1 Henriade, Chant 7.
2 A literal translation of Propp’s Problemy komizma i smekha would read The Problems of the Comic and Laughter, which Liberman (1984) chose to translate as The Problems of Laughter and the Comic, inverting the terms in the Russian title; we have chosen to translate it as On the Comic and Laughter. In his very perceptive introduction to Propp’s Theory and History of Folklore (1984), Liberman points out that under Marxism in the Soviet Union, specific theoretical principles of dialectical materialism were adhered to in all the humanities and that a certain style of writing also evolved: ‘Everyone begins to speak like the master. For many years the favourite words of Soviet humanistic scholarship have been problem and category. Fairy tales, metaphor, phonemes, or whatever as objects of analysis appeared under the titles of “the problem of the fairy tales,” “the problem of metaphor,” “the problem of the phoneme,” etc. Propp’s mirthless 1975 [sic] book is called The Problems of Laughter and the Comic. “Category” was almost automatically appended to space and time; hundreds of hours spent learning “the categories of dialectics” were well spent’ (xlvii).
3 Morfologija skazki, translated into English in 1958; a second standard revised edition was published in 1968.
4 Leacock then proceeds to define humour in a very witty way: ‘The best definition of humour that I know is: “Humour may be defined as the kindly contemplation of the incongruities of life and the artistic expression thereof.” I think this is the best I know because I wrote it myself. I don’t like any others as well. Students of writing will do well to pause at the word kindly and ponder it well’ (213).
5 For a detailed discussion of Propp’s attitude towards Marxist theory and history, see Liberman’s (1984) introduction to Propp’s Theory and History of Folklore, especially the sections ‘3. Propp and Marxist Theory: Synchrony’ (xliv-lii) and ‘4. Propp as a Historian’ (liii-lxxix).
6 See Perron and Debbèche (1998, 467–70).
7 In Cahiers de I’Institut de science économique appliquée 9 (March 1960): 3–36; reprinted in Anthropologie Structurale II (Paris: Plon, 1973).
8 ‘The cases examined so far are forms of hidden parody’ (60).
Borev expresses a similar idea: ‘Exaggeration and emphasis in satire are manifestations of a more general rule: the tendentious deformation of the material from life that helps to reveal the most essential flaw of the phenomena deserving satirical ridicule’ (1957, 363). Hartmann also expresses it assertively: ‘The comic always deals with exaggerations’ (1958, 646). These definitions are valid but are inadequate as an exaggeration is comical only when it reveals a flaw (64).
Pushkin thus ingeniously anticipated what professional philosophers stated later. Bergson formulated it as follows: ‘The art of the caricaturist consists in detecting this, at times, imperceptible tendency, and in rendering it visible to all eyes by magnifying it’ (2005, 13). The definition given here is very narrow; more broadly, though, the technique of portraying man using animal images along with all types of parody can be subsumed under caricature (64–65).
Borev (1957) gives a simple and accurate definition: ‘the grotesque is the supreme form of exaggeration and emphasis in a comedy. It is an exaggeration that imparts a fantastic character to a given person or literary work (67). Bushmin believes that exaggeration is not obligatory and defines it as follows: ‘The grotesque is the artificial, fantastic arrangement of combinations that are not available in nature and society’ (67). A different definition can be given as well: comical incongruity can be understood as a thought mechanism that prevails over its content (82).
Überhorst gives eight different definitions of them in his book on the comic. Specific works on witticisms and puns have appeared since then (Kuno Fischer, Freud, Yolles) and they are defined in some works on more general topics; I will not list these, but will focus only on the latest ones available to Russian scholarship. For Borev (1964, 225), ‘a pun is a play on words, a type of witticism based on purely linguistic devices.’ This definition shows that the issue needs more work. Borev has given a description rather than a definition and has defined the pun on the broader notion of witticism (92).
It is true that the borderline between the literal and the figurative meanings of words is not always distinct, but this is not an argument against the common definition of the pun, which according to our material turns out to be correct. From the point of view of the theory of the comic proposed here, it allows us to explain the nature of the pun as words having two or more meanings that are not on the same plane. Some are broad, generalized, or abstract, others are more narrow, specific, and practical (93).
Theorists of different trends felt this vaguely, but they based their definitions on purely theoretical grounds. Instead I began with the data; the analysis indicated what did or did not prove to be correct in the existing definitions of the comic, which we will now examine.
There is no need here for a lengthy argument, as any critique is fruitless unless it serves to define truth on principles different from those used by the authors whose position is being challenged. The various definitions of the comic that were given in the past will be examined briefly and their insufficiences or flaws criticized the better to avoid them. So what can or cannot be accepted in the theories discussed in the first chapter of this book? (138)
Which is why we must look for a more precise definition of how and where laughter becomes possible and also attempt to give a more precise and detailed description of the conditions for the comic (140).
9 ‘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 one 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 this sort of deviation, discrepancy, or contradiction, causes laughter’ (41).
10 There appear throughout his work comments about the representativity of his examples and the vastness of the corpus under study, for example: ‘As far as their psychological traits are concerned, the possible types of laughter are far from exhausted’ (137); ‘All the possible cases have not been exhausted, as it would make this study excessively long and ponderous without making it more convincing. A few examples will suffice to solve the problem. Anyone who is interested in this issue can supplement and expand it’ (143).
11 See Ricoeur (1989, 551–62 and 581–608).
1 Philosopheme – ‘philosophema. A philosophical proposition, or principle of reasoning: a theorem.’ Webster’s New Twentieth Century Dictionary, Second Edition (1979).
2 Gogol, Nikolai (1809–52) – Ukrainian-born novelist, dramatist, short story writer who became famous with the publication of his first collection Evening on a Farm Near Dikanka (1831) where he described Russian life and folklore with great humour. He is considered as having laid the foundations of nineteenth century Russian realism. In further works he mastered the art of caricature, denounced injustice, and ridiculed the social behaviour of his times.
3 Belinsky, Vissarion (1811–48) – one the greatest Russian literary critics. His argument that literature should express political and social ideas had a major impact on literary criticism, and he was often called the father of the Russian radical intelligentsia. He defended sociological realism in literature and reviewed the works of such contemporary authors as Turgenev, Pushkin, Lermontov, Dostoyevsky, and Gogol.
4 Volkelt, Johannes (1848–1930) – German Romanticist philosopher.
5 Chekhov, Anton (1860–1904) – one of Russia’s most important dramatists, and master of the modern short story. A practicing physician who observed humanity first-hand; three of his plays, The Seagull, Uncle Vanya, and The Cherry Orchard, are known throughout the world. They represent a break with traditional European dramaturgy, innovate with respect to the use of silence, and trace grand moments of Russian social and intellectual transition.
6 Schopenhauer, Arthur (1788–1860) – German philosopher.
7 von Kirchmann, Julius Hermann (1802–84) – German lawyer and philosopher.
8 Mandelstam, Iosif (1891–1938) – Russian poet and literary critic.
9 Pushkin, Alexander (1799–1837) – Russian poet, novelist, dramatist, and short-story writer. A meteoric precocious talent who published his first volume of verse at the age of 15, he is considered one of Russia’s greatest poets. A prolific author who integrated vernacular speech in his poems and plays; he penned Eugene Onegin and his great tragedy Boris Godunov in exile.
10 Chernyshevsky, Nikolai (1828–89) – Russian journalist, literary critic, and politician.
11 Words or comments that appear within square brackets […] have been provided by the translators and editors to render the text more legible – that is, not by Vladimir Propp, whose own comments appear within parentheses (…).
1 Yurenev, Rostislav (1912–2002) – Russian historian of cinema.
2 Lessing, Gotthold Ephraïm (1729–81) – German dramatist, critic, and writer on philosophy and aesthetics.
3 Repin, Ilya (1844–1930) – Russian painter and sculptor.
4 Zaporozhye Cossacks – in the sixteenth century, one of the six major hosts of peasants who fled from serfdom in Poland, Lithuania, and Muscovy to the Dnieper and Don regions, where they established free and self-governing military communities.
5 Borev, Yuri (1925-) – Russian writer and critic, author of several works on aesthetics.
1 Kagan, Moisey (1921–2006) – Russian scholar, author of several works on aesthetics, philosophy, and history of culture.
2 Hartmann, Nikolai (1882–1950) – German philosopher born in Latvia.
3 Bergson, Henri (1859–1941) – French philosopher.
4 Herzen, Aleksandr (1812–70) – Russian political thinker and activist.
5 Sokolov brothers: Boris (1889–1930) and Yuri (1889–1941) – Russian literary critics and collectors of folklore.
6 Varlamov, Konstantin (1848–1915) – Russian actor.
7 Ilyinsky, Igor (1901–87) – Russian actor.
8 Gorky, Maxim (1868–1936) – Russian novelist and short story writer.
9 Tolstoy, Leo (1828–1910) – Russian author, essayist, and philosopher, whose major works include War and Peace (1863–69) and Anna Karenina (1875–77).
10 Saltykov, Mikhail (1826–89) – novelist and one of Russia’s greatest satirists, better known under his pen name Shchedrin.
11 Ivanov, Aleksandr (1806–58) – Russian painter of historical subjects.
12 Turgenev, Ivan (1818–83) – Russian novelist, poet, and playwright, known for his detailed descriptions of everyday life in Russia in the nineteenth century.
13 Skomorokh – a Russian minstrel-cum-clown ‘juggler.’
1 This quotation is from Aristotle (1984), On the Parts of Animals, III, 10, I: 1049.
2 Brandes, Georg (1842–1927) – Danish critic and scholar who exerted great influence on the Scandinavian literary world.
1 ‘As for comedy, it is (as has been observed) an imitation of men worse than the average; worse, however, not as regards any and every sort of flaw, but only as regards one particular kind, the ridiculous, which is a species of the ugly.’ Poetics, 5, II: 2319.
1 Translations of Russian words that are necessary for immediate understanding of the examples (names, etc.) and some other short notes are given in the text in [square brackets].
2 Ф (phita) – the 34th letter of the Russian alphabet, originating from the Greek. In Gogol (1997: 75), fetyuk was translated as ‘foozle,’ hence Gogol’s note on phita.
3 Kozma Prutkov – an imaginary author invented by the Russian poet Aleksey Tolstoy and his cousins in the 1850s.
4 Hat is used here instead of the vulgar (common for military humour of the time) ass – the evident rhyme for guess. A more exact translation – ‘The whole of Europe is amazed to see how wide the colonel’s hat is’ – would fail to convey the play on the Russian rhyme, which makes it obvious that it is not the size of the colonel’s hat that amazes the whole of Europe.
5 Auditor – the nineteenth-century term for a military clerk who also performed some legal functions.
6 The notes in parentheses are by Vladimir Propp.
7 State Councillor – rank 5 (out of 14) in the Table of Ranks of civil servants, equivalent to the military rank of brigadier.
8 Dey – the title given to Ottoman commanders or governors of Algiers and Tunis. There are also instances where ‘the king of France’ is used instead of the ‘dey.’ See, for example, Gogol (1998, 178).
9 Chastooshka – a two- or four-line verse or song on humorous topics.
1 Ostrovsky, Alexander (1823–1886) – one of Russia’s major playwrights. Most of his plays represent characters belonging to the Russian merchant class; they include the comedies Poverty Is No Disgrace (1853), The Thunderstorm (1859), and The Snow Maiden (1873). With his 47 plays Ostrovsky created a Russian national repertoire, and he is considered the foremost representative of the Russian realistic period.
1 ‘As for comedy, it is […] but only as regards one particular kind, the ridiculous, which is a species of the ugly. The ridiculous may be defined as a mistake or deformity not productive of pain or harm to others; the mask for instance, that excites laughter, is something ugly and distorted without causing pain.’ Aristotle (1984), Poetics, 5, 1: 2319.
2 Podskalsky, Zdenek (1923–93) – Czech director and playwright.
3 Dal, Vladimir (1801–72) – Russian lexicographer, author of Explanatory Dictionary of the Live Great Russian Language (4 vol.). An online searchable edition of Vladimir Dal’s Explanatory Dictionary (in Russian) can be found at: http://vidahl.agava.ru.
4 Tsaritsa Natalya Kirillovna – Peter the Great’s mother.
5 Sarafan – woman’s dress with openings for arms and a girdle. Dushegreika -short, quilted, women’s jacket, normally sleeveless.
6 Nevsky Prospect [avenue] – the main street in St. Petersburg.
7 Navarino – Russian name for Pylos, a Greek port on the Ionian Sea where the joint naval forces of Russia, England, and France defeated the Turkish fleet in 1827.
1 Mayor – Gogol (1998) used this title though it was not an elective office at the time; hence a more appropriate term would be ‘town governor.’
2 See, for example, Vladimir Prokopevich Anikin, Russkiye narodniye skazki (Russian Folktales) (Moscow: Uchpedgiz, 1959), 67.
3 See Varvara P. Adrianova-Peretz, Ocherki po istorii satiricheskoy literatury XVII veka (Studies in the History of Seventeenth-Century Satirical Literature) (Moscow: Akademiya Nauk, 1937), 124–224.
4 Vobla – a type of fish, Rutilus rutilus caspicus.
1 Pumpion – Middle English for pumpkin.
2 Balalaika – Russian stringed musical instrument of the lute family.
3 Izhitsa (shape similar to v) – the last letter of the Church Slavonic alphabet.
4 (Collegiate) Assessor – rank 8 (out of 14) in the Table of Ranks of civil servants, equivalent to the military rank of major.
5 Onuchi – a kind of foot wrap; lapti – bast shoes.
1 Two feet approximately equal a quarter of an arshin (0.71 m) in the original -that is, merely 18 cm.
1 Bakhtin, Mikhail (1895–1975) – Russian literary theorist and philosopher of language whose wide-ranging ideas significantly influenced Western thinking in cultural history, linguistics, literary theory, and aesthetics.
2 See Pavel Naimovich Berkov, ‘Iz istorii russkoy parodii XVIII-XX vv’ (From the History of Russian Parody in the Eighteenth to the Twentieth Centuries). In Voprosy literatury (Issues of Literature), Issue V (Moscow: Akademiya Nauk, 1957), 220–68.
1 Here we have used the term ‘fathom’ in place of sazhen, the old Russian measure of length (1 sazhen = 2.134 m). An oblique sazhen is the distance between a heel and the fingertips of the raised opposite hand.
2 Bylina – Russian folk epic song about heroes.
3 One of the richest books on this topic is Karl Friedrich Flögel, Geschichte des Grotesk-Komischen (History of the Comic Grotesque). Several editions were published in 1788, 1862, and 1914.
4 Shevchenko, Taras (1814–61) – foremost Ukrainian poet and a major figure in the Ukrainian national revival.
1 Pancake – this is yaichnitsa in the original – more precisely, the Russian word for ‘omelette.’
1 Fonvizin, Denis (1744/45–92) – Russian playwright who satirized the cultural pretensions and privileged coarseness of the nobility; the nation’s foremost dramatist of the eighteenth century.
2 Facetiae – humorous, often indecent sayings/tales in medieval Italy. Fabliaux – short, metrical tales made popular in medieval France by professional storytellers, characterized by lively detail and realistic observation; they were usually comical and coarse and were often cynical. Schwank – a comical tale in medieval Germany.
3 See Propp, Russkie agrarnye prazdniki (Russian Agrarian Festivals) (Leningrad: Izdvo Leningradskogo universitet, 1963), 122, and the literature indicated in this book.
4 Busch, Wilhelm (1832–1908) – German painter and poet, best known for his drawings, which were accompanied by wise, satiric rhymes (e.g., ‘Max und Moritz’).
1 Dobrolyubov, Nikolai (1836–61) – radical Russian critic who rejected traditional and Romantic literature.
2 Vulis, Abram (1928–93) – Russian literary critic.
3 Chukovsky, Korney (1882–1969) – pseudonym of Nikolai Vasilyevich Korney-chukov. Russian literary critic, language theorist, translator, and author of children’s books, often called the first modern Russian author for children.
4 Vyatkin, Boris (1913–94) – Famous Russian clown.
5 Hegel, Georg Wilhelm Friedrich (1770–1831) – German philosopher.
6 Engels, Friedrich (1820–95) – German philosopher, political economist, friend, colleague, and adviser of Karl Marx with whom is the founder of modern Communism and Socialism.
1 Vinogradov, Viktor (1895–1969) – Russian linguist and literary critic.
2 Fischer, Kuno (1824–1907, original name Ernst Kuno Berthold) – German philosopher, educator, and contributor to the philosophy of aesthetics.
3 Mayakovsky, Vladimir (1893–1930) – Russian poet and playwright, among the foremost representatives of early-twentieth century Russian Futurism.
4 See Aleksandr Afanasyev, Narodnye russkye skazki (Russian Folktales), vol. III, no. 414 (1957); see also Pavel Naimovich Berkov, Russkaya narodnaya drama XVIII-XX vekov (Russian Folk Drama from the Eighteenth to Twentieth Centuries) (Moscow: Iskusstvo, 1953), 317–18.
5 Ilf and Petrov – pseudonyms, respectively, of Ilya Faynzilberg (1897–1937) and Yevgeny Katayev (1903–42), prose authors and humorists of the 1920s and 1930s. They did much of their writing together, and are almost always referred to as ‘Ilf and Petrov.’
2 Karandash - pseudonym of Mikhail Rumyantsev (1901–83), a famous Russian clown.
3 In a Russian steam bath, a ‘bunch of birch twigs’ is used for whipping as a kind of massage.
4 Čapek – Czech author. Jaroslav Hašek (1883–1923) wrote The Good Soldier Schweik.
1 Zoshchenko, Mikhail (1895–1958) – Russian satirist whose short stories and sketches are among the most popular comic literature of the Soviet period.
2 Cumulative folktale – a ‘Chicken Little’ type of folktale.
1 Ighin, Iosif (1910–1975) – Russian graphic artist and cartoonist.
2 Korchagina-Aleksandrovskaya, Yekaterina (1884–1951) – Russian actress.
3 Propp took this quotation from the Russian edition of Henri Bergson, Smekh v zhizni i na stsene (Laughter in Life and on Stage) (St Petersburg: Izdatelstvo “XX viek”, 1900), where the original ‘le comique’ was translated as ‘the ridiculous.’ The later edition, Bergson, Smekh (Moscow: Iskusstvo, 1992), as well as the English version cited here (2005) translate this word as ‘the comic.’
4 The quotation, however, is from Vorschule der Ästhetik itself.
1 Cf. Propp (1984), ‘Ritualniy smekh v folklore (Po povodu skazki o Nesmey-ane)’ (Ritual Laughter in Folklore [On the Folktale Regarding Nesmeyana]), 124–46, in Transactions of Leningrad State University 1939, 46 (including the bibliography on this issue). See also Propp, ‘Death and Laughter,’ in Russkiye agrarnye prazdniki (Russian Agrarian Festivals), 68–105.
2 For further details, see Propp, Russkiye agrarnye prazdniki, 25.
1 John Chrysostom (347–407) – early Church father, biblical interpreter, and archbishop of Constantinople. The Greek surname means ‘golden-mouthed.’
2 Kirsha Danilov – supposed compiler of the eighteenth-century collection of Russian bylinas and folk songs.
1 Hobbes, Thomas (1588–1679) – English philosopher and political theorist.
2 De Groos, Karl (1861–1946) – German psychologist who proposed an evolutionary instrumentalist theory of play.
1 It is written as ‘Dobchinsky and Bobchinsky’s fall,’ though everybody who saw or read The Government Inspector knows that only Bobchinsky was eavesdropping and fell down. Two men falling together would have little artistic value. The reference to Dobchinsky and Bobchinsky’s fall was repeated in the article ‘Komicheskie i khudozhestvennye sredstva ego otrazheniya’ (The Comic and the Artistic Means of Representing It) in Borev (1958, 307).
2 Lunacharsky, Anatoli (1875–1933) – Russian revolutionary, dramatist, and critic.
3 See Vladimir Dal, Poslovitsy russkogo (Russian People’s Proverbs) (Moscow: Gos. Izd-vokhudozh. Litru, 1957), esp. ‘Laughter, Joke, Fun’ (867–71).
4 Ilyinsky, Igor – People’s Artist of the USSR. ‘Oruzhiem smekha’ (With the Weapon of Laughter), Pravda, 5 July 1964.
5 Akimov, Nikolai (1901–68) – Russian theatre director and artist.
6 Russian pronouns make no distinction between the animate and the inanimate; ‘he’ could refer to ‘the person’ or ‘the moon.’
7 Yuran Guralnik, ‘Smekh, oruzhie sil’nych’ (1961), 6; Leonid Fedorovich Ershov, ‘Satiricheskiy rasskaz v Krokodile’ (Satirical Stories in the the magazine entitled Crocodile) (1946–55), in Voprosy sovetskoi literatury (Issues in Soviet Literature), Vol. V: 190–8; Dmitri Nikolayev, ‘Smekh, oruzhie satiry’ (Laughter as a Weapon of Satire) (1962), 1.
8 For the Soviet Union, the Civil War (1918–20) refers to the successful defense of the Bolshevik government against Russian and foreign anti-Bolshevik forces, including the White Guards, and the Great Patriotic War refers to the Second World War (1941–45).
9 Demyan Bedny – pseudonym of Yefim Pridvorov (1883–1945). Russian poet known both for his verses glorifying the Revolution of 1917 and for his satirical fables.