Teasing has long occupied a problematic place in Western culture. In Roman times, law prohibited mala carmina—abusive songs and poems that centered upon ritualized insult. Today teasing is often prohibited on the grammar-school playground and in the workplace. It is regulated by speech codes on college campuses. Irony, a relative of teasing, is not enjoying the most sterling of reputations. In the circles of literary criticism, a widely read treatise, “Regulations for Literary Criticism in the 1990s,” lists Regulation VII as “no irony.” The accompanying rationale is that “great literature demands of us a high seriousness of purpose—not disrespectful laughter and clowning around.” In For Common Things, Jedediah Purdy, fresh from his undergraduate days at Yale, issued a clarion call for sincerity and a move away from the derisive irony that fills the air during the swilling of cocktails at Ivy League parties.
The perils of teasing are patently clear. “Just teasing” is invoked as a last defense by the grammar-school bully and the incorrigible sexual malfeasant at work. But what they are referring to with the claim “I was just teasing” upon closer inspection is not teasing at all but aggression and coercion, pure and simple. Bullies steal, punch, kick, spit on, torment, and humiliate. They don’t really tease. Sexual predators grope, leer, and make crude, at times threatening, passes. They’re pretty ineffectual flirts. In contrast, teasing is a mode of play, no doubt with a sharp edge, in which we provoke others. We turn to the playful provocation of teasing to negotiate the ambiguities of social living—establishing hierarchies, testing commitments to social norms, uncovering potential romantic interest, negotiating conflicts over work and resources. To understand how this is so, we must first consider a universal institution that is the close relative of the tease—the jester or fool—as well as the philosophy of language. In doing so, we will discover a register of the voice and a pattern of semantics that illuminate the brilliant ways that humans put their bodies and representational minds to use in teasing.
FOOL’S PARADISE
On January 19, 1449, the Scots passed the Act for the Away-Putting of Feynet Fools. This act set into law punishments—the nailing of the ear to a post, amputation of fingers—for individuals falsely posing as jesters and fools. Fools and jesters were serious business in the Middle Ages and early Renaissance. Court jesters often acted as advisors on economic and diplomatic matters. They enjoyed well-remunerated positions within the courts of kings and queens in China, the Middle East, and Europe. The prominence of the jester and fool in public life is a human universal that dates back to the Aztecs, Mayans, and Native Americans of North America.
Court jesters, as richly detailed by Beatrice Otto in Fools Are Everywhere, hailed from poor backgrounds. Jesters most often were unusual in appearance or manner: hunchbacks, dwarves, and extremely ugly individuals were more likely candidates for this essential role than the town hunk (thus placing fools outside the competition for mates and resources). They often possessed other creative talents—they tended to be gifted musicians, poets, jugglers, or dancers.
Jesters dressed in their easily identifiable absurd garb. With their riddles, pratfalls, pranks, and sharp-tongued mockery, delivered with comical expressions, they satirized the powerful—the royal court, its nepotistic hangers-on, and especially the church. Jesters pointed to alternatives to the status quo. They reversed reality, turning conventional wisdom on its head. They often did so on behalf of the downtrodden and poor (and in fact, political pamphlets were developed out of some jesters’ activities). In the words of the great court jester Nasrudin, “I’m upside down in this life.”
When I began my study of teasing some ten years ago, the field would have benefited from the insights of a medieval jester or fool. They embodied a playfully provocative mode of commentary that speaks to the essence of what a tease is. The scientific study of teasing was hampered by poorly specified definitions of this ethereal phenomenon. This often happens when scientists rely upon natural language—the words we use—to capture what is largely a nonverbal phenomenon whose multilayered meaning is discerned in the subtle timing of a laugh or the shift in the speed or register of the voice.
The consensus was that teasing is “playful aggression.” Clearly, though, teasing does not equate to all kinds of playful aggression. Unintended playful aggression—accidentally elbowing a fellow train passenger’s nose while you’re hustling money with your imitation of Harpo Marx—is clearly not teasing (at least I hope you don’t think so). More general references to play are ambiguous. Many forms of childhood play, such as role playing (children acting as princesses or ninja warriors), roughhousing, highly structured playground games like tag or four square, and the ritualized jokes and conversational games that fill the air of school buses—are not teasing. The same is true of many forms of adult play: We tell amusing stories, exchange playful repartee, and josh around in ways that are not teasing.
Playful aggression fails to capture the edge of the antics of the jester and fool. In terms more felicitous to scientific inquiry, my colleagues Ann Kring and Lisa Capps and I defined a tease as an intentional provocation accompanied by playful off-record markers. We referred to provocation instead of aggression because a tease involves an act that is intended to provoke emotion, to discern another’s commitments. The provocation is evident in the content of the verbal utterance or some physical act, like a poke in the ribs, the proverbial pinch of the cheek, or a tongue protrusion. The tease, in a funny way (and I’m not teasing), is like a social vaccine. Vaccines are weak forms of pathogens (for example, smallpox) that, when injected, stimulate the recipient’s immune system—the inflammation response, killer T cells that recognize the dangerous pathogen, bind to it and kill it. The tease seeks to stimulate the recipient’s emotional system, to reveal the individual’s social commitments.
The more mysterious element is what is unsaid in the tease. This family of linguistic acts we called off-record markers. These are the nonverbal actions that swirl around the hostile provocation and signal that it is not to be taken literally but instead in the spirit of play. Here we turned to philosophical accounts of literal and nonliteral communication to find principles that account for the art of the tease, philosophical principles that organize the antics of the fool and that help differentiate the bully from the sage.
THIS AND NOT THIS
In the mid-1960s, philosopher Paul Grice outlined four principles of communication that would profoundly shape the study of pragmatics—that is, how people speak. Sincere communication, according to Grice, involves utterances that are to be taken literally. These statements should adhere as closely as possible to four maxims (see table below). Statements should follow the rule of quality—they should be truthful, honest, and based in evidence. Statements should be appropriately informative—the rule of quantity—and avoid the Strunk and White catastrophes of being too wordy or opaquely succinct. Statements should be relevant and on topic and avoid meandering into digressions, irrelevances, or stream-of-consciousness flights of fancy. Finally, in honoring the rule of manner, statements should be direct, clear, and to the point (sorry if I’ve violated this one).
Utterances that follow these four simple rules are on-record, and are to be taken literally. When an MD provides a prognosis about a life-threatening condition, she should follow these four rules of on-record communication. So too should the financial advisor announcing the unexpected loss of a family fortune—these are not the best moments for exaggeration, intentional falsehoods, fantastical description, obvious repetition, digression, meandering, or catchy metaphors or poetic obliqueness. Much of our social life, in fact—romantic declarations, sealing business deals, critiques at work, teaching young toddlers reaching to touch red-hot burners or rabid dogs—transpires in this realm of literal, on-record communication.
GRICE’S MAXIMS OF COMMUNICATION
LINGUISTIC PRINCIPLE
CRITERION
VIOLATIONS
QUALITY
TRUTH
EXAGGERA
TION, FANTASTICAL DESCRIPTION
QUANTITY
INFORMATIVENESS
REDUNDANCY, REPETITION, EXCESSIVE BREVITY
RELATION
RELEVANCE
DIGRESSION
MANNER
CLARITY
VAGUENESS, OBLIQUENESS, METAPHOR
When we intentionally violate Grice’s maxims, we signal that alternative interpretations of the utterance are possible. We say “this” with our words, and “not this” with violations of Grice’s maxims, pointing to other possible meanings of our utterance. We signal “not this” by resorting to obvious falsehoods or exaggerations of the truth (which violate the rule of quantity). We can provide too much information, for example in systematic repetition, or too little information, thus violating the rule of quantity. We can dwell in the irrelevant to violate the rule of relation. And we can resort to various linguistic acts—idiomatic expressions, metaphors, oblique references—that violate the rule of manner and its requirements of clarity and directness.
As important as sincere speech is to our social life, so too is this realm of nonliteral communication. Our brief utterances can take on the opposite meaning of what the words denote (irony, satire). We can connect disparate concepts in communicative acts that leap beyond narrow literal denotation (metaphor). We can endow our utterances with multiple layers of unbounded, aesthetically pleasing meaning (poetry).
The relevance of Grice’s maxims to teasing, ironically enough, is revealed in linguists Brown and Levinson’s 1987 classic, Politeness. Brown and Levinson carefully document how in the world’s languages speakers add a layer of politeness to their utterances when what they say risks embarrassing the listener or themselves. Politeness is achieved through systematic violations of Grice’s four maxims.
Consider the simple act of making a request. If someone asks you for the time, or directions, or to pass the rutabagas, or not to talk so loudly during the previews, that act is fraught with potential conflict. The recipient of the request is imposed upon and risks being revealed as incompetent, boorish, or disinterested in social conventions. The requester risks being perceived as intrusive and impolite. To soften the impact of requests and other potentially impolite acts such as recommendations, or criticism, people violate Grice’s maxims to communicate in more polite fashion. Say your best friend is being a bit boisterous, with elbows flying, at your Friday evening line dancing group that you’ve generously invited him to. To encourage a bit more restraint, you might politely resort to indirect questions (“Have you ever seen yourself dance?”), rhetorical questions (“Have you done line dancing before?”), metaphors (“Wow, you holler like a howler monkey”) and obliqueness (“I bet you’d be a terrific clown”). We break the rules of sincere communication to be polite. Equipped with this analysis of nonliteral communication, a careful examination of the tease reveals that teasing and politeness are surprisingly close relatives.
THE ART OF THE TEASE
What gives the tease the playful genius of the jester’s satire are systematic violations of Grice’s maxims. A first principle is exaggeration, which marks the playfulness of the tease by deviating from Grice’s rule of quality. Teasing can involve copious detail, excessive profanity, or an exaggerated characterization. In a study of the conversations of a very loving family, the mother referred to a young son as “horse mouth” when he did not speak clearly. We tease with dramatic and exaggerated shifts in our pitch—we mock the plaintiveness of another with high-pitched imitations, and the momentary obtuseness of another with slow-moving, low-pitched utterances. Parents will tease children about their excessive possessiveness by using vowel elongation and exaggerated pitch: “Mine!” We tease by imitating, in exaggerated form, the mannerisms of others—the bread and butter of a preteen’s around-the-clock, eye-rolling mockery of his or her parents.
Exaggeration is core to understanding “playing the dozens,” a sophisticated form of ritualized insult that the sociologist Roger Abrahams documented while spending two years living among young black kids in urban Philadelphia in the early 1960s. Abrahams found that young black males, in particular between the ages of eight and fifteen, resorted to a canon of teases—“the dozens,” oft-heard, profane poems about the target and the target’s mother. These ritualized insults occurred only among friends, and almost exclusively provoked fun and play rather than aggression. Playing the dozens, Abrahams observed, provided a context for the boys to test one another in ways that explored sexual identity and thickened their young skin as a defense against the institutionalized hostilities they faced in the inner city. The dozens is the intellectual predecessor to rap and employs exaggeration and other signals of nonliteral meaning—rhyming, repetition.
Don’t talk about my mother ’cause you’ll make me mad.
Don’t forget how many your mother had.
She didn’t have one, she didn’t have two,
She had eighty motherfuckers just like you.
I fucked your mother in a bowl of rice.
Two children jumped out shootin’ dice.
One shot seven and one shot eleven.
God damn, them children ain’t goin’ to heaven.
Repetition is a classic element of the tease, and violates the rule of quantity. If a friend says you are a really good neck rubber, you blush with pride. If she says you are a really, really, really, really outrageously fantastic neck rubber, you are likely to bristle a bit, recall questionable massage techniques—the use of your elbows and your nose—you’ve experimented with, wonder what her point is, and rise to defend yourself.
Repetitive formulaic expressions rhythmically placed within social routines signal teasing. These linguistic acts are a reliable part of the quotidian life of healthy families. Parents have been known to short-circuit their children’s mutinous reactions to their dinner with repetitive, formulaic expressions (“here’s your dog food”) to make light of, and preempt, their prickly objections.
We violate the rule of manner, or directness and clarity, in innumerable ways to tease. Idiomatic expressions—quirky nicknames and relationship-specific phrases—are a common element of teasing, zeroing in on idiosyncracies and potentially problematic characteristics of the target. We violate the rules of manner with several vocal cues, including sing-song voice, loud, rapid delivery, dramatized sighs, and utterances that are either louder or quieter than preceding utterances. All of these acts deviate from the prosody of clarity and directness. And of course there is the wink, the very emblem of off-record indirectness. The wink violates the sincere and truthful orientation of direct, straightforward gaze, and recognizes an audience to the side, thus signaling that all is not what it appears to be.
With exaggeration, repetition, and idiomatic phrases, with elongated vowels and shifts in the speed and pitch of our delivery, with tongue protrusions, well-timed laughs, and expressive caricature of others, we violate the maxims of sincere communication, all in the service of teasing. We provoke, on the one hand, but artfully signal that nonliteral interpretations of the provocation are possible. We signal that we do not necessarily mean what we say, that our actions are to be taken in the spirit of play.
When we tease, linguist Herb Clark observes, we frame the interaction as one that occurs in a playful, nonserious realm of social exchange. When done with a light touch and style, teasing is a game, a dramatic performance, one filled with shared laughter that transforms conflicts—between rivals in a hierarchy, romantic partners, siblings finding separate spaces—into playful negotiations. It is in artful teasing that we lightheartedly provoke, to discern one another’s commitments. It is with artful teasing that we convert many problems in social living to opportunities for higher jen ratios.
POLITE ROARS AND CROAKS
The philosopher Bertrand Russell argued, “The fundamental concept in social science is power, in the same sense that Energy is the fundamental concept in physics.” Power is a basic force in human relationships.
Power hierarchies h
ave many benefits. Hierarchies help organize the collective actions necessary to gathering resources, raising offspring, defense, and mating. They provide heuristic, quick-decision rules about the allocation of resources and the division of labor (often favoring those in power). They provide protection for those involved (and peril to those outside the hierarchy).
Alongside their benefits, hierarchies are costly to negotiate. Conflicts over rank and status are very often a deadly affair. Male fig wasps have large mandibles that they put to deadly use in conflicts over mates and territory, most typically chopping each other in half. When several males find themselves on the same fig fruit, lethal combat quickly arises. One fig fruit contained 15 females, 12 uninjured males, and 42 damaged males who were dead or on their way to dying, with holes in the thorax and abdomen. Male narwhals use their drill-like tusks to conduct their negotiations over rank. In one hierarchy of male narwhals, over 60 percent of the males had broken tusks, and most had head scars or tips of tusks embedded in their jaws.
Born to Be Good_The Science of a Meaningful Life Page 16