Theory of Humor and Comedy

THEORIES OF HUMOR AND COMEDY

Comedy's effect on the audience is like that of a celebration of community. It probably began in religious rituals—enactments of fertility myths, the death of winter and the rebirth of spring—part of ancient holiday celebrations, expressing the spirit of carnival as described by Mikhail Bakhtin: a time of pleasure subverting the normal social rules of the hegemony through laughter and chaos.

We may wonder, “Is comedy always funny?” Perhaps not. When we think about it, we realize that most definitions of comedy relate it to tragedy. There are basic similarities between them. The difficulties that face characters in a comedy are not unlike those that face characters in tragedy. The outcomes are different. With comedy, devices it would be foolish to rely on in real life achieve the comic ending. To that extent comedy may only appear to be more comforting than tragedy; its real view of life is not optimistic. In tragedy the individual retains integrity even in death; in comedy the individual is made to conform.

The complexity given to comedy almost make it seem indefinable, but may really mean that it is changing. It is not a stiff, dead concept but one still worth analysis and critical discussion.

What exactly is it about a situation that makes it laughable? We all know that some things do make us laugh; but it is very hard to say just what it is that these laughable things have in common. Consider the following:

Six elements are required for something to be humorous:

1) it must appeal to the intellect rather than the emotions;

2) it must be mechanical;

3) it must be inherently human, with the capability of reminding us of humanity;

4) there must be a set of established societal norms with which the observer is familiar, either through everyday life or through the author providing it in expository material, or both;

5) the situation and its component parts (the actions performed and the dialogue spoken) must be inconsistent or unsuitable to the surrounding or associations (i.e., the societal norms); and

6) it must be perceived by the observer as harmless or painless to the participants.

When these criteria have been met, people will laugh. If any one is absent, then the attempt at humor will fail.

The first criterion, the appeal to intellect rather than emotion, is obvious when we think of ethnic humor. Polish (Irish, Latino, blonde, fraternity, sorority, etc.) jokes can be hilarious to everyone; everyone, that is, except to the Poles (Irish, Latino, blonde, fraternity, sorority, etc.). To the group that is being made fun of, jokes at their expense are not funny—they are insulting and rude. People respond to insults and rudeness subjectively, taking umbrage, or, in more simple terms, they get angry, which is an emotion. To those who have no personal interest in the joke, i.e., everybody else, there is no insult and they take an objective, intellectual view of the joke and can respond to the other criteria for comedy if they are met. Thus, one can take the old joke, "How many Poles does it take to screw in a light bulb? Five: one to hold the bulb and four to turn the ladder," substitute a different group for Poles in each retelling, and irritate a whole new set of people each time.

An example may be helpful here. Lenny Bruce counted on the intellectual basis of comedy when, in one of his routines, he identified all the races and ethnic groups in his audience with insulting labels: "I see we have three niggers in the audience. And over there I see two wogs, and five spics, and four kikes," etc.. As he started the routine there were gasps of incredulity and even anger: the audience couldn't believe that Bruce would be so insulting and insensitive. But as Bruce continued and the list grew longer, and it became clear that he was listing everything he could think of, the words lost their connotative, emotional meaning as insulting terms and turned into just noises. In other words, they lost their emotive content and became an intellectual exercise in how words lose their meanings outside of context. At this point, the audience, all of whom had been appalled and angry at exactly the same words, started laughing at them: the audience was reacting intellectually, not emotionally.

Continuing with this analysis of the intellectual element of humor, Arthur Schopenhauer (1788-1860) says that all humor can be “traced to a syllogism in the first figure with an undisputed major and an unexpected minor, which to a certain extent is only sophistically [based on false logic] valid.” This intimidating formula may be illustrated by a piece of dialogue from the British playwright George Bernard Shaw's play Getting Married, in which a bishop is made to say that he “cannot, as a British bishop, speak disrespectfully of polygamy,” because the great majority of the subjects of the British Empire are polygamists. This might be regarded as the following syllogism: (major premise) All British institutions are to be respected; (minor premise) polygamy is a British institution; therefore(conclusion) polygamy is to be respected. Here the major premise is, for Shaw's audience in 1908, certainly “undisputed.” The minor premise is, equally certainly, both “unexpected” and “only sophistically valid.”

Perhaps revealing his limitation of analysis, Schopenhauer seems to take account only of the intellectual element in humor. For him humor depends on the pleasure of finding unexpected, intellectual connections between ideas. It differs from serious intellectual effort only because the connection, being merely “sophistically valid,” cannot be taken seriously.

In quite a very different way, we often laugh at people because they have some failing or defect, or because they find themselves at a disadvantage in some way or because they suffer some small misfortune. The miser, the glutton, the drunkard are all stock figures of comedy; so is the person who gets hit with a custard pie. We laugh, too, at mistakes: at egregiously incorrect answers, at faulty pronunciation, at bad grammar. These are all fairly crude examples, but it may be that even the most subtle humor is merely a development of this, and that the pleasure we take in humor derives from our feeling of superiority over those we laugh at. According to this view, all humor is derisive.

Thomas Hobbes (1588-1679) is probably the originator of this theory. “Laughter,” he says, “is a kind of sudden glory”; and he is using ”glory” in the sense of “vainglory,” or “pride,” or “self-esteem.” He adds that we laugh at the misfortunes or infirmities of others, at our own past follies, provided we are conscious of having now surmounted them, and also at unexpected successes of our own.

Arguing on these lines, Alexander Bain (1818-1903) maintains that all humor involves the degradation of something. Bain expands Hobbes in two main directions. He says that we need not be directly conscious of our own superiority; we may, for example, laugh sympathetically with another who scores off an adversary. Secondly, it need not be a person that is derided: it may be an idea, a political institution, or, indeed, anything at all that makes a claim to dignity or respect.

Aristotle states that comedy is that "which causes no pain or destruction . . . is distorted but painless" (my emphasis). The comic action is perceived by the audience as causing the participants no actual harm: their physical, mental, and/or emotional well-being may be stretched, distorted, or crushed, but they recover quickly and by the end of the performance they are once again in their original state. A prime example are the Warner Brothers' Road Runner cartoons, in which Wile E. Coyote is dropped, crushed, pummeled, rolled, wrung, and otherwise punished for his attempts to catch the road runner, yet seconds later is putting together his next Acme widget to carry out his next plan. Wile is never damaged permanently, no matter how high the cliff he falls off or how big the rock that lands on him. The criterion applies to real life, as well. It is funny when someone slips on the ice and falls: people laugh--until they realize that the person broke his leg. At that moment, the event is no longer humorous.

The obvious criticism of the above-formulated theory is that, by itself, it is also too narrow to cover every type of humor. It does not seem to apply to word play, or to nonsense of the type written in limericks by Edward Lear (1812-1888) or playful neologisms of Lewis Carroll (1832-1898). Nor does it apply to all comic characters. The laughter roused by comic vice, and particularly debauchery and profligacy, is often with the cause of the laughter rather than at it, as in Restoration comedy and any locker room story.

What we have been speaking about is often called the “superiority theory” of comedy. According to any superiority theory of humor, the laugher always looks down on whatever is laughed at, and so judges it inferior by some standard. Obviously many varieties of superiority theory are possible, according to the particular standard adopted.

One especially important and famous criterion for comedy, that it be mechanical and inherently human, is delineated by Henri Bergson (1859-1941) in his essay "Laughter". Bergson's ideal is elasticity, adaptability, the elan vital. Hence the laughable is for him ”something mechanical encrusted upon the living”—just where one would expect adaptability and flexibility. The typical comic character, he says, is someone with an obsession, or idee fixe. It's humorous when a person acts in a manner that is inappropriate to a stimulus or situation, as in any slapstick comedy routine. It is funny when a chair is pulled out from under someone who is sitting down, because he does not adapt to the change in situation and continues to sit in a mechanical fashion. Dogberry, in Shakespeare's Much Ado About Nothing, is funny because he continues blithely along, thinking he's in charge of the situation when in actuality he has no idea what's happening. Lucy on I Love Lucy is funny because she mechanically reacts to events without adapting to the complex and changing demands of reality, nor thinking about how events have changed the situation. As a typical example of comic rigidity, Bergson cites the story of the customs officers who went bravely to the rescue of the crew of a wrecked ship. The first thing the officers said when they finally got the sailors ashore was: ”Have you anything to declare?” Here, Bergson says, we have the blind, automatic persistence of a professional habit of mind, quite regardless of altered circumstances.

An extension of Bergson's theory is his idea that comedy is inherently human. Something is funny only insofar as it is or reminds the audience of humanity. The audience may laugh at the antics of an animal, such as chimpanzees or horses or bears, but only in direct proportion to the animal's capability of reminding the audience of something human. Thus, animals such as chimps and orangutans are often dressed in human clothing to heighten the reminder, and horses, such as Mr. Ed and Francis the Talking Mule, can talk and think better than the men they're around.

Laughter is, Bergson thinks, society's defense against the eccentric who refuses to adjust to its requirements. He does not seem to consider the possibility that humor may sometimes (as in Swift or Wilde or even Saturday Night Live) be directed at the social code itself; though this omission need not affect his theory, since it would then be the code that would be regarded as unduly rigid and out of touch with reality.

Superiority theories seem to leave out of account one very important element in humor: incongruity. Consider the child's misinterpretation of a well-known prayer:

Our Father, who are in heaven, / Howard be thy name.

We do not laugh at this simply because it is a mistake. We laugh because of the contrast between “Hallowed be thy name”--a phrase heavy with religious associations--and the very different attitude evoked by "Howard." Sacredness is kept in one compartment of our minds and men named Howard in quite another; it is the sudden mixing of these contrasting attitudes that causes laughter.

Thus, one major point that becomes apparent when one examines comedy is that it is based on incongruity: the unexpected with the expected, the unusual with the usual, the misfit in what has been established as a societal norm.

Incongruity theory is often identified with “frustrated expectation,” a concept we owe to Immanuel Kant (1724-1804), who says that humor arises “from the sudden transformation of a strained expectation into nothing.” More is implied here than merely surprise: the suggestion is that humor consists in the violent dissolution of an emotional attitude. This is done by the abrupt intrusion into the attitude of something that is felt not to belong there, of some element that has strayed, as it were, from another compartment of our minds.

In order for there to be incongruity, there must be something to be incongruous to. We understand, then, that for a comedy to work there must be an established set of cultural, human and societal norms, mores, idioms, idiosyncrasies, and terminologies against which incongruities may be found. Such norms may be internal or external. Internal norms are those that the author has provided in the text. External norms are those which exist in the society for which the text was written.

The major problem is to know what norms exist, and which have become out-of-date. Many times some people, upon hearing a joke, will respond with "I don't get it". This is because they don't know or understand the societal norms being violated in the joke. This is also why you can never explain a joke: to explain you must first expound on the norms, then show how they have been violated. Such an explanation removes any incongruity by illustrating how it works within the norms.

The need for norms also explains why humor can become passe. Stand-up comedians do very few jokes about President Eisenhower's administration because the norms have changed: no one understands topical references to forty years ago.

Plays and jokes can also go out-of-date. Neil Simon's early plays often depended heavily on social attitudes of the time, particularly those about the relationships between men and women. However, sex roles and attitudes have changed considerably since 1961 and Come Blow Your Horn, and the humor in the character Alan Baker's rather sexist approach to women and sex now evokes an emotional reaction in many people, distaste, rather than laughter. The humor that does work takes as its norms human attitudes and norms that are independent of society and culture.

Nonetheless, a funny play can remain funny, even when the norms change. Shakespeare's "breeches parts", such as Viola in Twelfth Night or Rosalind in As You Like It, evoked great laughter from Elizabethan audiences because their societal norms said that women do not wear men's clothing, and the sight of Viola and Rosalind in male attire was incongruous. Today, women wearing men's clothing is the norm, and therefore seeing Viola in pants is not funny. Nonetheless, there are many things in Shakespeare's plays that are incongruous to today's norms, and thus his comedies continue to be funny four hundred years later. We still laugh, perhaps not at what Elizabethan audiences did, but the plays are still funny because he gained most of his humor from human rather than societal norms.

Three aspects of incongruity are literalization, reversal, and exaggeration. In literalization the joke comes from taking a figure of speech and then performing it literally. When Max Smart (Get Smart) asks the robot agent Hymie to "give me a hand", Hymie detaches a hand and gives it over, interpreting the instruction literally. On the situation comedy Cheers, Coach, and later Woody, the bartenders, take everything that is said to them at face value, apparently incapable of re cognizing innuendo, hyperbole, or figures of speech. Consider, also, how literalization is a blending of Bergson’s mechanization with incongruity.

Reversal is simply reversing the normal, taking what is normal and expected and doing or saying the opposite. When Retief, in Keith Laumer's science fiction novel Retief And The Warlords, is subjected to what his captors think are the most horrendous tortures, he is assailed with modern art and smellovision renditions of overheated tires, burnt toast, chow mein, aged Gorgonzola, and the authentic odor of sanctity.

An exaggeration is taking what is normal and blowing it out of proportion. Events occur to which the characters will react beyond all proportion: the mountain out of a molehill syndrome. The jealous wife's discovery of a blonde hair on her husband 's jacket leads her to build an entire scenario of mad trysts, trips to the Riviera, and a murder plot against her, until he points at the collie sitting at her feet. Such exaggeration is a standard in comedy.

The greatest incongruity is the violating of societal taboos. This violation can provoke the greatest laughter. In American society the greatest taboos are discussions of sex, death, and biological functions. These are all subjects which society has decreed should be discussed seriously, discreetly, and euphemistically, if discussed at all. It is from these taboos that much humor is derived.

Concerning this view of incongruity as the origin of comedy, what is essential to humor is the mingling of two ideas which are felt to be utterly disparate. One or the other may be “degraded” in the process; but this is incidental. The neatness of the joke will depend on two things: the degree of contrast between the two elements, and the completeness with which they are made to fuse. A pun is “the weakest form of wit,” because here the connection between the two elements is purely verbal. Humor is more penetrating when it brings to light a real connection between two things normally regarded with quite different attitudes, or when it forces on us a complete reversal of values. Oscar Wilde's witticism that a particular man “hasn’t a single redeeming vice,” is funny—not merely because of its close resemblance to the wording of the conventional remark which it replaces, but because it presents us with a quite different, but perhaps equally appropriate, evaluation of the social fact referred to.

Herbert Spencer (1820-1903) thinks that all humor can be explained as “descending incongruity.” The adjective “descending” implies a judgment of value. Spencer agrees with Bain that incongruity always involves a contrast between something exalted, or dignified, and something trivial or disreputable; but he thinks that it is the incongruity, and not the descent or “degradation,” that is the important feature. Spencer sets out to answer a question that had been largely overlooked. Why, he asks, should the perception of incongruity lead to the peculiar bodily manifestations we call laughter? His answer is that laughter is an overflow of nervous energy, and that the abrupt transition from a solemn thought to a trivial or disreputable one leaves us with a fund of nervous energy which needs to be expended in laughter. This explanation, however, would seem to rest on a confusion, since a disreputable topic may well rouse more emotional energy than a respectable one.

It is important for us to consider that many writers on humor have refused to accept the wide-held view that humorous incongruity must necessarily consist in degrading something exalted by bringing it into contact with something trivial or disreputable. They not only hold that incongruity is quite distinct from degradation, but also insist that incongruity, and not degradation, is the central feature of all humor.

Thus, according to incongruity theories, humor may be said to consist in the finding of “the inappropriate within the appropriate.” It is not merely that unexpected connections are found between apparently dissimilar things: we have found that our notions of proper social norms are also involved. In any community certain attitudes are felt to be appropriate to some things but not to others; and there develop “stereotypes” of such figures as the typical politician, or poet, or maiden aunt, “the hundred per cent American,” and so on. The humorist drags into light the inconvenient facts which shatter these attitudes and puncture these stereotypes. Henry Fielding, for example, in his novel Jonathan Wild, portrays the exploits of a highwayman in the terms usually reserved for military heroes. He demonstrates that descriptions appropriate to the one can also be appropriate to the other. Here the effect is to cast doubt on the conventional system of values; but sometimes, as Bergson pointed out, the humor may be at the expense of the person who is unable to live up to the conventional requirements. Consequently humor is sometimes radical and sometimes conservative in its implications. Sometimes it is not clear which effect is intended. For example, Wilde's witticism, quoted above, may be taken either as a gibe at the boredom he finds in British men or as a questioning of the conventional Victorian attitudes toward religion and ethics.

Our exploration of humor as something intellectual, superior, and incongruous is still not complete; another theory, called “relief theory,” still needs our consideration. Since humor often calls conventional social requirements into question, it may be regarded as affording us relief from the restraint of conforming to those requirements. The relief may be only temporary: a locker room story, for example, is not usually a serious challenge to conventional morality; but it does enable us to air the sexual impulses which society makes us repress. Moreover, people who have been undergoing a strain will sometimes burst into laughter if the strain is suddenly removed. It may be, then, that the central element in humor is neither a feeling of intelligence, superiority, nor the awareness of incongruity, but, instead, the feeling of relief that comes from the removal of restraint.

This theory has been reinforced and brought into prominence by the psychological discoveries of Sigmund Freud (1856-1939). Freud himself regards humor as a means of outwitting the “censor,” his name for the internal inhibitions which prevent us from giving rein to many of our natural impulses. It is not only our sexual impulses that are repressed by the censor—the ‘Superego,” but also our malicious ones. In this way Freud is able to account, not only for indecent jokes and for the appeal of comic characters who ignore conventional moral restraints, but also for the malicious element in humor to which superiority theories call attention.

According to Freud, the censor will allow us to indulge in these forbidden thoughts only if it is first beguiled or disarmed in some way. The beguiling is done, he thinks, by means of the techniques of humor: such devices as punning, “representation by the opposite,” and so on. An insult, for example, is funny if it appears at first sight to be a compliment. To take another example, the above-stated witticism from Wilde can be regarded with this understanding. Freud finds many similarities between the techniques of humor and the ways in which our waking thoughts are distorted in dreams. This enables him to link his theory of humor with his theory of dream interpretation: dreams are also a means of eluding the censor.

The intellectual pleasure of playing with words and ideas, and of finding unexpected connections, regarded by the incongruity theories as the essential element in humor, thus finds a place in Freud's theory as a means of tricking the Superego. Since the censor is beguiled and not merely deceived, it is presupposed that such devices are a source of pleasure in themselves. Freud explains this by adopting Spencer's physiological explanation of laughter. The pleasure results, he thinks, from the economizing of nervous energy. Nevertheless, he does not regard the intrinsic appeal of these comic devices as sufficient to explain humor: they would be pointless if we were not able, under their cover, to give vent to repressed desires.

Our conclusion: So far we have seen that theories of humor may be divided into four main types: intellectual theories, superiority theories, incongruity theories, and relief theories. Yet there is a fifth, less important, theory of comedy. This formulation suggests that the central feature of humor is ambivalence, a mingling of attraction and repulsion. It is the humor that makes us squeal at the grotesque, laughing, “Eeeuu, so gross! So disgusting!”

Each of these five theories of humor is able to explain some types of humor, but it may be doubted if any of them can satisfactorily explain every type of humor. Intellectual theories of comedy are great for dealing with wit, but they pale in their explanations of comic farce or sexual humor. Superiority theories account very well for our laughter at small misfortunes and for the appeal of satire, but are less happy in dealing with word play, incongruity, nonsense, and indecency. Incongruity theories, on the other hand, are strong where superiority theories are weakest, and weak where they are strongest. Relief theories account admirably for laughter at indecency, malice, and nonsense (regarded as relief from ``the governess, reason”) but are forced to concede that there is an intrinsic appeal in incongruity and word play that is quite independent of relief from restraint. Ambivalence theory can help us explain the humor in the grotesque, but it fails with other instances of humor. Each type of theory does, however, illuminate some particular aspect of the complex topic of humor [DSW1] ; for that we are glad.

In the end, as long as the audience knows the norms and can thus see the incongruity, as long as the participants act in an inflexible manner but are inherently human, as long as no one appears to get hurt, and as long as the audience doesn't take the situation personally, then an attempt at being funny will succeed.

Sources:

MacLachian, C. J. M. “The Nature and Theory of Comedy.” <<http://www.st-andrews.ac.uk/~www_se/persona l/Comedy.html>>.

Monro, D. H. “Humor, Theories Of,” Colliers Encyclopedia CD-ROM, A Division of Newfield Publications, Inc. 28 Feb 1996.

Taflinger, Richard F. “Sitcom: What It Is, How It Works: A Theory of Comedy.” <<http://www.wsu.edu:8080/~taflinge/theory.html>> May 15, 2001.