Janus (17 page)

bisociated
with two.

 

 

I have coined the term 'bisociation' to make a distinction between the
routines of disciplined thinking within a single universe of discourse
-- on a single plane, as it were -- and the creative types of mental
activity which always operate on more than one plane. In humour, both
the creation of a subtle joke and the
re-creative
act of perceiving
the joke, involve the delightful mental jolt of a sudden leap from one
plane or associative context to another.

 

 

Let us turn to our other examples. In the film dialogue, the daughter's
'hand' is perceived first in a metaphorical frame of reference, then
suddenly in a literal, bodily context. The doctor thinks in terms of
statistical probabilities, the rules of which are inapplicable to
individual cases; and there is an added twist because, in contrast
to what naive common sense suggests, the patient's odds of survival
are unaffected by whatever happened before, and are still one against
ten. This is one of the profound paradoxes of the theory of probability;
the mathematical joke implies a riddle.

 

 

The widowed lady who looks upon death as 'eternal bliss' and at the same
time 'an unpleasant subject', epitomizes the common human predicament
of living in the 'divided house of faith and reason'. Here again the
simple joke carries unconscious overtones and undertones, audible to
the inner ear alone.

 

 

The masochist under the shower who punishes himself by depriving himself
of his daily punishment is governed by rules which are a
reversal
of
those of normal logic. (We can also construct a pattern where
both
frames of reference are reversed: 'A sadist is a person who is kind
to a masochist.') However, the joker does not really believe that the
masochist takes his hot shower as a punishment; he only pretends to
believe it. Irony is the satirist's most effective weapon; it pretends
to accept the opponent's ways of reasoning in order to expose their
implicit absurdity or viciousness.

 

 

Thus the common pattern underlying these stories is
the perceiving of a
situation or idea in two self-consistent but mutually incompatible frames
of reference or associative contexts
. We might call it a collision between
two mental holons, each governed by its own rule-book. This formula can be
shown to have a general validity for all forms of humour and wit, some of
which will be discussed below. But it covers only one aspect of humour --
its
logical structure
. We must now turn to another fundamental aspect
-- the
emotional dynamics
which breathes life into that structure and
makes us laugh, giggle or smile.

 

 

 

4

 

 

When a comedian tells a story, he deliberately sets out to create
a certain tension in his listeners, which mounts as the narrative
progresses. But it never reaches its expected climax. The punch-line
or
pointe
acts as a verbal guillotine which cuts across the logical
development of the story; it debunks our dramatic expectations; the
tension we felt becomes suddenly redundant and is exploded in laughter,
like water gushing from a punctured pipe. To put it differently, laughter
disposes of emotive excitations which have become pointless and must
somehow be worked off along physiological channels of least resistance;
and the function of the 'luxury reflex' is to provide these channels.

 

 

A glance at a caricature by Hogarth or Rowlandson, showing the brutal
merriment of people in a tavern, makes one realize at once that they
are working off their surplus of adrenalin by contracting their face
muscles into grimaces, slapping their thighs, and exhaling in explosive
puffs through the half-closed glottis. Their flushed faces reveal that
the emotions disposed of through these tension-relieving safety valves
are brutality, envy, sexual gloating. However, if one leafs through an
album of
New Yorker
cartoons, coarse laughter yields to an amused
and rarefied smile: the ample flow of adrenalin has been distilled
and crystallized into a grain of Attic salt. As we move across the
spectrum of humour, from its coarse to its subtle forms, from practical
joke to brain-teaser, from jibe to irony, from anecdote to epigram,
the emotional climate shows a parallel transformation. The emotion
discharged in coarse laughter is aggression robbed of its purpose; the
jokes small children enjoy are mostly scatological; adolescents of all
ages gloat on vicarious sex; the sick joke trades on repressed sadism,
satire on righteous indignation. There is a bewildering variety of moods
involved in different forms of humour, including mixed or contradictory
feelings; but whatever the mixture, it must contain a basic ingredient
which is indispensable: an impulse, however faint, of aggression or
apprehension. It may appear in the guise of malice, contempt, the veiled
cruelty of condescension, or merely an absence of sympathy with the victim
of the joke -- 'a momentary anaesthesia of the heart', as Bergson put it.
In the subtler types of humour the aggressive tendency may be so faint
that only careful analysis will detect it, like the presence of salt
in a well-prepared dish -- which, however, would be tasteless without
it. Replace aggression by sympathy, and the same situation -- a drunk
falling on his face -- will no longer be comic but pathetic, and evoke
not laughter but pity. It is the aggressive element, the detached malice
of the comic impersonator which turns pathos into bathos, tragedy into
travesty. Malice may be combined with affection in friendly teasing -- or
when we don't know whether we shall laugh or cry at the misadventures of
Charlie Chaplin; and the aggressive component in civilized humans may be
sublimated or no longer conscious. But in jokes which appeal to children
and primitive people, cruelty and boastful self-assertiveness are much
in evidence. In 1961 a survey carried out among American children aged
eight to fifteen made the researchers conclude that 'mortification or
discomfort or hoaxing of others very readily caused laughter, while a
witty or funny remark often passed unnoticed'. [4]

 

 

Similar views are reflected in historically earlier forms and theories
of the comic. In Aristotle's view, laughter was intimately related to
ugliness and debasement. Cicero held that 'the province of the ridiculous
. . . lies in a certain baseness and deformity'. Descartes believed that
laughter was a manifestation of joy 'mixed with surprise or hatred or
sometimes with both'. In Francis Bacon's list of the causes which give
rise to laughter, the first place is given to 'deformity'. One of the
most frequently quoted utterances on the subject is this definition in
Hobbes's
Leviathan
:

 

The passion of laughter is nothing else but sudden glory arising from
a sudden conception of some eminency in ourselves by comparison with
the infirmity of others, or with our own formerly.

 

Translated into our terminology, laughter appears as a harmless outlet
for a sudden overflow of the self-assertive tendency. However much the
opinions of the theorists differ, on this one point nearly all of them
agree: that the emotions discharged in laughter always contain an element
of aggressiveness. But aggression and apprehension are twin phenomena;
psychologists talk of 'aggressive-defensive impulses'. Accordingly,
one of the typical situations in which laughter occurs is the moment of
sudden cessation of fear caused by some imaginary danger. Rarely is the
nature of laughter as an over-flow of redundant tensions more strikingly
manifested than in the sudden change of expression on the small child's
face from anxious apprehension to the happy laughter of relief. This
seems to be unrelated to humour; yet at a closer look we find here the
same logical structure as before: the wildly barking little dog was first
perceived by the child in a context of danger, then as a tail-wagging
puppy; the tension has suddenly become redundant, and spills over.

 

 

Kant realized that what causes laughter is 'the sudden transformation
of a tense expectation into nothing'. Herbert Spencer took up the idea
and attempted to formulate it in physiological terms: 'Emotions and
sensations tend to generate bodily movements. . . . When consciousness
is unawares transferred from great things to small', the 'liberated
nerve force' will expend itself along channels of least resistance --
the bodily motions of laughter. Freud incorporated Spencer's theory of
humour into his own*, with special emphasis on the release of repressed
emotions in laughter; he also attempted to explain why the excess energy
should be worked off in that particular way:

 

According to the best of my knowledge, the grimaces and contortions
of the corners of the mouth that characterise laughter appear first
in the satisfied and over-satiated nurseling when he drowsily quits
the breast . . . They are physical expressions of the determination
to take no more nourishment, an 'enough' so to speak, or rather a
'more than enough' . . . This primal sense of pleasurable saturation
may have provided the link between the smile -- that basic phenomenon
underlying laughter -- and its subsequent connection with other
pleasurable processes of de-tension. [5]
* For a detailed analysis of Freud's and Bergson's theories of
humour, see Insight and Outlook, Appendix II.

 

In other words, the muscle-contractions of the smile, as the earliest
expressions of relief from tension, would thereafter serve as channels
of least resistance. Similarly, the explosive exhalations of laughter
seem designed to 'puff away' surplus tension, and the agitated gestures
obviously serve the same function.

 

 

It may be objected that such massive reactions often seem quite out of
proportion to the slight stimulations which provoke them. But we must
bear in mind that laughter is a phenomenon of the trigger-releaser type,
where a minute pull may open the tap for vast amounts of stored emotions,
often derived from unconscious sources: repressed sadism, sexual tumescence,
unavowed fear, even boredom: the explosive laughter of a class of schoolboys
at some trivial incident is a measure of their pent-up resentment during
a boring lecture. Another factor which may amplify the reaction out of
all proportion to the comic stimulus is the social infectiousness which
laughter shares with other emotive manifestations of group-behaviour.

 

 

Laughter or smiling may also be caused by stimulations which are not
in themselves comic, but
signs
or
symbols
deputizing for
well-established comic patterns: Chaplin's boots, Groucho Marx's cigar,
catch-phases or allusions to family jokes. To discover why we laugh
requires on some occasions tracing back a long, involved thread of
associations to its source. This task is further complicated by the fact
that the effect of such comic symbols -- on a cartoon or on the stage --
appears to be instantaneous, without allowing time for the accumulation
and subsequent discharge of 'expectations' and 'emotive tensions'. But
here memory comes into play, acting as a storage battery whose charge
can be sparked off at any time: the smile which greets Falstaff's
appearance on the stage is derived from a mixture of memories and
expectations. Besides, even if our reaction to a
New Yorker
cartoon
appears to be instantaneous, there is always a process in time until we
'see the joke'; the cartoon has to tell a story, even if it is telescoped
into a few seconds. All of which goes to show that to analyse humour is
a task as delicate as analysing the chemical composition of a perfume
with its multiple ingredients -- some of which are never consciously
perceived, while others, when sniffed in isolation, would make us wince.

 

 

 

5

 

 

I have discussed first the logical structure of humour; and then its
emotional dynamics. Putting the two together, we may summarize the
result as follows: the bisociation of a situation or idea with two
mutually incompatible contexts, and the resulting abrupt transfer of the
train of thoughts from one context to another, puts a sudden end to our
'tense expectations'; the accumulated emotion, deprived of its object,
is left hanging in the air, and is discharged in laughter. When the
marquis rushes to the window and starts blessing the people in the
street, our intellect turns a somersault and enters with gusto into
the new game; but the malicious erotic feelings which the start of the
story has aroused cannot be fitted into the new context; deserted by the
nimble intellect, it gushes out in laughter like air from a punctured
tyre. To put it differently:
we laugh because our emotions have a
greater inertia and persistence than our reasoning processes
. Affects
are incapable of keeping step with reasoning; unlike reasoning, they
cannot 'change direction' at a moment's notice. To the physiologist
this is self-evident since our self-assertive emotions operate through
the phylogenetically old, massive apparatus of the sympathetic nervous
system and its allied hormones, acting on the whole body, while language
and logic are confined to the neocortex at the roof of the brain. Common
experience provides daily confirmation of this particular aspect of the
dichotomy between the old and the new brain. We are literally 'poisoned'
by our adrenal humours; it takes time to talk a person out of a mood;
fear and anger show persistent after-effects long after their causes have
been removed. If we could change our moods as quickly as we jump from one
idea to another, we would be acrobats of emotion; but since we are not,
our thoughts and emotions frequently become dissociated. It is emotion
deserted by thought that is discharged in laughter. For emotion, owing
to its greater mass-momentum, is, as we have seen, unable to follow the
sudden switch of ideas to a different type of logic; it tends to persist
in a straight line. Ariel leads Caliban on by the nose: she jumps on a
branch, he crashes into the tree. Aldous Huxley once wrote: