An examination of the conditions under which stupidity and lack of logic can create a comic effect will help us answer another question: Why, and under what conditions, can telling a lie cause laughter? In answering this, we should bear in mind that there seem to be two different types of comical deceit. Sometimes a liar tries to deceive the person he is addressing by presenting falsehood as truth. The scene in The Government Inspector where Khlestakov tells a lie is a good example. In other instances, the liar does not mean to deceive the listener; rather, his aim is to amuse. This is what happens in the stories told by Münchausen and, generally speaking, in all comical tall tales.
Let us examine the first case. Deceits are far from always being comical; as with other human vices, for them to become so, they must be trivial and not result in tragedy. Furthermore, they must be exposed afterwards, as unexposed deceits cannot be comical. When a lie is told, someone is speaking and others are listening. Sometimes the listener realizes that a lie is being told, but the liar is not aware of it and is not certain whether his deceit has succeeded. In this instance, people listen to the liar with pleasure and rejoice in his belief that everybody trusts him, whereas the listener actually sees through him. There is no climax of the comic in such situations; comicality can last several minutes but does not cause a burst of laughter. The liar makes a fool of himself though he does not realize it and is not punished. In the second case, there is some continuation of the plot. Some listener says something that immediately exposes the lie and this can cause everyone to burst out laughing. In this instance, the liar makes a fool of himself and is punished for his deceit. Laughter comes at the moment of exposure, when the hidden suddenly becomes evident, which is similar to what occurs in other cases of the comic. Only a few examples need to be analysed.
There are two kinds of listeners in the scene who hear Khlestakov’s obvious deceits. Some of them are on the stage – that is, the town governor and his cohort who are willing to believe him, so his lies are not funny to them. If what he says is true, then for them this truth is dangerous. The other listeners are the audience at the theatre. Khlestakov’s lies are evident to them and therefore funny, and his deceit is exposed because of its absurdity; at the same time it exposes him as a liar. The watermelon that costs seven hundred rubles, the soup arriving directly from Paris, thirty-five thousand couriers, etc., are comical not only because they are ridiculous but also because Khlestavov shows what kind of man he is, thereby revealing his true nature. Nozdryov, with his stories about the horses with pink and blue hair that allegedly used to stay in his stable, belongs to the same category of liars. Moreover, both of them lie automatically because once they begin they cannot stop. One of Agafya Tikhonovna’s suitors in ‘Marriage’ is also a compulsive liar. He is rejected because, as the matchmaker Fyokla says about him: ‘He couldn’t open his mouth without telling a lie, and such whoppers too’ (Gogol 1998, 188).
Gogol was not only a master of the comic but also a magnificent theorist, though he seldom expressed his ideas. Speaking of Khlestakov, Gogol writes that when he is ‘telling lies he expresses his true nature’ (1984, IV:361). These words are more precise than many of the lengthy expositions by aestheticians. When speaking, a liar reveals his nature, making his deceit obvious to everyone, but he himself does not notice it and thinks that others do not either. All of this can be understood as a particular instance of the comic. Nevertheless this is not all; the comic effect of Khlestakov’s deceits does not consist only in involuntarily exposing his own. Gogol continues: ‘To lie means to tell lies as sincerely, naturally and ingenuously as only truth can be told, and this makes the lie comical’ (excerpt from a letter written by Gogol after the first performance of The Government Inspector, 1984, IV:351). He defines the specific nature of the comic of lying. According to him, deceit for selfish or lucrative purposes would not be funny, and the more self-serving a lie, the less funny it happens to be. Therefore, the most comical lies are those that are completely devoid of any selfish interest; through such lies, the liar reveals his true nature.
Nevertheless, provided that no serious consequences can be expected, self-serving lies can also be comical. For example, Sobakevich lies, without batting an eyelid, that the dead peasants he sold are alive. Talking to the fake government inspector, the town governor boasts of his tremendous efforts to run the town properly. Kochkaryov lies to prospective suitors about Agafya Tikhonovna and to her about the suitors; then he ousts them all to gain control of the battlefield. In all of these examples characteristic of literary works, the lie is not revealed to the participants of the action; rather, the storyteller or the playwright exposes the lie to the spectator or the reader.
A different situation is more common in real life: the lie is exposed and laughed at in the presence of the liar. Laughter comes at the moment of exposure. Such instances occur in literary works as well. Leo Tolstoy’s story about a boy who has eaten a plum on the sly can serve as an example. He keeps silent in reply to his father’s question about who has eaten the plum, thereby denying his guilt. Then his father says that the one who has eaten the plum with a pit will die. The boy says: ‘But I spat out the pit.’ Everybody bursts out laughing, and the boy starts to cry. These examples hardly require detailed theoretical explanations. It is more difficult to explain the comic of Münchausen’s tales, for example. Schopenhauer applies to them his theory of ‘evident discrepancy between what is perceived and what is thought’; we see the Baron’s stories, the things that happen, but we think they are impossible. According to Schopenhauer, it is this discrepancy that provokes laughter, though we already know that not every discrepancy of this kind is comical. Moreover, the philosopher does not explain what the comic actually consists of. The laughter caused by the baron’s stories does not belong to the domain of ridiculing laughter. Khlestakov’s deceits expose the negative aspects of his nature, while Münchausen’s deceptions, on the contrary, arouse sympathy for the narrator because of his resourcefulness. Mun-chausen’s comic characters will be discussed below, but this is not the only point. It is notjust the baron’s characters that are comical; his stories are, too, and most of his tall tales originate in folklore. In them the narrator amazes listeners with his ability to find a way out of apparently the most desperate situation. For example, Münchausen supposedly pulls himself out of a bog by his hair; so he claims, with complete seriousness. (Here Gogol’s theory proves to be true once more.) A somewhat similar event occurs in a Russian folktale. A man has got bogged down in a swamp up to his neck and we are told that a duck has made a nest on his head and laid eggs. A wolf comes along and eats the eggs while the man winds its tail around his hand and shouts to frighten it. The beast then runs away, pulling him out of the swamp.
But there are also tall folktales of a different kind that contain no elements of success and resourcefulness. People talk, for example, about rivers of milk with banks of fruit jelly, about huge vegetables grown in their kitchen garden, about jumping across the sea to the world of the dead, etc. In these cases deceit serves neither a satirical purpose nor reveals the hidden. Here the storyteller or the listener takes no interest in the liar; rather, he or she is interested in the plot, which is constructed on an absolutely obvious and evident absence of logic. This is quite sufficient to make the listener smile happily and laugh with pleasure.