The comedy keeps coming

Stop me if you’ve heard this one before, but while we’re on the subject of humor, here’s another mistake that is often made in discussions of it: failing to identify precisely which aspect of the phenomenon of humor a theory is (or is best interpreted as) trying to explain.  For instance, this is sometimes manifest in lists of the various “theories of humor” put forward by philosophers over the centuries.

In my previous post, I mentioned (and tentatively advocated) the incongruity theory, according to which we find something funny when it involves some kind of anomalous juxtaposition or combination of incompatible elements.  Other examples would be the superiority theory, which holds that finding something funny involves a feeling of superiority over and contempt for others; and the release theory, which holds that we find something funny when it involves release of tension or pent-up feelings.  (There are several other theories too, but I’m not going to rehearse them all -- you get the idea.)

Now, Aristotle and Aquinas are sometimes represented as putting forward yet another theory of humor, called the play theory.  The basic idea is conveyed by Aquinas as follows:

[J]ust as weariness of the body is dispelled by resting the body, so weariness of the soul must needs be remedied by resting the soul: and the soul's rest is pleasure... Consequently, the remedy for weariness of soul must needs consist in the application of some pleasure, by slackening the tension of the reason's study. Thus… it is related of Blessed John the Evangelist, that when some people were scandalized on finding him playing together with his disciples, he is said to have told one of them who carried a bow to shoot an arrow. And when the latter had done this several times, he asked him whether he could do it indefinitely, and the man answered that if he continued doing it, the bow would break. Whence the Blessed John drew the inference that in like manner man's mind would break if its tension were never relaxed.

Now such like words or deeds wherein nothing further is sought than the soul's delight, are called playful or humorous. Hence it is necessary at times to make use of them, in order to give rest, as it were, to the soul. (Summa Theologiae II-II.168.2)

While excess is possible here as elsewhere, Aquinas is clear that deficiency vis-à-vis humor can even be at least mildly sinful:

In human affairs whatever is against reason is a sin. Now it is against reason for a man to be burdensome to others, by offering no pleasure to others, and by hindering their enjoyment… [A] man who is without mirth, not only is lacking in playful speech, but is also burdensome to others, since he is deaf to the moderate mirth of others. Consequently they are vicious, and are said to be boorish or rude… (Summa Theologiae II-II.168.4)

You might say that for the Angelic Doctor, “chillaxing” can be positively virtuous (as opposed to neutral, let alone bad).  And since humor facilitates chillaxing, humor can be virtuous.

Now, this is often discussed as if it were a rivalto theories of humor like the incongruity theory, the superiority theory, etc.  But it seems to me that that is not the case.  For Aristotle and Aquinas are simply not addressing the same question those other theories are concerned with.  Those theories are addressing the question of what makes something funny, of why we find ithumorous.  But the “play theory” of Aristotle and Aquinas is not trying to explain what makes something funny.  Rather, it is explaining the benefits of humor in human life, its function in facilitating our psychological well-being.  You might say that the incongruity theory, the superiority theory, etc. are theories about the formal cause of jokes and other forms of humor, whereas Aristotle and Aquinas are concerned with the final cause of jokes and other forms of humor.  They are saying, in effect: “Whatever the factor is whose presence causes us to find certain things to be funny -- and we’re not addressing that -- finding things to be funny has an important function of facilitating relaxation of mind.”

To be sure, writers on humor sometimes point out that one can combine different theories of humor, but noting that in this case the theories in question are addressing entirely different aspects of the phenomenon -- a difference which, again, can be characterized in terms of the traditional and independently motivated distinction between formal and final causes -- allows for greater conceptual precision than just averring that more than one theory may contain elements of truth. 

Take another example, from Jim Holt’s little book Stop Me If You've Heard This: A History and Philosophy of Jokes(which is great, by the way).  Holt reports on a 1998 discovery by UCLA researchers that, by stimulating a patient’s brain, the patient can be made suddenly to find all sorts of ordinary and unremarkable things funny.  Holt worries:

If, given the application of a little current to a spot in the brain, absolutely everything becomes invested with risible incongruity -- becomes, that is, a joke -- then how can humor pretend to be an aesthetic category worthy of philosophical analysis? (Baudelaire observed that the same effect could be produced by hashish, but never mind.) (p. 122)

As that last line (and the overall tone of his book) indicate, Holt isn’t really all that worried by this finding, so I hesitate to attribute to him any weighty thesis about the implications of neuroscience for the philosophy of humor.  But (given the neuromaniarampant today) someone mightseriously think that the finding in question somehow undermines the point of philosophizing about humor.  And as with other instances of neuromania, such a conclusion would be fallacious.  For here too, we have a claim which is not actually in competition with anything the traditional theories of humor are saying. 

For one thing, if the traditional theories are addressing formal and final causes, you might say that what the researchers uncovered were material and efficientcauses.  In particular, they uncovered (some of) the material and efficient causes of the psychological state of being amused.  By contrast, the play theory is addressing the final cause of that psychological state (viz. to facilitate relaxation of mind), whereas the incongruity theory, say, is addressing the formal cause of the psychological state (viz. a perception of something as incongruous). 

For another thing, we need to distinguish between normal and deviant cases.  Neurologically induced hallucinations can tell you something about normal vision, since there are features they have in common, but it would be absurd to conclude from this that normal vision can be assimilated to hallucination.  The differences between the cases are hardly less important than the similarities.  By the same token, it would be absurd to suppose that all cases of finding something funny can be assimilated or reduced to what is going on in the case of a patient whose brain is being stimulated in such a way that he ends up finding all sorts of unremarkable things amusing.  This is a highly abnormal case, and precisely as such, it can only tell us so much about the normal cases.  Yet it is the normal cases that the traditional theories (the incongruity theory, play theory, etc.) are concerned with.

Of course, there are all sorts of nuances and qualifications that a systematic application of the Aristotelian four-causal approach would have to take account of, and I’m not addressing all that here.  Anyway, as in philosophy more generally, so too in even so esoteric a subfield as the philosophy of humor, the four causes continue to have application.  Funny, no?

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Dragging the net

My recent Claremont Review of Books review of Scruton’s Soul of the World and Wilson’s The Meaning of Human Existenceis now available for free online.

Should we expect a sound proof to convince everyone?  Michael Augros investigates at Strange Notions (in an excerpt from his new book Who Designed the Designer? A Rediscovered Path to God's Existence).

Intrigue!  Conspiracy!  Comic books!  First, where did the idea for Spider-Man really come from?  The New York Post reports on a Brooklyn costume shop and an alleged “billion dollar cover up.”

Then, according to Variety, a new documentary reveals the untold story behind Roger Corman’s notorious never-released Fantastic Four movie.  (I’ve seen the new one.  It’s only almostas bad as you’ve heard.)

The notion of curved space has had predictivesuccess.  But does it make metaphysical sense? At Philosophy Now, Raymond Tallis expresses his doubts.

At National Review, John O’Sullivan on Robert Conquest and his obituaries.

The famous 1968 televised duel between Bill Buckley and Gore Vidal is recounted in a new documentary, as reported by New York magazine and The Weekly Standard.

In New Statesman, John Gray on the F. A. Hayek he knew.

Did the making of the Planned Parenthood sting videos really involve lying?  At Crisis, Monica Migliorino Miller answers in the negative.  Some commentary on Miller from Brandon Watson at Siris.

The New York Review of Books gives two cheers for the Middle Ages.  And Atlas Obscura exposes the myth of the medieval chastity belt.

Atheist philosopher of religion William L. Rowe has died.

Whatever happened to the guys behind the greatly underrated, ahead-of-its-time movie Sky Captain and the World of Tomorrow?  The Telegraph reports.

At Salon, Camille Paglia attacks the myth of the open-minded and well-informed liberal.

Scientism: The New Orthodoxy, edited by Richard N. Williams and Daniel N. Robinson, is reviewed at Notre Dame Philosophical Reviews.

Massimo Pigliucci, at The Philosophers’ Magazine, on a false dichotomy that prevails in post-9/11 discussion of Islam.

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Is it funny because it’s true?

In a recent article in National Review, Ian Tuttle tells us that “standup comedy is colliding with progressivism.”  He notes that comedians like Jerry Seinfeld and Gilbert Gottfried have complained of a new political correctness they perceive in college audiences and in comedy clubs, and he cites feminists and others who routinely protest against allegedly “sexist,” “racist,” and/or “homophobic” jokes told by prominent comedians like Louis C. K.  In Tuttle’s view, the “pious aspirations” of left-wing “moral busybodies” have led them to “[object] to humor that does not bolster their ideology” and “to conflate what is funny with what is acceptable to laugh at.”

 
No doubt he’s right about that.  But what does Tuttle think is the correct attitude to take to humor?  Comedy, he says, is about “speaking truth to power,” and “the comedian[‘s]… jokes are never without a bit of truth.”  Indeed, he writes:

 “Only the truth is funny,” comedian Rick Reynolds observed in the 1990s.  The comedian, in his role as fool, can never stray beyond what is true, or he will have trouble making it funny.

In his May 2014 GQfeature about Louis C.K., Andrew Corsello identified a willingness to tell the truth about what people do and think as part of C.K.’s brilliance: “He’s always striking through the mask, Louis C.K.  It’s not just a matter of braying aloud what the rest of us only dare to think; he says things we aren’t even aware we’re thinking until we hear them from C.K.  That’s his genius.”

End quote.  Tuttle is, of course, hardly the first to assert that comedy is essentially about telling uncomfortable truths.  That Lenny Bruce, George Carlin, et al. were all in the business of “speaking truth to power” has become a cliché.  But (with no disrespect to Tuttle intended) it’s also a pious falsehood.  Indeed, it is exactly the samepious falsehood Tuttle rightly condemns when he sees it in progressives. 

After all, the humorless progressives Tuttle criticizes don’t think the jokes they condemn really do contain any uncomfortable truths.  Rather, they think these jokes promote what the critics sincerely take to be falsehoods.  They think that the jokes in question do not “speak truth to power,” but rather aid and abet the powerful by facilitating lies about those who are less powerful.  This is all overheated and humorless, of course, but that is what they think.  In other words, they are applying Tuttle’s own criterion for evaluating humor.   And if Tuttle were to respond: “OK, but these left-wingers are just wrong about where the truth lies,” then he would be guilty of taking exactly the same ideological approach humor that the left-wingers do.  For of course, they would say that he is the one who is wrong about where the truth lies.

The problem is not that the progressives in question look at humor through the wrong political lens.  The problem is that looking at humor through anypolitical lens, including the right one, is simply to misunderstand the nature of humor.  The fact is that there does not seem to be any essential connection at all between something’s being funny and it’s conveying some truth, uncomfortable or otherwise.  The uncomfortable truth is rather that lots of things really are funny even though they rest on falsehoods, and lots of things are unfunny even though they are uncomfortable truths.

It’s hardly difficult to come up with examples.  To learn you have terminal cancer is to learn an uncomfortable truth.  But it isn’t funny, even if you are one of the “powerful” to whom this truth is being “spoken.”  Probably even your enemies won’t find it at all funny, but will feel sorry for you.  And even if they are very hard-hearted and don’t feel sorry for you, it probably won’t be because they think it’s funny, but rather because they think you somehow deserve it.

Perhaps someone who thinks that there is an important link between truth and humor would respond that there are at least imaginable contexts in which this sort of truth would be funny.  And that is correct -- there is such a thing as dark comedy, after all, and I’ll say more about it in a moment.  But in these cases it is precisely the additional context that generates the comedy, and not the uncomfortable truth itself.

Nor is it difficult to think of examples of things that are funny even though they don’t convey truths of any sort.  What truth is conveyed by a slap fight between the Three Stooges?  Or lines like “Don’t call me Shirley” or “Roger, Roger.  What's our vector, Victor?” in the movie Airplane?  Even jokes motivated by views one takes to be false or offensive can be funny.  For example, even the most ardent admirer of John Foster Dulles would have to admit that “Dull, duller, Dulles” is a pretty funny insult.  In his book Comic Relief, John Morreall suggests, quite rightly in my view, that the reason “Polish jokes” were popular in the U.S. in the 1970s was not because people really thought Poles were unintelligent.  George Carlin was usually pretty funny even though his views about politics and religion were usually pretty sophomoric.  (In my view, anyway; of course, some readers will disagree.  But even those who disagree have no doubt heard somecomedian or other tell a joke that prompted them to think: “I don’t agree with the view underlying it, but I have to admit it’s still funny.”)

Philosophers have over the centuries debated various theories about what makes something funny, and the “It’s funny because it’s true” theory is not among them.  Probably the most widely accepted theory -- and, I think, the most plausible one -- is the incongruity theory, according to which we find something funny when it involves some kind of anomalous juxtaposition or combination of incompatible elements.  Think of Kramer’s ridiculous antics on Seinfeld -- ineptly attempting to masquerade as a doctor, shaving with butter, preparing a meal in the shower, trying to pay for a calzone with a big sack of pennies, etc. -- or Larry David’s over-the-top reactions to minor inconveniences and offenses on Curb Your Enthusiasm.  Or consider the way that the punch line of a joke typically involves some sort of reversal of what one would have expected given the setup. 

To be sure, the incongruity thesis needs to be qualified in various ways.  There is, for example, nothing funny about a rattlesnake you find slithering up next to you after you slip into your sleeping bag while out camping, even though there is an obvious incongruity between settling down to sleep and finding a rattlesnake next to you.  However, if you “detach” yourself from such a scenario -- imagine seeing this happen onscreen in a movie, or even happening to someone else -- it certainly canseem funny.  Similarly, no one who seriously embarrasses himself in public -- by giving a horrible speech or telling a joke that falls flat, by having some personal foible revealed in front of a crowd, by losing control of his bowels, or whatever -- finds it funny at the time.  But such scenarios are nevertheless very common in comedy movies, and even someone to whom such a misfortune occurs often laughs about it later, as do those to whom he relates the story.   It is incongruity detached from any immediate danger that is funny.  (Noël Carroll suggests some other ways the incongruity theory might be refined and qualified in Humour: A Very Short Introduction.) 

It seems to me that people often overestimate the significance of certain kinds of jokes because they fail to see that it is incongruity that is key to their effectiveness.  They wrongly identify some other prominent element as key, and then overreact in either a negative or positive way.  For example, some people find “dark comedy” or “black humor” offensive, because they think it reflects insensitivity to human suffering or that it is motivated by a desire to shock decent sensibilities.  But that is not the case.  Of course, someone who tells such a joke could be insensitive or motivated by ill-will, but the point is that he need not be.  Rather, dark humor is funny precisely because of how extremethe incongruity involved typically is.  (Consider, if you have the taste for this kind of humor, this example, or this one, or the work of cartoonist John Callahan.) 

Similarly, the reason people find ethnic jokes or “dumb blonde” jokes funny need not be because they harbor “racist” or “sexist” attitudes.  Nor need religious jokes be motivated by sacrilegious or blasphemous intent.  For example, the famous Last Supper scene in Mel Brooks’ History of the World, Part Iis effective because of the extremeness of the incongruity it portrays -- the preposterous juxtaposition of Christ solemnly teaching while some annoying waiter is trying to push soup and mulled wine on the disciples.  (Note that I am not addressing here the question of what sorts of jokes are appropriatefrom a moral point of view -- that’s another matter.  I’m talking about why people in fact find certain things funny.)

At the other extreme, people can react in too positivea way to comedy when they fail to see that it is incongruity rather than some other prominent element that “does the work” in humor.  And that is, I think, exactly what is happening when people suggest (quite absurdly, in my view) that standup comedy has some profound mission of “speaking truth to power” etc.  The sober, mundane truth is rather merely that comedians like Lenny Bruce, George Carlin, or Louis C. K. say things that you are “not supposed” to say -- things that violate the rules of etiquette or decorum, or conflict with the conventional wisdom, or are odd or unusual.  In other words, there is an incongruity between what they say and what people usually feel comfortable saying.  Sometimes what they say captures some “uncomfortable truth,” but sometimes it’s just crackpot bloviating or rudeness.  And when it is true, it isn’t the truth per se that makes it funny, but rather the incongruity. 

Hence, just as critics of some forms of humor overreact because they misidentify the source and motivation of the joke (“That’s insensitive!”  “That’s racist!”  “That’s blasphemous!”), so too do the boosters of certain comedians ridiculously overstate the significance of what they do.  “He’s a genius, a diagnostician of our social ills, an exposer of hypocrisy, he’s speaking truuuuth to powwwwer!”

Nah, he’s just some guy telling jokes.  That’s all.

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Religion and the Social Sciences

Check out the recently published Religion and the Social Sciences: Conversations with Robert Bellah and Christian Smith, edited by R. R. Reno and Barbara McClay.  The volume is a collection of essays presented at two conferences hosted by First Things on the work of Bellah and Smith.  (My essay “Natural Theology, Revealed Theology, Liberal Theology” is included.)  The publisher’s website for the book can be found here. 

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