Voltaire said that heaven has given us two things to counterbalance the many hardships in life: hope and sleep.1 He might have added laughter, if only the means for arousing it in reasonable people were as easy to come by, and if the wit or whimsical originality needed for it were not just as rare, as the talent in common for people to write, as mystical ponderers do, things that break your head, or to write as geniuses do, things that break your neck, or to write as sentimental novelists do (also, I suppose, sentimental moralists), things that break your heart.
Immanuel Kant (1987, §54.334: 203)
Vladimir Jakovlevich Propp’s posthumous work, On the Comic and Laughter2 which was published for the first time in Russian in 1976 as Problemy komizma i smekha, six years after his death on 2 August 1970, makes a significant contribution to the study of humour and laughter. Far from being yet another treatise on the comic, this work – a thorough analysis of the underlying principles of humour – focuses mainly on the forms and functions of the comic in literature while also examining its manifestations in many other media. This is the first English edition of a seminal work that has so far been translated into Serbian (1984), Italian (1988), and Chinese (1998). Propp’s interest in the comic dates back to his early work; in 1939 he published the article ‘Ritualniy smekh v folklore’ (Ritual Laughter in Folklore).
As Liberman (1984) points out in his introduction to Propp’s Theory and History of Folklore, Propp’s work was not widely circulated among Russian scholars. Nonetheless his most innovative and pioneering study on narrative, Morphology of the Folktale (1928),3 has been recognized and acclaimed in the West for its originality and for its decisive impact on narrative theory and methodology in numerous disciplines in the social sciences and humanities. His research on narrative was so transformative that scholars integrated it into their own theories and extended it internationally to a large number of aesthetic forms, including film and theatre.
We could say of the comic what Roland Barthes (1966) wrote about narrative: Numberless are the forms of the comic. Both appear in many guises and can be articulated through spoken and written language, moving or fixed images, or gestures, as well as a combination of any or all of these. The renowned Canadian humorist and theorist of humour, Stephen Leacock (1943), when examining the various forms of the verbal comic, noted that humorous literature can be classified hierarchically: the most primitive forms are puns and bad spelling; next is the wide range of burlesque writing, followed by a higher form – humorous scenes and funny episodes. He concludes that the comic is not a frivolous form but in fact encompasses the illogical nature of human life: ‘And above that again the presentation of character in the light of humour, and highest of all, the sublime humour that reflects through scene or character the incongruity of life itself’ (223). Contrary to Leacock’s hierarchical classification, Propp deconstructs the dichotomy of ‘low’ and ‘high’ comic in a very precise and rigorous manner … and then sets it aside. It will become apparent that in his analysis he goes far beyond Leacock when, after studying the facts and the data, he finds it necessary to raise the issue of the comic’s artistic and moral dimensions, as well as its negative effects. Propp begins his theoretical inquiry by postulating the following principle: an aesthetics that separates itself from life is too abstract to suit the purposes of real cognition. Yet true to his method, he argues with great conviction that this ‘problem’ should be dealt with only after a detailed examination of the data.
Like many contemporary thinkers, Propp recognized the difficulty of defining the complexity of laughter and the comic. The very first sentence in Bergson’s (2005) work on laughter (originally published in French in 1900 as Le rire : essai sur la signification du comique) asks this fundamental question: ‘What does laughter mean? What is the basal element in the laughable? … The greatest of thinkers, from Aristotle downwards, have tackled this little problem, which has a knack of baffling every effort, of slipping away and escaping only to bob up again, a pert challenge flung at philosophic speculation’ (1). Some years later, Leacock (1916) wrote that no attempt to define humour had ever succeeded. For him, explaining humour was a daunting task that had been attempted by some of the world’s great philosophers (for example, Kant and Schopenhauer), a task that basically resulted in ‘the explanation of the humorous proceeds thus ad obscurum per obscurius’ (101). He noted, as well, that very few scholars had attempted a painstaking and scientific analysis of what is humorous (102). In a later work, Leacock (1943) once more reflected on the difficulty of defining it: ‘As with poetry, everybody knows what humour is until he tries to define it.’ The difficulty resides in part in the fact that the word is used in two ways: sometimes to designate something in individuals (‘our sense of humour’) and at other times to mean the ‘humour of a situation … To put it in the academic language of philosophy, one term is subjective, the other objective’ (213).4 Propp was aware of this awesome challenge and attempted not only to provide a rigorous definition of this phenomenon but also to work out a theory and methodology that would permit him to deal with such a thorny issue.
When faced with the enormous diversity of the manifestations of the comic, Propp did not attempt to find a unique pattern, as he did in Morphology of the Folktale, in which he reduced tales to a single plot comprising thirty-one functions. Instead, he developed a methodology that accounted for the plethora of comic utterances and features that constituted his data, or corpus. He undertook a systematic study, incorporating the variants and examining them not in isolation but in light of their interrelationships. Propp (1984) clearly articulated this principle in his response to Claude Lévi-Strauss’s review of the Morphology of the Folktale when he made the point that this strategy was in agreement with Engels who called the study of isolated phenomena ‘metaphysical thinking’ as opposed to ‘dialectical study’: ‘An exact representation of the universe, of its evolution and that of mankind, as well as the reflection of this evolution in the human mind, can therefore only be built up in a dialectical way, taking constantly into account the general actions and reactions of becoming and ceasing to be, of progressive or retrogressive changes’ (125). This does not mean that Propp’s approach to the study of the comic is purely philosophical. He takes an empirical approach, observing life rather than reflecting on the abstract, and though he adheres to the idea that satire is an instrument for criticizing the bourgeoisie – the counter-revolutionaries – his empirical approach to humour goes beyond the dominant socio-political discourse of the times without directly confronting it.5 Contrary, for example, to the Paris School of Semiotics,6 which privileged a hypothetico-deductive method, Propp founds his analysis on an inductive method that does not proceed from hypotheses but rather from direct examination of data, in the belief that ‘sciences can no longer be founded on the mere creation of hypotheses’ (4). This inductive method corresponds to the Danish linguist Hjelmslev’s (1953) definition of empiricism, which should fulfil three conditions: the first, non-contradiction; the second, exhaustibility; and the third, simplicity. In an ideal world, the principle of exhaustibility could lead to a classification of all possible variants of the comic and laughter. Propp does not claim to exhaust systematically the totality of all occurrences, but he does constitute his corpus according to the principle of representativity, based on a selection of the salient manifestations of humour from his extensive data. To this end, he offers a broad array of examples, including classical authors and folklore, comic and satirical magazines, and newspaper satire. He examines not only purely literary works but also the circus, variety shows, and comic films.
Throughout his career, Propp always claimed – and never more so than in his rebuttal to Lévi-Strauss’s ‘Reflections on a Work by Vladimir Propp’7 – that he was an empiricist and not an abstract theorist. We will not discuss this debate in detail except to state that Lévi-Strauss – having acknowledged the importance of Propp’s contribution to narrative theory – set him up as a straw man and then labelled him a formalist, not a structuralist. In earlier times this accusation might have created serious difficulties for Propp in orthodox Marxist circles, for it suggested implicitly that his analysis set aside history. For Lévi-Strauss (1973), structural analysis was radically different from formalism in that it refused to contrast the concrete against the abstract and to privilege the latter. Form is defined in contrast to matter that is foreign to it. For Lévi-Strauss, structure lacked a distinct content insofar as it was the content itself; he apprehended it as a logical organization considered as a property of the real (139). Propp (1984) wrote a sharp rebuttal of the anthropologist’s argument, contending that he had renounced formalism after publishing Morphology of the Folktale and that he had devoted himself to the historical and comparative study of the relationships between oral literature (his term for folklore) and myths, rites, and institutions (71). He stated that, had Lévi-Strauss bothered to read his Historical Roots of the Wondertale, he would have seen that this study defined the tale in question not through plot but rather through composition; in other words, he was building on the methodology he had developed in his first major work on the folktale, which appeared in 1928. Propp strongly defended himself against the anthropologist’s accusation that he was torn between a ‘formalist vision’ and the ‘obsession with historical explanations’; and he showed that Lévi-Strauss had made a fundamental error in failing to take into account the bulk of his research (the ‘data’ or ‘facts’ as he might say) since the publication of the Morphology of the Folktale, on which he continued to build (71). He argued that it is a theoretical error to separate formal analysis from the historical approach and then to juxtapose the two. Not without certain irony, he wrote:
Lévi-Strauss has a very important advantage over me: he is a philosopher, whereas I am an empiricist, indeed an incorruptible empiricist, who first scrutinizes the facts and studies them carefully, checking his premises and looking back at every step in his reasoning. However, the empirical sciences are also all different. In some instances the empiricist can, and even must, limit himself to mere descriptions … But if we are describing a series of facts and their relationships, our description will bring out what is essential in the phenomenon, and, apart from being of interest to the specialist, will invite philosophical meditations. (68)
We concur with Propp’s position in his debate with Lévi-Strauss, who, in short, was accusing him of adopting a formalist position, in other words, of being a grammarian and folklorist who simply gave a morphological description of the object under study from an ahistorical perspective without having a proper theory of sign, stricto sensu; whereas, he, an anthropologist who studied myth, was a genuine structuralist whose own descriptive practices were founded on a Saussurian theory of the sign – that is, were based on the concepts of signifier, signified, system, position, differential, and value.
Be that as it may, it is now legitimate to ask: What is Propp’s empirical method? A close examination of the data or facts, as presented in his own analysis, shows clearly that he was meticulous about definitions, whether they were taxonomic or instrumental (i.e., made up of a set of qualifications) or functional. It is important now for us to focus briefly on the metasemiotic dimension of the notion of definition. Propp makes use of definitions in his descriptive practice in order to ground concepts and then integrate postulates into a network of interdefinitions in a way that ensures the internal coherence of the system of the comic considered as a construct. This is all the more remarkable in that he has succeeded in articulating complex concepts and elaborating a model that highlights and brings to the fore the distinctive features of the comic.
His study is replete with discussions on the various definitions used by his predecessors and contemporaries who have written on the comic, and he is quick to point out their inaccuracies and even their weaknesses: ‘An example has already been given about how definitions of the comic ended up being too broad, since non-comical phenomena matched them as well. The greatest philosophers made this mistake’ (6). He stresses the inconsistency and lack of logic in certain definitions; he states that they generally have no theoretical foundations when they refer to ‘low’ comic and that when they do define the term, their definitions lack coherence: ‘According to his theory (Kirchmann7), the comic is always caused by some unreasonable, absurd action […] The lack of logic and consistency in this definition is obvious since all we find is some vague gradation instead of defined borders’ (1868, II) (7). He then shows how other definitions are tautological: ‘Though everyone knows what parody is, it is not at all easy to give a precise scientific definition of it. Here is how Borev defines it in his book Okomicheskom (On the Comical): “Parody is an imitation of comic exaggeration and it is an exaggerated and ironical reproduction of characteristic individual features of the form of a certain phenomenon that exposes the comic and brings its content down to a lower level” (1957, 208). One can see that this definition is based on a tautology’ (60).8 Through his interactions and interrogations with other theorists, Propp dislocates and unravels certain misconstrued ideas of the comic; and in a tour de force he ends up redefining its essential attributes.
On the other hand, Propp is extremely clear about the originality of his own position, which unambiguously differentiates his approach to defining the comic from those of all other theorists who came before him. When they oppose the low to the high, this does not inform us about the actual nature or specificity of the comic, which is what Propp is attempting to do: ‘I will define the comic without any reference to the tragic or the sublime, and will thereby try to understand and define it as such. Cases where the comic is somehow linked to the tragic should be considered but they should not be the starting point’ (6). He emphasizes the importance of understanding the specificity of the comic; in his view, to ignore this is another weakness of most works that deal with the subject: ‘It is therefore necessary to determine which flaws can be funny, under what circumstances, and in which cases they can be funny or not’ (6).
In his effort to define the comic, Propp addresses other problems related to the aesthetics of laughter and the comic. Before doing so, he examines the various methodological strategies that need to be worked out before the material can be analyzed: ‘The important hypothesis that there are two different, opposite types of comic, which has not been raised until now, must be examined first. Many bourgeois aestheticians maintain that there are two types of comic: the high and the low’ (7). He takes to task those who define the comic in negative terms and think of it as a low form, which they then contrast with the high or the sublime. This leads to contempt for the comic – a contempt that is obvious in the works of Schopenhauer, Hegel, Vischer, and others (7).
In counter-distinction to many theorists for whom the comic arises from a discrepancy between what appears and what is, or between form and content – a counter-distinction that has always been pointed out in aesthetics – Propp adopts a more rigorous, linguistic or Saussurian theoretical perspective. Indeed, he defines the system of the comic in much the same way that Ferdinand de Saussure defined the sign – that is, as a unit constituted by a relation of presupposition established between the expression plane (form or signifier) and the content plane (content or signified) – all the while noting the arbitrariness of this relation. This bold move lends his approach an extremely solid theoretical foundation. He adheres to Volkelt, who noted that ‘the norms of unity of the content and the form hold true for the comical too (1905, 14).’ He never abandons this position; indeed, on occasion in his essay he makes this point forcefully. For example, he takes to task the proponents of a theory of discrepancy, stating categorically that there is none whatsoever ‘between the form and the content in Gogol’s The Government Inspector, or in Shakespeare, Molière, Goldoni, and many other comedies, or in any humorous stories.’ He claims, rightfully so, that ‘the more talented the writer, the more closely related are form and content’ (138).
His next theoretical move, after elaborating a theory of the subject, is to define the comic in relation to its object; put another way, he links the study of the comic to the psychology of laughter and the perception of the comic, before classifying the types of laughter found in the data (12). He argues that in this type of analysis one must consider the fact that laughter is contextually, culturally, nationally, and historically specific. He also espouses the need to limit his analysis to the nineteenth and twentieth centuries and focuses mainly on European forms of the comic, with a few brief incursions into North American humour. After examining a massive amount of data, he hypothesizes that it is the sudden revelation of hidden human flaws that causes laughter in spectators, when their attention is shifted from inner actions to their external manifestations, which have suddenly become obvious to them (26). This hypothesis, based on the careful scrutiny of a wide range of data, enables him to uncover their inherent patterns.
Propp demonstrates his empiricist method throughout his analysis. He systematically asks the same question when faced with cases of theoretical difficulty: ‘Is this always so or not? Under what conditions is similarity comical or not?’ (36). Only after noting numerous manifestations of the comic does he generalize, expressing his observations in the following way: ‘Any feature or oddity that distinguishes a person from his or her environment can make that person funny’ (40). Commenting on the cases he has just studied, he emphasizes that they are based on deviations from biological norms but that there exist deviations from political or social norms that can also become comical.9 The next area of study of the comic that he examines, one that he judges to be a broad domain of inquiry, is comical situations, plots, and actions: ‘Comical plots can be found in dramatic art, cinema, circus, and variety shows; much humorous and satirical literature is based on them, and so is a significant amount of narrative folklore.’ He does not believe it possible to exhaust all available data, or to give a list of the most frequent occurrences: ‘However, it is not necessary to do this, as some vivid and pertinent examples are sufficient to illustrate the matter’ (69). He subsequently focuses on linguistic devices, and simply gives a number of pertinent examples to illustrate the points he is making. He remarks subtly on the relationship between style and the comic for the authors he is examining, on how they use names, and on the main techniques they utilize in depicting characters, plot, and conflict. He underscores the vastness of the corpus and then provides a telling example to illustrate his empirical method. He defines the domain of an author’s linguistic style by the set of verbal devices described: ‘A study of an author’s style, even that of a humorist, is beyond the scope of this book. Language is essential for creating comicality, and the degree of a writer’s talent is determined not only by his “technique” but also by his style’ (103).10
Propp’s empirical method is such that a further examination of his own data and conclusions drawn from previous observations enables him to rectify, refine, and complete his general theory. For example, in drawing the conclusion that laughter is a punishment for some hidden human flaw that is suddenly revealed, he notes that after reviewing the data his initial hypothesis had to be verified once again: ‘This hypothesis emerged as a conclusion after a wide spectrum of data was examined, but to clarify the constructed nature of the analysis it was expedient to place the conclusions at the beginning’ (26). Also, when analysing negative comic characters, he again re-evaluates, reassesses, and questions his previous conclusions. After studying the comic aspects of negative characters, he posits the existence of positive ones as well, and asks why this is so: ‘Does it contradict the theory I am suggesting – that laughter is caused when negative qualities are revealed? Or are we dealing with a different type of laughter, that is, not ridiculing laughter? It may seem that positive types cannot be negative from either a theoretical point of view, or in art’ (109). Revisiting the data, he concludes that the characters examined ‘are comical not because of their positive qualities but because of the weaknesses and inadequacies revealed through their behaviour and mannerisms’ (111). He exercises great caution before generalizing on the nature of laughter and the comic as such: ‘… we should study all types if possible. It is also quite clear that we laugh not only because some flaws in the people around us is revealed, but for other reasons as well that still remain to be determined’ (119). This leads him to criticize the list of the types of laughter proposed by Yurenev, which in his view is not systematic enough and therefore not useful for research, since it does not attempt to classify them. On the other hand, his observations of the data lead him to conclude, along with Aristotle, that ridiculing laughter is the main type of laughter, with other forms occurring much less often: ‘This division corresponds to a classification that hinges on the presence or absence of a particular characteristic’ (119). The insistence on the need to classify – to distribute a given set of comic elements into subsets – leads to a taxonomy of the comic as he applies a succession of discriminatory categories to the data analysed -categories that enable him to construct the definition of the comic with respect to laughter.
The empirical method, whereby conclusions are reached after – and only after – the analysis of an extremely varied and extensive corpus, permits him to address major issues ignored by most other theorists of humour – in particular, those related to the classification of the comic. For example, though initially he identified six different types of laughter, he eventually concludes that this list could be extended. However, he rectifies and qualifies this statement by remarking that he has limited the scope of his project only to the types of laughter that are ‘directly or indirectly related to the comic’ (137).
The originality of Propp’s contribution to the study of the comic and laughter stems directly from his empirical method, which is based on the careful observation of a vast array of comical data and, as noted above, on the classification of comical elements through the application of discriminatory categories. From the data, he elaborates a theory using the inductive method, constructing a methodology that enables him to use the descriptions of the data to enrich his theory of the comic and laughter. In this highly sophisticated study he has not simply provided categories and applied the theory to the data; he has also configured the data as a living experience for reconfiguring the theory. In short, we could say about Propp what Paul Ricoeur said in a very Husserlian fashion about the relations among theory, methodology, and text. His genius and the originality of his work reside in the fact that he disengaged concepts from the data and reconfigured the data in the theory itself.11
The list of references given by Propp himself consisted of fifty-seven items, sixteen of them German sources. The rest – Russian ones as well as translations of foreign authors – have been compiled and included by the editors. We have supplemented the original list with existing English translations whenever they are available. References to them are given in normal type: author, year, volume, and page. The references in italics are to Russian sources and, in a few cases, to German ones. The translations of the quotations appear in roman type. Comments and translations that appear within square brackets […] have been provided by the editors and translators; those that appear within parentheses (…) are Vladimir Propp’s.
Propp sometimes quotes from memory with no accurate reference. We have made every attempt to verify both the literary and the theoretical texts he cited throughout his study, unlike the previous translations into Serbian, Italian, and Chinese, which have simply reproduced Propp’s original work.
We thank for their valuable suggestions, corrections and translations of this book: Igor V. Sannikov, Vyatka State University; Maria Y. Rodionova, Olga V. Petrova, Linguistic University of Nizhny Novgorod; Anastasia Shteyn, Maria Gein, Samantha Cross, University of Toronto. We also thank Richard Ratzlaff, University of Toronto Press, for his invaluable comments in revising the original manuscript. The unflagging care and professionalism of these individuals contributed greatly to the final form of this book. They were always a joy to work with.