The Mirror of Laughter

Alexander Kozintsev

• Publisher: Routledge
• Year: 2017
• Print ISBN: 9781412847643
• eBook ISBN: 9781351479400
• Topic: Social Sciences
• Subtopic: Sociology
• Index: Social Sciences

The Mirror of Laughter presents a theory of humor and laughter by examining their relationship to human behaviors. Kozintsev is especially interested in the relationship between biological and cultural factors that influence behaviors. He divides his work into four chapters, the first of which establishes a theme of the book, focusing on the study of meaning from the perspective of philosophy and psychology, while examining linguistic theories of humor.

The second chapter examines biological data regarding laughter and the evolutionary origins of laughter and humor. It demonstrates the author's interest in studying humor objectively by detailing physiological reactions and underlying psychological issues. The third section on play, including linguistic play, distinguishes between orderly and disorderly play. While orderly play has no biological roots and is synonymous with culture, disorderly play is rooted in the pre-human past. The final chapter discusses the conflict between culture and nature and how culture has transformed the original semantics of laughter.

Kozintsev seeks to understand the relationship between the biological, cultural, and social origins of humor and, from here, he seeks to create new understanding that only the alliance of several disciplines could provide. All of this is done while the author challenges many popular ideas of humor, such as that humor is inherently related to hostility. Originally written in Russian, this work makes great strides towards its goal, and it does so in an interesting and enlightening way.

1 The Comical, or Imitation of Inferior People

1.1 Incongruity, Degradation, and Self-Parody: The Implicit Narrator

Let us begin with the classic definition of the comical, found in Aristotle’s Poetics (II, 1448а, 16-18; V, 1449а, 32-36). Many theorists still consider it almost ideal. Aristotle distinguishes between tragedy and comedy thus: the former represents people as better than they are today, while the latter, as worse. “Comedy,” he continues, “is a representation of inferior people,¹ not indeed in the full sense of the word bad, but the laughable is a species of the base or ugly. It consists in some blunder or ugliness that does not cause pain or disaster, an obvious example being the comic mask which is ugly and distorted but not painful.”²

Aristotle is very prudent. The first thing he does is to puzzle the reader. Indeed, idealizing people as in tragedy seems natural, but why represent them as worse than they are in fact? However, we hardly have time to ponder this question before an easy way out is offered to us as a reservation about the utter inoffensiveness of what is represented. A comic mask – big deal! Neither pain nor disaster. Up to the present day, numerous aestheticians have held on to, like a lifebuoy, the idea of inoffensiveness of the themes referred to by comedy, as if taking no notice of a whole sea of facts contradicting it.

So who exactly “imitates inferior people” and why? Is it only the comic artist – one whose face is covered up by a ridiculous mask or distorted by a grimace? Yes, we usually think so and believe that the best purpose for such an imitation is to depict for us spectators evil or imperfection in all its wretchedness so as to “destroy” it with laughter and to experience triumph in our victory. This was the usual viewpoint of Soviet theorists, who considered laughter a “weapon of satire.”

In the seventeenth century, Thomas Hobbes, the author of the superiority theory, voiced a rather similar opinion. However, according to Hobbes, “grimaces called laughter” express not the triumph of a socially beneficial victory over evil and imperfection, but our egotistic and vain “sudden glory” stemming from the fact that we consider ourselves nobler, smarter, and more beautiful than the object (Hobbes, 1957/1651, p. 36). The optimism, as we see, is the same, and the difference is only in the function of the derision. In the first case it is put at the service of society; in the second, it is realized in self-serving aims.

An extreme version of the superiority theory was recently proposed by Marina Riumina, who asserts that the comical is “a situation where evil happens to someone else,” with the “observer-subject occupying, as it were, the place of God” and egotistically rejoicing in his own safety. “The tragic and the comical coincide in almost every respect (the nature of the situation and man’s position in it), and differ only in the choice of viewpoint” (Riumina, 2003, p. 115). But if so, then why should they just “coincide”? They could as well switch places. The American comedian Mel Brooks was more consistent: “Tragedy is when I cut my finger. Comedy is when you walk into an open sewer and die.” In the West, the Hobbesian concepts of the comical, often in the form of the “schadenfreude theory,” are quite popular (McGhee, 1979, p. 22; Morreall, 1983, pp. 4-10; Sanders, 1995, p. 38; Gruner, 1997; Martin, 2007, pp. 43-55).

Superiority, schadenfreude, triumph over evil – is this the reason for our pleasure; is this why comedies are written? This view had already aroused doubt very long ago. To quote Friedrich Schlegel, “The simple man is not so sensitive to the repulsive, which the comical often contains: he can be amused by the comic features of a suffering or wicked creature... Pure pleasure seldom contains funniness, but funniness (very often none other but pleasure in the bad) is more active and vital.” (F. Schlegel, 1979/1794, p. 20). Schlegel called the “inherent pleasure in the bad” a “hereditary sin of comic energy.” The tint of class snobbery present in these dicta makes them even more valuable because in spite of his views Schlegel had to admit that as soon as Menander had tried to cleanse comedy from the “hereditary sin” and endow it with refinement and elegance and the characters with “humanity” (evidently considering the “imitation of inferior people” an unworthy occupation), the comic energy of Old Comedy vanished into thin air.

“Pleasure in the bad” – this is, after all, something directly contrary to pleasure in superiority, schadenfreude, and triumph over the bad. Who, then, imitates “inferior people” and why does s/he do that? Let us approach Aristotle for explanations. “A man will draw the line at some jokes,” he wrote in a treatise addressed to his son or to his father (Nicomachean Ethics, IV, 14 [VIII]), “for raillery is a sort of vilification, and some forms of vilification are forbidden by law; perhaps some forms of raillery ought to be prohibited also….The buffoon is one who cannot resist a joke; he will not keep his tongue off himself or anyone else, if he can raise a laugh...”³

Unlike the passages about the comical preserved in the Poetics, this excerpt hardly admits any variant readings. Aristotle makes it clear that it is not comic actors who imitate the “inferior people,” depicting them in caricatured form with the ostensible aim of ridiculing them, but the authors of comic texts and their listeners, and that this “aischrology” (foul language) inherited from Old Comedy is no occupation for a free-born man and is more suited to a “beast.” How different is the New Comedy with its elegance, sense of proportion and innuendos!

The simplest thing is to brush such opinions aside, claiming that Aristotle used the word “beasts” with reference to slaves and that therefore his words cannot apply to us. But even we, like Athenians of the fourth century BC laugh at jokes. As soon as we start reflecting on our laughter, we are left with a strange aftertaste as was Aristotle. “To what a difficult, ignoble and intrinsically vicious artistic genre jokes belong,” wrote Kornei Chukovsky in his diary (1995/1937, p. 154). “Since poetry, lyricism, and tenderness are excluded from them, they forcibly draw you into vulgar attitudes to people, things, and events – after which you feel diminished and far worse than you are in fact.”

A man who would risk voicing such an opinion nowadays would probably be deemed a crank. Leonid Karassev (1996, pp. 67-74) has good reason to say that the antithesis of laughter is shame. People who avoid being considered cranks prefer to be ashamed of shame itself. “It is shameful not to be shameless,” wrote St. Augustine about them and about us as well (Confessions, II, 9).

Modern humor theorists⁴ who study jokes from the linguistic standpoint tend to ignore the ethical aspect altogether. Their evaluations of the quality of jokes are based nearly exclusively on cognitive and semantic aspects – “script oppositeness,” “logical mechanisms,” punchline, etc. The genre itself, however, is tacitly believed to be no better and no worse than any other. The idea that good jokes and bad jokes may, in some important sense, be equally “bad,” and that precisely this “badness” may account for their popularity, sounds either hopelessly naïve or Freudian.

The authors of modern linguistic theories of verbal humor, which are in line with the incongruity theory (Raskin, 1985; Attardo, 1994, 2001b; Ritchie, 2004), see the main incongruity, believed to underlie funniness, in the semantics of the comic text, i.e., in its relation to the real or possible world. This relation is contradictory, being based on the coexistence of two alternative meanings of the text. By perceiving the text as funny the subject allegedly reacts to this incongruity. In other words, the comic incongruity is believed to be objective, that is, inherent in the text or in its referent. This view is shared by nearly all theorists – not only those who hold the incongruity theory, but also proponents of most other theories.⁵ Incongruity can come about in various ways. Either the text is realistic but ambiguous (Shultz, 1972) or fantasy and faulty logic are invoked (Suls, 1972; see Ritchie, 2004, pp. 55-7, for a discussion of these two models). In any event, the text has to be instantaneously reinterpreted by the perceiver, causing what the cognitive linguists call a “frame shift” (Coulson, 2001).

According to a belief held by members of the highly influential school founded by Victor Raskin, the necessary and sufficient conditions for a text to be funny are that (1) the text is compatible with two different scripts, and (2) these two scripts are opposite in a special sense, that is, they evoke binary categories that are essential to human life (Raskin, 1985, pp. 99, 113, 115; Attardo, 1994, pp. 203-5; Attardo, 2001b, pp. 17-20). Overlapping but non-opposed scripts are said to be found in ambiguous, metaphorical, and mythical texts, whereas opposed but non-overlapping scripts suggest conflict, possibly tragic (Attardo, 1994, p. 204). Also, the theory holds that jokes belong to the non-bona fide communication mode in that they violate Grice’s conversational maxims (Grice, 1989, pp.26-7): “In many if not most jokes,…ambiguity is deliberate and the intention of the speaker includes two interpretations which he wants the hearer to perceive” (Raskin, 1985, p. 115).⁶

Well, let’s see how it works. At the Last Supper, Jesus asserted that bread was his body, whereas wine was his blood. A frame shift indeed! The two scripts, mundane and mystical, show both oppositeness and at least partial overlap (a full overlap for believers taking Communion). No doubt, categories such as real/unreal and profane/sacral are highly essential to human life. Moreover, ambiguity was deliberate, and the speaker obviously wanted both interpretations, relating to the accidentia and to the substantia, respectively, to be perceived by the hearers either simultaneously or in succession (apparently, he hadn’t heard about Grice’s maxims). Did any of the confused disciples laugh? The gospels are silent on this matter. At least nowadays, words pronounced during the Eucharist are hardly perceived as a joke by many people, believers or otherwise. Or again, scripts on which a crime story is based are both overlapping and opposed. The innocent/guilty (good/bad) opposition is highly essential to human life, ambiguity is deliberate, and both scripts are confused in the mind of the readers. In short, all the “sufficient” conditions are met, and yet hardly many of us find such stories funny. Even the “punchline” – the sentence which unexpectedly disambiguates the crime story and discloses the murderer – doesn’t make us laugh. On the other hand, the conditions are unnecessary as well since people can laugh at texts in which no script oppositeness can be detected by any stretch of the imagination (Morreall, 2004). Perhaps the main lesson to be drawn from the age-long history of attempts at formulating an essentialist definition of funniness is that these attempts are futile (see section 1.3).

Most psychologists and linguists believe that humorous incongruity is normally “resolved” in some way or other (Suls, 1972). Means of resolution are referred to as “justification” (Auboin, 1948, p. 95), “cognitive rule” (Suls, 1972), “appropriate inappropriateness” (Monro, 1951, pp. 241-2),⁷ “appropriate incongruity” (Oring, 1992, p. 81), “local logic” (Ziv, 1984, p. 90), “logical mechanism” (Attardo, 2001b, pp. 25-6), or “pseudo-plausibility” (Chafe, 2007, p. 9). All these notions, however, are applicable to nonhumorous texts as well. Thus, the local logic in the Evangelical example cited above is that all the absurdity of the claim notwithstanding, Christ’s body should be represented by a solid substance (bread), whereas blood should be represented by a liquid (wine, likely red). Logical mechanisms connecting the two overlapping and opposed scripts are a sine qua non of crime fiction.

Many jokes and cartoons, too, are based on this principle, although some of them (those belonging to the category of nonsense) do not admit resolution. A typical example of unresolved incongruity is the cartoon depicting a skier who, judging by the tracks, has managed to pass a tree with one ski on one of its sides and the other ski on the other.⁸ The artist is trying to foist absurdity on us. Remaining on the level of the cartoon, we conclude: if people were able to pass through hard objects, then everything would look like that, but.... Hence the next conclusion: if this were serious, then we should reflect upon it, but...

Thus we move from the level of humorous stimulus to the metalevel⁹ and no longer think about what we are shown or told, but about why we are shown or told it. In semiotic terms our attention shifts from the semantics of the representation (semantics is absent here as there is no meaning to be found in the picture) to its pragmatics, that is, to its context or author. We conclude that the artist is either not in his right mind or – which is more likely – is pulling our leg. Maybe he is mocking realistic art that seeks to copy life? Or maybe it is not reality that he represents, but an absurd picture drawn by someone else? This is what William Hogarth did in his Satire on False Perspective. The chances are that the cartoonist’s aim is not to affirm the primacy of marvel over reality (a cartoon is hardly an appropriate means of achieving that end), but to amuse us. We are expected to laugh – and we do laugh if we are in the right mood. Or we don’t if we are out of sorts.

But the problem is not only with nonsense. If the key element in the perception of humor is getting the point of a joke or a cartoon, then what’s the difference between the pleasure derived from “incongruity resolution” and that derived from solving a puzzle, guessing a riddle, or discovering which character in a crime story is the murderer? We won’t be able to understand this if we look at the humorous narrative from the level of its semantics – from the low level on which the author forcibly places us. “Logical mechanisms” functioning on this level are usually sham and illusory, and what seemed to be a resolution proves devoid of meaning (Rothbart and Pien, 1977). Take the wisecrack of a four-year-old boy who proved able to resolve an incongruity and to create an “appropriate inappropriateness” by means of a logical mechanism. Seeing a cartoon of dogs watching television, he said, “They’re probably showing a dog food commercial” (Pien and Rothbart, 1976).

“Local logic” is irrefutable: if dogs were able to watch TV, the first thing to attract their attention would probably be a dog food commercial. The “resolution” here is incomplete, though. The incongruity has still not been removed – dogs do not watch TV. We have no choice but to shift to the metalevel and draw a conclusion no longer pertaining to the semantics of the utterance, but to its pragmatics. Had this been said in earnest, it should have been treated seriously, but... Having understood the speaker’s intention and having agreed to be fooled, we laugh. If we don’t agree, we don’t laugh.

Partial resolution of incongruity, then, does not make us feel less duped than would the absence of any resolution. And even if the incongruity is minimal and is perfectly resolved so that the joke formally resembles a riddle or a crime story, the situation remains basically the same. Take an utterly realistic joke that for some reason has been extremely popular with contemporary humor scholars (Raskin, 1985, pp. 117-27). “Is the doctor at home?” the patient asked in his bronchial whisper. “No,” the doctor’s young and pretty wife whispered in reply, “Come right in!” At the joke level everything is perfectly resolved: a whisper can indeed be a symptom of illness, but... The story turns out to have been ambiguous, and its two scripts show a nearly perfect overlap. Graeme Ritchie (2004, pp. 59-60) believes that in such cases of forced reinterpretation (aka backtracking) we should speak of surprise disambiguation not incongruity resolution. Indeed, the punchline comes as a surprise, activating the second script (or frame); the logical mechanism is faultless and furnishes a complete resolution, so no faulty logic is required. The only problem is that this brings us nowhere near to laughter. From the standpoint of semantics we are faced with what in another context could be considered an intriguing short story.

To laugh, it is necessary, though not sufficient, to shift to the metalevel and reach a conclusion concerning not the meaning of the story but the story itself: if it were serious, then it should be treated accordingly, but... We reach this conclusion not because “such things don’t happen” (as in nonsense). They do happen – why not? – but the issue here is not one of semantics, but of pragmatics. We recognize the age-old intention of the joke teller – to fob off on us a fake that does not meet our standards of common sense, decorum, taste, etc. However, to understand this, a sense of humor is not required. And now comes the critical moment. We need to take a wrong turn, to overcome internal resistance, in other words, not to judge the joke as we would in a serious mood (“Baloney!”; “Is this the best one you can tell?,” etc.), but to yield to temptation and accept what’s being thrust on us. In other words, we need to perceive the story from two points of view: from the metalevel (that is, from our own level) and from the low level of the story itself, or rather, of its author or narrator.

Thus the meaning of a joke and the meaning of humor are entirely different things. In fact, they may be opposed. Many if not most theories of humor confuse these things. It is in our own behavior, and not in the object, that the comic incongruity is rooted. Indeed, when we are serious, we avoid fakes and do not allow others to fool us. Writers of fantasy fiction do not fool us; they fascinate and shock us by force of imagination. In both instances we are serious and consistent. In the case of humor, by contrast, we show inconsistency. Despite recognizing the insignificance, triviality, vulgarity, in other words, the nonseriousness of the story, we accept what ...

Table of contents

• Cover Page
• Title Page
• Copyright
• Contents
• Preface
• 1 The Comical, or Imitation of Inferior People
• 2 The Origins
• 3 Play, Language, Laughter
• 4 Culture versus Nature
• Conclusions
• References
• Name Index
• Subject Index