The reasons why similarity is comical and the conditions that make it possible have been examined but the explanation is incomplete. The similarity of twins in life and the similarity of paired or multiple characters in literary works, corresponds at the same time to their dissimilarity to all other people. They have a particular trait that distinguishes them from everyone else. This observation can be generalized and expressed as follows: any feature or oddity that distinguishes a person from his or her environment can make that person funny.
Why is this so? This is one of the most complicated and difficult tasks in the explanation of the comic. Ever since Aristotle,1 aesthetics has been reiterating that the ugly is comical but has failed to explain why and to determine which ugliness in particular is funny or not. The ugly is the opposite of the beautiful, and nothing beautiful can ever be funny, while digressing from it can be. People have a certain instinct for the appropriate, of what they perceive as the norms related to appearance as well as to moral and intellectual life. The ideal of external beauty seems to be determined by the expediency of nature. A beautiful person is a person with a proportional and harmonious build that reveals signs of health, strength, vigour, and dexterity, along with an ability to undertake various activities. Yurenev and many others are right in saying that laughter is caused by discrepancies that reveal deviations from the norm, as people instinctively determine the norm in relation to themselves. A giraffe’s long neck and legs are quite useful for the animal: they help it reach leaves in tall trees. But a long neck in a human is a defect as it reveals some flaws and is a deviation from the norm. We already know that flaws are comical, but only those that do not offend and shock us and that do not cause pity and sympathy. For example, a hunchback can provoke laughter only in someone who is morally flawed. The same applies, for example, to the physical manifestation of old age or illness. Therefore, not every form of ugliness is funny, and Aristotle’s limitation is still true today.
The cases that have been examined are based on deviation from norms of a biological nature, such as all the physical defects mentioned in the previous chapter. But deviating from public or socio-political norms can also be comical under certain conditions. There are socially appropriate norms, the opposite of which are considered inadmissible and improper. Those norms vary from one period to another, from one nation to another, from one social structure to another. Any group of people – not only as large as an entire nation but also smaller ones including the smallest groups, the inhabitants of a town, a locality, or a village, even pupils in a class – has a certain unwritten code that covers both moral and social norms to which everyone involuntarily conforms. To infringe on this unwritten code is to deviate from certain collective ideals, or norms of life, it is experienced as a flaw, and, as in other cases, its discovery causes laughter. It was noticed long ago that such deviation, discrepancy, or contradiction, causes laughter. For example, Podskalsky2 (1954, 14) writes: ‘The main social comical contradiction which in a class society is a class contradiction is also accompanied by a certain contradiction where people’s characters and actions contravene the common ideal of dignity that has been established through the development of the society and results from the basic rules of any social conduct.’
During social upheavals, what has irrevocably become a thing of the past and does not conform to the new norms created by the victorious regime or social way of life can become comical. Karl Marx noticed this, and his conclusion is often paraphrased as follows: ‘Humanity parts with its past with laughter.’ Marx never wrote those words, which are a distortion by those who have popularized his idea. Here are Marx’s (1994 [1843], 61) original words: ‘History is thorough, and passes through many phases when carrying an old form to the grave. The final phase of a world-historical form is its comedy. The Greek gods, already once mortally wounded, tragically, in Aeschylus’s Prometheus Bound, had to die once more, comically, in the dialogues of Lucian. Why does history proceed in this way? So that humanity will separate itself happily from its past.’ These words define the general historical rule and expediency (‘so that’). The deaths of heroes who sacrificed their lives in the struggle for historical justice are tragic. This is the first phase. Humanity does not part with its past happily at all. When the struggle is over, the remains of the past in the present are subject to ridicule.
The tragic and the comic, however, are not automatically separated, and the remains of the past in the present are not always comical in themselves. Are religious remnants always comical? Hardly in themselves, but they can be portrayed satirically by means of artistic comedy. The stronger and more serious this remnant is (strength considered in terms of aesthetic influence on believers through music and painting), the more difficult it is to represent it satirically; the pettier the remnant (a devout old woman’s reasoning about the sinfulness of space flights), the easier it is to create satire. The same applies to all similar remnants. Many of them define the competence of a public prosecutor rather than that of a satirist. But the satirist and the public prosecutor can often help each other. The comic in the cases just analysed is based on the dissimilarity of the norms of two historically developed social ways of life.
The comic can result from differences in everyday life – say, between two contemporaneous nations – but not only in terms of social differences. If every nation has its own social and inner norms that have been elaborated during the development of its own culture, then everything that does not conform to these norms will be comical. This is the reason why foreigners are so often funny when they stand out, in other words when they differ from their hosts because of their oddities. The greater the differences, the more probable the comic. For unsophisticated and naive people, the unusual habits or manners of foreigners, the sounds of the speech of their native tongue, all of which seem strange to their ears, and the awful pronunciation when they speak with an accent, will seem funny.
In The Government Inspector, Hiebner is comical not only because of his wretchedness but also because he is a German among Russians, and his confusing pronunciation contributes to this. Germans are ridiculed in ‘Nevsky Prospect’ in the person of Schiller, who ‘was German to the marrow of his bones’ (Gogol 1998, 31). This is followed by a description of him as someone who is not familiar with Russians. In folklore, one can find good-natured jokes referring to non-Russian neighbours that have no malicious intent whatsoever. The same can be said about numerous proverbs, teasers, and sayings concerning inhabitants of neighbouring villages and towns. Here are some examples: The people ‘of Ladoga drove a pike away from its own eggs’; ‘Those of old Russia ate a horse and wrote to Novgorod asking for more’; ‘Those of Tver can only afford to eat turnips’; ‘Those of Kashino are heavy water-drinkers who cannot afford alcohol.’ The most noteworthy collection of such sayings, accompanied by valuable historical comments, can be found in Dal’s works.3
However, not only can people of another group, large or small, be ridiculous but so too can those belonging to their own group if they differ greatly from everyone else in some way. Each people and each era have their customs and norms of behaviour, which can change and sometimes rather quickly. These changes are originally perceived as a violation of what is generally accepted, and cause laughter just as extravagant or unusual fashions can. The history of fashion can easily be depicted in a satirical way; for example, ladies’ hat styles can change within one generation. Once upon a time people wore huge hats that they decorated with ostrich feathers; stuffed hummingbirds, or parrots, or other beautiful birds were attached to them. Artificial flowers, fruits, and berries were pinned to hats, such as glass cherries or bunches of grapes. These fashions reached the countryside, and a chastooshka was composed about them:
Like a painted picture
Is a Petersburg youngster.
Her hat’s like a kitchen garden,
And she strolls like a lady.
The super-fashionable is also comical but in general so are any uncommon clothes that make a person stand out in his or her environment. Old-fashioned dresses – for example, the dresses sometimes worn by old women who dress according to the customs of their time – are funny for the same reason new fashions are ridiculous. Pushkin (1943, 3: 763) describes this predilection for the past with good-natured humour in The Negro of Peter the Great, during the assembly scene: ‘The elderly ladies had craftily endeavored to combine the new fashions with the proscribed style of the past; their caps resembled the sable head-dress of Czarina Natalya Kirillovna4 and their gowns and capes recalled the sarafan and dushegreika.’5 On the other hand, Pushkin describes the new fashions of Peter the Great’s epoch with open sympathy. The clothes worn at that time showed one’s political orientation, an inclination either to Boyar times or to Peter’s innovations.
Gogol represents both the comical taste for new fashions and the inclination to former times when describing some of the ladies’ attire at a provincial ball in Dead Souls. After describing the latest fashions, the author exclaims: ‘No, this is no province, this is a capital; this is Paris itself!’ But he immediately notes: ‘Only in these places would some bonnet stick out such as had never been seen on earth, or even almost some sort of peacock feather, contrary to all fashion, following its own taste’ (1997, 165). Even harsher satire directed at high society appears in ‘Nevsky Prospect’:6 ‘And as for the sleeves worn by the ladies on Nevsky Prospect! Sheer delight! They could be likened to twin aerostats, ready at any moment to hoist their wearer aloft into the air, were she not held down by her cavalier’ (1998, 6). Gogol gives a great number of examples in which a person (and at the same time the social stratum he or she belongs to) is characterized by his or her clothes; for example, the cranberry-coloured tailcoat, or the one with ‘the colors of the smoke and flames of Navarino’7 (1997, 364) that Chichikov has tailored for himself.
The attire of foreigners can appear laughable for the same reason fashions and old-fashioned clothes seem ridiculous. English stockbrokers still wear bowlers, but if they appeared today wearing them on Nevsky Prospect, they would cause laughter. This example clearly shows that unusual clothes provoke laughter not because they are uncommon but because their uncommonness reveals some discrepancy with distinct ideas about the flaws expressed by these clothes. If this discrepancy is lacking, clothes that are strange, uncommon, and alien to us will not cause laughter. In our streets one can see visitors from India and other countries in magnificent colourful national clothes, and the long silk dresses worn by Indian women induce universal admiration; people feast their eyes on them.
These examples explain why, and in which cases, dissimilarity is perceived as comical. The last ones analysed dealt with dissimilarity caused by a person’s behaviour, though these do not differ essentially from the cases of dissimilarity caused by nature rather than by people. A general biological rule emerges: individual biological differences are funny when they are perceived as ugliness that disrupts harmony in nature. Portly men have already been discussed, and we have indicated that a physical defect was comical because at a different level one could imagine a flaw behind it. However, physical defects of a different kind also occur; for example, big hairy moles, squinting or protruding eyes, drooping lips, a big goiter, a twisted mouth, red or blue noses, and so on seem ridiculous to children as well as to naive people in general. Why are bald or short-legged or lanky people ridiculous? These defects do not reveal any inner personal flaws. They express natural ugliness and therefore conflict with our notion of harmony and proportion that is consistent with general laws of nature. In this sense the theorists, starting with Aristotle, who have identified the comic with the ugly are correct, although they have not explained why such ugliness is comical.
This is also why human faces in distorting mirrors are comical. Exaggerated, protruding noses, impossibly thick cheeks, huge, bulging ears, facial expressions that are absolutely uncommon for humans – especially when laughing so that the mouth stretches from ear to ear – represent some ugliness and cause laughter, like other kinds of ugliness and disproportion.