Theories of Laughter

 One time, during a work meeting, we were all sitting around the conference room at the office discussing sports injuries. I had none of my own to contribute, so I tried to offer one from my family's experience. "We went skiing one winter," I explained, "and my mom tore her ACLU." 

I immediately turned beet red. Everyone else laughed. Of course, I had meant to say "ACL," the common abbreviation of the knee ligament that is so frequently destroyed in ski collisions. But, having started on those first three letters, my mouth unconsciously went on to shape the fourth letter of the other famous acronym that begins in the same way. I had been guilty of an automatism. 

Why, though, was this slip of the tongue funny? It seems to me that here is a good opportunity to test the rival theories of humor that have been propounded over the ages. 

According to the so-called "superiority theory," often associated with Hobbes, my co-workers laughed because they had caught me out in a mistake. This gave them a burst of "sudden glory," as Hobbes would call it. They saw me stumble, and realized all at once my abject inferiority and their awesome power in comparison. This gave them a rush of confidence and self-approval that overflowed in the form of laughter. 

While Hobbes provided the most famous version of this theory of laughter, he was not the only one to propose it. Seldom discussed in this regard is an even more disturbing version of "superiority theory" that appears in Elias Canetti's Crowds and Power. It is discussed in a relatively short, even fleeting, passage of that large book—but it is a memorable passage for all that. 

Canetti suggests that laughter is a sort of vestigial evolutionary trait, associated with our species' predatory and carnivorous characteristics. We laugh, he argues, at the spectacle of the sudden weakness of others— when they trip and fall, that is to say, whether physically or verbally or spiritually—because it reminds us of a struggling victim about to become our prey. We laugh, in short, as a prelude to devouring them. 

I proposed this version of humor theory to a friend a few years ago, after I had just finished Canetti's book. "And," I explained, "he points out that the other animal known to make a human-like laughing sound is the hyena—so, laughter must be a way for carnivorous predators to open up their gullets prior to devouring the helpless victim." 

My friend said something that I misinterpreted as approval of the theory. "I know," I said, "isn't that fascinating!" He replied: "No, I said I 'loathe it.'" "Oh," I said, "I thought you said, 'I luuuurrrve it.'" My friend replied that he thought it was evidence-free armchair philosophizing based on untested, unscientific assumptions. I agreed that's exactly what it was, but I couldn't see why we should let the mere fact that the theory probably wasn't true stand in the way of its being interesting. 

Regardless, neither Canetti nor Hobbes is the last word on humor; fortunately, others have proposed more innocuous explanations of the phenomenon, that don't rely so heavily on sadism and predation. One alternative theory holds that humor arises from inconsistency and surprise. Another, often associated with Freud, holds that humor arises from a relaxation of social taboos—the burst of relief we feel when we allow a repressed thought or emotion to be obliquely expressed. 

Then there is Henri Bergson's theory. And this one, of all the theories of humor, I confess is the one that always seemed the least plausible to me, when I heard about it in the abstract. But now, having read Bergson's Laughter: An Essay on the Meaning of the Comic, in which he propounds the theory, I am much closer to being persuaded. 

The essence of Bergson's theory is that laughter arises from situations in which we suddenly perceive the ludicrous (so far, so circular, but bear with me). And the ludicrous, in turn, is defined as any situation in which something we ordinarily regard as living betrays the tendencies of something merely mechanical, thing-like, or automatic. When a person behaves as a machine, in short, this is the essence of the comic. 

Now, when I first saw this theory described—specifically, in a dissertation by my favorite college TA—I thought that it was a strangely narrow way of conceiving humor that plainly excluded the vast majority of its more obvious examples. 

Sure, I can think of a few instances in which the humor of a situation obviously arose from the intrusion of something "mechanical" into something that was supposed to be alive. Remember all those awkward moments that Marco Rubio had on the campaign trail? The usual explanation of why people laughed at him delivering stock lines or reaching for a water bottle mid-sentence was that he appeared strangely "robot-like." 

Or, to take a more recent example still, what was it that people found so hilarious about Katie Britt's cringe-inducing GOP response to Biden's State of the Union address? It was largely that her emotions seemed so "artificial." Within the space of a single sentence, she would shift rapidly from a maudlin voice to a fake grin. She seemed, in short, like someone imitating humanity, rather than expressing it. 

These are just the obvious examples, though, where politicians were directly mocked for acting "like robots." Surely, though, that's not the only kind of thing people laugh at—or so I thought at first. 

But, as Bergson goes on to elaborate his theory, I started to see that he might indeed be onto something. The ludicrous element in every comic situation may indeed be reducible to its element of artificiality.

Of course, people do rote, artificial things all the time without anyone mocking them for it. People write scholarly articles laced with insincere jargon, the meaning of which the authors themselves have long since forgotten. People pen organizational statements filled with overwrought emotional grandstanding and the clichéd language of moral outrage and denunciation, and no one reading it is deluded for a moment that the people who wrote this still genuinely felt these emotions. 

Bergson says, however, that these types of artificialities are indeed the things that can become the objects of comedy. Just imagine lifting them out of their familiar environment for a moment, then you will see that they are humorous. 

He admits, after all, that the comic effect can lose its strength through familiarity. If we are surrounded every day by the same routines and artificialities, we stop finding them funny. But imagine quoting them in a different context, or exposing them to an audience that is not so used to them. The inherent comedic potential within them will suddenly shine through. 

This surely, is why the hysterical language of denunciation found in Stalinist literary criticism, say—which no doubt seemed familiar and bland enough to its writers and immediate readers—becomes so hilarious when quoted in a different cultural and political context. We suddenly see the artificiality of the jargon and its underlying assumptions. We see how people are mechanically applying a formal ideology to something that is supposed to be supple and living. They are contorting life and literature to fit a preset dogma, rather than adapting their ideas to suit the living as they should—and this, for Bergson, is the essence of the comic. 

I am reminded of Milan Kundera's concept of "the border," in his Book of Laughter and Forgetting—which has to be up there with Bergson's essay among the best things ever written on the subject of humor. In substance, Kundera's theory, as proposed in the novel, is more than compatible with Bergson's. The "border," for Kundera, is that liminal zone in which a behavior or a belief system starts to becomes ridiculous through sheer repetition. No matter how sincerely we once believed in something, or how earnestly we once pursued an action, Kundera writes, if we then go on to repeat the same idea too many times, or mimic the same action, it will eventually move from the sublime to the ridiculous. 

Such is Kundera's theory, at any rate. And Bergson would agree, except he would expand on the point. It's not solely repetition that makes something ludicrous—rather, repetition is merely one means of several to bring out the element of the artificial, the clichéd and stereotyped, that we find ludicrous. 

And the more Bergson multiplies his examples of the phenomenon, the more one realizes that indeed, almost everything we find funny shares this same characteristic. Bergson mentions in passing at one point, for instance, the phenomenon of comedy in poetry. This led me to reflect that, indeed, it is a common element of humorous verse that it calls attention in some way to the artificiality of its own form. 

As Paul Fussell once pointed out, in his writings on prosody, Ogden Nash's poems are usually funny because each line is plainly contrived, in blatant disregard to meter, to force a preordained rhyme at the end of it. 

The same author also observes at one point (if memory serves) that iambic tetrameter has always been the chosen meter of satire, pointing to Hudibras as an example. Fussell doesn't say why this would be the case but, with Bergson's theory in hand, one can aim at an explanation. After all, the smaller number of feet available in tetrameter forces the poet to arrive more quickly at each rhyme, introducing a strained, artificial quality that makes it ludicrous. This is the essence of the humor behind the Hudibrastic line: 

And pulpit, drum ecclesiastick,
Was beat with fist, instead of a stick;

Such a line, from the opening canto of Butler's Hudibras, is funny precisely because the rhyme is so obviously contrived—and all at once, we are reminded of the artificiality of the entire enterprise of verse. The poem has become funny to us because it has let down the pose of being perfectly supple and living, and has confessed to us its mechanical nature. 

Here again, we see the same pattern that, as Bergson writes, always underlies the comic. The dead and artificial form of poetry is supposed to serve life and art—in short, things that are supple and living. Instead, the subject matter and the language are being contorted to serve the dead form of the verse and its meter and rhyme scheme. Something that is supposed to be alive has become thing-like and mechanical. And this, as Bergson shows, is the heart of the comical. 

But even supposing this really is an element in every comic scenario, we still might ask: why do we find that funny, precisely? Why should the artificial make us laugh? 

And here, we find that Bergson's theory is not really so far removed from either the Hobbesian/Canettian superiority theory or the Freudian "relief" theory. For Bergson suggests that laughter arose (perhaps—though he doesn't specify—through our evolutionary history) to serve a social function. Specifically, as s form of social sanction. In his words, it serves as a societal "corrective" to the wayward individual. (Brereton and Rothwell trans. throughout.)

What society needs above all, Bergson writes, is for every member to be alert and responsive to the needs of others. What it punishes through laughter, therefore, is always "unsociability" or unresponsiveness in some form. And the essence of unsociability is to be mechanical. It is to subordinate life to dead forms. This is the vice that comedy exists to punish. 

And indeed, this makes sense, given what we know about comedy. Is not every comic character in essence someone who has been taken over by a mechanical element, and thereby become unresponsive to the needs of the people around him? In his exploration of classic comedy in Anatomy of Criticism, Northrop Frye points out that the genre always includes a "blocking character" at its heart—someone whose single fixed idea or obsession is getting in the way of the supple lives of others (usually, it is specifically blocking two living young people from getting married). 

Such is also true, in Frye's telling, of satire. The object of satire's ridicule throughout the ages has always been the vain philosopher, the crank, the ideologue—someone who subjects, that is to say, the real and the living (life as we actually find it)—to something dead and formal and artificial (e.g., the ideological scheme he has concocted in his own mind). This is why the quintessential satirical character is a Pangloss—someone who persists in subordinating the evidence of experience to his philosophical priors. 

And of all the dead, artificial ideas to which people are prone to subordinate reality, the most prominent is their own artificially-inflated conception of themselves. This, in Bergson's telling, is why the depiction of vanity always lies so close to the heart of comedy. 

The essential comedic character is someone who lacks self-awareness, says Bergson ("there must be some aspect of his person of which he is un-aware"). He is a boaster, a wannabe, someone who presents himself as something he is not. This, no doubt, is why the Alazon—the braggart soldier—is, in Northrop Frye's telling—one of the oldest stock figures in comedy. 

The quintessential comedic character then, is a kind of Michael Scott. He is someone who tells jokes without realizing they are not funny, or who tells stories about his own achievements that are patently untrue. He preserves a mental conception of himself that is blatantly at odds with what everyone else knows to be true about him. 

We laugh in order to try to fix that sort of person, or at least, to curb their behavior. We want to make them aware of who they really are, so that they will stop allowing their own artificial conceptions to dominate their behavior and start paying attention to the real life of society around them. 

The goal may not be the same as the sheer sadism and self-conceit that Hobbes identified in laughter—but its means are not all that different. The purpose of laughter, according to Bergson, really is to "humiliate" the victim. There is indeed, therefore, an element of that "sudden glory" in the humorous situation that Hobbes was talking about. 

But we then face the question—why is it that we laugh at some kinds of artificiality but not others? My slip of the tongue at work, when I said, "ACLU" instead of "ACL" was funny. But if I had delivered an entire presentation in a painfully artificial manner, people might just have been embarrassed on my behalf. 

It does seem crucial to our analysis of humor, then, that my "ACLU" automatism was minor, and therefore seemed laughable. Bergson explains that humor can only arise when we shut off our other emotions—we must not be imaginatively participating or empathizing with the pain of others, in order to find it funny. I would agree with this, in turn, but go a step further in the analysis: I would say that, or order to achieve this state of "indifference," as Bergson calls it, laughter must be directed at something corrigible. 

If laughter fundamentally serves a socially corrective purpose, after all—if it exists to try to bring people back to awareness of social realities and the actual life of the world, rather than being lost in their own daydreams and artificial conceptions, because society needs people to be paying attention to the needs of others in order to function—then laughter impliedly holds out a sort of invitation. It welcomes a person back into society, if they heed its message. 

This is why we do not laugh at vices or crimes so severe that they seem to remove a person from the community. If a person does something we so completely disapprove of that we cannot see welcoming them back, then we do not laugh. We shun. 

Laughter, even if it does contain the element of "humiliation" that Bergson was talking about, therefore also holds out a promissory note of readmission to the community—albeit on set terms. 

When my colleagues laughed at me and I turned red about the "ACLU" malapropism, they were laughing along Bergsonian lines at the mechanical element that had suddenly been introduced into my speech. What had at first seemed alive—namely, my expression of a thought, my recollection of a family memory—became in an instant something dead—the rote completion of a familiar acronym, even when it made no sense in context. 

Our attention was thereby called, in that moment, to the artificiality of language, through showing the absurd resemblance in verbal form between the two completely unrelated things they denote—which, as Bergson tells us, is the essence of the "comic in words"—the root of all punning and word-play. 

But then I joined in the laughter at my own mistake. I was able to see my own moment of mechanical artificiality, and by laughing at it, I was able to reassert the claims of life over something dead. I was able to show that I was indeed still adaptable and supple after all. I was able to see my own error and correct it. I was still alive and responsive to society's needs, even if I had been guilty of a momentary slip into the dead and the artificial. 

And this, surely, is why we always seem to find something redemptive in laughter—and, more specifically, in the ability to laugh at oneself. Laughing at one's own mistakes shows that we are alive and adaptable after all. It is quite literally a victory of life over death. And after proving that we are capable of this adaptability and self-awareness, society is often then prepared to readmit us. We are redeemed. We can join in the circle of laughers. 

Even Marco Rubio suddenly seemed more human again, for instance, when he was asked by a reporter to comment on Katie Britt's abominable speech. "At least," he told one interviewer, "she didn't drink any water." There it is! In that one moment, he redeemed himself. He showed he was able to laugh at his own earlier robot-like behavior. We are prepared to accept him as a living human again. 

This is why, in Northrop Frye's telling, the comedy always ends with a reconciliation with the "blocking character." If that character remained an obstacle to the end, by contrast—and still more, if they triumphed, without ever changing their ways—the play would cease to be a comedy, and become a tragedy. 

The reason Romeo and Juliet is a tragedy, after all, is not because it is lacking any blocking characters with fixed ideas. Indeed, it is the fixed and artificial ideas of the parents—their insistence on substituting the dead form of their obsessional rivalry for the living needs of two young people—that sets the play's events in motion. What makes the play a tragedy is that the blocking characters are not reformed, until it is already too late for them to do so. 

Laughter may therefore serve an element of humiliation and social sanction—but it is not purely to glory in the debasement of others, as Hobbes suggests. Such debasement, if it contains no hope of the other person ever saving themselves and reforming, becomes pathetic, rather than comic. Rather, then, laughter has a redemptive purpose. It is the response we reserve for those faults in others that we find capable of correction. It is society's mild reproof to those small errors—the slips of the tongue, the "ACLUs"—that are clearly fixable. It is a corrective, and a sharp one—but not one we would not deliver if we did not think the other person were capable of better. 

And so, for all its darker elements—which Hobbes and Canetti and even Bergson bring out—I say, that we should not fear laughter. Or fear to make mistakes. We may be laughed at; but if society is laughing, that is already a good sign. It means the door is still open for us to correct our error and rejoin the community. It means society will be ready to receive us, once we join in the laughter ourselves. We can be the blocking character who realizes the error of his fixed idea—and we can join in the conciliatory wedding feast at the end of the play.

And so, laugh with them, I say. For laughter at the self is the triumph of the living tissue of self-awareness over the dead hand of self-obliviousness. It is how we redeem ourselves while still alive from the ever-threatening specter of death—the prospect, that must come for us all in the end, of being literally transformed into a thing.