the Study of Symbolic Interaction. All rights reserved. Please direct all re- quests for permission to photocopy or reproduce article content through the University of California Press’s Rights and Permissions website, at http://www.ucpress.edu/journals/rights.htm. Direct all correspondence to Paul Paolucci, Department of Anthropology, Sociology, and Social Work, 107 Keith Building, Eastern Kentucky University, Richmond, Kentucky 40475; e-mail: paul.paolucci@eku.edu. Sociology of Humor and a Critical Dramaturgy Paul Paolucci Eastern Kentucky University Margaret Richardson Western Kentucky University Goffman’s analytic framework can provide tools useful for a critical theory of modern society. While commentators have remarked on Goffman’s apparent technical neutrality, a sociology of humor can help reveal his criti- cal thrust. Using a latent content analysis, we demonstrate how several frames found in Jerry Seinfeld’s humor are both dramaturgical and covertly critical. We use these themes to illuminate the critical analyses of modern social life provided by Goffman’s method. The work of Erving Goffman, one of sociology’s most influential theorists (Fine and Manning 2000), perhaps “the greatest sociologist of the latter half of the twentieth century” (Collins 1988:41), has elicited conflicting readings. 1 Commentators have seen it as systematic (Giddens 1988) and as discontinuous (Sharrock 1976). Some see a general micro theory in his work (Manning 1992), while others find “a much more structural image than we would receive from most symbolic interactionists” (Ritzer and Goodman 2004:225; see also Chriss 1995:178; Smith 2003:655). Maybe all these claims are justified. Goffman said he was “as much . . . a symbolic interac- tionist as anyone else. But . . . also a structural functionalist in the traditional sense” (quoted in Verhoeven 1993:318). Claiming not to take “the term dramaturgy . . . all that seriously,” he labeled his approach a “structural Social Psychology [that was] closer to the structural functionalists, like Parsons or Merton,” and described him- self as a “cultural relativist” and “a positivist basically” (pp. 320, 322, 324, 325; see also Jaworski 2000:303). What goes unsaid in these characterizations? Though Goffman’s work addresses class (Gonos 1980), critics have cast it as a tepid sociology of the “new middle class” (Gouldner 1970). Others see a critical theory at its heart. At a micro level, Goffman’s