In all of the cases analysed, laughter occurs because of the characteristics of the person who is the object of it. In other words, failure is caused involuntarily by the person himself, who is the only one involved. Even so, someone else can deliberately cause failure or foil plans, in which case two people are involved. There is a very expressive word in Russian for these acts: odurachivanie [making a fool of or duping].
Duping occurs quite often in satirical and humorous literature where the presence of two characters makes it possible to develop a conflict, a struggle, or an intrigue. Each can have a group of supporters or companions, and there can be conflict between the central positive and negative characters or between two negative ones. While in the previous examples the comic was caused by sudden, unexpected situations, the technique of duping can underpin multi-act comedies and longer narratives. The person duped may be discredited through his own fault: his opponent uses some of his flaws and by exposing them makes him a laughing-stock. In some instances the person duped does not seem to be at fault at all, yet everybody laughs at him or her.
When analysing comedy plots, we learn that duping is one of their central elements. It dominates in folk puppet shows and Punch and Judy theatre, where the character that fears no one emerges as the victor. It occurs in the Italian commedia dell’arte and in ancient classical comedies of Western Europe, and it can be found in Shakespeare’s comedies as well. Duping is a very useful technique from the point of view of comedy, and it is not without reason that the great Russian comedy writers Gogol and Ostrovsky were keenly interested in the comedy of intrigue. Gogol took an active part in translating Giovanni Giro’s comedy The Tutor Is Embarrassed, and Ostrovsky translated Shakespeare and Goldoni’s comedies as well as Cervantes’s works. These foreign works bore no relation to Russian life, though they attracted these writers and translators because of their excellent comic technique.
If we carefully study Molière’s comedies, we find that some of them are based on the principle we have just discussed. This is quite evident, for example, in Georges Dandin, or the Abashed Husband, where the wife, a noblewoman, and her relatives pull the wool over the eyes of a good-natured but dull farmer who wants to marry out of vanity a wealthy gentleman’s daughter. The last words of this comedy – ‘Tu l’as voulu, Georges Dandin!’ (You asked for it, George Dandin!) – became proverbial not only in France but all over the world. Here the principle of duping is quite clear, but it implicitly underlies almost all of Molière’s comedies. Duping generally is the foundation not only of ancient but also of later comedy. Fonvizin’s1 The Ignoramus, in which all of Mrs Prostakova’s undertakings fail is founded on duping; Gogol’s comedies are also all based on it. In The Government Inspector, the town governor is made a fool of through his own fault. ‘Look, just look, all of you -the whole world, all Christendom – look up and see the Mayor, see what a fool he’s made of himself!’ (1998, 334). This technique is quite evident in ‘Marriage,’ it is evident in Players as well. This comedy, devoid of the social satire that gives so much depth to The Government Inspector, is a clear example of the ‘deceiver/deceived’ type. A professional swindler happens to be deceived by another swindler who is even more clever.
Many of Ostrovsky’s comedies, too, revolve around duping. For example, in It’s a Family Affair, I’ll Settle It among Ourselves, the handsome cheat Silych Bolshov, a merchant, declares bankruptcy in order to deceive his creditors. He transfers his property to his son-in-law, who turns out to be an even bigger cheat than Bolshov, as he allows the latter to be imprisoned and freely uses his property to his own ends. Bolshov’s fate would be tragic were it not his own fault; he is a deceiver/deceived, a negative hero who has been deceived through his own fault. A positive hero can also get into such quandaries, however, when he finds himself among people with characters, morals, and beliefs that are the opposite of his own. The plot of Wit Works Woe (Griboyedov 1992) consists in this. Having come to Moscow with certain ideals and a great love in his heart, Chatsky experiences the loss of all his illusions. ‘So I’m enlightened,’ he exclaims at the end of the comedy. A positive character has been made a fool of, although it is not his flaws that have been exposed but rather those of the people he has misjudged. In Russian comedies duping is not the only plot but rather the main type.
Comical and narrative folklore is another area in which duping is the mainspring of the plot. Various comical folktales – facetiae, the Schwank, fabliaux2 – are part of the genre, as are folktales about animals and satirical tales. These tales belong to a separate category, and their plots can be classified according to their forms, which could serve to create a scholarly index of plots, though this is not relevant for the present study. In a folktale it is always the cheat and the joker who are morallyjustified; the listeners or readers sympathize with them and not with the duped. Duping is also the main plot device in folklore satire.
The cunning fox is the main character of many European folktales about animals. Other cultures have different animals, but it is always an animal that is thought to be cunning: a raven, a monkey, a mink, etc. The plot of Russian folktales about a fox usually boils down to the fox duping everybody. Pretending to be dead, he steals fish from a man’s cart. The fox advises the wolf to put its tail through a hole in the ice to catch some fish. The tail freezes in the ice, and men kill the wolf. Having fallen into a trap with other animals, the fox persuades the bear to eat his own bowels. He rips open its own belly and dies, while the fox devours it and escapes from the hole. I will not list all of the fox’s tricks, but I would add that in some folktales the fox itself is deceived or punished. It invites the rooster to confess his main sin, polygamy; then, when he flies down, the fox grabs him and carries him off. When the rooster promises him to bake communion bread and take it to the archbishop’s feast, the fox lets him go and he flies up onto a tree, laughing at him. As already mentioned, this tale has its origins in literature, not in folklore, and dates back to the seventeenth century, but the principle of duping remains relevant and even occurs twice in the tale. Not only the fox but other animals as well can play the role of a deceiver, for example, the cat that frightens everyone, or the fearless rooster that frightens more powerful animals with its singing. These folktales are actually not funny in the narrow sense of the word, they do not cause loud laughter even though they are interspersed with very specific folk humour. The listener is on the deceiver’s side not because people approve of deceit but because the person deceived is stupid, dull, dim-witted, and simply deserves to be deceived.
The plots of a large number of folktales about clever thieves are based on the principle of duping. A thief who appears in them is never described as a criminal but as a cheerful con artist who is able to steal eggs from under a brood hen or who uses his skill to make a fool of the landlord. Having learned about his deftness, to test him the landlord makes him undertake what he considers to be an impossible task. At night, the thief steals the bedsheet from under the landlord and his wife, and he steals his favourite stallion from the stable. After having deceived all the watchmen, he even steals the ‘mentor from Kerzhen’ (the priest), puts him in a bag, and hangs it on the gate. Thieves of a different type also exist, for example, the soldiers who steal butter from an old merchant woman. A woman is carting butter to market when she meets two soldiers; one of them stops her to chat while the other steals butter from the cart. The woman discovers the theft only after she arrives at the market. The soldiers have been suffering from privation for years in the Tsar’s service while the deceived person happens to be a rich and foolish merchant, so people think the soldiers are justified.
Another group of this type of folktale is about jesters. In one of them, a jester who has out-jested seven others says he has a lash that brings the dead back to life. Having connived with his wife, he feigns a quarrel with her and pretends to stab her with a knife. He pierces a bladder full of blood that was hidden on her beforehand, then lashes her, and she comes back to life. He sells the lash for a high price to a buyer who kills his wife and tries to bring her back to life with it, while the cheat laughs at him. The tale consists of a series of similar tricks. His enemies try to get revenge, but this proves to be impossible as he always manages to get away with it.
These types of folktales are an enigma for us today, as the laughter appears cynical and senseless. Folklore, however, has its own laws, and the listeners do not attribute reality to them because they know they are dealing with a folktale and not a true story. The winner is right because he wins, and the story does not at all pity the credulous fools who become victims of the jester’s tricks. These types of folktales easily become social satire, when the deceived persons happen to be priests or landowners while the deceiver is a farm labourer who ruins and even kills the priest. He cripples the priest’s children and chops them to pieces, he ravishes the priest’s wife and daughter, or he throws his wife off a cliff, and all of this is done without the slightest regret, because in folklore people never have any pity for their enemies, be they Tatars in an epic, Frenchmen in historical songs about Napoleon, or landowners and priests in folktales. In Pushkin’s ‘Balda,’ the labourer deceives not only the priest and the master but also the devils themselves. Strictly speaking, however, he does not deceive the priest, whom he has hired for a mere three flicks of his forefinger on the clergyman’s forehead. What is unexpected, though, is the actual force of the flicks: the priest is punished for his greed. The form of duping used in folktales is not a good satirical technique. Its use betrays the narrator’s negative attitude towards the duped person. Sometimes we have to guess the reasons for it, as the narrator does not consider it necessary to expound on them since they become evident only after people hate the duped person because of his or her social status. However, satire in the exact sense of the word is not present here.
When Gogol uses this technique in his narrative works, he does so in a different way. He briefly and clearly exposes the negative aspects of the characters portrayed. As the main feature of the ‘comedy of plot,’ this device does not appear too frequently in this author’s works. Whenever it is used it is always related to folklore. For example, in ‘A Night in May,’ youngsters jeer at the village headman: they throw a stone at his window and sing mischievous, ridiculing songs under his windows, and when he tries to catch them, they make certain he catches his own sister-in-law instead. These jokes are simply vengeful: the headman is hated because he abuses his power and imposes work orders at will. He has other defects as well. ‘The headman has only one eye; but this one eye is a real devil and can spot a bonny lass from a mile off’ (Gogol 1991, 80). Gogol was an excellent ethnographer for he knew very well that in the old days these kinds of pranks were acceptable during Christmastide and that young men were getting even with those they disliked, especially with older people who were local authorities. ‘For example, one of those jokes consisted in mixing horse muck with mud and slush, then spreading it on the window or the door of some peasant and when the master of the house stuck his head out, the other person dipped a broom in the manure and swept his face with it […].’3 They blocked a gate so that it could not be opened; they poured water into a chimney from the roof or stuffed hay or ice down the chimney so that the stove started to smoke, etc. This custom, which is quite ancient, probably played some role in the origin of ancient Attic comedy. The once widespread April fool jokes, when it was thought necessary to play a prank on somebody and then to laugh at him or her, are also of ritual origin.
In this respect, we should mention cruel jokes and tricks, that are sometimes played on absolutely innocent and occasionally very good people, but which still make us laugh. Wilhelm Busch’s ‘Max and Mo-ritz,’ a work known all over the world, is a typical and striking example.4 With a saw, Max and Moritz cut through the piers of a footbridge that the tailor is going to cross, and they laugh when he falls into the water; they fill the teacher’s pipe with gunpowder so that he burns his face severely; etc. The gloating delight that is almost imperceptible in other kinds of humour is quite explicit here. This is what makes this sort of humour disagreeable; nonetheless, it is present in human nature, which does not necessarily always strive for the good. The reader involuntarily associates with Max and Moritz in all their tricks also because the victims of the joke are self-satisfied, dull, and narrow-minded German bourgeois, who, though they are honest workers (a tailor, a baker, a teacher), live in the stuffy and stagnant world of the petty bourgeoisie. Their peace and quiet are shattered by the pranksters’ tricks; but then, after being punished, the bourgeois regain their former state.
These kinds of tricks – ‘practical jokes’ in English – are not very popular with us, but they are much more so in America than witticisms. In Further Foolishness, Leacock writes about a joker who appeared in a boarding house and who ‘used to put tar in the tomato soup, and beeswax and tin-tacks on the chairs’ (1916, 298), etc. It was also considered funny to stuff a pillowcase with thistles or to put a grass snake in people’s boots. Leacock’s joker ‘one night […] stretched a string across the passage-way and then rang the dinner bell. One of the boarders broke his leg. I nearly died laughing’ (297). It is evident from the last phrase that Leacock condemns this sort of humour; nevertheless, the conclusion he draws that humour can only be good-natured is wrong. Those who have attended high school could probably tell us a great deal about the tricks students played on their teachers. However, the teachers were at fault because they failed to establish their authority. The entire school system of the time encouraged strife between teachers and students, whose tricks resulted from normal contempt among playful teenagers for dullness, injustice, boredom, and any immorality in the pedagogical environment, which they could not but notice. Teachers who were loved and respected were never the victims of this behaviour.
Our moral judgment on such acts today does not necessarily coincide with moral judgements made on duped people in the past. In Leacock’s examples the jokers seem abominable to us since the duped people suffer hardships for no reason whatsoever. Still if, in literature or in real life, jokes are played on people (or types of people) who are unpleasant, mean, or generally bad, we tend to side with the jokers. Shevtsov’s (1965) short story ‘The Winnings’ is noteworthy in this respect. A man jokingly tells his wife and mother-in-law that he has won five thousand rubles. At first he regrets having said it, but soon his wife, his mother-in-law, and other relatives become so greedy that he discovers their true nature.