Janus (19 page)

 

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 corresponding 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.

 

 

 

8

 

 

The criteria which determine whether a humorous offering will be judged
good, bad or indifferent, are of course partly a matter of period taste
and personal preference, partly dependent on the
style and technique
of the humorist. It would seem that these criteria can be summed up
under three main headings: (a) originality, (b) emphasis, (c) economy.

 

 

The merits of
originality
are self-evident; it provides the essential
element of surprise, which cuts across our expectations. But true originality
is not very often met either in humour or in other forms of art. One common
substitute for it is to increase the tension of the audience by various
techniques of suggestive emphasis. The clown's domain is the rich,
coarse type of humour; he piles it on; he appeals to sadistic, sexual,
scatalogical impulses; one of his favourite tricks is repetition of
the same situation, the same key-phrase. This diminishes the effect
of surprise, but helps in drawing emotion into the familiar channel --
more and more liquid is being pumped into the punctured pipeline.

 

 

Emphasis on local colour and ethnic peculiarities -- as in Scottish,
Jewish, Cockney stories -- is a further means to channel emotion into
familiar tracks. The Scotsman or Cockney must of course be caricatures
if the comic purpose is to be achieved -- in other words, exaggeration
and simplification once more appear as indispensable tools to provide
emphasis.

 

 

In the higher forms of humour, however, emphasis tends to yield to the
opposite kind of virtue:
economy
. Economy, in humour and art, does not
mean mechanical brevity, but the implicit hint instead of the explicit
statement -- the oblique allusion in lieu of the frontal attack. The
old-fashioned
Punch
cartoon featuring the British lion and the Russian
bear 'rubs it in'; the
New Yorker
cartoon poses a riddle which the
reader must solve by an imaginative effort in order to 'see the joke'.

 

 

In humour, as in other forms of art, emphasis and economy are complementary
techniques. The first forces the offering down the consumer's throat;
the second tantalizes, to whet his appetite.

 

 

 

9

 

 

Earlier theories -- including even Bergson's and Freud's -- have treated
humour as an isolated phenomenon, without attempting to throw light
on the intimate connections between the comic and the tragic, between
laughter and crying, between artistic inspiration, comic inventiveness
and scientific discovery. Yet (as we shall see) these three domains
of creative activity form a continuum with no sharp boundaries between
wit and ingenuity, nor between the art of discovery and the discoveries
of art.

 

 

It has been said, for instance, that scientific discovery consists in
seeing an analogy which nobody has seen before. When, in the Song of
Songs, Solomon compared the Shulamite's neck to a tower of ivory, he saw
an analogy which nobody had seen before; when William Harvey perceived in
the exposed heart of a fish a messy kind of mechanical pump, he did the
same; and when the caricaturist draws a nose like a cucumber, he again
does just that. In fact, all the bisociative patterns discussed above,
which constitute the 'grammar' of humour, can also enter the service
of art or discovery, as the case may be. The pun has its equivalent in
the rhyme, but also in the problems which confront the philologist. The
clash between incompatible codes of behaviour may yield comedy, tragedy
or new psychological insights. The dualism of mind and inert matter is
exploited by the practical joker, but also provides one of the eternal
themes of literature: man as a marionette on strings, manipulated by
gods or chromosomes. The man-beast dichotomy is reflected by Donald
Duck, but also in Kafka's
Metamorphosis
and the psychologist's
rat-experiments. The caricature corresponds not only to the artist's
character-portrait, but also to the scientist's diagrams and charts,
which emphasize the relevant features and leave out the rest.

 

 

 

The conscious and unconscious processes underlying creativity are
essentially combinatorial activities -- the bringing together
of previously separate areas of knowledge and experience. The
scientist's purpose is to achieve
synthesis
; the artist aims at a
juxtaposition
of the familiar and the eternal; the humorist's game
is to contrive a
collision
. And as their motivations differ, so
do the emotional responses evoked by each type of creativity: discovery
satisfies the 'exploratory drive'; art induces emotional catharsis
through the 'oceanic feeling'; humour incites malice and provides a
harmless outlet for it. Laughter can be described as the 'Haha reaction';
the discoverer's Eureka cry as the 'Aha! reaction'; and the delight of
the aesthetic experience as the 'Ah . . . reaction. But the transitions
from one to the other are continuous: witticism blends into epigram,
caricature into portrait; and whether one considers architecture,
medicine, chess or cookery, there is no clear frontier where the realm
of science ends and that of art begins. Comedy and tragedy, laughter
and weeping, mark the extremes of a
continuous spectrum
.

 

 

 

SUMMARY

 

 

Humour provides a back-door entry to the domain of creativity because
it is
the only example of a complex intellectual stimulus releasing a
simple bodily response
-- the laughter reflex.

 

 

To describe the unitary pattern underlying all varieties of humour I have
proposed the term 'bisociation' -- perceiving a situation or event in two
mutually exclusive associative contexts. The result is an abrupt transfer
of the train of consciousness to a different track, governed by a different
logic or 'rule of the game. This intellectual jolt deflates our expectations;
the emotions they aroused have suddenly become redundant, and are flushed out
along channels of least resistance in laughter.

 

 

The emotions thus involved, however complex, always contain a dominant
element of the self-assertive, aggressive-defensive tendencies. They are
based on the ancient adrenal-sympathetic branch of the nervous system
-- the old brain -- and have a much stronger momentum and persistence
than the subtle and devious processes of cortical reasoning, with which
they are unable to keep step. It is emotion deserted by thought that is
discharged, harmlessly, in laughter. But this luxury reflex could only
arise in a creature whose reasoning has gained a degree of independence
from its biological drives, enabling him to perceive his own emotions as
redundant -- to realize that he has been fooled. The person who laughs is
the opposite of the fanatic whose reason has been blinded by emotion --
and who fools himself.

 

 

After applying the theory to various types of the comic -- from
physical tickling to social satire -- I discussed the criteria of
styles and techniques in humour:
originality
or unexpectedness;
emphasis
through selection, exaggeration and simplification; and
its reverse:
economy
or implicitness which forces the audience
to make a re-creative effort.

 

 

Lastly, the brief cross-references to creativity in science and art at
the end of this chapter may serve as an introduction to the sections
that follow.

 

 

 

 

 

VII

 

 

THE ART OF DISCOVERY

 

 

 

1

 

 

Creativity in science could be described as the art of putting two and
two together to make five. In other words, it consists in combining
previously unrelated mental structures in such a way that you get more
out of the emergent whole than you have put in. This apparent bit of
magic derives from the fact that the whole is not merely the sum of its
parts, but an expression of the relations between its parts; and that
each new synthesis leads to the emergence of new patterns of relations --
more complex cognitive holons on higher levels of the mental hierarchy.

 

 

Let me give a few brief examples selected from the numerous case-histories
of scientific discoveries described in
The Sleepwalkers
,
The Act of
Creation
, etc.