So there is a sarcastic humor which points out the foibles and weaknesses of others either grossly or delicately. Usually these others are those differing from one's own group--the Irish, Jew, farmer, Negro--and the jokes either deal with their personal appearance (a low humor) or their characteristic expressions, points of view and actions. The audience is convulsed at their quaintness or folly, though often enough on the stage the comic figure delivers a sort of wisdom mingled with his foolishness, and this adds to the humorous explosion. The sarcastic humor in its highest form reaches satire, where under a disguise powerful institutions or the habit and ways of life of a group are criticized. In polite society people are continually attacking each other in a kind of warfare called repartee, in which the tension is kept just without the bounds of real hostility, while the audience sides with the one whose shaft is the most telling. In the lower ranks this interchange, which is surprisingly frequent, is coarse and insulting. It is supposed to be a test of character to be able to "stand" these attacks with equanimity and even to join in the laugh against oneself. To "kid" and take "kidding" is thus an important social trait. Humor is often used to expose the folly of the pretentious. Much of the stock in trade of the humorist lies in his attack on the pedant, the pompous, the great, the new-rich, the over-important of one kind or another. To find them less than they pretend to be gives two especial kinds of pleasure to the audience; the first the stripping away of disguise (Bergson), and the second the relief of our own feeling of inferiority in their presence by showing how inferior they really are. Since inhibition wears on us, the great inhibitions are directly attacked by the humorist. Thus sex forms one of the great subjects of humor, and from the obscene story told by those on whom the sex inhibitions rest lightly to the joke about clothes, etc., told by those who mock the opposite sex, the whole idea is to bring about pleasure in the release of inhibitton and the play of the mind around the forbidden. Freud has some interesting remarks on this type of humor, which he regards largely as sexual aggression. It is necessary to say that the release of inhibition is always that of an inhibition not too strongly felt or accepted. A really modest person, one to whom the sex code is a sacred thing, does not find pleasure in a crude sex joke. Similarly with the inhibition surrounding marriage, which is a stock subject of humor. The overearnest person dislikes this type of humor and reacts against it by calling it "in bad taste." In the Middle Ages (and to-day among those opposed to the Catholic church), the priest and nun were slyly or coarsely attacked by the humorist, and in all times those somewhat skeptical find in religion, its ceremonials and customs, a field for joke and satire.