A three-part enquiry into laughter, comedy, humour and foolery.
From Trickster to Python - A Brief History of Humour
Paul Radin, in his study of native American Indian folklore provides a representative example of primal, pre-civilised humour, starring one of the, if not the oldest creator deity in the human story, Trickster, who, one day was wandering over the earth when he came across a bulb on a bush which informed him that anyone who ate it would defecate. Trickster seized the bulb, gobbled it up, and went on walking. After a time he started farting, first a little Tommy Squeaker, then larger and larger gut-blasts until he was having to hang on to trees to stop himself being blown away. When he reached the village he frantically warned the animals of his monstrous farts, who ran around in panic until they fell on the idea to bury Trickster under a small mountain of little dogs, to contain the explosion, but the next fart was like a bomb going off, scattering the little dogs, howling and welping, all over the village. Trickster found this very funny, but he then felt a desire to defecate, and sure enough, just as the bulb had foretold, he unloaded a vast quantity of excrement, a literal mountain of it in fact, into which, hanging from the top branch of a tree, he fell and had a good deal of trouble climbing out. The story concludes;
…his racoon-skin blanket was covered with filth, and he came out dragging it after him. The pack he was carrying on his back was covered with dung, as was the box containing his penis. He threw his penis away and then placed the box on his back and carried on to his next adventure.1
This trickster tale is not a joke, it’s a primal myth, a story about God, but, for those of us who grew up with Noah, Moses, Abraham and all those gloomy fellows, quite a different kind of god from those found in civilised myths, which are not generally told to inspire laughter, delight or that mad, rupturing rising of spirit one feels when the seams of reality are unstitched and come apart. The ponderous religious epics of our civilisation are told, under the pretext of inspiring awe or reverence, to cow us, to make us feel fear or, at best, to reconcile us to a battleground universe of debt, despair and perpetual strife. Imagine Yahweh or Allah pulling himself from a mountain of his own excrement and ‘throwing his penis away’.
Free, joyous laughter is dangerous to power. Has there ever been a funny king? dictator? politician? Plenty there are who can be laughed at, and a few have the dry, critical, Churchillian wit of the satirist, but there are none who inspire or invite joyous laughter, the kind of humour which not only makes light of hierarchies and the pretensions that sustains them but necessitates loss of the self-control which civilisation is founded on, the kind that is required to drag yourself out of bed each morning and go to work, or not to laugh in the boss’s face when he tells you that ‘we’re all in it together’. This is why laughter, like weeping, orgasming and shitting, is prohibited in the civilised world, unless under certain controlled conditions (such as that most depressing of happenings; enforced fun).
The most profound laughter, the kind that has no object, is not just dangerous because it mocks power; satirical laughter is often tolerated, like the king’s fool, as a useful — but toothless — means to release frustration (complaint forms serve a similar function, as do prostitutes, drinks on a Friday night, amusing panel shows and sport). Far more threatening to power is the kind of laughter which unravels the deepest illusion of civilised life, that there is an unbridgeable chasm between the subject and the object. This is mad, true, primal, panjective laughter, the laughter of the gods, which reconciles us with the world.
Primal, panjective humour, like primal ‘philosophy’, ruptures the subjective-objective split, revealing a universe in which the distinction between ‘my’ conscious ‘I’, and ‘yours’, is dissolved. This is not an act of imagination, but a felt empathic reality. As Kant proved (and modern neuroscience demonstrates), the quantitative divisions we recognise between separate things do clearly exist, objectively — if they didn’t nothing we said or thought would or could make sense — but they are brought to us by the mind. If there is any quality to experience which transcends these divisions it cannot be apprehended by the mind, only by the one ‘thing’ in the universe that I don’t have to go via the mind to experience, the one thing that I can know from the inside; my consciousness.
This extraordinary, boundary-crossing consciousness is a rare experience in civilised society, which is founded on a kind of absolute objectivity, the belief, usually unspoken, that only what appears to the senses, or can be apprehended by the rational mind, is literally true. This dreary practical belief, in which meaning always seems to come down to mere success, is common to all civilised ideologies, whether pantheistic, like the ancient Greeks’, monotheistic, like the ancient Hebrews’, or atheistic, like ours; although all civilised ideologies, whether Mayan, Mongol or Han, are profoundly antagonistic to the radical, panjective laughter of primalism and seek to punish it, along with the barbarians and savages who dare express it.
Western civilisation has its cultural origins in Judaism and Graeco-Roman classicism, both of which were — at least officially — humourless affairs. The Abrahamic God of the former is an extraordinarily gloomy creature. Where Yahweh laughs, which is infrequent, it is derisively (‘I also will laugh at your calamity; I will mock when your fear cometh’ Proverbs 1:262). There are no instances of Allah laughing in the Quran, although He is keen to prohibit mockery of Islam, while his prophet, according to those who knew him, never laughed and discouraged joking (although one of the Hadiths records a ‘joke’ of Mohammed’s; ‘Why are there no old women in heaven? Because they become young girls when they get there.’). St Paul, another humourless prophet, forbids jesting in the Epistle to the Ephesians and, although Jesus appears cheerful and given to absurdist humour, his evangelists do not record a laugh. As Nietzsche notes, ‘in the whole of the New Testament there is not one joke, a fact which would invalidate any book.’3 If two thousand years of European art are to go by, it would seem that if you want a laugh you’d be in better company with the devil.
God doesn’t explain His jokes, and neither do other comedians.
In Graeco-Roman culture we also find divine humour to be founded on and largely made up of sardonic ridicule. The first laugh in Western literature comes from the Olympians ridiculing Hephaestus’ limp, which sets the tone for most Greek and Roman comedy which follows, along with theories about it.4 Plato described comedy as originating in mockery and considered laughter not much different from vomiting, Aristotle, despite recognising its incongruous features, considered humour a form of abuse, while Cicero, despite also acknowledging incongruity, enjoyed laughing at deformity and was, like many classical prophets and theorists, wary of ‘inappropriate’ laughter.
Greek comedy, exemplified by the comedies of Aristophanes, has moments of boundary-breaking absurdity, but these primal touches are rare, rudimentary and soon fade into the sterile humour of later Greek and Roman comedy, which is essentially the comedy of 1970s nightclubs, packed with mother-in-law jokes, saucy allusions to tits and bums and the like. The first joke on record, by the archaic poet dramatist Susarion of Megara is a real thigh-slapper: ‘A woman is the bane of life, your peace she wrecks, But face it fellas, we can’t make a family without their sex!’ The comedy of Menander, Philemon, Diphilus, Plautus, Terrance, Juvenal and Petronius are all, more or less, on this level, their work based on abusive satire alternating with cock and arse gags, rape jokes, weak puns and cheap, mugging, ‘oh brother!’ type head-slapping quips, the kind of thing you might see in a 1950s American comedy show, I Love Lucy or The Phil Silvers Show. By the fall of the Graeco-Roman empire even this had largely faded away, at least from the formal stage.
Humour continued to live on, beyond the reach of the cheerless West, in ever-exuberant India for example (although the Buddha was a pretty cheerless fellow), and beyond the reach of the Christian church, flourishing in medieval Europe, the art, secular literature and semi-pagan festivals of which testify to a radical comic freedom long lost to the sorrowful Romans. But the ecstasies of the medieval era were not to last. In the fourteenth and fifteenth centuries after Christ, civilisation began to reassert itself. Science, technology, religion and secular power coalesced around a new middle-class which began to suppress the wild, the radical and the uncouth. The unmannered gaiety of Chaucer and Rabelais gave way to the more restrained pratfalls of Cervantes and Shakespeare which, in turn, ceded to the bleak, savage satire of La Rouchefoucauld, Swift, Pope, and the tight-lipped wits of the Enlightenment.
By the beginning of the eighteenth century humour in the civilised West had reached something of a nadir, the mad raptures of times past all but invisible in ‘acceptable society’. In England, Henry Fielding’s light-hearted easy acceptance and (notwithstanding his bleak and morally exhausted world view) Laurence Sterne’s carnivalesque upturning of convention, had began to harden into the long, dark modern era. Mark Twain’s satires and Charles Dickens’ monstrosities delighted the people, but industrial Europe was now as far from primal delight as the wretched Romans had been, or the grim Abbasids. The Puranas of India, the Journey to the West (aka ‘Monkey’) in China and absurdist Japanese Manzai all testify to crazy, panjective comedy in the Far East, beyond the reach of the darkness, but the idea that art, representing ‘culture’, should be a free, comic affair, accessible to all, had become, by the time we reach the nightmare of twentieth century modernism, hopelessly out of fashion (novels which, prior to the twentieth century, had been predominantly comedies, became mainly tragedies). It would take at least half century for the spirit of insane comedy to return to the West — just at the point that it began to collapse, bringing the world civilisation it had spawned down with it. In the laughter that can be heard here, at the very end, we find that comedy has come, to some degree, full circle — if, that is, we can hear it beneath the cheerless rubble of official culture.
None of this is to suggest that a capsule history of civilisation can hope to capture the story of comedy, over millennia, nor that literature, despite giving us a good idea of what a people have laughed at, captures the illiterate or informal humour of ordinary folk, any more than it does their sex lives. What we do see however, time and time again, is that higher or deeper laughter — that of people with a sense of humour — dies out as the civilised system gains control over their lives. To understand how this happens, we have to grasp, as best as we’re able to, what we mean by ‘higher’ and ‘deeper’, as opposed to ‘low’ and ‘shallow’, which means, first of all, getting a slippery grip on what humour actually is.
What’s So Funny? - Theories of Humour
It is impossible to define comedy. God doesn’t explain His jokes, and neither do other comedians. One can write about humour, just, but it’s unlikely to be very funny, and so it usually ends up being rather beside the point. ‘Humor can be dissected, as a frog can, but the thing dies in the process and the innards are discouraging to any but the pure scientific mind’.5 If two people share a different sense of humour, there is no possible way to cross the divide, at least with a rational explanation, because comedy reaches deeper than conceptual thought. Anyone who doesn’t share my sense of humour is going to react badly to this account and find it biased, fallacious, purist or whatever, for the same reason they do when I write about music in a manner which condemns their favourite tack.
Despite the unbridgeable chasm of taste, and assuming, dear reader, you find the same kinds of things funny as I do, we can, by paying the right kind of attention to the truth of comedy, touch on an aspect of the world which not only makes sense of the horror of it, but provides a key to unearthing a wellspring of strange delight, an underground river of joy that runs through the greatest art and artists, the sanest individuals and cultures, and even, if one is conscious enough, through the fabric of the universe itself. There is an enigma in comedy which we may not be able to unravel with po-faced analysis, but in approaching it, we find our shoulders a little lighter.
Let’s begin with the simplest and least-controversial definition of comedy, one that, like all definitions, admits of all kinds of exceptions, but which at least gives us somewhere to begin. Comedy, or humour, is that which inspires laughter. We don’t laugh at tragedy, which tends to induce tears, although we can cry with laughter, and with joy, and then we find that comedy and tragedy have, inexplicably, become the same thing. Normally however, the two remain apart, tragedy being a question of seeing things from the standpoint of the limited, mortal self; which makes us sigh, and comedy, from the unlimited, immortal mystery which stands, and dances, and farts, behind it; which makes us laugh.
Why should we take the cheerless seriously?
Both comedy and tragedy are uniquely human. Higher animals express loving pleasure, and a few a kind of a rudimentary laughter, but they do not experience psychological rupture as we do, the kind that makes us weep. No animals weeps, just as no animal experiences fascination at their own conscious existence.6 Animals are not sufficiently conscious for the depths of comedy and tragedy. They can experience neither the miserable constraints of ego, nor hilarious unselfish liberation from it. Following from this, animals cannot experience two of the most conspicuous consequences of human consciousness, human language and culture, freedom from which also provokes uniquely human laughter. Higher animals are, like the ancient Greeks, capable of pranks and a rudimentary kind of ridicule, and they can certainly be playful, but you don’t see them smirking at puns or laughing at each other’s nudity or simply cracking up.
Consciousness, in the deep sense I am using the word here, is not thought, but that which is aware of thought. Nor is consciousness will, nor is it feeling, nor isolated sense. It is that which ‘precedes’ these things, which is to say ‘precedes’ the mental-emotional-volitional-somatic self. This is an elusive idea, quite impossible to express directly, literally.7 It can only be approached indirectly, metaphorically, which is the chief ‘purpose’ of comedy, although, being independent of will, the word ‘purpose’ is misleading too. When we laugh we laugh because we laugh because we laugh, not because there is something useful about the experience.8
The most conscious comedy is selfless. Freedom from the known elicits the wildest laughter, exemplified in playful, primal comedy; the heart or height of comedy. The further away we get from the panjective source of conscious experience, the more we find comedy revolving around the self; what I want, what I need, what I like. Theories of comedy all reflect this, the circumference of experience, emphasising the laughter of superiority, or of release, or of incongruity, all of which are based on the constraints of the self, which is why with only a handful of exceptions, there is no point in studying them; because they are written by men without a sense of humour. Accepting the theories of Aristotle, Hobbes and Freud on the subject of humour is like taking ethical advice from Genghis Khan.9 The philosopher who is incapable of raising a real laugh does not and cannot speak for the primal trickster, the playful, wise, bungling, brilliant, boundary-shattering god at the heart of all things. Martin Heidegger, to choose an extreme example, was recorded to have only laughed once.10 Why read him? Why should you take the cheerless seriously? The rational analyst whose humour reaches no higher than weak puns and sharp snides speaks for the gods of command, for Yahweh, and Allah, and for the cruellest and grimmest of gods all, ‘the people’. As Nietzsche realised, in one of his less vicious moods;
I would order the ranks of philosophers according to the rank of their laughter – right up to those who are capable of golden laughter. And assuming that the gods also practise philosophy, a fact which many conclusions have already driven me to — I don’t doubt that in the process they know how to laugh in a superhuman and new way — and at the expense of all serious things! Gods delight in making fun: even where sacred actions are concerned, it seems they cannot stop laughing.11
Returning to the three basic theories of comedy, we have, first of all, theories of superiority, founded on the experience of one self laughing at being freed from the threat or power of another. Plato, Aristotle and Hobbes all subscribed, with various modifications, to this dismal idea. The latter charmingly described laughter as ‘caused either by some sudden act of their own, that pleaseth them; or by the apprehension of some deformed thing in another, by comparison whereof they suddenly applaud themselves’. A more modern theorist, Henri Bergson believed that laughter is intellectual joy at humiliation; at those who have become like machines in their unconsciousness, a means by which we can avoid their fate.
Theories of release, of the self laughing at being freed, albeit temporarily, from social convention, were shared by Herbert Spencer, the Earl of Shaftesbury and Sigmund Freud, who believed that laughter represented momentary freedom for the pesky Id, the animal needs of which, when given a holiday from the constraints of social convention, responds with laughter. This is why we laugh at poo, although we might note that laugh-a-minute Freud, like many theorists, saw this as largely an intellectual activity, with empathy, or joy, or loving companionship, being, for all their value, fatal to a good laugh.
The third principle strand of comic theory identifies it with incongruity; the self laughing at being freed from the constraints of rational thought. This idea, more fruitful than the other two, was shared, in modified forms, by Kierkegaard, Schopenhauer and Kant. The latter speaks of laughter in his Critique of Judgment as ‘an affect resulting from the sudden transformation of a heightened expectation into nothing’, allying it to some degree with theories of release. Indeed all three theories blend into each other. We laugh at the idea of a huge duck, for example, rampaging through Slough, because of the incongruous weirdness of it, because we like to see a pointless and ugly unplace being destroyed and because we feel unconscious pleasure at being freed from that pointless ugliness (anyone who has spent any time in Slough invariably laughs with pleasure as the train pulls away from it).
For Kierkegaard, whose theory of humour was, like much of his thought, the deepest and subtlest of all those who wrote on the subject, declared that comedy, in its purity and truth, was a consequence of an absolute innocence that both transcends the contradictory facts of the world and, in irony — a state which, for Kierkegaard was far more profound than mere verbal sarcasm — unites them. When Charlie Chaplin’s ‘Great Dictator’ dances round his office with a floating globe we perceive a quality which unites the horrors of fascistic greed with, of all things, rhythmic gymnastics. And somehow then, both are okay. ‘The person who has essential irony has it all day long’, Kierkegaard wrote,12 because he exists, like Chaplin did, in a state of inwardness which he can no more forgo than a he could his own guts. This is why, for Kierkegaard, no stranger to a decent gag,13 the genius of comedy was superior than to mere ethics, which is merely public, and therefore, finally, dispensable.
Theories of comedy, to the degree they are based on the self, are also founded on social realities; that which shapes and, in civilised society, confines the self. In the case of theories of superiority we discover laughter to be a function of ethnic, class and gender antagonisms (the rich laughing at the poor, the civilised laughing at the barbarian, etc, etc.), with theories of release it’s the stress of conformity and suppression of instinct that provides the pressure that we express in laughter (discovering two colleagues humping in the stationary cupboard is likely to lead to laughter; unless one is your wife), and with theories of incongruity it is the dreary limits of rational thought and the inculturated codes of expectation built into institutional behaviour that we seek to laugh our way out out of (something that Eddie Izzard, when he used to be funny, would rupture, with tales of cats firing elastic bands at each other from their elbow-thumbs). This is why, generally speaking, for comic theorists there is no such thing as asocial laughter, the laughter of the gods; why Sándor Ferenczi for example claimed that a totally virtuous individual would be as incapable of laughing as a perfectly wicked one would, because laughter is the sound of release from cultural restraints which are unknown to perfect virtue and vice. The notion that the saint is laughing constantly, as is the villain — the former from absolute joy, the latter from absolute ego — is foreign to most theories of laughter.
Not that ‘social laughter’ is degenerate or that it is necessarily perverse to laugh at a surprising pun, or at a heart attack, or even at someone we hate. Rather that theories which limit laughter to these things simply cannot explain why something is funny. Theories of comedy tell us what funny things have in common, but are incapable of telling us what actually does make us laugh. They tell us that humour is relief, and so it is; those trapped by social convention laugh at it being abused, those who gain from it laugh at it being reinforced. In both cases, yes, relief. But it’s not enough to see one’s enemies ridiculed, or for pressure to build up and be released, or for us to experience something incongruous. We can watch an actor dressed as Hitler being humiliated, endure half an hour of a comic shouting us into a tense frenzy and then telling us to relax, or see a two men dressed as big shoes walk across a stage and not come close to a laugh. Or a comic theory will tell us that humour is illogical incongruity, and, again, so it is. But if a sentence starts in a normal logical way and then fish, carpet, Mao Zedong, je suis une brosse à cheveux — you weren’t expecting that, but neither did you laugh (I hope). Unrelenting surrealism, without reference to something greater is an exhausting nightmare, as those who have endured The Mighty Boosh and American Dad might appreciate. And while you might find an inappropriate fart in a lift funny, you wouldn’t laugh at an old lady shitting herself. Or maybe you would — but theory couldn’t tell you why.
What is actually making some kinds of incongruity, or absurdity, or imitation, or relief, funny, and other kinds tiresome, juvenile or revolting…?
Parts 2 of this series is here, and part 3, here. These concluding essays are for paying subscribers. If you can’t pay but are desperate to read, just drop some promotional shares around the internet and let me know about it and I’ll sub you into the temple. Otherwise…
Paul Radin, The Trickster: A Study in American Indian Mythology.
Although the Psalms describe ‘mouths filled with laughter’ at being released from wordly suffering.
Kierkegaard wrote, in his journal, that ‘to the frivolous, Christianity is certainly not glad tidings, for it wishes first of all to make them serious.’
Although a Homerian comic epic, which surely would have contained a few good laughs, has been lost.
A Subtreasury of American Humor, E. B. White and Katharine S. White.
Their lack of consciousness is why we accept leads on dogs but not on children.
Hence ‘precedes’ in scare quotes, because nothing can ‘precede’ time and space, ‘going before’ itself being a timespace concept. For further discussion see Self and Unself.
This, incidentally, is partly why people who are obsessed with use — with making something of their lives, with getting somewhere in the world — often have a weak sense of humour.
The counter argument here is that one need not be a chicken to study chickens, which is also false. The scientist who cannot enter into the inner life of a chicken has no business speaking about what its measurable form gets up to.
At a picnic with Ernst Jünger in the Harz Mountains. Jünger leaned over to pick up a sauerkraut and sausage roll, and his lederhosen split with a tremendous crack. To be fair, I’d laugh too, wouldn’t you? But that’s it? in a whole life?
Friedrich Nietzsche, Beyond Good and Evil. Nietzsche’s writes generally, particularly here and in The Gay Science is infused with laughter—terrible, inhuman laughter, to be sure—but no less inspiring for all that.
Søren Kierkegaard, Concluding Unscientific Postscript to the Philosophical Fragments.
When the queen had finished telling a story at a court function and all the court officials, including a deaf minister, laughed at it, the latter stood up, asked to be granted the favour of also being allowed to tell a story, and then told the same story.
Søren Kierkegaard, Repetition.
Or try this:
There is a story about a peasant who went barefooted to town with enough money to buy himself a pair of stockings and shoes and to get drunk, and in trying to find his way home in his drunken state, he fell asleep in the middle of the road. A carriage came along, and the driver shouted to him to move or he would drive over his legs. The drunken peasant woke up, looked at his legs and, not recognizing them because of the shoes and stockings, said: “Go ahead, they are not my legs.”
Søren Kierkegaard, The Sickness Unto Death.
These are hardly gut-busters, but can you imagine Kant, Hegel, Husserl or Heidegger offering such an anecdote?
Readers of the AI chatbot which Slavoj Žižek writes with, which generates gags with the same *sniff*, *jerk*, *sniff*, *tugs sweater* compulsion as it spits out books, may object that the Žižekbot understands humour, comedy, irony and so on, but this is precisely the kind of irony that Kierkegaard repudiates in the Concluding Unscientific Postscript: ‘nothing is more ludicrous than regarding [essential irony] as a style of speaking or an author’s counting himself lucky to [*sniff*, *jerk*, *sniff*, *tugs sweater*] express himself ironically once in a while’.