* 'Wit' stems from witan, understanding, whose roots go back to the Sanskrit veda, knowledge. The German Witz means both joke and acumen; it comes from wissen, to know; Wissenschaft, science, is a close kin to Furwitz and Aberwitz -- presumption, cheek, and jest. French teaches the same lesson. Spirituel may either mean witty or spiritually profound; 'to amuse' comes from to muse' (a-muser), and a witty remark is a jeu d'esprit -- a playful, mischievous form of discovery. ** This chapter is based on the summary of the theory which I contributed to the fifteenth edition of the Encyclopaedia Britannica. [2]
2
Humour, in all its many-splendour'd varieties, can be simply defined as a type of stimulation which tends to elicit the laughter reflex. Spontaneous laughter is a motor reflex, produced by the coordinated contraction of fifteen facial muscles in a stereotyped pattern and accompanied by altered breathing. Electrical stimulation of the zygomatic major, the main lifting muscle of the upper lip with currents of varying intensity, produces facial expressions ranging from the faint smile through the broad grin, to the contortions typical of explosive laughter. [3] (The laughter and smile of civilized man is of course often of a conventional kind where voluntary effort deputizes for, or interferes with, spontaneous reflex activity; we are concerned, however, only with the latter.)
Once we realize that laughter is a humble reflex, we are immediately faced with several paradoxes. Motor reflexes, such as the contraction of the pupil of the eye in dazzling light, are simple responses to simple stimuli, whose value in the service of survival is obvious. But the involuntary contraction -- of fifteen facial muscles associated with certain irrepressible noises strikes one as an activity without any practical value, quite unrelated to the struggle for survival. Laughter is a reflex, but unique in that it has no apparent biological utility. One might call it a luxury reflex. Its only purpose seems to be to provide temporary relief from the stress of purposeful activities.
The second, related paradox is a striking discrepancy between the nature of the stimulus and that of the response in humorous transactions. When a blow beneath the knee-cap causes an automatic upward kick, both 'stimulus' and 'response' function on the same primitive physiological level, without requiring the intervention of higher mental functions. But that such a complex mental activity as reading a story by James Thurber should cause a specific reflex-contraction of the facial musculature is a phenomenon which has puzzled philosophers since Plato. There is no clear-cut, predictable response which would tell a lecturer whether he has succeeded in convincing his listeners; but when he is telling a joke, laughter serves as an experimental test. Humour is the only form of communication in which a stimulus on a high level of complexity produces a stereotyped, predictable response on the physiological reflex level. This enables us to use the response as an indicator for the presence of that elusive quality that we call humour -- as we use the click of the Geiger counter to indicate the presence of radioactivity. Such a procedure is not possible in any other form of art; and since the step from the sublime to the ridiculous is reversible, the study of humour provides the psychologist with important clues for the study of creativity in general.
3
The range of laughter-provoking experiences is enormous, from physical tickling to mental titillations of the most varied and sophisticated kinds. I shall attempt to demonstrate that there is unity in this variety, a common denominator of a specific and specifiable pattern which reflects the 'logic' or 'grammar' of humour. A few examples will help to unravel that pattern.
(a) A masochist is a person who likes a cold shower in the morning, so he takes a hot one. (b) An English lady, on being asked by a friend what she thought of her departed husband's whereabouts: 'Well, I suppose the poor soul is enjoying eternal bliss, but I wish you wouldn't talk about such unpleasant subjects.'* * This is a variant of Russell's anecdote in the Prologue. (c) A doctor comforts his patient: 'You have a very serious disease. Of ten persons who catch it only one survives. It is lucky you came to me, for I have recently had nine patients with this disease and they all died of it.' (d) Dialogue in a film by Claude Bern: 'Sir, I would like to ask for your daughter's hand.' 'Why not? You have akeady had the rest.' (e) A marquis at the court of Louis XV unexpectedly returned from a journey and, on entering his wife's boudoir, found her in the arms of a bishop. After a moment's hesitation the marquis walked calmly to the window, leaned out and began going through the motions of blessing the people in the Street. 'What are you doing?' cried the anguished wife. 'Monseigneur is performing my functions, so I am performing his.'
Is there a common pattern underlying these five stories? Starting with the last, we discover after a little reflection that the marquis's behaviour is both unexpected and perfectly logical -- but of a logic not usually applied to this type of situation. It is the logic of the division of labour, governed by rules as old as human civilization. But we expected that his reactions would be governed by a different set of rules -- the code of sexual morality. It is the sudden clash between these two mutually exclusive codes of rules -- or associative contexts, or cognitive holons -- which produces the comic effect. It compels us to perceive the situation in two self-consistent but incompatible frames of reference at the same time; it makes us function simultaneously on two different wave-lengths. While this unusual condition lasts, the event is not, as is normally the case, associated with a single frame of reference, but bisociated with two.
I have coined the term 'bisociation' to make a distinction between the routines of disciplined thinking within a single universe of discourse -- on a single plane, as it were -- and the creative types of mental activity which always operate on more than one plane. In humour, both the creation of a subtle joke and the re-creative act of perceiving the joke, involve the delightful mental jolt of a sudden leap from one plane or associative context to another.
Let us turn to our other examples. In the film dialogue, the daughter's 'hand' is perceived first in a metaphorical frame of reference, then suddenly in a literal, bodily context. The doctor thinks in terms of statistical probabilities, the rules of which are inapplicable to individual cases; and there is an added twist because, in contrast to what naive common sense suggests, the patient's odds of survival are unaffected by whatever happened before, and are still one against ten. This is one of the profound paradoxes of the theory of probability; the mathematical joke implies a riddle.
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 pun
ch-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.
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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:
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