Whatever the composition of the emotional charge which a narrative carries, it will produce a comic effect only if an aggressive-defensive tendency, however sublimated, is present in it. You may be deeply moved by a person's predicament, and yet unable to suppress a smile at its ludicrous aspect; and the impression of the 'ludicrousness' of another person's behaviour always implies an assertion -- conscious or unconscious -- of your own superiority; you smile at his expense.
The emotions which dominate on the opposite side of the triptych do not concern us as yet; but I must briefly mention them for the sake of contrast. Listening to Mozart, watching a great actor's performance, being in love or some other state of grace, may cause a welling up of happy emotions which moisten the eye or overflow in tears. Compassion and bereavement may have the same physical effect. The emotions of this class, whether joyous or sad, include sympathy, identification, pity, admiration, awe, and wonder. The common denominator of these heterogeneous emotions is a feeling of participation, identification, or belonging; in other words, the self is experienced as being a part of a larger whole , a higher unity -- which may be Nature, God, Mankind, Universal Order, or the 'Anima Mundi'; it may be an abstract idea, or a human bond with persons living, dead, or imagined. I propose to call the common element in these emotions the 'participatory' or 'self-transcending' tendencies. This is not meant in a mystical sense (though mysticism certainly belongs to this class of emotion); the term is merely intended to convey that in these emotional states the need is felt to behave as a part of some real or imaginary entity which transcends, as it were, the boundaries of the individual self; whereas when governed by the self-assertive class of emotions the ego is experienced as a self-contained whole and the ultimate value.
As a rule our emotions are complex mixtures in which both tendencies participate. Thus the emotion called 'love' -- whether sexual or maternal -- usually contains an aggressive or possessive, self-asserting component, and an identificatory or self-transcending component. If emotions were represented by different colours, then the two opposite tendencies would appear as brightness values (black-white mixtures) superimposed on them.
The subject will be discussed in more detail later (Chapters XI-XV); readers irritated by these repeated anticipatory excursions may find some excuse for them in the consideration that the painful vivisection of the comic, in which they are asked to participate, is not an end in itself, but a means to uncover the pattern which unites the apparently so heterogeneous creative activities in humour, art, and discovery.
The Inertia of Emotion
The first to make the suggestion that laughter is a discharge mechanism for 'nervous energy' seems to have been Herbert Spencer. His essay on the Physiology of Laughter (1860) starts with the proposition: 'Nervous energy always tends to beget muscular motion; and when it rises to a certain intensity always does beget it. . . . Emotions and sensations tend to generate bodily movements, and . . . the movements are violent in proportion as the emotions or sensations are intense.' Hence, he concludes, 'when consciousness is unawares transferred from great things to small' the 'liberated nerve force' will expend itself along the channels of least resistance, which are the muscular movements of laughter.
The details of Spencer's theory (parts of which Freud incorporated into his own) [7] have become obsolete; but its basic thesis that 'emotion tends to beget bodily motion' has not only been confirmed, but has become so much of a commonplace in contemporary neurophysiology that the need to qualify it is often forgotten. For there exist, of course, emotional states -- looking at the sea, or engaging in religious contemplation -- which, on the contrary, tend to promote relaxation and bodily passivity. The title of Walter B. Cannon's pioneer work, which had a decisive influence on the modern approach to the problem of emotions -- Bodily Changes in Pain, Hunger, Fear, and Rage -- ought to have acted as a warning that the emotions which mobilize the body into action all belong to an important, but nevertheless limited, category -- that which enters the service of the self-assertive tendencies. Cannon himself warned -- with little success -- against the lumping together of all emotions into a kind of red rag drenched with adrenalin.* However, for the moment we are concerned only with precisely this limited category -- the aggressive-defensive type of emotion which enters into the comic.
When the Marquis in the Chamfort story rushes to the window, our intellect turns a somersault and enters with gusto into the new game; but the piquant expectations which the narrative carried, including perhaps an unconscious admixture of sadism, cannot be transferred to the other, the 'quid-pro-quo' matrix; they are disposed of through channels of least resistance. When Othello, on the point of strangling Desdemona, breaks into hiccoughs and is transformed into a poor, sodden ham, our thoughts are again capable of performing the jump from one associative context into another, but our tension, now deprived of its logical justification, must somehow be worked off. In a word, laughter is aggression (or apprehension) robbed of its logical raison d'être; the puffing away of emotion discarded by thought.
To give another example: one of the popular devices of sustained humour is impersonation. Children imitating adults, the comedian impersonating a public figure, men disguised as women and women as men -- in all these cases the impersonator is perceived as himself and somebody else at the same time. While this situation lasts, the two matrices are bisociated in the spectator's mind; and while his intellect is capable of swiftly oscillating from one matrix to the other and back, his emotions are incapable of following these acrobatic turns; they are spilled into the gutters of laughter as soup is spilled on a rocking ship.
What these metaphors are meant to convey is that the aggressive-defensive class of emotions has a greater inertia, persistence, or mass momentum than reason . This assumption is tacitly shared by most psychological theories, but it needs to be explicitly stated in order to appreciate its consequences. The most important among these is that quite frequently our emotions are incapable of keeping step with our reason and become divorced from reason. In psychopathology this phenomenon is taken for granted, but its significance in less extreme situations is generally overlooked -- although both common experience and neurophysiology ought to make it obvious. Emotions of the self-asserting type involve a wide range of bodily changes, such as increased secretion of the adrenal glands, increase of blood sugar, acceleration of heart rate, speedier clotting of the blood, altered breathing, inhibition of digestive activity, changes in electric skin resistance, sweating, 'goose-pimples' which make the hair of the skin stand on end, dilation of the pupils, muscle tension, and tremor. The joint effect of these so-called emergency reactions is to put the whole organism into a state of readiness for come what may; sweating, for instance, disposes of the heat generated by fight or flight, and the abundance of blood sugar in the circulation provides the muscles with excess energy. Hence the remarkable feats of force of which people are capable in danger; but more important from our point of view is the lowering of the threshhold of motor responses -- the increased excitability of the muscles by nervous impulses, and the resulting tendency to violent movement, to 'work off', or at least 'shake off', the physiological effects of emotion. The chief mediators of this general mobilization of the resources of the body are the so-called sympathetic division of the autonomous nervous system, and the hormones secreted by the medulla of the suprarenal glands: adrenalin and nor-adrenalin, the 'humours' of fear and anger. Since these nervous and glandular processes are interrelated, it is convenient to refer to them jointly as activities of the sympathico-adrenal system. (To avoid confusion, I must underline that the sympathetic nervous system has nothing to do with the friendly emotion of sympathy; rather, as I have just said, with its opposites: rage and fear. However, by a lucky coincidence the initials of Sympathico-Adrenal system are the same as those of the Self-Assertive emotions which are aroused by it.)
It follows from the above that these emotions involve incomparably heavier machinery, acting on the whole body, than
the process of thinking which, physiologically speaking, is confined to the roof of the brain. The chemical and visceral states induced by the action of the sympathico-adrenal system tend to persist; once this massive apparatus is set in motion it cannot be called off or 'change its direction' at a moment's notice. Common observation provides daily, painful confirmation of this. We are literally 'poisoned' by our adrenal humours; reason has little power over irritability or anxiety; it takes time to talk a person out of a mood, however valid the arguments; passion is blind to better judgement; anger and fear show physical after-effects long after their causes have been removed. If we could change our moods as quickly as we jump from one thought to another we would be acrobats of emotion.
Thinking, in its physiological aspect, is based on electro-chemical activities in the cerebral cortex and related regions of the brain, involving energy transactions which are minute compared to the massive glandular, visceral, and muscular changes that occur when emotions are aroused. These changes are governed by phylogenetically much older parts of the brain than the roof-structures which enable man to think in verbal symbols. Behaviour at any moment is the outcome of complex processes which operate simultaneously on several levels of the nervous system, from the spinal cord to our latest acquisition, the prefrontal lobes. There is probably no formal thinking without some affective colouring; but it is nevertheless legitimate to distinguish between form and colour -- in our case between the logical pattern of a comic narrative and the emotive charge which it carries.
The sympathico-adrenal system might be compared to the body of a piano which gives resonance to the cortical strings of thought. When all is well the huge wooden box lends depth and colour and warmth to the vibrations of the strings. But if you play a humorous scherzo with full pedal on, the resonating body is unable to follow the swift modulations of the chords -- thought and emotion have become dissociated. It is emotion deserted by thought which is discharged in laughter. For emotion, owing to its greater mass momentum, is unable to follow the sudden switch of ideas to a different type of logic or a new rule of the game; less nimble than thought, it tends to persist in a straight line. Ariel leads Caliban on by the nose: she jumps on a branch, he crashes into the tree.
It could be objected that the faint emotive charge of a joke, the slight malice or salaciousness which it arouses, would not be sufficient to bring the massive sympathico-adrenal machinery into action. The answer lies in the anachronistic character of our autonomous responses to stimuli which carry an echo, however faint, of situations that held a threat or promise in the remote past of the species; which once were biologically relevant, though they no longer are. These reactions lag by many millennia behind the conditions in which we live: we jump at a sudden sound; we develop gooseflesh in response to a screeching noise, to make our long-lost body hair bristle at the attack of some extinct beast; we sweat before an examination -- to dispose of the excessive heat our bodies might develop in the impending struggle with the examiner. I like to call these innate, anachronistic responses the over-statements of the body . One of the remarkable things about them is that they can be triggered off by certain stimuli in minute, quasi-homeopathic doses.
To sum up, the grain of salt which must be present in the narrative to make us laugh turns out to be a drop of adrenalin.
The Mechanism of Laughter
In the first chapter I discussed the logic of humour; in the previous section its emotional dynamics. Fitting the two together, we can now expand the formula on page 35 as follows: The sudden bisociation of a mental event with two habitually incompatible matrices results in an abrupt transfer of the train of thought from one associative context to another. The emotive charge which the narrative carried cannot be so transferred owing to its greater inertia and persistence; discarded by reason, the tension finds its outlet in laughter.
But that still leaves the question open why the excess energy should be worked off in the particular form of laughter and not, say, by flapping one's arms or wiggling one's toes. The somewhat tentative answer is that the muscular contractions and breathing actions in laughter seem to offer natural channels of least resistance for the overflow. To quote Freud:
According to the best of my knowledge, the grimaces and contortions of the corners of the mouth that characterize laughter appear first in the satisfied and over-satiated nursling when he drowsily quits the breast. . . . They are physical expressions of the determination to take no more nourishment, an 'enough' so to speak, or rather a 'more than enough'. . . . This primal sense of pleasurable saturation may have provided the link between the smile -- that basic phenomenon underlying laughter -- and its subsequent connection with other pleasurable processes of de-tension. [8]
In other words, the muscle-contractions of the smile, as the earliest manifestations of relief from tension, would thereafter become channels of least resistance.
The peculiar breathing in laughter, with its repeated, explosive exhalations, seems designed to 'puff away' surplus tension in a kind of respiratory gymnastics; and the vigorous gestures and slapping of thighs obviously serve the same function. Often these massive reactions seem to be quite out of proportion to the feeble stimuli which provoke them -- particularly when we do not like the type of joke which causes such hilarity in others:
A thousand Edinburgh schoolchildren burst into laughter when David Oistrakh, the Russian violinist, snapped a string while playing Schubert's Fantasy in C Major during a recital of a city housing estate yesterday. Their studious attention broke when Mr. Oistrakh -- guest ofhonour at the Edinburgh Festival -- held up the violin and looked with consternation at his accompanist. [9]
Let us try to understand what those brats found so funny. Firstly, there is the familiar pattern of the practical joke which the laws of physics play on the artist, suddenly revealing that his magic strings are made of common cat-gut -- 'I know you from a plum-tree'. The 'consternation' on Oistrakh's face is the consternation of the man slipping on the banana skin; exaltation is debunked by the sudden impact of triviality. But all this does not account for that unexpected, barbaric outburst of hilarity which schoolmasters know only too well -- unless one realizes that what I call, somewhat abstractly, 'the emotional charge of the narrative' contains here a mass of resentment, mostly perhaps unconscious, at having to sit still and listen 'with studious attention' to that Russian with the unpronounceable name; a repressed emotion, tending to beget fidgety motions, until the tension snaps with the string, releasing the outburst, instantly transforming the hushed class into a horde of savages.
In other words, all discussions of the comic remain bloodless abstractions unless we bear in mind that laughter is a phenomenon of the trigger-release type, where a minute cause can open the tap of surprisingly large stores of energy from various sources: repressed sadism; repressed sex; repressed fear; even repressed boredom. Here is a list of 'occasions for laughter' recorded by American undergraduates in reply to a questionnaire:
A pillow fight in the dormitory A girl friend tore her dress I fell during skating A dog came in during a lecture A mispronounced word in rhetoric class Being teased about my corpulence Lizzie trying to do a fairy dance My opponents in a bridge game bidding four spades when I held two aces and the king, jack and five of spades An article by a priest on the sex life of H. G. Wells. [10]
This ought to be enough to make one realize that laughter may be entirely mirthless and humourless;* it can be contrived as a means of social communication or in lieu of a rude noise. It can also serve to cover up sexual or sadistic gloating, as in the forced, tumescent laughter of the spectators at a strip-tease -- or in the jolly manifestations of English popular humour at public hangings in the last century.
Surprisingly, Bergson believed that one can only laugh in the presence of others -- presumably because this fitted his theory of laughter as an act of social correction ('one has no taste for the comic when one feels isolated. It seems that laughter needs an echo. Our laughter is always the laughter of
a group.'). [11] No doubt, collective giggling fits do occur in dormitories at girls' schools, and no doubt one laughs with more gusto in company than alone. But the infectiousness of emotive manifestations is a well-known phenomenon in group behaviour, which equally applies to hysteria, panic, even to infectious coughing of theatre audiences; it is not a specific characteristic of laughter, and contributes nothing to its explanation.
Lastly, laughter or smiling frequently occur in response to stimuli which in themselves are not comic, but merely signs or symbols for comic stimuli, or even symbols of symbols -- Chaplin's boots, Groucho Marx's cigar, caricatures of celebrities reduced to a few visual hints, catch-phrases and allusions to familiar situations. The analysis of these oblique cases often requires tracing back a long and involved thread of associations to its source, which is not much fun; yet the procedure is essentially the same as the literary critic's or the art historian's when they try to analyse the evocative power of a poetic image or a landscape. The task is made more complicated by the fact that the effect of such comic symbols -- the sight of Colonel Blimp on a cartoon, the appearance of Falstaff on the stage -- appears to be instantaneous; there seems to be no time for first accumulating and then discharging tension. But in these cases memory serves as an accumulator, a storage battery whose electric charge can be sparked off any time: the smile which greets Papageno strutting on to the scene is derived from a mixture of memories and expectations. All of which goes to show that to find the explanation why we laugh may be a task as delicate as analysing the chemical composition of a perfume, with its multiple ingredients -- some of which are never perceived, while others, sniffed in isolation, would make us wince.
The Act of Creation Page 5