Janus
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The widowed lady who looks upon death as 'eternal bliss' and at the same time 'an unpleasant subject', epitomizes the common human predicament of living in the 'divided house of faith and reason'. Here again the simple joke carries unconscious overtones and undertones, audible to the inner ear alone.
The masochist under the shower who punishes himself by depriving himself of his daily punishment is governed by rules which are a reversal of those of normal logic. (We can also construct a pattern where both frames of reference are reversed: 'A sadist is a person who is kind to a masochist.') However, the joker does not really believe that the masochist takes his hot shower as a punishment; he only pretends to believe it. Irony is the satirist's most effective weapon; it pretends to accept the opponent's ways of reasoning in order to expose their implicit absurdity or viciousness.
Thus the common pattern underlying these stories is the perceiving of a situation or idea in two self-consistent but mutually incompatible frames of reference or associative contexts. We might call it a collision between two mental holons, each governed by its own rule-book. This formula can be shown to have a general validity for all forms of humour and wit, some of which will be discussed below. But it covers only one aspect of humour -- its logical structure. We must now turn to another fundamental aspect -- the emotional dynamics which breathes life into that structure and makes us laugh, giggle or smile.
4
When a comedian tells a story, he deliberately sets out to create a certain tension in his listeners, which mounts as the narrative progresses. But it never reaches its expected climax. The punch-line or pointe acts as a verbal guillotine which cuts across the logical development of the story; it debunks our dramatic expectations; the tension we felt becomes suddenly redundant and is exploded in laughter, like water gushing from a punctured pipe. To put it differently, laughter disposes of emotive excitations which have become pointless and must somehow be worked off along physiological channels of least resistance; and the function of the 'luxury reflex' is to provide these channels.
A glance at a caricature by Hogarth or Rowlandson, showing the brutal merriment of people in a tavern, makes one realize at once that they are working off their surplus of adrenalin by contracting their face muscles into grimaces, slapping their thighs, and exhaling in explosive puffs through the half-closed glottis. Their flushed faces reveal that the emotions disposed of through these tension-relieving safety valves are brutality, envy, sexual gloating. However, if one leafs through an album of New Yorker cartoons, coarse laughter yields to an amused and rarefied smile: the ample flow of adrenalin has been distilled and crystallized into a grain of Attic salt. As we move across the spectrum of humour, from its coarse to its subtle forms, from practical joke to brain-teaser, from jibe to irony, from anecdote to epigram, the emotional climate shows a parallel transformation. The emotion discharged in coarse laughter is aggression robbed of its purpose; the jokes small children enjoy are mostly scatological; adolescents of all ages gloat on vicarious sex; the sick joke trades on repressed sadism, satire on righteous indignation. There is a bewildering variety of moods involved in different forms of humour, including mixed or contradictory feelings; but whatever the mixture, it must contain a basic ingredient which is indispensable: an impulse, however faint, of aggression or apprehension. It may appear in the guise of malice, contempt, the veiled cruelty of condescension, or merely an absence of sympathy with the victim of the joke -- 'a momentary anaesthesia of the heart', as Bergson put it. In the subtler types of humour the aggressive tendency may be so faint that only careful analysis will detect it, like the presence of salt in a well-prepared dish -- which, however, would be tasteless without it. Replace aggression by sympathy, and the same situation -- a drunk falling on his face -- will no longer be comic but pathetic, and evoke not laughter but pity. It is the aggressive element, the detached malice of the comic impersonator which turns pathos into bathos, tragedy into travesty. Malice may be combined with affection in friendly teasing -- or when we don't know whether we shall laugh or cry at the misadventures of Charlie Chaplin; and the aggressive component in civilized humans may be sublimated or no longer conscious. But in jokes which appeal to children and primitive people, cruelty and boastful self-assertiveness are much in evidence. In 1961 a survey carried out among American children aged eight to fifteen made the researchers conclude that 'mortification or discomfort or hoaxing of others very readily caused laughter, while a witty or funny remark often passed unnoticed'. [4]
Similar views are reflected in historically earlier forms and theories of the comic. In Aristotle's view, laughter was intimately related to ugliness and debasement. Cicero held that 'the province of the ridiculous . . . lies in a certain baseness and deformity'. Descartes believed that laughter was a manifestation of joy 'mixed with surprise or hatred or sometimes with both'. In Francis Bacon's list of the causes which give rise to laughter, the first place is given to 'deformity'. One of the most frequently quoted utterances on the subject is this definition in Hobbes's Leviathan:
The passion of laughter is nothing else but sudden glory arising from
a sudden conception of some eminency in ourselves by comparison with
the infirmity of others, or with our own formerly.
Translated into our terminology, laughter appears as a harmless outlet for a sudden overflow of the self-assertive tendency. However much the opinions of the theorists differ, on this one point nearly all of them agree: that the emotions discharged in laughter always contain an element of aggressiveness. But aggression and apprehension are twin phenomena; psychologists talk of 'aggressive-defensive impulses'. Accordingly, one of the typical situations in which laughter occurs is the moment of sudden cessation of fear caused by some imaginary danger. Rarely is the nature of laughter as an over-flow of redundant tensions more strikingly manifested than in the sudden change of expression on the small child's face from anxious apprehension to the happy laughter of relief. This seems to be unrelated to humour; yet at a closer look we find here the same logical structure as before: the wildly barking little dog was first perceived by the child in a context of danger, then as a tail-wagging puppy; the tension has suddenly become redundant, and spills over.
Kant realized that what causes laughter is 'the sudden transformation of a tense expectation into nothing'. Herbert Spencer took up the idea and attempted to formulate it in physiological terms: 'Emotions and sensations tend to generate bodily movements. . . . When consciousness is unawares transferred from great things to small', the 'liberated nerve force' will expend itself along channels of least resistance -- the bodily motions of laughter. Freud incorporated Spencer's theory of humour into his own*, with special emphasis on the release of repressed emotions in laughter; he also attempted to explain why the excess energy should be worked off in that particular way:
According to the best of my knowledge, the grimaces and contortions
of the corners of the mouth that characterise laughter appear first
in the satisfied and over-satiated nurseling 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. [5]
* For a detailed analysis of Freud's and Bergson's theories of
humour, see Insight and Outlook, Appendix II.
In other words, the muscle-contractions of the smile, as the earliest expressions of relief from tension, would thereafter serve as channels of least resistance. Similarly, the explosive exhalations of laughter seem designed to 'puff away' surplus tension, and the agitated gestures obviously serve the same function.
It may be objected that such massive reactions
often seem quite out of proportion to the slight stimulations which provoke them. But we must bear in mind that laughter is a phenomenon of the trigger-releaser type, where a minute pull may open the tap for vast amounts of stored emotions, often derived from unconscious sources: repressed sadism, sexual tumescence, unavowed fear, even boredom: the explosive laughter of a class of schoolboys at some trivial incident is a measure of their pent-up resentment during a boring lecture. Another factor which may amplify the reaction out of all proportion to the comic stimulus is the social infectiousness which laughter shares with other emotive manifestations of group-behaviour.
Laughter or smiling may also be caused by stimulations which are not in themselves comic, but signs or symbols deputizing for well-established comic patterns: Chaplin's boots, Groucho Marx's cigar, catch-phases or allusions to family jokes. To discover why we laugh requires on some occasions tracing back a long, involved thread of associations to its source. This task is further complicated by the fact that the effect of such comic symbols -- on a cartoon or on the stage -- appears to be instantaneous, without allowing time for the accumulation and subsequent discharge of 'expectations' and 'emotive tensions'. But here memory comes into play, acting as a storage battery whose charge can be sparked off at any time: the smile which greets Falstaff's appearance on the stage is derived from a mixture of memories and expectations. Besides, even if our reaction to a New Yorker cartoon appears to be instantaneous, there is always a process in time until we 'see the joke'; the cartoon has to tell a story, even if it is telescoped into a few seconds. All of which goes to show that to analyse humour is a task as delicate as analysing the chemical composition of a perfume with its multiple ingredients -- some of which are never consciously perceived, while others, when sniffed in isolation, would make us wince.
5
I have discussed first the logical structure of humour; and then its emotional dynamics. Putting the two together, we may summarize the result as follows: the bisociation of a situation or idea with two mutually incompatible contexts, and the resulting abrupt transfer of the train of thoughts from one context to another, puts a sudden end to our 'tense expectations'; the accumulated emotion, deprived of its object, is left hanging in the air, and is discharged in laughter. When the marquis rushes to the window and starts blessing the people in the street, our intellect turns a somersault and enters with gusto into the new game; but the malicious erotic feelings which the start of the story has aroused cannot be fitted into the new context; deserted by the nimble intellect, it gushes out in laughter like air from a punctured tyre. To put it differently: we laugh because our emotions have a greater inertia and persistence than our reasoning processes. Affects are incapable of keeping step with reasoning; unlike reasoning, they cannot 'change direction' at a moment's notice. To the physiologist this is self-evident since our self-assertive emotions operate through the phylogenetically old, massive apparatus of the sympathetic nervous system and its allied hormones, acting on the whole body, while language and logic are confined to the neocortex at the roof of the brain. Common experience provides daily confirmation of this particular aspect of the dichotomy between the old and the new brain. We are literally 'poisoned' by our adrenal humours; it takes time to talk a person out of a mood; fear and anger show persistent after-effects long after their causes have been removed. If we could change our moods as quickly as we jump from one idea to another, we would be acrobats of emotion; but since we are not, our thoughts and emotions frequently become dissociated. It is emotion deserted by thought that is discharged in laughter. For emotion, owing to its greater mass-momentum, is, as we have seen, unable to follow the sudden switch of ideas to a different type of logic; 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. Aldous Huxley once wrote:
We carry around with us a glandular system which was admirably well
adapted to life in the Paleolithic times but it is not very well
adapted to life now. Thus we tend to produce more adrenalin than is
good for us, and we either suppress ourselves and turn destructive
energies inwards or else we do not suppress ourselves and we start
hitting people. [6]
A third alternative is to laugh at people. There are other outlets for tame aggression such as competitive sports or literary criticism; but they are acquired skills, whereas laughter is a gift of nature, included in our native equipment. The glands that control our emotions reflect conditions at a stage of evolution when the struggle for existence was more deadly than at present -- and when the reaction to any strange sight or sound consisted in jumping, bristling, fighting or running. As security and comfort increased in the species, new outlets were needed for the disposal of emotions which could no longer be worked off through their original channels, and laughter is obviously one of them. But it could only emerge when reasoning had gained a degree of independence from the 'blind' urges of emotion. Below the human level, thinking and feeling appear to form an indivisible unity; not until thinking became gradually detached from feeling could man perceive his own emotion as redundant, confront his glandular 'humours' with a sense of humour, and make the smiling admission, 'I have been fooled.'
6
The foregoing discussion was intended to provide the tools for dissecting and analysing any specimen of humour. The procedure to be followed is to determine the nature of the two (or more) frames of reference whose collision gives rise to the comic effect -- to discover the type of logic or 'rules of the game' which govern each. In the more sophisticated type of joke the 'logic' is implied and hidden; and the moment we state it in explicit form, the joke is dead. Unavoidably, the section that follows will be strewn with cadavers.
Max Eastman, in The Enjoyment of Laughter, remarked of a laboured pun by Ogden Nash: 'It is not a pun but a punitive expedition'. That goes for most puns, even for Milton's famous lines about the Prophet Elijah's ravens -- which were 'though ravenous/taught to abstain from what they brought'; or Freud's character, who calls the Christmas season the 'alcoholidays'. Most puns strike one as atrocious, perhaps because they represent the most primitive form of humour: two disparate strings of thought tied together in an acoustic knot. But the very primitiveness of such bisociations based on pure sound may account for the pun's immense popularity with children and its prevalence in certain types of mental disorder ('punning mania').
From the play on sounds -- puns and Spoonerisms -- an ascending series leads to the play on words and so to the play on ideas. When Groucho Marx says of a safari in Africa, 'We shot two bucks, but that was all the money we had', the joke hinges on the two meanings of the word 'buck'. It is moderately funny, but would be even less so without the reference to Groucho, which evokes a visual image instantly arousing a high voltage of expectations. The story of the marquis and the bishop is clearly of a superior type of humour, because it plays not on mere words, but on ideas.
It would be quite easy -- and equally boring -- to draw up a list in which jokes and witticisms are classified according to the nature of the frames of reference whose collision creates the comic effect. We have already come across a few, such as metaphorical versus literal meaning (the daughter's 'hand'); professional versus common-sense logic (the statistically minded doctor); incompatible codes of behaviour (the marquis); confrontations of the trivial and the exalted ('eternal bliss'); trains of reasoning travelling happily joined together in opposite directions (the sadist who is kind to the masochist). The list could be extended indefinitely; in fact any two cognitive holons can be made to yield a comic effect of sorts by hooking them together and infusing a drop of malice into the concoction. The frames of reference may even be defined by such abstract concepts as 'time' and 'weather'; the absent-minded professor who tries to read the temperature from his watch or to tell the hour from the thermometer, is comic for the same reason as it would be to watch a game of ping-pong played with a football or a game of rugb
y played with a ping-pong ball. The variations are infinite, the formula remains the same.
Jokes and anecdotes have a single point of culmination. The literary forms of sustained humour, such as the picaresque novel, do not rely on a single effect but on a series of minor climaxes. The narrative moves along the line of intersection of contrasted planes -- e.g., the fantasy world of Don Quixote and the cunning horse-sense of Sancho Panza -- or is made to oscillate between them; as a result tension is continuously generated and discharged in mild amusement.
Comic verse thrives on the melodious union of incongruities -- Carroll's 'cabbages and kings'; and particularly on the contrast between lofty form and flatfooted content. Certain metric forms like the hexameter or Alexandrine arouse expectations of pathos, of the heroic and exalted; to pour into these epic moulds some homely, trivial content -- 'Beautiful soup, so rich and green / Waiting in a hot tureen -- is an almost infallible comic device. The rolling dactyls of the first lines of a limerick which carry, instead of Hector or Achilles, a young lady from Niger for a ride, make her ridiculous even before the expected calamities befall her. Instead of a heroic mould, a soft lyrical one may also pay off: 'And what could be moister / Than the tears of an oyster?'
Another type of incongruity between form and content yields the bogus proverb: 'The rule is: jam tomorrow and jam yesterday -- but never jam today.' Two contradictory statements have been telescoped into a line whose homely, admonitory sound conveys the impression of a popular adage. In a similar way, nonsense verse achieves its effect by pretending to make sense, by forcing the reader to project meaning into the phonetic pattern of the jabberwocky, as one interprets the ink blots in a Rorschach test.