Satire is a verbal caricature which shows us a deliberately distorted image of a person, institution or society. The traditional method of the caricaturist is to exaggerate those features which he considers to be characteristic of his victim's personality and to simplify by leaving out everything that is not relevant for his purpose. The satirist uses the same technique; and the features of society which he selects for magnification are of course those of which he disapproves. The result is a juxtaposition, in the reader's mind, of his habitual image of the world in which he moves, and its absurd reflection in the satirist's distorting mirror. The reader is thus made to recognize familiar features in the absurd, and absurdity in the familiar. Without this double vision the satire would be humourless. If the human Yahoos were really such evil-smelling monsters as Gulliver's Houyhnhnm hosts claim, the book would not be a satire but the statement of a deplorable truth. Straight invective is not satire; it must deliberately overshoot its mark.
A similar effect is achieved if, instead of exaggerating the objectionable features, the satirist projects them by means of the allegory on to a different background, such as an animal society. A succession of writers, from Aristophanes though Swift and Anatole France to George Orwell, have used this technique to focus attention on deformities of society which, blunted by habit, we take for granted.
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The coarsest type of humour is the practical joke: pulling away the chair from under the dignitary's lowered bottom. The victim is perceived, first as a person of consequence, then suddenly as an inert body subject to the laws of physics: authority is debunked by gravity, mind by matter; man is degraded to a mechanism. Goose-stepping soldiers act like automatons, the pedant behaves like a mechanical robot, the Sergeant-Major attacked by diarrhoea or Hamlet getting the hiccoughs show man's lofty aspirations deflated by his all-too-solid flesh. A similar effect is produced by artefacts which masquerade as humans: Punch and Judy, Jack-in-the-Box, gadgets playing tricks on their masters as if with calculated malice.
In Henri Bergson's theory of laughter, this dualism of subtle mind and inert matter -- he calls it 'the mechanical encrusted on the living' -- is made to serve as an explanation of all varieties of the comic, whereas in the light of what has been said it applies only to one type of comic situation among many others.
From the bisociation of man and machine, there is only a step to the man-animal hybrid. Disney's creations behave as if they were human without losing their animal appearance. The caricaturist follows the reverse procedure by discovering horsey, mousey, piggish features in the human face.
This leads us to the comic devices of imitation, impersonation and disguise. The impersonator is perceived as himself and somebody else at the same time. If the result is slightly degrading -- but only in that case -- the spectator will laugh. The comedian impersonating a public personality, two pairs of trousers serving as the legs of the pantomime horse, men disguised as women and women as men -- in each case the paired patterns reduce each other to absurdity.
The most aggressive form of impersonation is the parody, designed to deflate hollow pretence, to destroy illusion, and to undermine pathos by harping on the human weaknesses of the victim. Wigs falling off, speakers forgetting their lines, gestures remaining suspended in the air: the parodist's favourite points of attack are again situated on the line of intersection between the sublime and the trivial.
Playful behaviour in young animals and children is amusing because it is an unintentional parody of adult behaviour, which it imitates or anticipates. Young puppies are droll, because their helplessness, affection and puzzled expression make them appear more 'human' than full-grown dogs; because their ferocious growls strike one as impersonations of adult behaviour -- like a child in a bowler hat; because the puppy's waddling, uncertain gait makes it a choice victim of nature's practical jokes; because its bodily disproportions, the huge padded paws, Falstaffian belly and wrinkled philosopher's brow give it the appearance of a caricature; and lastly because we are such very superior beings compared to a puppy. A fleeting smile can contain many logical ingredients and emotional spices.
Both Cicero and Francis Bacon regarded deformity as the most frequent cause of laughter. Renaissance princes collected dwarfs, hunchbacks and blackamoors for their merriment. As we have become too humane for that kind of fun, we are apt to forget that it requires a good deal of imagination and empathy to recognize in a midget a fellow-human who, though different in appearance, thinks and feels much as oneself does. In children this projective faculty is still rudimentary; they tend to mock people with a stammer or a limp, and laugh at the foreigner with an odd pronunciation. Similar attitudes are shown by tribal or parochial societies to any form of appearance or behaviour that deviates from their strict norms: the stranger is not really human, he only pretends to be 'like us'. The Greeks used the same word 'barbarous' for the foreigner and the stutterer: the uncouth, barking sounds the stranger uttered were considered a parody of human speech. Vestiges of this primitive attitude are still found in the curious fact that we accept a foreign accent with tolerance, but find the imitation of a foreign accent comic. We know that the imitator's mispronunciations are mere pretence; this knowledge makes sympathy unnecessary and enables us to be childishly cruel with a clean conscience.
Another source of innocent merriment occurs when the part and the whole change roles, and attention becomes focused on a detail torn out of the functional context on which its meaning depended. When the gramophone needle gets stuck, the soprano's voice keeps repeating the same word on the same quaver, which suddenly assumes a grotesquely independent life. The same happens when faulty orthography displaces attention from meaning to spelling, or when the beam of consciousness is directed at functions which otherwise are performed automatically -- the paradox of the centipede. The self-conscious, awkward youth, who 'does not know what to do with his hands' is a victim of the same predicament.
Comedies used to be classified according to their reliance on situations, manners or characters. The logic of the last two need no further discussion; in the first, comic effects are contrived by making a situation participate simultaneously in two independent chains of events with different associative contexts, which intersect through coincidence, mistaken identity, or confusions of time and occasion. The coincidence on which they are hinged is the deux ex machina of both comedy and antique tragedy.
Why tickling should produce laughter remained an enigma in all earlier theories of the comic. Darwin was the first to point out that the innate response to tickling is squirming and straining to withdraw the tickled part -- a defence-reaction designed to escape attacks on vulnerable areas such as the soles of the feet, armpits, belly and ribs. If a fly settles on the belly of a horse, it causes a ripple of muscle-contractions across the skin -- the equivalent of squirming in the tickled child. But the horse does not laugh when tickled, and the child not always. It will laugh only -- and this is the crux of the matter -- when it perceives tickling as a mock attack, a caress in mildly aggressive disguise. For the same reason people laugh only when tickled by others, not when they tickle themselves.
Experiments in Yale on babies under one year old revealed the not very surprising fact that they laughed fifteen times more often when tickled by their mothers than when they were tickled by strangers; and when tickled by strangers they mostly cried. For the mock attack must be recognized as being only pretence, and with strangers one cannot be sure. Even with its own mother there is an ever-so-slight feeling of uncertainty and apprehension, the expression of which will alternate with laughter in the baby's behaviour; and it is precisely this element of tension between the tickles which is relieved in the laughter accompanying the squirm. The rule of the game is: 'Let me be just a little frightened so that I can enjoy the relief'.
Thus the tickler is impersonating an aggressor, but is simultaneously known not to be one; this is probably the first situation in life which makes the infant live on two planes at once -- a delectab
le foretaste of being tickled by the horror comic.
Humour in the visual arts reflects the same logical structures as discussed before. Its most primitive form is the distorting mirror at the fun fair which reflects the human frame elongated into a column or compressed into the shape of a toad; it plays a practical joke on the victim who sees the image in the mirror both as his familiar self and a patient lump of plasticine that can be stretched and squeezed into any absurd form. But while the mirror distorts mechanically, the caricaturist does it selectively, by the same technique of exaggerating characteristic features and simplifying the rest, which the satirist employs. Like the satirist, the caricaturist reveals the absurd in the familiar; and like the satirist he must overshoot his mark. His malice is rendered harmless by our knowledge that the monstrous pot-bellies and bow-legs he draws are not real; real deformities are no longer comic, they arouse pity.
The artist, painting a stylized portrait, also uses the technique of selection, exaggeration and simplification; but his attitude to the model is dominated by positive empathy instead of negative malice; and the features he selects for emphasis differ accordingly. In some character-studies by Leonardo, Hogarth or Daumier the passions reflected are so violent, the grimaces so ferocious, that it is impossible to tell whether they were meant as portraits or caricatures. If you feel that such distortions of the human face are not really possible, that Daumier merely pretended that they exist, then you are absolved from horror and pity and can laugh at his grotesques. But if you think that this is indeed what Daumier saw in those de-humanized faces, then you feel that you are looking at a work of art.
Humour in music is a subject to be approached with diffidence, because the language of music ultimately eludes translation into verbal symbols. All one can do is to point at some analogies: a 'rude' noise, such as the blast of a trumpet inserted into a passage where it does not belong, has the effect of a practical joke; a singer or an instrument out of tune produces a similar reaction; the imitation of animal sounds, vocally or instrumentally, exploits the technique of impersonation; a nocturne by Chopin transposed into hot jazz, or a simple street song performed in the style of the Valkyrie is a marriage of incompatibles. These are primitive devices corresponding to the lowest levels of humour; higher up we come across compositions like Ravel's La Valse -- an affectionate parody of the sentimental Wiener Walzer; or Haydn's Surprise Symphony or the mock-heroics of Kodály's folk opera, Hári János. But in comic opera it is almost impossible to sort out how much of the comic effect is derived from the book, how much from the music; and the highest forms of musical humour, the unexpected delights of a light-hearted scherzo by Mozart, defy verbal analysis -- or else this would have to be so specialized and technical as to defeat its purpose. Although a 'witty' musical passage, which springs a surprise on the audience and cheats it of its 'tense expectations', certainly has the emotion-relieving effect which tends to produce laughter, a concert audience may occasionally smile, but will hardly ever laugh; which goes to show that the emotions evoked by musical humour are of a subtler kind than those of the verbal and visual variety.
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The criteria which determine whether a humorous offering will be judged good, bad or indifferent, are of course partly a matter of period taste and personal preference, partly dependent on the style and technique of the humorist. It would seem that these criteria can be summed up under three main headings: (a) originality, (b) emphasis, (c) economy.
The merits of originality are self-evident; it provides the essential element of surprise, which cuts across our expectations. But true originality is not very often met either in humour or in other forms of art. One common substitute for it is to increase the tension of the audience by various techniques of suggestive emphasis. The clown's domain is the rich, coarse type of humour; he piles it on; he appeals to sadistic, sexual, scatalogical impulses; one of his favourite tricks is repetition of the same situation, the same key-phrase. This diminishes the effect of surprise, but helps in drawing emotion into the familiar channel -- more and more liquid is being pumped into the punctured pipeline.
Emphasis on local colour and ethnic peculiarities -- as in Scottish, Jewish, Cockney stories -- is a further means to channel emotion into familiar tracks. The Scotsman or Cockney must of course be caricatures if the comic purpose is to be achieved -- in other words, exaggeration and simplification once more appear as indispensable tools to provide emphasis.
In the higher forms of humour, however, emphasis tends to yield to the opposite kind of virtue: economy. Economy, in humour and art, does not mean mechanical brevity, but the implicit hint instead of the explicit statement -- the oblique allusion in lieu of the frontal attack. The old-fashioned Punch cartoon featuring the British lion and the Russian bear 'rubs it in'; the New Yorker cartoon poses a riddle which the reader must solve by an imaginative effort in order to 'see the joke'.
In humour, as in other forms of art, emphasis and economy are complementary techniques. The first forces the offering down the consumer's throat; the second tantalizes, to whet his appetite.
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Earlier theories -- including even Bergson's and Freud's -- have treated humour as an isolated phenomenon, without attempting to throw light on the intimate connections between the comic and the tragic, between laughter and crying, between artistic inspiration, comic inventiveness and scientific discovery. Yet (as we shall see) these three domains of creative activity form a continuum with no sharp boundaries between wit and ingenuity, nor between the art of discovery and the discoveries of art.
It has been said, for instance, that scientific discovery consists in seeing an analogy which nobody has seen before. When, in the Song of Songs, Solomon compared the Shulamite's neck to a tower of ivory, he saw an analogy which nobody had seen before; when William Harvey perceived in the exposed heart of a fish a messy kind of mechanical pump, he did the same; and when the caricaturist draws a nose like a cucumber, he again does just that. In fact, all the bisociative patterns discussed above, which constitute the 'grammar' of humour, can also enter the service of art or discovery, as the case may be. The pun has its equivalent in the rhyme, but also in the problems which confront the philologist. The clash between incompatible codes of behaviour may yield comedy, tragedy or new psychological insights. The dualism of mind and inert matter is exploited by the practical joker, but also provides one of the eternal themes of literature: man as a marionette on strings, manipulated by gods or chromosomes. The man-beast dichotomy is reflected by Donald Duck, but also in Kafka's Metamorphosis and the psychologist's rat-experiments. The caricature corresponds not only to the artist's character-portrait, but also to the scientist's diagrams and charts, which emphasize the relevant features and leave out the rest.
The conscious and unconscious processes underlying creativity are essentially combinatorial activities -- the bringing together of previously separate areas of knowledge and experience. The scientist's purpose is to achieve synthesis; the artist aims at a juxtaposition of the familiar and the eternal; the humorist's game is to contrive a collision. And as their motivations differ, so do the emotional responses evoked by each type of creativity: discovery satisfies the 'exploratory drive'; art induces emotional catharsis through the 'oceanic feeling'; humour incites malice and provides a harmless outlet for it. Laughter can be described as the 'Haha reaction'; the discoverer's Eureka cry as the 'Aha! reaction'; and the delight of the aesthetic experience as the 'Ah . . . reaction. But the transitions from one to the other are continuous: witticism blends into epigram, caricature into portrait; and whether one considers architecture, medicine, chess or cookery, there is no clear frontier where the realm of science ends and that of art begins. Comedy and tragedy, laughter and weeping, mark the extremes of a continuous spectrum.
SUMMARY
Humour provides a back-door entry to the domain of creativity because it is the only example of a complex intellectual stimulus releasing a simple bodily response -- the laughter reflex.
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To describe the unitary pattern underlying all varieties of humour I have proposed the term 'bisociation' -- perceiving a situation or event in two mutually exclusive associative contexts. The result is an abrupt transfer of the train of consciousness to a different track, governed by a different logic or 'rule of the game. This intellectual jolt deflates our expectations; the emotions they aroused have suddenly become redundant, and are flushed out along channels of least resistance in laughter.
The emotions thus involved, however complex, always contain a dominant element of the self-assertive, aggressive-defensive tendencies. They are based on the ancient adrenal-sympathetic branch of the nervous system -- the old brain -- and have a much stronger momentum and persistence than the subtle and devious processes of cortical reasoning, with which they are unable to keep step. It is emotion deserted by thought that is discharged, harmlessly, in laughter. But this luxury reflex could only arise in a creature whose reasoning has gained a degree of independence from its biological drives, enabling him to perceive his own emotions as redundant -- to realize that he has been fooled. The person who laughs is the opposite of the fanatic whose reason has been blinded by emotion -- and who fools himself.
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