Two shady business men have succeeded in making a fortune and were trying to elbow their way into Society. They had their portraits painted by a fashionable artist; framed in gold, these were shown at a reception in the grand style. Among the guests was a well-known art critic. The beaming hosts led him to the wall on which the two portraits were hanging side by side. The critic looked at them for a long time, then shook his head as if he were missing something. At length he pointed to the bare space between the pictures and asked: 'And where is the Saviour?'
A nice combination of transformation with interpolation.
Economy, in humour as in art, does not mean mechanical brevity but implicitness. Implicit is derived from the Latin word for 'folded in'. To make a joke like Picasso's 'unfold', the listener must fill in the gaps, complete the hints, trace the hidden analogies. Every good joke contains an element of the riddle -- it may be childishly simple, or subtle and challenging -- which the listener must solve. By doing so, he is lifted out of his passive role and compelled to co-operate, to repeat to some extent the process of inventing the joke, to re-create it in his imagination. The type of entertainment dished out by the mass media makes one apt to forget that true recreation is re-creation.
Emphasis and implication are complementary techniques. The first bullies the audience into acceptance; the second entices it into mental collaboration; the first forces the offer down the consumer's throat; the second tantalizes, to whet his appetite.
In fact, both techniques have their roots in the basic mechanisms of communicating thoughts by word or sign. Language itself is never completely explicit. Words have suggestive, evocative powers; but at the same time they are merely stepping stones for thought. Economy means spacing them at intervals just wide enough to require a significant effort from the receiver of the message; the artist rules his subjects by turning them into accomplices.
NOTE
To p. 70. Cf. the analysis of an Osbert Lancaster cartoon in Insight and Outlook, p. 80 f.
IV
FROM HUMOUR TO DISCOVERY
Explosion and Catharsis
Primitive jokes arouse crude, aggressive, or sexual emotions by means of a minimum of ingenuity. But even the coarse laughter in which these emotions are exploded often contains an additional element of admiration for the cleverness of the joke -- and also of satisfaction with one's own cleverness in seeing the joke. Let us call this additional element of admiration plus self-congratulation the intellectual gratification offered by the joke.
Satisfaction presupposes the existence of a need or appetite. Intellectual curiosity, the desire to understand, is derived from an urge as basic as hunger or sex: the exploratory drive (see below, XI, and Book Two, VIII). It is the driving power which makes the rat learn to find its way through the experimental maze without any obvious incentive being offered in the form of reward or punishment; and also the prime-mover behind human exploration and research. Its 'detached' and' disinterested' character -- the scientists' self-transcending absorption in the riddles of nature -- is, of course, often combined with ambition, competition, vanity: But these self-assertive tendencies must be restrained and highly sublimated to find fulfilment in the mostly unspectacular rewards of his slow and patient labours. There are, after all, more direct methods of asserting one's ego than the analysis of ribonucleic acids.
When I called discovery the emotionally 'neutral' art I did not mean by neutrality the absence of emotion -- which would be equivalent to apathy - -but that nicely balanced and sublimated blend of motivations, where self-assertiveness is harnessed to the task; and where on the other hand heady speculations about the Mysteries of Nature must be submitted to the rigours of objective verification.
We shall see that there are two sides to the manifestation of emotions at the moment of discovery, which reflect this polarity of motivations. One is the triumphant explosion of tension which has suddenly become redundant since the problem is solved -- so you jump out of your bath and run through the streets laughing and shouting Eureka! In the second place there is the slowly fading after-glow, the gradual catharsis of the self-transcending emotions -- a quiet, contemplative delight in the truth which the discovery revealed, closely related to the artist's experience of beauty. The Eureka cry is the explosion of energies which must find an outlet since the purpose for which they have been mobilized no longer exists; the carthartic reaction is an inward unfolding of a kind of 'oceanic feeling', and its slow ebbing away. The first is due to the fact that 'I' made a discovery; the second to the fact that a discovery has been made, a fraction of the infinite revealed. The first tends to produce a state of physical agitation related to laughter; the second tends towards quietude, the 'earthing' of emotion, sometimes a peaceful overflow of tears. The reasons for this contrast will be discussed later; for the time being, let us remember that, physiologically speaking, the self-assertive tendencies operate through the massive sympathico-adrenal system which galvanizes the body into activity -- whereas the self-transcending emotions have no comparable trigger-mechanism at their disposal, and their bodily manifestations are in every respect the opposite of the former: pulse and breathing are slowed down, the muscles relax, the whole organism tends towards tranquillity and catharsis. Accordingly, this class of emotions is devoid of the inertial momentum which makes the rage-fear type of reactions so often fall out of step with reasoning; the participatory emotions do not become dissociated from thought. Rage is immune to understanding; love of the self-transcending variety is based on understanding, and cannot be separated from it.
Thus the impact of a sudden, bisociative surprise which makes reasoning perform a somersault will have a twofold effect: part of the tension will become detached from it and exploded while the remaining part will slowly ebb away. The symbols
on the triptych are meant to refer to these two modes of the discharge of tension: the explosion of the aggressive-defensive and the gradual catharsis, or 'earthing', of the participatory emotions.
'Seeing the Joke' and 'Solving the Problem'
The dual manifestation of emotions at the moment of discovery is reflected on a minor and trivial scale in our reactions to a clever joke. The pleasant after-glow of admiration and intellectual satisfaction, gradually fading, reflects the cathartic reaction; while the self-congratulatory impulse -- a faint echo of the Eureka cry -- supplies added voltage to the original charge detonated in laughter: that 'sudden glory' (as Hobbes has it) 'arising out of our own eminency'.
Let our imagination travel once more across the triptych of creative activities, from left to right, as it were. We can do this as we have seen, by taking a short-cut from one wing to another, from the comic to the tragic or sublime; or alternatively by following the gradual transitions which lead from the left to the centre panel.
On the extreme left of the continuum -- the infra-red end of the emotive spectrum -- we found the practical joke, the smutty story, the lavatory humour of children, each with a heavy aggressive or sexual or scatalogical load (which may be partly unconscious); and with a logical structure so obvious that it required only a minimum of intellectual effort to 'see the joke'. Put into a formula, we could say that the ratio A: I -- where A stands for crude emotion, and I for intellectual stimulation -- is heavily loaded in favour of the former.
As we move across the panel towards the right, this ratio changes, and is ultimately reversed. In the higher forms of comedy, satire, and irony the message is couched in implicit and oblique terms; the joke gradually assumes the character of an epigram or riddle, the witticism becomes a challenge to our wits:
Psychoanalysis is the disease for which it pretends to be the cure. Philosophy is the systematic abuse of a terminology specially invented for that purpose. Statistics are like a bikini. What they reveal is suggestive. What they conceal is vital.
Or, Heine's description of a young virgin:
Her face is like a palimpsest -- beneath the Gothic lettering of the monk's sacred text lurks the pagan poet's ha
lf-effaced erotic verse.
The crude aggression of the practical joke has been sublimated into malicious ingenuity; gross sexuality into subtle eroticism. Incidentally, if I had not mentioned that the last quotation was by Heine, whose name combined with 'virgin' arouses ominous expectations, but had pretended instead that it was from a novel by D. H. Lawrence, it would probably have impressed the reader as profoundly poetic instead of malicious -- a short-cut from wing to wing, by reversal of the charge from minus to plus. Again, imagine for a moment that the quotation occurred in an essay by a Jungian psychologist -- and it will turn into an emotionally neutral illustration of 'the intrusion of archetypes into perception'.
In cases like this the wording of the narrative (or the picture on the canvas) can remain unaltered, and its transformation from a comic into a poetic or intellectually enlightening message depends entirely on the subjective attitude of the percipient.* However, the lines of correspondence across the panels are meant to indicate more general patterns of creative activity. Thus, as we move from coarse humour towards the neutral zone, we find the bisociation of sound and meaning first exemplified in the pun, then in word games (ranging from the crossword puzzle to the decyphering of the Rosetta stone); lastly in alliteration, asonance, and rhyme. The mind-matter theme we found expressed in countless variations on all three panels; and each variation of it -- the puppet on strings or Jack-in-the-Box -- was again seen as tri-valent. Impersonation is used both in comedy and tragedy; but in between them the medicine man in his mask, the cassocked priest in the confessional, the psychiatrist in the role of the father, each impersonate a person or power other than himself. The distorting mirror, with its emphasis on one significant aspect to the exclusion of others, is used alike in the caricature and in the scientist's diagrams and schemata; when Clavdia in the Magic Mountain offers her lover an X-ray portrait of her chest as a souvenir we hardly know on which of the three panels we are. Nor can we draw a sharp line between social satire and sociological discovery: Animal Farm and 1984 taught a whole generation more about the nature of totalitarianism than academic science did. One last example:
In 1960 an anecdote in the form of an imaginary dialogue circulated in the satellite countries of the East:
Tell me, Comrade, what is capitalism? The exploitation of man by man. And what is Communism? The reverse.
The 'double entendre' on 'reverse' -- it pretends to be the opposite, but it comes down to the same, only the exploiting is done by a different gang --casts a new, sharp light on a hoary problem; it has the same power of sudden illumination as an epigram by Voltaire.
Similar borderline cases are brain-twisters, logical paradoxes, mathematical games. Even chess problems can be both 'witty' and 'funny' if they contain some sudden reversal of logic, an ironical twist, or an affront to chess common sense; the connoisseur will smile, or even laugh, when he is shown the solution, and the tension suddenly snaps. His laughter may signify 'how stupid of me not to have seen it' or 'not to have seen it at once' or 'how clever of me', etc. To distinguish between these cases would be splitting hairs, for the basic process is the same: the tension has been dissociated from its original purpose and must find some other outlet. When the string of the guitar snaps it gives out a twang -- for precisely the same reason.
But this tension is no longer comparable to the emotions aroused in the grosser types of humour. The intellectual challenge, which in the coarse joke played such a subsidiary part, now dominates the picture; the A: I ratio has been reversed. There may be vanity and competitiveness in rising to the challenge; but they are sublimated and held in balance by a self-forgetting absorption in the problem.
As we cross the fluid boundary leading into the central panel of the triptych, the task of 'seeing the joke' becomes the task of 'solving the problem'. And when we succeed we no longer roar with laughter as at the clown's antics; laughter gradually shades into an amused, then an admiring smile -- reflecting the harmonic balance of opposites, the sudden glory and quiet glow of intellectual satisfaction.
The Creation of Humour
Up to now I have been discussing the effects of humour on the audience: the reader, listener, spectator. Let me turn from the consumer's reactions to the processes which go in on the mind of the producer -- the inventor of the joke, the creator of humour.
Humour depends primarily on its surprise effect: the bisociative shock. To cause surprise the humorist must have a modicum of originality -- the ability to break away from the stereotyped routines of thought. Caricaturist, satirist, the writer of nonsense-humour, and even the expert tickler, each operates on more than one plane. Whether his purpose is to convey a social message, or merely to entertain, he must provide mental jolts, caused by the collision of incompatible matrices. To any given situation or subject he must conjure up an appropriate -- or appropriately inappropriate -- intruder which will provide the jolt.
>> Stepping back out of situation, onto objective plane.
The first schoolboy to have the idea of sawing through the legs of the master's chair must have been a genius (such practices were not uncommon in my school-days in Hungary). His habitual outlets for aggression being barred by the heavy penalties they would entail, he must have been labouring under a creative stress which initiated his search for an original solution of his problem. A chance observation -- like the fall of Newton's apple -- may have provided the link to a different frame of reference, where the object of his resentment was merely a mass subject to the pull of gravity. Now all he had to do was to transfer the scene of operations from the blocked matrix M1 to this auxiliary matrix M2. If this sounds facetious let us remember that Bergson's theory of humour is based on this single facet.
In all forms of malicious wit there is an aggressive tendency at work which, for one reason or another, cannot be satisfied by the usual methods of reasoned argument, physical violence, or straight invective. I shall call a matrix 'blocked' when its 'rules of the game' prove inapplicable to the existing situation or problem in hand; when none of the various ways of exercising a skill, however plastic and adaptable that skill is, leads to the desired goal. The young officer in the Viennese anecdote, resenting the courtesan's pretentious reply, is in the same position as the frustrated schoolboy: he cannot reply: 'Come off the high horse, I know that cash is all that matters to you,' without incurring the penalties of vulgarity. Chamfort's Marquis cannot kill the Bishop -- it would be an unpardonable lack of savoir-faire. Picasso cannot tell the dealer that he is an insufferable bore who does not know a Kokoschka from a Klee; that would be unkind.
But how do they discover the inspired reposte which saves the situation? It sounds a simple question, but if psychology knew the answer to it there would be no point in writing this book.
As a first step let us note a trivial fact: the officer's mental leap from the metaphorical to the literal plane indicates a phenomenon already discussed: the displacement of attention to a seemingly irrelevant feature -- in this case from the poetic connotations of the lady's heart to its concrete spatial location. (We remember that Wilde used a similar displacement effect for a different purpose in 'How else but through a broken heart . . .'). The Marquis achieves his aim -- to kill by ridicule -- by transferring his attention from the glaringly obvious consideration that the Bishop is usurping his privileges , to an irrelevant side-line -- that he is doing another man's job ; as if the issue were a demarcation dispute between the Boilermakers' and the Shipwrights' Unions on who should drill the holes.
Thus in some of the cases we have discussed, the solution is arrived at by a kind of thinking aside, a shift of attention to some feature of the situation, or an aspect of the problem, which was previously ignored, or only present on the fringes of awareness. The humorist may stumble on it by chance; or, more likely, guided by some intuition which he is unable to define. This gives us a first intimation of unconscious processes intervening in the creative act. The humorist's achievement, represented on the neat diagrams in previous chapters,
appears as an exercise in pure intellecthal geometry: 'Construct two planes inclined at a given angle and generate two curves which intersect in a given point.' In actual fact, however, the bisociative act, in humour as in other branches of creativity, depends in varying degrees on assistance from fringe-conscious or unconscious processes. Picasso's illuminating grunt was certainly inspired by a process of this kind. On the other hand, the mediocre cartoonist and other professional craftsmen of the comic operate mostly with the same familiar matrices, fixed at a given angle, as it were, governed by familiar rules of the game; and their task is reduced to devising new links -- puns, gags, pegs for parody. It is a mechanized kind of bisociative technique, which also has its practitioners in science and art.