Janus (18 page)

 

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 rugby 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.

 

 

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.

 

 

 

7

 

 

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.