Progress is nothing but the victory of laughter over dogma.
—Benjamin DeCasseres
Comedy is a serious business.
—Buster Keaton
I began thinking about laughter as a window on the brain one night when my four-year-old son—having wheedled his way into bed with my wife and me in the middle of the night and promptly fallen back to sleep, leaving me wide awake in the dark—suddenly laughed in his sleep. It was a lovely sound, a deep, heartfelt chuckle that bubbled into a belly laugh that was remarkably sonorous, considering that it came from so small a belly. I wondered what had made him laugh. That started me wondering what makes anybody laugh.
A difficult question. Laughter is found in every human culture, yet every community sports at least one sourpuss. It is notoriously difficult to predict just what will make people laugh—producers of comedy films know all too well that a scene that draws guffaws from one audience may meet with stony silence from another audience, two hours later, in the same theater. Yet some humor is accepted universally; Charlie Chaplin is as popular today in China as in the United States. We laugh at a joke, which is a cerebral stimulus, and also at being tickled, which is physical, but while the laughs sound the same they are subtly different: I can for instance crack myself up by saying something funny, but I cannot make myself laugh by tickling myself. Every laugh is a paradox.
Eventually I left off trying to sleep, got up and went to my study, and began paging through the books of the great thinkers to read their ideas about the nature of laughter. I was still at it months later.
There are, I learned, some eighty distinct theories of why people laugh, and they concur on almost nothing. Some authors maintain that a sense of humor is inborn, others that it is acquired. Most see humor as a universal human attribute, but a few, emphasizing the painful truth that some people simply have no sense of humor, argue that laughter is a skill that must be mastered, like riding a bicycle. Many assume that it is fun to laugh, but Henri Bergson in his celebrated essay on humor maintains that laughter is devoid of emotion: “Indifference is its natural environment, for laughter has no greater foe than emotion,” Bergson writes. “… Its appeal is to intelligence, pure and simple.” I had imagined that my little boy laughed because he’d seen something funny in a dream, but Sigmund Freud informed me that the human child “lacks all feeling for the comic.” Hegel regarded humor as essentially aggressive, while Chaplin and Walt Disney saw nothing particularly hostile about a good laugh. (On this last point we may be seeing the difference between an artist and a critic; Disney and Chaplin were funny, while I doubt that Hegel could have provoked a laugh to save his life.)
The experts, I found, differ even on so fundamental a question as whether it is a good thing to have a sense of humor. Certainly laughter is “the best medicine,” as the jokes column in Reader’s Digest had it—the journalist Norman Cousins engineered his recovery from a potentially fatal illness through a regimen that included repeated viewing of Marx Brothers comedies, a feat that helped earn him a faculty post at the UCLA Medical School—but whatever its physical benefits, laughter is regarded in some circles as infra dig. Ecclesiastes declares that “a fool lifteth up his voice with laughter, but a wise man doth scarce smile a little.” Lord Chesterfield advised his famously over-counseled son that “loud laughter is the mirth of the mob, who are only pleased with silly things; for true wit or good sense never excited a laugh since the creation of the world. A man of parts and fashion is therefore only seen to smile, but never heard to laugh.” I even came across one dour expert who dismissed the love of humor as idiosyncratic to the Saxon peoples; that hypothesis got a good laugh from a Samoan friend of mine.
What we have, then, is a mystery within the human brain as deep as anything we’ve found among the stars. Why is it that laughter poses such a paradox, so that the philosophers and psychologists have found it necessary to invent such outlandishly serious and mutually exclusive arguments to account for it?
Having pondered this question at length, I think I have the answer—one that sheds light on the nature of the brain and, therefore, on the role of the mind in a cosmic context. Like the philosophers who have preceded me I feel confident that my theory of laughter alone is correct, and will banish all others as surely as the rising sun evaporates the dew. Like them, I will explain my theory with unwavering seriousness, thus ensuring that while it may not seem funny today, it is certain to draw laughs in the future. (As Cervantes remarked, “It is difficult not to write satire.”)
The essence of my theory is that laughter arises from the interaction of two important programs in the human brain, one of which constructs plausible models of reality while the other challenges such models. (In reality there probably are more than two programs involved, but for simplicity’s sake I will treat them as only two, in something like the way that historians treat two great armies as individuals although each contains many corps.) If I am correct, laughter presents us with conspicuous evidence of the multipartite brain at work, and the difficulties that have beset previous efforts to understand laughter have arisen from the mistaken assumption that the brain is best regarded as singular.
This is what I think is happening:
The mind is confronted every day with the task of making sense of the universe, and of one’s self, and of one’s place in the universe. To do this it has evolved a model-building program. This program is sober, responsible, creative, and assured—the domain, if you like, of the god Apollo. The Apollo program (as I will call it, with apologies to NASA) works across a wide spectrum of time and space, rendering sensory data into perceived objects from moment to moment, while on larger and longer scales producing our conceptions of our fellow human beings and our world.
The Apollo program, however, works imperfectly. All the models it creates are flawed in one way or another—they are, after all, only models—and if they went unchallenged we would spend most of our time immersed in delusion. (Perhaps we do anyway, but that’s another subject.) Delusion can be dangerous: The tree dweller who grabs a rotten branch under the misapprehension that it is a sound branch is in trouble; so is a camper who mistakes fetid water for good water, or a pearl diver who thinks a stonefish is a stone. Therefore the brain has evolved a second program, responsible for challenging the models that the Apollo program builds. This program is irreverent, skeptical, and playful—the domain of Pan.
All comedy puts these two gods on display. The banker is Apollo; W. C. Fields as the Bank Dick is Pan. The commencement speaker is Apollo; the streaker who interrupts his lofty pronouncements is Pan. Society needs both. It is pointless to deride a pompous professor for being a stick-in-the-mud, or to complain that a comedian lacks respect for our cherished institutions; both are simply doing their jobs, by embodying, respectively, the god that builds and maintains models and the god that mocks them and tears them down. (The tragedy of scientific creativity is that the great scientist begins as Pan, coming up with new theories that supplant the old, and then in defending them is transformed into Apollo; that, I think, is why few theoretical physicists do creative work much past the age of forty.)
When the Pan program discovers a dangerous fault in a model constructed by the Apollo program the situation is not funny—at least not to the person threatened by the discrepancy. Imagine that you are strolling down a path in the jungle. Thanks to the Apollo program, you see “objects” all around—trees, vines, a bird in flight, a stick on the ground in the path. Thanks to the Pan program, these models are constantly being interrogated. When the Pan program spots a threatening discrepancy between reality and representation—that “stick” is not a stick but a venomous snake, a fer-de-lance, camouflaged against the leaf litter on the trail!—it activates mechanisms that prepare brain and body to deal with the threat. If the danger is perceived as immediate and severe, the limbic system produces a cascade of chemicals (principally corticotropin releasing hormone, which in turn triggers the release into the bloodstream of adrenocorticotropic hormone and Cortisol) that result in a sudden increase in brain alertness and body tension, producing a state known generically as “stress.” These chemicals prime the body to perform with unusual speed and strength: Time slows down, perceptions are heightened, and muscle power increases dramatically.
But when the danger proves to be groundless—if the snake turns out to be a stick after all—you are left with the alarm bells ringing to no purpose: The fight-or-flee chemicals are surging through the bloodstream, all dressed up and nowhere to go. Vigorous physical exercise can help dispel stress; so can meditation. But the quickest and easiest way to discharge stress is by emitting a convulsive bark, a paroxysm of brain and body, what one authority described as “spasmodic contractions of the large and small zygomatic (facial) muscles and sudden relaxations of the diaphragm accompanied by contractions of the laryns and epiglottis”—in short, by laughing.
A laugh, then, results when the Pan program spots a potentially dangerous error in a model crafted by the Apollo program but the error turns out to be harmless, so that stress is first aroused and then quickly dispelled.
The greater the amount of stress, the more likely we are to laugh once it is relieved. This can happen without anything being particularly funny. Charles Darwin cited the example of soldiers “who after strong excitement from exposure to extreme danger were particularly apt to burst into loud laughter at the smallest joke.” When I was an editor at Rolling Stone magazine an armed band of Hell’s Angels stormed into my office one afternoon and threatened to dangle me by my ankles out the window, from which vantage point I could contemplate the sidewalk five stories below. (They were angry about an article that had appeared in the magazine.) So long as they contented themselves with conversation instead of defenestration I can assure you that I felt quite merry indeed.
Low comedy works on this level, dispelling stress simply by redirecting it outward. We laugh at the pratfalls of clowns because we are all a bit anxious about hurting ourselves—especially by falling, the bane of our tree-dwelling ancestors—and so feel relieved to see that someone can act even more awkwardly than we do yet survive the fall. Humor of this sort can easily turn cruel—as when children laugh at the sight of an ordinary mortal slipping on a banana peel, not realizing that he can be hurt—but it is a mistake to conclude, as Hegel did, that all comedy is cruel. Low comedy is only one form of the comic; it relieves our tensions but teaches us little, and as such it is disdained by those who can do better. (“Life is too serious to do farce comedy,” said Buster Keaton, who after performing an exquisite bit of custard pie throwing for a 1939 Hollywood retrospective on the silent film era mused glumly that never before in his long career had he found it necessary to throw a pie.)
High comedy adds another ingredient; it not only relieves stress, but discloses an imperfection in the model of reality that produced the stress. In doing so it teaches us something. The laugh discharges our anxiety while we delight in having learned something new.
That is why the best jokes are about serious subjects like sex, inadequacy, death, and taxes. Charlie Chaplin believed that the underlying theme of his tramp character was mortality: “I am always aware that Charlie is playing with death,” he said. “He plays with it, mocks it, thumbs his nose at it, but it is always there. He is aware of death at every moment of his existence, and he is terribly aware of being alive.” When Lenny Bruce on his opening night at the Blue Angel in New York City borrowed Wilt Chamberlin’s cigarette, examined the filter tip, then said, with an air of astonishment, “He niggerlipped it!” he got a laugh because there was quite enough racism in the atmosphere to make the insult authentically shocking, and its evaporation into a joke legitimately enlightening. (Because he maintained that hurtful words lose their sting once we laugh at them, Bruce made enemies among those who confuse words with reality.)
The dependency of laughter on stress imposes upon humor a kind of law of conservation of energy. A comic can get a quick laugh by eliciting relatively little stress and promptly dispelling it, even though the punchline reveals but a trivial insight. If she takes longer to build a joke, raising the level of stress, the punchline must be worthier or else the joke will collapse under its own weight. Most professional comedians exploit this law by working fast; the average standup comic gets off a punchline every ten or fifteen seconds. When Henny Youngman says, “I found a solution to the parking problem—I bought a parked car,” he may not have revealed anything very profound, but we laugh because the anxiety we had to undergo to get to the payoff—a moment’s attention to the parking problem—did not represent much of an investment.
Economy, not brevity, is the soul of wit. A master comedian can afford to work slowly, building the tension higher, provided that he has more to reveal at the punchline. Jack Benny on a 1957 episode of his television series pulled off a joke that consumed nearly ten full minutes of air time. The premise is that the head of a Hollywood studio wants to talk with Benny about making a film of his life story. Benny, whose last movie, The Horn Blows at Midnight, was a flop, is elevated to delusions of grandeur by his anticipated return to movie stardom. When he and his wife arrive and are let through the gate by a security guard, Benny orders his driver, Rochester, to park in the spot reserved for the president of the studio. No sooner has Rochester brought the car to a halt than a gunshot rings out. The three look up in astonishment to see that the security guard has fired a bullet through the radiator of Benny’s car.
“What’s the big idea of shooting at us?” Benny demands of Herman, the guard.
“You took the space reserved for Mr. Adler,” Herman replies.
“Oh,” says Benny. “I’m terribly sorry…. You see, I’m Jack Benny and I’ve got an appointment with …”
“Jack Benny?”
“Yes.”
“The one that starred in The Horn Blows at Midnight?”
“Yes, yes. I made that for Warner Brothers years ago. Did you see it?”
“See it?” the guard replies. “I directed it.”
That’s a marvelous punchline, but note that to build the gag over so long a period, Benny and his writers had to push the tension and incongruity of the situation to almost unbelievable levels. This was true of many of Benny’s jokes, some of which moved so slowly that they devolved into silence. In his most famous gag, confronted by a mugger who growls, “Your money or your life!” Benny said nothing; by the time he finally delivered the punchline—”I’m thinking it over!”—he had drawn what has been described as the longest laugh in radio history.
The most profound jokes invoke paradox, the ultimate incongruity. Their subject is the inadequacy, not just of a particular model of reality, but of all models. They attack the very basis of the Apollo program, reminding us that no paradigm fully reflects reality. Their target is every individual who imagines that his is the one correct view of life.
That, I suppose, is why there is a robust tradition of paradox in the humor of Jews, who have suffered so frequently at the hands of true believers. Freud quotes a joke about an old Jew who tries to play cards with a friend but gives up in frustration at the other man’s clumsiness and ignorance of the game: Throwing down his cards in disgust, he says, “What can I expect from a man who plays cards with me?”
“I wouldn’t belong to any club that would have me for a member,” said Groucho Marx, resurrecting the same joke (and improving it; Groucho was a great lapidarist). Groucho’s joke strikes not just at antisemitism but at all systems of rigid thought and belief. They all have knots, you see, where the ruled parallel lines of faith and logic snake together and spiral away like water down a drain. Most of us ignore the knots most of the time, and act as if our assumptions about life and the universe were as true as planed hardwood. Gadflies like Einstein and Bohr and Keaton and Marx gather at the knots, and drill there, and sometimes break through to glimpse another way of looking at the world. The new system may be better or worse, but it, too, will be inadequate. The gadflies know this, but go on drilling anyway. That is their job—to punch holes in belief systems and let the light shine through, awakening the rest of us.
The imperative that wit involves wisdom holds true even (or perhaps especially) when the humor is unintentional. Years ago, as a boy growing up in south Florida, I heard an Army general stationed at Cape Canaveral being interviewed on a radio program. He was asked why he did not think it advisable to arc missiles carrying polar-orbit satellites directly over Miami, though this would have been more efficient than routing them out to sea. “Should a missile crash into downtown Miami,” the general replied thoughtfully, “the result could be massive loss of life and destruction of property, and that would be harmful to the morale of my men.” What made this remark funny, it seems to me, is that the general revealed himself to be doing exactly what he ought to be doing—concerning himself above all else with the welfare of the soldiers under his command—even though the incongruity of his outlook, in ranking their morale above the specter of a rocket-fuel fireball engulfing downtown Miami, was enough to make a civilian’s jaw drop.
Unquestionably, humor can be a fearsome weapon. Comedians recounting a triumphant show say, “I destroyed them; I killed them; I murdered them.” The Germans have a word for it—auslachen, which means to attack and disarm someone by making jokes at his expense. Among African and Arctic peoples there are some who practice formal duels of wit, in which two conflicting males, rather than fighting, take turns insulting each other until one is judged to have triumphed by uttering a conclusive bon mot, whereupon the two adversaries shake hands and bury the hatchet. (A similar institution can be found in African-American communities, where it is known variously as “mother ranking” and “doing the dozens.”)
Physical violence, too, abounds in comedy. The young Chaplin, said his friend the juggler Blaise Cendrars, “had a way of kicking people which was wonderful to behold.” W. C. Fields’ most popular act, the famous bent-pool-cue routine, ended with his pretending to brain his partner with the cue; on one occasion, when Fields discovered that his partner was drawing laughs by mugging the audience while crouched beneath the pool table, Fields dispensed with pretense and knocked the man unconscious. Buster Keaton as a child performed a routine in which he was regularly beaten black and blue by his father, a heavy drinker. If Keaton flinched, his father would hiss at him, “Face! Face!” “That meant freeze the puss,” Keaton recalled.
.… In this knockabout act, my father and I used to hit each other with brooms, occasioning for me strange flops and falls. If I should chance to smile, the next hit would be a good deal harder. All the parental correction I ever received was with an audience looking on. I could not even whimper.
But violence is a catalyst of wit, not its final product. A joke that arouses anger but then dispels it is very different from a cruel joke that leaves the anger unassuaged; as Cervantes said, “Jests which slap the face are not good jests.” A really good joke creates tension not merely to dispel it, but to reveal something to us as well. As Kant remarked, “Laughter is an affection arising from the sudden transformation of a strained expectation into nothing.” The expectation must be strained, or we would not be close enough to seeing through the paradigm to get the joke. The paradigm is transformed into nothing in the sense that it is exposed for what it is, a thin and tattered tissue hung between our tender sensibilities and the cold reality of an uncaring universe.
The chemistry of stress and revelation makes it possible for a profound insight to produce a laugh even if it’s not at all funny. I have often laughed out loud at first hearing a composer’s masterful turn of phrase in a symphony, or watching a superlative gymnast perform on the parallel bars, not because I found them incongruous but because I hadn’t previously imagined that such a thing could be done; the deed called attention to a ludicrous disparity between the splendor of the human performance and the poverty of my preconceptions about its limits. (Freud became interested in the psychology of wit after his friend and pupil Theodor Reik noticed that Freud’s students responded with a delighted laugh when the meaning of a dream was revealed to them.) This phenomenon is the mirror image of low comedy, in which the level of stress is high and that of insight low. Here stress is at a minimum, insight at a maximum. A great joke can cover the whole spectrum: Harold Lloyd dangling from the hands of a clock high above a city street can be laughed at anywhere from the low comedy perspective that he’s in danger to the high comedy perspective that he, like the rest of us, is a prisoner of time, and is doomed to die anyway.
Bergson to the contrary, the incongruity that sparks a laugh need not be purely intellectual. It can be mostly emotional. We laugh at dirty jokes because sex is a profoundly troubling subject, even if we learn nothing from the jokes except that we have company in our incomprehension. But we also disparage dirty jokes, as we do puns, because their intellectual content is usually so meager. The most rewarding jokes, again, are the most enlightening.
We take pleasure in laughter, then, both because we enjoy the release of the anxiety it provides, and (if the joke rises to any higher than a purely emotional level) because the brain delights in discovering incongruities between perception and reality. Schopenhauer came close to what I am trying to say when he identified humor as arising from the perceived distinction between abstract rational knowledge and the raw material of perception. The cause of laughter, he wrote, “is simply the sudden perception of the incongruity between a concept and the real objects which have been thought through it in some relation, and laughter itself is just the expression of this incongruity”—the incongruity, that is to say, between the “abstract and the concrete object of perception.” (“Everything is contained in Schopenhauer,” Chaplin told Blaise Cendrars, when he was a young man in London and contemplating a career in medicine.)
It follows that a genuinely serious man is more likely to display a healthy sense of humor than is a superficial man, since he is accustomed to constantly testing his version of reality against the facts, and must—because he is serious—learn to roll with the intellectual pratfalls that result when his models fail the test. “The more a man is capable of entire seriousness, the more heartily can he laugh,” writes Schopenhauer. A sense of humor, as George Santayana remarked, is a sense of proportion, and to one who has a sense of cosmic proportion every human pretension is ridiculous. “In humor the little is made great and the great little, in order to destroy both, because all is equal in contrast with the infinite,” wrote Samuel Coleridge, borrowing an idea from Jean Paul Richter.
Humor like anything else can be counterfeited, and there are always a few comics (Don Rickles comes to mind) who make a living less by being funny than by acting as if they were funny. The distinction lies in the genuine comedian’s ability to relax the mainspring of anxiety by unveiling an insight. The insight bursts forth like a bull from behind the matador’s cape. In tragedy the bull dies. In comedy he turns out to be Ferdinand.
Good jokes are enlightened, bad jokes unenlightened; that they resemble each other is just another example of nature’s passion for camouflage. The fact that two patterns of behavior can look identical and yet arise from disparate casts of mind is emphasized in Zen Buddhism, the philosophy of Groucho Marx and Fuke.*Superficially, a Zen master sweeping the floor is doing exactly what an untutored monk is doing when he sweeps the floor, but in actuality, they are having two quite different experiences. The Zen master Bokushu made this point in a talk to the assembled monks: “If you are not yet clear about the Great Matter,” he said, “it is like the funeral of one’s parents; if you are already clear about it, it is like the funeral of one’s parents.”
Among all systems of thought, it is Zen that best isolates the universal human dilemma in which humor takes root. If I could adequately put the message of Zen in words (which I cannot) I would say that it affirms the fact that the mind strives to make sense of the human condition, while knowing that it does so in vain. The Zen master accepts the absurdity of life, then transcends it, by living life exactly as if it were worth living: He sleeps and eats and sweeps the floor, understanding the pointlessness of it all and yet doing it anyway. His life is devoid of intentional cruelty, panic, bathos, piety, preachiness, apology and explanation. These manifestations of illusion are replaced by an appreciation of the beauty and value of life as experience, so that he really can live each day as if it were his last.
The nearest I have approached to the flavor of enlightenment came one summer afternoon when I was seventeen years old. My father and I were working in a garden under the hot Florida sun, and he sent me to fetch three rakes. I returned with the rakes, but in trying to hand them over lost my grip, and the rakes fell every which way. With much fussing and fuming I stooped, gathered the rakes together, and stood and handed them to my father, who was watching me with an even gaze. He took them, paused for a moment without taking his eyes from mine, then deliberately let them go. Watching the rakes scatter on the ground, I burst into laughter. I’d suddenly understood something important—that my striving to gather the rakes (which was, after all, a form of complaint) had served only to make an easy task difficult. They were, after all, only a bunch of rakes, and we were but a man and a boy, working in a garden. So why make a big deal out of it? Why not enjoy ourselves?
Years later I came across the same joke, in an account of the Zen master Ryutan and his student Tokusan:
Tokusan went one night to Ryutan to ask for his teaching. At last Ryutan said, “It is late; you had better go back.” Tokusan made his bows, lifted the blind and went out. Seeing how dark it was outside he came back in, and said, “It’s dark out there.” Ryutan lit a lantern [a candle with paper round it] and handed it to him. Tokusan was about to take it, when Ryutan blew it out. At this Tokusan was enlightened.
Ryutan’s point (in part; in whole it is equal to the universe) was that the student was making too much of the dark. Our fears of the dark and our love of light are ours alone; to God, darkness and light are the same, and if we are to live with natural ease in the universe they must be the same to us, too. If we aspire to make ourselves worthy of dialogue with a “superior” extraterrestrial intelligence, we will need to comprehend that this kind of understanding counts for more than rocket ships, books, or bombs.
So why did my son laugh in his sleep that night? Because he thought of something funny, I suppose. What was it? I don’t know, but I’ll bet it involved an incongruity. Perhaps he was thinking of one of his many word games, as when he calls a nose a toe, or a man a big lump of oatmeal. Children love word play; it reassures them that words are only words and not things, and rehearses skills taxed by the considerable burden of learning a first language. (The average child memorizes four to eight words a day, accumulating a vocabulary of eight to fourteen thousand words by age six.) Perhaps he dreamed of something physical—a man trying to catch a greased pig, say—and laughed at the disparity between that man’s aspirations toward grace and his sadly imperfect actions, and was amused to reflect on his own struggles each day to make his body do what he wanted it to do. (Belly flops can be funny, if the diver leads us to expect something better; a perfect dive is funny only if we have been led to expect a belly flop.) Or perhaps he simply dreamed of being tickled. (The gigantic adult menaces the child physically, but the outcome is only a gentle tickle, and so the child laughs.)
Does all this explain humor? Not very adequately, I’m afraid. But it may suggest how humor invokes the darkness of the unknown, while we in our little circle of light whistle and fidget and laugh. Half of that darkness lies outward, in the vast universe; from a cosmic perspective, I suspect, a State of the Union address or an advertising campaign is as funny as an Amos and Andy skit. The other half lies within, where laughter echoes down unexplored corridors of the mind. We laugh when suddenly reminded of how little we are, and how little we know. And that is why we stay young so long as we can laugh, and why every child’s laughter is our own.
*Fuke was a Zen master, dates unknown, renowned for his wicked sense of humor. His last words are the most generous—i.e., instructive—I have heard of. When Fuke lay dying, surrounded by friends, he thrust out his hand, palm up, and said, “Give me some money!”