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A number of psychiatrists, among them Hartmann, Kris, Loewenstein, Ehrenzweig, and Lee have, in recent publications, (1) discussed audience responses to various art forms. Of these men, Dr. Kris has made the most elaborate study in his book, Psychoanalytic Explorations in Art, in which the reader can discern an implicit classification of individual and group audience responses to dramatic and narrative literature.
This classification may by inversion be used to classify literature itself in terms of the responses which it tends to induce in the audience. Such a classification which has as its ultimate basis modern psychoanalytic concepts concerning the structure and functioning of the human mind seems to me potentially very fruitful for the student of oral folk literature. In this paper I shall suggest several categories into which oral literature might thus be divided and analyze three Nez Perce tales which exemplify certain characteristics of humor, the particular category in which I am most interested.
My classification has two principal components. The first of these is concerned with the degree of empathy which the individual in the audience feels toward the work of art, or, more specifically, for oral literature, the entire story or the characters within the story. In other words, does