The Importance of not being Earnest
Discussing the problem of man's innate aggressive tendencies, Aldous Huxley once said:
On the physiological level I suppose the problem is linked with the fact that we carry around with us a glandular system which was admirably well adapted to life in the Paleolithic times but 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. [12]
A third alternative, which Huxley overlooked, is to laugh at people. There are, of course, other outlets for tame aggression: sport, politics, book-reviewing, and so forth; but these are conscious, voluntary activities, whereas laughter is a spontaneous, physiological reflex, a gift of nature included in our native equipment as part of the evolutionary package deal. Not only the functions of our glands, but the whole autonomous nervous system and the emotion-controlling centres in the mid-brain, are much older than the Paleolithic Age, and reflect conditions at a stage of human evolution when the struggle for existence was more deadly than at present and when any unusual sight or sound had to be answered by jumping, bristling, fight, or flight. As security and comfort increased in the species, the affect-generating emergency mechanisms of the sympathico-adrenal system gradually became an anachronism. But organs and their functions do not atrophy at the rate at which they become redundant; and thus the biological evolution of homo saplens (if it has not stopped altogether) lags dangerously behind his mental evolution. One consequence of this is that our brains have become 'divided houses of faith and reason', of thinking at odds with emotions; another, that our emotive responses have become 'over-statements of the body' out of all proportion with the reactions biologically required or socially permitted -- and cannot be worked off through their original channels. Fortunately, at some point along the evolutionary line, the luxury reflexes of laughter and weeping emerged as overflow mechanisms for the disposal of at least part of our redundant emotions. They are obviously twin reflexes: laughter serving the disposal of aggressive emotions cast off by the intellect, while crying (to anticipate once more) facilitates the overflow of participatory emotions accepted by the intellect.
It follows that two conditions had to be fulfilled before homo ridens, the laughing animal, could emerge: first a relative security of existence, which called for new outlets for excess energies; second and more important, a level of evolution had to be reached where reasoning had gained a certain degree of autonomy from the 'blind' urges of emotion; where thought had acquired that independence and nimbleness which enable it to detach itself from feeling -- and to confront its glandular humours with a sense of humour. Only at this stage of 'cortical emancipation' could man perceive his own emotions as redundant, and make the smiling admission 'I have been fooled'.
Beneath the human level there is neither the possibility nor the need for laughter; it could arise only in a biologically secure species with redundant emotions and intellectual autonomy.* The sudden realization that one's own excitement is 'unreasonable' heralds the emergence of self-criticism, of the ability to see one's very own self from outside ; and this bisociation of subjective experience with an objective frame of reference is perhaps the wittiest discovery of homo sapiens.
Thus laughter rings the bell of man's departure from the rails of instinct; it signals his rebellion against the singlemindedness of his biological urges, his refusal to remain a creature of habit, governed by a single set of 'rules of the game'. Animals are fanatics; but O / How the dear little children laugh / When the drums roll and the lovely / Lady is sawn in half . . . . [13]
NOTES
To p. 56. Criticizing a paper read by a neurologist to a learned society, he remarked: 'The author spoke of emotions in very general terms. . . . There are features which he mentioned which I could recognize as characteristic of major emotions, as anger and rage; but after all, love is an emotion. . . . I think that when we discuss emotion we ought to specify the sorts of emotion we have in mind' (Cannon, 1929).
To p. 61. The article in which this list appeared is characteristic of the behaviourist approach; it ennumerated three 'basic principles' of laughter: (a) 'as an expression of joy', (b) 'laughter makes for group cohesion through homogeneity of feeling within the group', (c) 'laughing an be used as a weapon in competitive situations'. The word 'humour' was not mentioned in the article; laughing at 'jokes, antics, etc.', was mentioned only in passing, as obviously not a phenomenon worthy of the psychologists' attention.
To p. 63. Some domesticated animals -- dogs, chimpanzees -- seem to be capable of a humorous expression and to engage in teasing activities. These may be regarded as evolutionary forerunners of laughter.
III
VARIETIES OF HUMOUR
The tools have now been assembled which should enable the reader to dissect any specimen of humour. The procedure to be followed is: first, determine the nature of M1 and M2 in the diagrams on pages 35 and 37 by discovering the type of logic, the rules of the game, which govern each matrix. Often these rules are implied, as hidden axioms, and taken for granted -- the code must be de-coded. The rest is easy: find the 'link' -- the focal concept, word, or situation which is bisociated with both mental planes; lastly, define the character of the emotive charge and make a guess regarding the unconscious elements that it may contain. In the sections which follow I shall apply this technique to various types of humour.
Pun and Witticism
Our spacemen, Mrs. Lamport fears, are 'heading for the "lunar bin".' The ageing libertine, she tells us, 'feels his old Krafft Ebbing'. The Reverend Spooner had a great affection, or so he said, for 'our queer old dean'.
One swallow, the proverb says, does not make a summer -- nor quench the thirst. Elijah's ravens, according to Milton, were 'though ravenous taught to abstain from what they brought'. Not so Napoleon, who, shortly after his coronation, confiscated the estates of the house of Orléans, which caused a contemporary to remark: C'est le premier vol de l'aigle. Equally to the point was Mr. Paul Jenkin's discovery regarding the pros and cons of Britain's entry into the Common Market: 'The Cons were pro, while Lab has turned con.'
The pun is the bisociation of a single phonetic form with two meanings -- two strings of thought tied together by an accoustic knot. Its immense popularity with children, its prevalence in certain forms of mental disorder ('punning mania'), and its frequent occurrence in the dream, indicate the profound unconscions appeal of association based on pure sound. Its opposite number is the rhyme. In between these two, on the central panel, the bisociation of sound and sense assumes a playful form in word games like Lexicon, anagram, and crossword puzzle; and a serious form in comparative philology and paleography, the deciphering of ancient inscriptions (pp. 186-7).
Whether the two meanings associated with the pun are derived from the same root as in 'lunar bin'; or are homonyms as vol = flight and vol = theft, is irrelevant provided the two derivations have drifted apart far enough to become incompatible. In fact, there is a continuous series stretching from the pun through the play of words (jeu de mots) to the play of ideas (jeu d'esprit). Let me quote a few more examples of the latter.
The super-ego is that part of the personality which is soluble in alcohol. The concept 'soluble' is bisociated (a) with the context of the chemical laboratory and (b) with the (metaphorical) dissolution of one's high principles in one's cups. The first few words of the sentence arouse perhaps a mild irritation with the Freudian jargon -- or apprehension, as the case may be; which is then tittered away through the now familiar mechanism.
Here is another sample from this game of definitions: What is a sadist? A sadist is a person who is kind to a masochist. The link-concept is 'kindness', bisociated with two diametrically opposed meanings; moreover the whole definition is open to two different interpretations:
(a) the sadist does a kindness to the masochist by torturing him;
(b
) the sadist is torturing the masochist by being kind to him.
In both cases the sadist must go against his own nature, and the definition turns out to be in fact a variant of the logical paradox about the Cretan who asserts that all Cretans are liars. But we can get around it by deciding that in either interpretation 'kind' should be understood both literally and metaphorically at the same time; in other words, by playing simultaneously two games governed by opposite rules. We shall see that such reversals of logic play a considerable part in scientific discovery (pp. 191-9). They are also a recurrent motif in poetry and literature. One of my favourite Donne quotations is a line from the Holy Sonnets: 'For O, for some, not to be martyrs is a martyrdom.'
I have given examples of the bisociation of professional with commonsense logic, of metaphorical with literal meaning, of contexts linked by sound affinities, of trains of reasoning travelling, happily joined together, in opposite directions. The list could be extended beyond the limits of patience. In fact any two matrices can be made to yield a comic effect of sorts, by finding an appropriate link between them and infusing a drop of adrenalin. Take as a random example two associative contexts centred on the unpromising key-words 'alliteration' and 'hydrotherapy'. (The example actually originated in a challenge following a discussion; I am merely quoting it, with apologies, to show that in principle it can be done):
Gossip Column Item: Lady Smith-Everett, receiving me in her sumptuous boudoir, explained that she had always suffered from 'the most maddening rashes' until she met her present physician, a former professor ofpsycho-hydrotherapy at the University of Bucharest. By employing a new test which he invented, the Professor discovered that she had 'a grade 4 allergy' against sojourning in spas and holiday resorts with the initial letter C. No more visits to Capri and Carlsbad for Lady S-E.!
It is not even necessary that the two matrices should be governed by incompatible codes. One can obtain comic effects by simply confronting quantitatively different scales of operation, provided that they differ sufficiently in order of magnitude for one scale to become negligible compared with the other. The result is the type of joke made according to the formula: the mountains laboured, the birth was a mouse.
With an added twist you get this kind of dotty dialogue -- between a nervous bus-passenger and the conductor:
What's the time? Thursday. Good Lord! I must get off.
This is a serial affair in which not two but three matrices are successively involved, each with a different scale of measurement. M1 has a grid of hours and minutes; M2 of days of the week. The two differ in fact only in quantity but provide qualitatively different frames of reference; the third matrix has spatial instead of temporal co-ordinates -- where to get off, not when. It would be impossible to orientate one's behaviour with reference to these three different grids at the same time; yet that is precisely what the tri-sociated passenger is trying to do.
Let me repeat: any two universes of discourse can be used to fabricate a joke. Lewis Carroll sent the following contribution to a philosophical symposium:
Yet what mean all such gaieties to me Whose life is full of indices and surds? x² + 7x + 53 = xx/3'
The universes of verbal and mathematical symbols are linked by pure sound-affinity -- with rhyme but without reason. When T. E. Lawrence joined the ranks as Private Shaw, Noel Coward wrote to him that famous letter beginning 'Dear 338171 (may I call you 338?)'.
Man and Animal
In the previous chapter I discussed the bisociation of man and machine; related to it is the hybrid man-animal. Disney's creatures behave as if they were human without losing their animal appearance, they live on the line of intersection of the two planes; so do the cartoonist's piggy or mousy humans. This double-existence is comic, but only so long as the confrontation has the effect of a slightly degrading exposure of one or the other. If sympathy prevails over malice, even poor Donald Duck's misfortunes cease to be laughable; and as you move over to the right-hand panel of the triptych, the man-animal undergoes a series of transformations: from the cloying lyricism of Bambi to the tragedy of Orwell's Boxer; from the archetypal menace of the werewolf to the Metamorphosis of Kafka's hero into a filth-devouring cockroach. As for science, the importance of learning about man by the experimental study of animal physiology need not be stressed; in psychology it has been rather overstressed to the point where the salivary reflexes of dogs came to be regarded as paradigmatic for human behaviour.
Impersonation
The various categories of the comic shade into each other: Disney's animals acting like humans could as well be classified under the heading 'imitation, impersonation, and disguise'. The impersonator is two different people at one time. If the result is degrading, the spectator will laugh. If he is led to sympathize or identify himself with the impersonated hero, he will experience that state of split-mindedness known as dramatic illusion or the magic of the stage. Which of the two possibilities will occur depends of course partly on the actor, but ultimately a jest's prosperity lies in the ear / Of him that hears it, never in the tongue / Of him that makes it.[1] The same 'narrative', a Victorian melodrama or a Chinese opera, acted in both cases in precisely the same way, will make some spectators giggle, others weep. The same dramatic devices may serve either a comic or a tragic purpose: Romeo and Juliet are the victims of absurd coincidences, Oedipus's marriage to his mother is due to mistaken identity; Rosamund in As You Like It and Leonora in Fidelio are both disguised as men, yet in one case the result is drama, in another comedy. The technique of creating character-types is also shared by both: in the classical form of tragedy, whether Greek, Indian, or Japanese, characterization is often achieved by standardized masks; in the comedy, down to Molière, by the creation of types: the miser, the glutton, the hypocrite, the cuckold. In the centre panel (where impersonation appears in the form of empathy, the act of self-projection which enables one to understand others, see below, pp. 187-8) the classification of character-types has been the aim of incessant efforts -- from the 'four temperaments' of the Greeks, to Kretschmer, Jung, Sheldon, and so on.
The Child-Adult
Why are puppies droll? Firstly, their helplessness, trustingness, attachment, and puzzled expression make them more 'human' than grown-up dogs; in the second place the ferocious growl of the puppy strikes us as an impersonation of adult behaviour (like the little boy with stuck-on beard and bowler-hat, pretending to be the family doctor); thirdly, the puppy's waddling and tumbling makes it a choice victim of nature's practical jokes; furthermore, its bodily disproportions, the huge padded paws, wrinkled brow, and Falstaffian belly, give it the appearance of a caricature; and so on. The delighted laughter which greets the puppy's antics seems so simple to explain; but when we try to analyse it we find several interlocking causes; and while the word 'delighted' indicates a pure emotion, free from the ugly taint of aggressiveness, the grain of self-satisfied condescension, the conviction of our own superiority is nevertheless present, even if we are not aware of it.
A simple shift of emphasis will move the bisociation of child and adult into the centre panel where it becomes a concern of pedagogues and psychiatrists. A further shift to the right, and the relation will be reversed, the child will be seen as an adult in disguise, immersed in the hidden tragedies of the nursery and boarding school -- an inexhaustible subject of the autobiographical novel.
The Trivial and the Exalted
Parody is the most aggressive form of impersonation, designed not only to deflate hollow pretence but also to destroy illusion in all its forms; and to undermine pathos by harping on the trivial, all-too-human aspects of the victim. Stage props collapsing, wigs falling off, public speakers forgetting their lines, dramatic gestures remaining suspended in the air -- the parodist's favourite points of attack are all situated on the line of intersection between two planes: the Exalted and the Trivial.
The artist reverses this technique by conferring on trivial experiences a new dignity and wonder: Rembrandt painting the carcass of a
flayed ox, Manor his skinny, insipid Olympia; Hemingway drawing tragedy out of the repetitive, inarticulate stammer of his characters; Chekhov focussing the reader's attention on a fly crawling on a lump of sugar while Natasha is contemplating suicide.
When 'consciousness is unawares transferred from great things to small' -- which Spencer regarded as the prime cause of laughter -- the result will be either a comic or an aesthetic experience, depending on whether the person's emotions are of the type capable of participating in the transfer or not. The artist, reversing the parodist's technique, walks on a tightrope, as it were, along the line where the exalted and the trivial planes meet; he sees with equal eye, as God of all, / A hero perish or a sparrow fall. The scientist's attitude is basically similar in situations where he suddenly discovers the connection between a banal event and a general law of nature -- Newton's apple or the boiling kettle of James Watt.