Janus: A Summing Up

by Arthur Koestler

  We carry around with us a glandular system which was admirably well adapted to life in the Paleolithic times but it is not very well adapted to life now. Thus we tend to produce more adrenalin than is good for us, and we either suppress ourselves and turn destructive energies inwards or else we do not suppress ourselves and we start hitting people. [6]

  A third alternative is to laugh at people. There are other outlets for tame aggression such as competitive sports or literary criticism; but they are acquired skills, whereas laughter is a gift of nature, included in our native equipment. The glands that control our emotions reflect conditions at a stage of evolution when the struggle for existence was more deadly than at present -- and when the reaction to any strange sight or sound consisted in jumping, bristling, fighting or running. As security and comfort increased in the species, new outlets were needed for the disposal of emotions which could no longer be worked off through their original channels, and laughter is obviously one of them. But it could only emerge when reasoning had gained a degree of independence from the 'blind' urges of emotion. Below the human level, thinking and feeling appear to form an indivisible unity; not until thinking became gradually detached from feeling could man perceive his own emotion as redundant, confront his glandular 'humours' with a sense of humour, and make the smiling admission, 'I have been fooled.'

  6

  The foregoing discussion was intended to provide the tools for dissecting and analysing any specimen of humour. The procedure to be followed is to determine the nature of the two (or more) frames of reference whose collision gives rise to the comic effect -- to discover the type of logic or 'rules of the game' which govern each. In the more sophisticated type of joke the 'logic' is implied and hidden; and the moment we state it in explicit form, the joke is dead. Unavoidably, the section that follows will be strewn with cadavers.

  Max Eastman, in The Enjoyment of Laughter, remarked of a laboured pun by Ogden Nash: 'It is not a pun but a punitive expedition'. That goes for most puns, even for Milton's famous lines about the Prophet Elijah's ravens -- which were 'though ravenous/taught to abstain from what they brought'; or Freud's character, who calls the Christmas season the 'alcoholidays'. Most puns strike one as atrocious, perhaps because they represent the most primitive form of humour: two disparate strings of thought tied together in an acoustic knot. But the very primitiveness of such bisociations based on pure sound may account for the pun's immense popularity with children and its prevalence in certain types of mental disorder ('punning mania').

  From the play on sounds -- puns and Spoonerisms -- an ascending series leads to the play on words and so to the play on ideas. When Groucho Marx says of a safari in Africa, 'We shot two bucks, but that was all the money we had', the joke hinges on the two meanings of the word 'buck'. It is moderately funny, but would be even less so without the reference to Groucho, which evokes a visual image instantly arousing a high voltage of expectations. The story of the marquis and the bishop is clearly of a superior type of humour, because it plays not on mere words, but on ideas.

  It would be quite easy -- and equally boring -- to draw up a list in which jokes and witticisms are classified according to the nature of the frames of reference whose collision creates the comic effect. We have already come across a few, such as metaphorical versus literal meaning (the daughter's 'hand'); professional versus common-sense logic (the statistically minded doctor); incompatible codes of behaviour (the marquis); confrontations of the trivial and the exalted ('eternal bliss'); trains of reasoning travelling happily joined together in opposite directions (the sadist who is kind to the masochist). The list could be extended indefinitely; in fact any two cognitive holons can be made to yield a comic effect of sorts by hooking them together and infusing a drop of malice into the concoction. The frames of reference may even be defined by such abstract concepts as 'time' and 'weather'; the absent-minded professor who tries to read the temperature from his watch or to tell the hour from the thermometer, is comic for the same reason as it would be to watch a game of ping-pong played with a football or a game of rugby played with a ping-pong ball. The variations are infinite, the formula remains the same.

  Jokes and anecdotes have a single point of culmination. The literary forms of sustained humour, such as the picaresque novel, do not rely on a single effect but on a series of minor climaxes. The narrative moves along the line of intersection of contrasted planes -- e.g., the fantasy world of Don Quixote and the cunning horse-sense of Sancho Panza -- or is made to oscillate between them; as a result tension is continuously generated and discharged in mild amusement.

  Comic verse thrives on the melodious union of incongruities -- Carroll's 'cabbages and kings'; and particularly on the contrast between lofty form and flatfooted content. Certain metric forms like the hexameter or Alexandrine arouse expectations of pathos, of the heroic and exalted; to pour into these epic moulds some homely, trivial content -- 'Beautiful soup, so rich and green / Waiting in a hot tureen -- is an almost infallible comic device. The rolling dactyls of the first lines of a limerick which carry, instead of Hector or Achilles, a young lady from Niger for a ride, make her ridiculous even before the expected calamities befall her. Instead of a heroic mould, a soft lyrical one may also pay off: 'And what could be moister / Than the tears of an oyster?'

  Another type of incongruity between form and content yields the bogus proverb: 'The rule is: jam tomorrow and jam yesterday -- but never jam today.' Two contradictory statements have been telescoped into a line whose homely, admonitory sound conveys the impression of a popular adage. In a similar way, nonsense verse achieves its effect by pretending to make sense, by forcing the reader to project meaning into the phonetic pattern of the jabberwocky, as one interprets the ink blots in a Rorschach test.

  Satire is a verbal caricature which shows us a deliberately distorted image of a person, institution or society. The traditional method of the caricaturist is to exaggerate those features which he considers to be characteristic of his victim's personality and to simplify by leaving out everything that is not relevant for his purpose. The satirist uses the same technique; and the features of society which he selects for magnification are of course those of which he disapproves. The result is a juxtaposition, in the reader's mind, of his habitual image of the world in which he moves, and its absurd reflection in the satirist's distorting mirror. The reader is thus made to recognize familiar features in the absurd, and absurdity in the familiar. Without this double vision the satire would be humourless. If the human Yahoos were really such evil-smelling monsters as Gulliver's Houyhnhnm hosts claim, the book would not be a satire but the statement of a deplorable truth. Straight invective is not satire; it must deliberately overshoot its mark.

  A similar effect is achieved if, instead of exaggerating the objectionable features, the satirist projects them by means of the allegory on to a different background, such as an animal society. A succession of writers, from Aristophanes though Swift and Anatole France to George Orwell, have used this technique to focus attention on deformities of society which, blunted by habit, we take for granted.

  7

  The coarsest type of humour is the practical joke: pulling away the chair from under the dignitary's lowered bottom. The victim is perceived, first as a person of consequence, then suddenly as an inert body subject to the laws of physics: authority is debunked by gravity, mind by matter; man is degraded to a mechanism. Goose-stepping soldiers act like automatons, the pedant behaves like a mechanical robot, the Sergeant-Major attacked by diarrhoea or Hamlet getting the hiccoughs show man's lofty aspirations deflated by his all-too-solid flesh. A similar effect is produced by artefacts which masquerade as humans: Punch and Judy, Jack-in-the-Box, gadgets playing tricks on their masters as if with calculated malice.

  In Henri Bergson's theory of laughter, this dualism of subtle mind and inert matter -- he calls it 'the mechanical encrusted on the living' -- is made to serve as an explanation of all varieties of the comic, whereas in the light
of what has been said it applies only to one type of comic situation among many others.

  From the bisociation of man and machine, there is only a step to the man-animal hybrid. Disney's creations behave as if they were human without losing their animal appearance. The caricaturist follows the reverse procedure by discovering horsey, mousey, piggish features in the human face.

  This leads us to the comic devices of imitation, impersonation and disguise. The impersonator is perceived as himself and somebody else at the same time. If the result is slightly degrading -- but only in that case -- the spectator will laugh. The comedian impersonating a public personality, two pairs of trousers serving as the legs of the pantomime horse, men disguised as women and women as men -- in each case the paired patterns reduce each other to absurdity.

  The most aggressive form of impersonation is the parody, designed to deflate hollow pretence, to destroy illusion, and to undermine pathos by harping on the human weaknesses of the victim. Wigs falling off, speakers forgetting their lines, gestures remaining suspended in the air: the parodist's favourite points of attack are again situated on the line of intersection between the sublime and the trivial.

  Playful behaviour in young animals and children is amusing because it is an unintentional parody of adult behaviour, which it imitates or anticipates. Young puppies are droll, because their helplessness, affection and puzzled expression make them appear more 'human' than full-grown dogs; because their ferocious growls strike one as impersonations of adult behaviour -- like a child in a bowler hat; because the puppy's waddling, uncertain gait makes it a choice victim of nature's practical jokes; because its bodily disproportions, the huge padded paws, Falstaffian belly and wrinkled philosopher's brow give it the appearance of a caricature; and lastly because we are such very superior beings compared to a puppy. A fleeting smile can contain many logical ingredients and emotional spices.

  Both Cicero and Francis Bacon regarded deformity as the most frequent cause of laughter. Renaissance princes collected dwarfs, hunchbacks and blackamoors for their merriment. As we have become too humane for that kind of fun, we are apt to forget that it requires a good deal of imagination and empathy to recognize in a midget a fellow-human who, though different in appearance, thinks and feels much as oneself does. In children this projective faculty is still rudimentary; they tend to mock people with a stammer or a limp, and laugh at the foreigner with an odd pronunciation. Similar attitudes are shown by tribal or parochial societies to any form of appearance or behaviour that deviates from their strict norms: the stranger is not really human, he only pretends to be 'like us'. The Greeks used the same word 'barbarous' for the foreigner and the stutterer: the uncouth, barking sounds the stranger uttered were considered a parody of human speech. Vestiges of this primitive attitude are still found in the curious fact that we accept a foreign accent with tolerance, but find the imitation of a foreign accent comic. We know that the imitator's mispronunciations are mere pretence; this knowledge makes sympathy unnecessary and enables us to be childishly cruel with a clean conscience.

  Another source of innocent merriment occurs when the part and the whole change roles, and attention becomes focused on a detail torn out of the functional context on which its meaning depended. When the gramophone needle gets stuck, the soprano's voice keeps repeating the same word on the same quaver, which suddenly assumes a grotesquely independent life. The same happens when faulty orthography displaces attention from meaning to spelling, or when the beam of consciousness is directed at functions which otherwise are performed automatically -- the paradox of the centipede. The self-conscious, awkward youth, who 'does not know what to do with his hands' is a victim of the same predicament.

  Comedies used to be classified according to their reliance on situations, manners or characters. The logic of the last two need no further discussion; in the first, comic effects are contrived by making a situation participate simultaneously in two independent chains of events with different associative contexts, which intersect through coincidence, mistaken identity, or confusions of time and occasion. The coincidence on which they are hinged is the deux ex machina of both comedy and antique tragedy.

  Why tickling should produce laughter remained an enigma in all earlier theories of the comic. Darwin was the first to point out that the innate response to tickling is squirming and straining to withdraw the tickled part -- a defence-reaction designed to escape attacks on vulnerable areas such as the soles of the feet, armpits, belly and ribs. If a fly settles on the belly of a horse, it causes a ripple of muscle-contractions across the skin -- the equivalent of squirming in the tickled child. But the horse does not laugh when tickled, and the child not always. It will laugh only -- and this is the crux of the matter -- when it perceives tickling as a mock attack, a caress in mildly aggressive disguise. For the same reason people laugh only when tickled by others, not when they tickle themselves.

  Experiments in Yale on babies under one year old revealed the not very surprising fact that they laughed fifteen times more often when tickled by their mothers than when they were tickled by strangers; and when tickled by strangers they mostly cried. For the mock attack must be recognized as being only pretence, and with strangers one cannot be sure. Even with its own mother there is an ever-so-slight feeling of uncertainty and apprehension, the expression of which will alternate with laughter in the baby's behaviour; and it is precisely this element of tension between the tickles which is relieved in the laughter accompanying the squirm. The rule of the game is: 'Let me be just a little frightened so that I can enjoy the relief'.

  Thus the tickler is impersonating an aggressor, but is simultaneously known not to be one; this is probably the first situation in life which makes the infant live on two planes at once -- a delectable foretaste of being tickled by the horror comic.

  Humour in the visual arts reflects the same logical structures as discussed before. Its most primitive form is the distorting mirror at the fun fair which reflects the human frame elongated into a column or compressed into the shape of a toad; it plays a practical joke on the victim who sees the image in the mirror both as his familiar self and a patient lump of plasticine that can be stretched and squeezed into any absurd form. But while the mirror distorts mechanically, the caricaturist does it selectively, by the same technique of exaggerating characteristic features and simplifying the rest, which the satirist employs. Like the satirist, the caricaturist reveals the absurd in the familiar; and like the satirist he must overshoot his mark. His malice is rendered harmless by our knowledge that the monstrous pot-bellies and bow-legs he draws are not real; real deformities are no longer comic, they arouse pity.

  The artist, painting a stylized portrait, also uses the technique of selection, exaggeration and simplification; but his attitude to the model is dominated by positive empathy instead of negative malice; and the features he selects for emphasis differ accordingly. In some character-studies by Leonardo, Hogarth or Daumier the passions reflected are so violent, the grimaces so ferocious, that it is impossible to tell whether they were meant as portraits or caricatures. If you feel that such distortions of the human face are not really possible, that Daumier merely pretended that they exist, then you are absolved from horror and pity and can laugh at his grotesques. But if you think that this is indeed what Daumier saw in those de-humanized faces, then you feel that you are looking at a work of art.

  Humour in music is a subject to be approached with diffidence, because the language of music ultimately eludes translation into verbal symbols. All one can do is to point at some analogies: a 'rude' noise, such as the blast of a trumpet inserted into a passage where it does not belong, has the effect of a practical joke; a singer or an instrument out of tune produces a similar reaction; the imitation of animal sounds, vocally or instrumentally, exploits the technique of impersonation; a nocturne by Chopin transposed into hot jazz, or a simple street song performed in the style of the Valkyrie is a marriage of incompatibles. These are primitive devices correspo
nding to the lowest levels of humour; higher up we come across compositions like Ravel's La Valse -- an affectionate parody of the sentimental Wiener Walzer; or Haydn's Surprise Symphony or the mock-heroics of Kodály's folk opera, Hári János. But in comic opera it is almost impossible to sort out how much of the comic effect is derived from the book, how much from the music; and the highest forms of musical humour, the unexpected delights of a light-hearted scherzo by Mozart, defy verbal analysis -- or else this would have to be so specialized and technical as to defeat its purpose. Although a 'witty' musical passage, which springs a surprise on the audience and cheats it of its 'tense expectations', certainly has the emotion-relieving effect which tends to produce laughter, a concert audience may occasionally smile, but will hardly ever laugh; which goes to show that the emotions evoked by musical humour are of a subtler kind than those of the verbal and visual variety.