What's so funny?
by Joe Palmer
[ opinion - november 06 ]
The World's funniest joke:
Two hunters are out in the woods when one of them collapses. He doesn't seem to be breathing and his eyes are glazed. The other guy takes out his phone and calls the emergency services, 911.
He gasps: "My friend is dead! What can I do?" The operator says: "Calm down, I can help. First, let's make sure he's dead." There is a silence, then a gunshot is heard. Back on the phone, the guy says: "OK, now what?" - CNN, Science and Space 10/7/2002, research by Richard Wiseman, University of Hertfordshire, from over two million worldwide ratings.
Duck jokes are also funny everywhere, according to the Wiseman study.
A duck waddles into a store to buy a Chapstick.
"Cash, or charge?" asks the clerk.
"Put it on my bill," says the duck.
And there is endless variation on the joke that begins So a duck walks into a bar and orders a grape, and the quintessential duck joke:
Q: What's the difference between a duck?
A: One leg is both the same.
Which is grammatical but nonsense. In humor we have a great spread from the simple pun, a play on the multiple meanings of a word form, to the illogical and absurd, as in:
-- Say goodnight, Gracie.
-- Goodnight, Gracie.
The prisoners on the cellblock had run out of jokes. They had told the same jokes over and over, so in order to save their breaths they assigned numbers to the jokes they all knew well. In the quiet boredom of a prison evening a prisoner would call out a number and everyone would laugh. On an evening one prisoner laughed and couldn't stop laughing.
-- What's wrong with him?
-- He hadn't heard that one before.
We weep or laugh to purge ourselves of our conscious reactions to words and things, to lessen our discomfort at seeing or imagining evil, a threatening situation, or the flawed and inferior, the stupid, ugly, or absurdly incongruous. Emotion is displaced action, the sort of feelings we get when we want to do something but can't, when we can't fight or flee, as when a loved one dies, and also the sort of feelings we get when we compare ourselves to others and feel we are superior to them. Humour can also be a sort of aggression, as when a defensive, unsure person assigns nicknames to his associates.
President G W Bush assigns names to people in his life:
Donald Rumsfeld: Rummy
James Baker: Jimmy
Tony Blair: Landslide
Karl Rove: Turd Blossom
Vladimir Putin: Pootie-Poot
Maureen Dowd: Cobra
Dick Cheney: Big Time
And so on. [NNDB-Soylent, 2006]
Nicknames given the president include Fuhrerous George, Arbusto, Dim Son, Toxic Texan, and Smirk. Among David Letterman's Top Ten Mexican names for the president are Señorita Cheney, Guacamoron, No Habla Inglés, and Bandito de la Elección, all of which illustrate an awesome disaffection.
The size of the distance between others' pain and our pleasure is how close to others we feel, a function of identification. Recently in Thailand a circus dwarf bounced from a trampoline by accident into the maw of a yawning hippo, which gagged and swallowed him. The audience applauded wildly, thinking it was part of the act. When they soon learned the truth, they laughed nervously, that is, they gave out only nervous laughs, because other displays of emotion are taboo in that culture. However, we weep to purge our feelings, our emotions, our discomfort at seeing or imagining the suffering of the good and the innocent, when JFK, or 665,000 Iraqis, or five little Amish girls perish for whatever ends.
My parents took me to Amish country, which to a kid, to see a bunch of people that have no cars, no TV, no phone you go, 'So what? Neither do I.' Who wants to see a whole community that's been grounded?
We take pleasure from the misfortune of others. The principle of Schadenfreude (German, damage + joy), enjoyment obtained from the troubles of others, is a defining human trait showing itself in many ways. When we laugh at ourselves we are looking at ourselves as if we were someone else, taking pleasure in our own misfortune, or pretending to take pleasure, which is some sort of lie to ourselves and to others.
There is an old story about the taciturn cowboy and the curvaceous girl sitting in a swaying railway carriage. The cowboy sits looking down under the brim of his hat, apparently at the girl's legs. As her skirt creeps up she pulls it down over her knees. After she straightens her skirt a couple of times, the cowboy says, "Don't rip your skirt, Sweetie. My weakness is liquor, not women."
Girls are supposed to be self-conscious and shy, and cowboys lustful and goatish. You, the audience - the reader, listener, or watcher - you put yourself in the situation of the story, you feel the narrative, seeing the girl's vain assumption, and so her error provides a spark of mental energy having no place to go but to laughter - or to a groan, a special form of laughter. Myself, I think the cowboy is lying, and I think the girl is giggling, both of them enjoying the situation.
We need to maintain a balance, a state of equilibrium in our consciousness at the place between our minds and our bodies. We physically displace the energy in our emotions into weeping or laughing. Then we feel better. The Dalai Lama does not weep; he looks at evil, and smiles blissfully. Depressed people weep, seeing evil everywhere, suffering melancholy and despair.
A groan can be a kind of laughter, a commentary on our delighted disapproval, a metalaugh meaning that that is not funny enough to laugh at but I am laughing anyway. A diabolical or maniacal laugh is a lie, sarcasm disguised as joy. Defiant laughter is the forced laugh that shows threats are not sufficient to remove our opposition. Nervous laughter shows discomfort in social situations. Hysterical laughter is the cause and consequence of euphoria. It is contagious. Teenage girls often catch it; Greek hystera: womb. Schadenfreude may produce shameful laughter, shame at finding joy in the misfortune of others.
We laugh at clowns first because they look and act different, out of place and inferior. We feel superior to them. They are funny because they are sad, standing right on the cusp between misery and humor. The cuckolded clown Canio in the opera Pagliacci knows the show must go on, and so he tells himself to put on his costume and turn his agony and tears into buffoonery:
Vesti la giubba... Tramuta in lazzi lo spasmo ed il pianto... Ridi, Pagliaccio. Laugh, Clown.
Pagliacci is the opera chosen for making fun of operas. It is the most parodied of all operas. Groucho sings Ridi, Pagliacci...I love you very muchee.
The costumes of characters often suffice to make things funny. Bertie Wooster, already dressed like a fop, in a white hat looks like a pimp or a mobster. Jeeves is funny just because he wears a valet's uniform, a cutaway coat and bowler hat - all the time. Enoch Emery, in Flannery O'Connor's Wise Blood, wears a yellowish white suit, a pinkish white shirt, and a tie the color of green peas. He says:
I know a whole heap about Jesus. I attended thisyer Rodemill Boys' Bible Academy that a woman sent me to. If it's anything you want to know about Jesus, just ast me.
Irony, showing the duality of characters' peculiarity, is the goal of storytelling and drama. Characters are both like and unlike others. The differences make the story. Do you recall the one about the farmwife who invites a poor new neighbor to accompany her to church on Sunday? Among many people, an apron, a costume worn while doing domestic work, is inappropriate for wearing to church. Among the Amish, women wear aprons much of the time, especially to church. The neighbor wears her clean and pressed apron, so the farmwife goes back home and puts on her apron so that the neighbor will not feel inferior or out of place. The irony comes from the farmwife avoiding the neighbor being ridiculed by dressing in a ridiculous costume too.
Ridiculous: Latin ridiculus - absurd, preposterous, laughable in a sense like Schadenfreude. We laugh so as not to cry. The ridiculous is something we laugh at and disapprove of. The ridiculous is absurd or foolish, or simply wrong like a dull-normal, dyslexic president.
In his Poetics Aristotle explains how it is that we feel better by getting relief from feelings of shame and dread in catharsis, ridding ourselves of the stress of pity and fear through the sacrament of tragedy.
A good and true Hamlet or other tragedy is hard to find, and so most theatre and cinema today mix tragedy and comedy together. Main characters are silly and flawed, rising only to the level of pity and derisive humor. If the main character is virtuous and yet he loses the struggle, as in the story of Lawrence of Arabia, then we have a true, memorable tragedy. If the hero is inferior, flawed and selfish to start with, and he does not win, then we have a comedy, a laughably sad situation. Immediately David Mamet's Edmond comes to mind, a dirty joke of a play, whose main character is a sad sack lost in racism, misogyny and violence, leading to a punch line - Edmond, a wimpy, white, imprisoned loser, before going to bed kisses his cellmate, a rapacious, menacing black fellow convict, goodnight.
If Aristotle wrote a commentary about comedy, the manuscript is lost, perhaps as supposed in Eco's novel The Name of the Rose. We have remaining from Aristotle only his suggestion that in comedy we imitate people of inferior character, as opposed to the sympathetic heroes of tragedy.
The word comedy comes down to us through the ages from Aristotle's komos+oidos, revel and sing. The most mundane and ordinary occurrences seem comical to us when excessive eating and drinking dull the senses and the intellect. We revel and sing when we are happy, so it is that Carnival is the time of eating and drinking before Lent when activities are permitted to be farcical, silly, jocular, amusing, out of the ordinary, or ordinarily out of the ordinary. The Carnival parades in New Orleans, for example, were originally intended to be fun, a live show of license and drollery. Everything but death was funny then. Nowadays, it's funny that Carnival is part of a tourist trap there.
Death is funny at Hallowe'en. It is then that we laugh at ghoulies and ghosties and long-legged beasties, and things that go bump in the night. On the Day of the Dead some people eat too much and drink too much until they laugh in drunken glee on the decorated graves of their loved ones, singing sad songs until their songs become a celebration of life. As far as I know, Mexican cemeteries do not yet attract Yanqui package tours.
In The Anatomy of Melancholy, Robert Burton argues, quoting Seneca, that God created pleasures and recreations - feasts, mirth, music, singing, dancing - "for our use." Not to serve our necessities did God create these good, lawful things, but out of "His great love, for our delectation."
What's so funny? Why do we laugh? How many ludicrous ways can Bugs Bunny humiliate Elmer Fudd? And why is feckless Fudd funny? And Daffy Duck?
When I was a teacher, every year we had a group photo. Every year the same old photographer had us pose seated and standing for the picture. He always said at that point 'Now, put your footsies together," and then everyone always laughed, whether at relief from the tension of being told what to do, at the photographer always repeating the same command, at his use of the baby-talk footsies, or for all of these reasons. I can't think of any recurring, funny event more trivial than that yearly repetition of footsies maybe the annual visit from Santa Claus, that painful swap meet, that farce in which it seems you get something for nothing while knowing full well you have to pay for your gifts in the end.
Traditionally all is comic that ends well. In the long poem, the [Divine] Comedy (1308-21), the last great allegory of the Middle Ages and the first great literary work of the Renaissance, Dante tells a story that includes a visit to Hell and a happy ending with a visit to Paradise - a comedy as opposed to a tragedy. The Divine Comedy is not at all funny, fun, or comic, unless you feel that the depiction of Mohammed, "the disseminator of scandal and schism, the pseudoprophet" with his intestines hanging out, is funny.
Only an individual sure and certain of his own salvation can find suffering funny (as Buddhists try to do). You have to be damn sure of your own dollop of grace to act as if you are simply one of the gaggle of sinners suffering the torments of the just and of the unjust.
Flannery O'Connor, who said she thought Simone Weil was funny, was such a one. How could a writer like Flannery, her tent pitched right on the edge of the abyss, find humor in the writings of Simone, who had already fallen in? Nowhere is there anything intentionally comical in Simone's works or in her brief life. She starved herself while dying of tuberculosis after writing essays about God and man's malevolence. She died from despair, carrion comfort, cancer of the conscience, unable to help others suffering from the Nazis. She was always deadly serious. Flannery, dying of lupus, a crippled and droll woman, wrote stories about alienation and absurdity, a sort of Laurel-and-Hardy-funny way of being serious that is comical if you think stupidity and selfishness are funny.
I looked at Stan Laurel and Oliver Hardy to find parallels to Flannery's work in theirs. I found that their created characters always seem blameless in their depiction of stymied, baffled people. They are somehow inexcusable vandals, yet barbarians with an innocence that enrages self-important individuals. Flannery does the same but on a larger scale with a universal, general dimension, making fun of our inability to do anything about persistent social problems - racial discrimination, poverty, and the prevalence of fundamental, crude religion, that universal fear and trembling that knows no subtlety or theology.
In addition to those similarities, I found that Ollie once managed a cinema in Milledgeville, Georgia, where Flannery raised peafowl, and now rests in peace. That coincidence I found funny.
Along with her version of the human comedy, Flannery also depicts the painful operation of divine grace, painful because the path to Goodness is rocky, and therefore banana-peel humorous. It is a vicious circle. She says you can't have Grace wherever you are; you have to go the hard way to It. Catholicism, an older religion than Humanism, holds that people are basically no damn good, always trying to take the easy, selfish way. They cannot be relied on to be good. Catholicism attracted both Flannery and Simone, and it suited and held Flannery because a happy ending in the Faith proves that our existence is all a comedy, but Catholicism was not catholic enough, that is, universal enough for Simone. The Original Sin and man's fall from Grace were not sufficient explanation for her. Simone wanted to see angels instead of devils. She was a humanist, a Pelagian heretic, hoping that man was capable of choosing the good without divine help and the suffering it entails. Pretty funny, huh?
What Flannery says to me: Ignorant, ecstatic religionists follow the mob. They are drug addicts lying in the gutters of the mind. They are the slaves of earnest preachers, of charlatans and confidence men. They take upon themselves the task of relieving their misery themselves, looking for Sweet Jesus or Allah in the clutter of their own personalities. In mega-churches and mosques, in storefront chapels, and on TV they take Religious Rolaids, patent medicine for the sin-sick soul.
Flannery mocked the sentimental foolishness of popular culture. She would have laughed at our mendacious, pederastic priests and politicians, and she would have busted a gut at the Masters of Business Administration making the Charlie McCarthy President tell another whopper. Madonna and Brangelina adopting black African babies would have tickled her pink.
A duck goes in a bar and orders a grape. Annoyed, the bartender tells the duck he has no grapes. Next day the duck returns and asks for a grape. The exasperated bartender throws the duck out, telling him that if he returns he'll nail his bill to the bar. Next day the duck goes in the bar and asks the bartender if he has a nail.
-- No, I don't have any nails.
-- OK, I'll have a grape.
