Jokes and joking: a serious laughing matter

Queens University, Belfast, August 1987²²⁶

At the Manchester meeting of the British Association in 1842, a surgeon called James Bray tried to enter the topical but disreputable subjects of animal magnetism and mesmerism into one of the sections. He failed to gain admission and was forced to repair to the Free Trade Hall, where he was able to demonstrate the facts of mesmerism, which he then retitled hypnotism. (This was the occasion when the term ‘hypnotism’ was coined for the first time.) If a section labelled ‘X’ had existed in 1842, I have no doubt that the disreputable subject of animal magnetism would have succeeded in gaining admission. X is the lower end of the alphabet. X is a letter which is very rarely used, and then only for things that are out of the ordinary, out of the usual – for that which is in some way unclassifiable, or unmanageable. In his account of the concentration camps, Primo Levi recorded a hierarchy which existed among the inmates with regard to the numbers tattooed on their arms. Those with the lowest numbers, being the earliest arrivals, were the aristocrats; while those with the highest numbers, being the most recent arrivals, were the proletariat of the camp.²²⁷ In our case, ‘X, General’ represents the disreputable end of the British Association. It is the unclassifiable; that which is opposed to the pristine respectability of ‘A, Physics’, and ‘B, Chemistry’.

I think there is something quite significant about the fact that I am President of Section X, and that my subject is humour. For humour is an unclassifiable and unmanageable subject, something which has consistently defeated the attempts of scientists to explain it. It also has other drawbacks as a subject for discussion. While it fails to gain admission for serious consideration by scientists, it is also regarded by those laymen who take great pleasure in the experience of laughter as being too frivolous and too enjoyable to be treated by science at all. In fact, the journalists who usually come to these meetings take great pleasure whenever someone does deal with humour in demonstrating how unfunny the treatment of the subject is, rather as if it should be a qualification of a surgeon dealing with cancer that he or she should have the disease before operating upon it.

Humour is an extremely difficult subject to talk about and it is an even more difficult subject to be scientific about. We have to deal with the peculiar phenomenon of laughter, a respiratory convulsion which seems to be excited – whether we like it or not – by certain events which we experience. We normally regard laughter as an action, as something which we do – as a performance of some sort. But in fact it is hardly something in which we can be said to have competence. Laughter is not at all like a physical action. It is not like raising a hand, or making a fist. It is not like writing or speaking. Laughter is not something which we can undertake voluntarily: we cannot laugh at will. Of course, we can put ourselves in situations where laughter is the result, but there is no way in which we can make ourselves laugh. Someone who does make him- or herself laugh – an actor or an actress, for example – is indulging in what we call mirthless laughter. True laughter is not something to which we have direct voluntary access.

In this sense, laughter seems to be a cognate concept with things like sneezing and coughing. We cannot sneeze at will; and once we have started to sneeze, we cannot always stop ourselves at will either. Similarly we cannot laugh at will; and once we have started laughing, we cannot always stop ourselves. In some ways, then, laughter has features in common with sneezing and coughing, in the sense that all of these things belong to the area of the involuntary. Yet in other ways they all belong to the province of the will. For example, we can voluntarily suppress sneezing, coughing and laughter. Thus we may blame someone at a concert who sneezes or coughs, and we may blame someone at a funeral who giggles at the graveside. Thus each of these phenomena is distinguished from other forms of involuntary action – such as peristalsis – that cannot be either started or stopped at will. Someone, for example, who at the graveside produces audible borborygmi may be laughable, but they are not blameable. We cannot be blamed for stopping peristalsis and we cannot be praised for starting it.

So we are dealing with actions that are involuntary, in the sense that they cannot be started at will, but that are voluntary in the sense that they can be suppressed. Next, we must distinguish between involuntary actions like sneezing and coughing on the one hand, and laughing and blushing on the other. We think of sneezing as being an involuntary action which can be induced by putting oneself in a situation which produces it. For example, we may take snuff in order to sneeze. Similarly with laughing and blushing. We have to put ourselves in situations where joking matter is around in order to make ourselves laugh, and we have to be in situations which are embarrassing in order to blush. However, there is a distinction between snuff and laughing matter, just as I believe there is a distinction between snuff and embarrassing matter. Snuff is a physical stimulus which attacks the nervous system from the ‘bottom up,’ whereas laughing matter approaches the nervous system from the ‘top down.’ Snuff is purely physical – we do not have to understand anything in order to sneeze; but laughing matter is cognitive – we have to understand the situation before we can be tickled into laughter, or embarrassed into blushing.

It is interesting that we use the word ‘tickling’ because laughter does overlap into the sneezing area. We know that we can produce laughter by something as crude as a physical stimulus, and this does not require cognitive appreciation in order to work.

So far, I have simply been exploring some concepts that are cognate with laughter. It may be worth recapitulating my main conclusions. Laughter is involuntary in the sense that we cannot start it, even though we can stop it. Laughter has to be started by putting oneself in a situation where the stimulus is provided, but the stimulus to laughter is not like the stimulus to sneeze. We do not have to be in a frame of mind in order to sneeze, we simply have to have our noses tickled. But a frame of mind is required for laughter. This is because laughter is a ‘top down’ concept. In other words, it comes from higher, cognitive levels of the nervous system, as opposed to the other involuntary actions which attack the nervous system from the ‘bottom up.’

The idea of laughter as a ‘top down’ phenomenon can be demonstrated by an interesting clinical finding, which is taught to medical students when they go on the neurological wards and see patients with strokes. This finding is one of the ways in which we distinguish between an upper motor-neurone and a lower motor-neurone defect. The illness called Bell’s palsy attacks the seventh or facial nerve and causes paralysis of one half of the face. In this palsy, half of the face becomes slack; patients may dribble from one side of their mouth, and often the lower eyelid is everted. Bell’s palsy is an extremely painful and embarrassing affliction. However, it is what we call a lower motor-neurone defect. It affects the lower part of the nervous system, the final common path through which motor impulses gain access to the muscles. In contrast, there are other, upper motor-neurone defects which involve the same muscles. For example, a stroke which affects the motor neurones in the cerebral cortex may also cause paralysis on one side of the face. However, there are sharp distinctions in the repertoires of patients suffering from these two different sorts of defect.

We pick a patient with a stroke and ask them to show us their teeth. We say ‘Grin, please,’ and they grin on just one side. We say for the second time, ‘Grin, please, on both sides of your face.’ Again, they respond by grinning on just one side. In other words, the patient does not have access to the other side of their face; not, that is, until we amuse them. Once amused, then there is bilateral symmetry in their performance. In other words, they do not have a total lack of access to their own face; they have access to their face with respect to a particular cognitive situation. If you amuse them, if they see a joke, they smile; but they cannot smile at will. In a patient with Bell’s palsy – a lower motor-neurone defect – on the other hand, neither the order to grin nor amusement produces a symmetrical smile, because there is a block in the final path through which nerve impulses gain access to the relevant muscles.

The thing which is interesting here is the extraordinary situation of the stroke patient. He or she cannot grin to order, but they can smile when amused. This goes back to the question of how we gain access to involuntary performances like blushing and laughter, which seem to be things over which we have partial and incomplete control.

If a Martian visited the Earth, he, she or it would be extremely puzzled by the strange respiratory convulsion of laughter, which sometimes sweeps through assemblies, and which people pay large amounts of money in order to experience. This strange phenomenon, which has been called a sudden glory, cannot surely be a respiratory convulsion alone. After all, there are other ways of being convulsed respiratorily from which we actually flee. Indeed, we flee from the sort of laughter which we can be tickled into. This sort of thing can be torture, whereas no one ever flees from a cabaret or a performance of a great comedian. People flee from the laughter which is induced by physical stimulation, but no one flees from the laughter which is produced by a cognitive situation.

Now, all of this leads us to ask an intriguing question: might there be some evolutionary significance in this curious performance of laughter, in this curious involuntary competence? Why is it that we pay so much money in order to put ourselves in situations where laughter results? Why is it that we pay so highly for people to do this to us, whereas we would not dream of paying someone to tickle our feet with a feather for three minutes? Could it be that there is an evolutionary pay-off in the pleasure which is associated with the cognitive situations which seem to induce this activity?

Presumably there is a selective pay-off in the pleasure associated with sexual intercourse. If there were no pleasure to be associated with sexual intercourse, we might forget to do it; in absent-mindedness, as it were, we might pass it up altogether. The same thing goes for eating. Both sexual intercourse and eating involve the use of scarce resources, i.e. the resources of physical energy in the pursuit and the consummation of these activities. Both are selectively advantageous and personally pleasurable. Without lapsing into the heresy of adaptationism – the assumption that everything we do has some specific evolutionary pay-off – I would like to suggest that what is true of sexual intercourse and eating may also be true of laughter. In other words, I propose that there may be positive selective advantage associated with the cognitive rehearsals which we tend to go through in undergoing the experience of laughter.

To discover this evolutionary pay-off we must consider what laughter is for. There are many theories of the origins of laughter. Michael Neve deals with one of the most famous of these theories, which is Freud’s idea that laughter is simply the release of repressed material which has been prevented from expressing itself.228 According to Freud, it is only through the medium of the joke, and suddenly, that repressed material is allowed us; and this provokes laughter. This is an idea which has gained wide acceptance in the psychoanalytic community, and I think there is something to be said for it.

Another, more biological theory of laughter was proposed by the French philosopher Henri Bergson.²²⁹ Bergson claimed that we laugh at people in situations where they revert to a more automatic type of behaviour. When the herd observes a reduction in the versatility and flexibility of one of its members, it goes through loud respiratory convulsions which, as it were, ask the offending individual to ‘pull its socks up.’ A less flexible, less versatile individual endangers the biological integrity of the herd, and so the herd acts to protect itself. We laugh at the man who falls on the banana skin. (The man on the banana skin has become an emblematic figure in theories of humour, for reasons which have always escaped me.) Why? Because instead of retaining his versatility, his spontaneity and his flexibility, the man who tumbles is yielding to the force of gravity and is becoming something like a robot. He is becoming an inflexible object, and at that moment he is being reminded to pull himself together, to restore himself to a state of vigilant flexibility which will then make him into a valuable and productive member of the herd. Once again, it would be wrong to laugh this theory out of court; but as it stands, it deals with so little of the topic. This is a common feature of theories about humour: practically none of them cover the whole topic. There is almost always a series of exceptions which can be made to what purports to be a comprehensive theory of humour.

The last theory with which I shall deal very briefly is the idea that we laugh at situations where we see ourselves as superior to some victim. On this view, the victim of laughter is being reminded of his or her weakness by stronger members of the herd. In a performance that is an inheritance from our primate ancestors, dominant individuals put subordinates ‘in their place.’ This crude ethological view has been widely popularized, but I reject it out of hand because it overlooks complex cognitive and moral issues. This is why I prefer Erving Goffman to someone like Desmond Morris. Goffman perceived all of these things in their moral and social context, and not in terms of a crude inheritance from primate ancestors. Of course it may be possible to look at the motor performance of laughter and trace it back to certain primate roots; but at the cultural level I believe it has become latched on to something so elaborate, and so elaborately moral, that it is no longer useful to consider it in crude ethological terms. This, I believe, is why Darwin’s book on The Expression of the Emotions in Man and Animals (1872) is such an intolerably tedious volume. It has encouraged even more tedious types of ethological thought in the last 25 years.

In contrast to all of these theories, I would like to raise what I believe to be a largely unconsidered theory of what humour is for, and what its biological value might be. In my view, the value of humour may lie in the fact that it involves the rehearsal of alternative categories and classifications of the world in which we find ourselves. Perhaps we should distinguish between serious discourse, on the one hand, and humorous discourse on the other. (This is really a way to avoid using the word ‘joke’.) When we are in the domain of humorous discourse – i.e. those cognitive situations which actually bring about laughter – we almost always encounter rehearsals, playings with and redesignings of the concepts by which we conduct ourselves during periods of seriousness. When we conduct our ordinary business in the world – our practical affairs – we deal with things for the most part by rule of thumb; we mediate our relationships with one another through a series of categories and concepts which are sufficiently stable to enable us to go about our business fairly successfully. But if we were rigidly locked on to these categories and concepts, if we were inflexibly attached to them, we would not continue to be a successful, productive and above all socially cooperative species. What we require, then, is some sort of sabbatical let-out in one part of the brain and one part of our competence to enable us to put things up for grabs; to reconsider categories and concepts so that we can redesign our relationships to the physical world, to one another, and even to our own notion of what it is to have relationships.

Perhaps I can illustrate this idea of what humour is for with a cartoon from the New Yorker. The cartoon portrays two African explorers in a swamp. They are wearing pith helmets, and are surrounded by lianas, creepers, serpents and so forth. They are obviously in trouble because they are up to their necks in the swamp as they proceed from left to right of the cartoon. The figure at the back is saying to the figure at the front: ‘Quicksand or no, Carruthers, say what you like. I have half a mind to struggle.’

Simply describing the cartoon causes something strange to happen. Even without seeing the cartoon, we tend to laugh. Now, why is this? A crude, ethological view would be, ‘Oh, we are taking pleasure by laughing at the fact that we are not in the swamp, and they are.’ Or again, ‘We are taking pleasure by laughing at what is clearly a ludicrous view of their true situation.’ I think, however, that if we parse the joke we can see that what is really going on is that certain categories with regard to the notion of volition are being played with. The cartoon actually throws up into the air the categories of will and action which we considered in relation to the notion of laughter as a voluntary or involuntary performance.

Consider the cartoon caption again: ‘Quicksand or no, Carruthers, say what you like. I have half a mind to struggle.’ Surely the core of this joke is not the situation of the swamp, nor the fact of our being outside the swamp and them being in it, but rather the fact that what we think of as struggling is not the sort of thing about which one could be in ‘half a mind.’ We cannot as it were consider struggling as the next thing on the agenda. We cannot say: ‘We’ve tried firing warning shots into the air; we’ve tried hanging on to the creepers; now let’s have a spirited go at struggling.’ Again, we laugh at the very thought of applying the notion of decision to something which is at it were a paradigm of those things to which we do not have voluntary access. Sneezing, laughter and struggling are not things which you can be in half a mind to do. Struggling is not even something which you can be in full mind to do. It is not something to which the notion of mind seems to be relevant at all. It is something which happens flat out, whether you like it or not. It is something about which, in retrospect – if the struggling worked – you might say, ‘I’m afraid I found myself struggling, although I know I ought not to have done.’ In exactly the same way, you might say at the graveside, ‘I’m afraid I couldn’t help myself laughing.’ You cannot be in half a mind to laugh, but you can be in full mind to try and stop yourself laughing, and in much the same way you cannot be in half a mind to struggle but you can be in full mind to try and stop yourself struggling.

What I am suggesting is that this joke rehearses what we customarily think of as hard and fast divisions between the voluntary and the involuntary. In this way, it introduces us to a concept that is fundamental to our relationships with one another and to the organized structures of our society. One of the things which makes our society coherent is that we have notions of what it is meet to praise and what it is meet to blame; what we send people to prison for, and what we award them knighthoods for; what we hit them for, and what we kiss them for. In other words, we divide things into a series of praiseworthy areas and blameworthy areas. The New Yorker cartoon is one of a battery of jokes which plays with our notions of praise and blame. By applying these notions to something which is clearly in the area of the involuntary, this joke rubs our noses in some of the basic ideas by which we live. At the same time, it allows us to reconsider these notions, and – if appropriate – to revise them.

I would like to make use of another example before I close. Twenty-seven years ago, when I started out in the humour business, I performed for three years in Beyond the Fringe. Each night I used to stand open-mouthed with wonder at my colleagues performing on the stage and making other people laugh. I was always amazed at their talent, but also I was amazed at the relationship between their performance and the strange noise of laughter that came from the audience beyond the footlights. After three years, I was able to analyse the performance in some detail, and it was here that this notion of humour as a disorder of categories came home to me. I would like to give you one example from a sketch which we used to perform every night. It was a sketch about civil defence in which there were three of us behind a table, and Dudley Moore was planted in the audience to ask questions. The question of civil defence was raised and discussed, and halfway through we issued an invitation for questions from the audience – hoping, of course, that Dudley would get in first. Dudley would say, ‘Yes, I have a question. Following the nuclear holocaust, how soon will normal public services be resumed?’ The answer to that was: ‘That’s a very fair question. Following Armageddon, we do hope to have public services working fairly smoothly pretty soon after the event. In all fairness, though, I ought to point out that it must needs be something in the nature of a skeleton service.’230

Now there are several pieces of ‘joke-work,’ as Freud would put it, here. All of them involve opportunities for us to throw previously rigid categories into the air, and thus to reconsider the concepts by which we think and live. The traditional explanation of this joke is black humour. We laugh at something which is so intolerable, so horrible in our predicament that we simply have to laugh in order not to cry. This is one of the traditional sort of push-me-pull-you views of humour, which does not help at all. Much more plausible, I think, is the idea that the joke involves a subversion of our concept of Armageddon. Armageddon is not one of those things, like Christmas, or Thursday, which has events following it. It is not something which you might, as it were, put in your diary; so that in response to the question, ‘What are you doing November 11th?’ you could say, ‘Well, I’ve got Armageddon coming up; but once that settles down…’ Armageddon just is not something which settles down, or which has a sequel to it.

Just as struggling is not the next thing on the agenda, so Armageddon is not an event after which there can be other events, least of all normal public services. Once again, I think, we are amused by a discrepancy – that is, the discrepancy between the magnitude of Armageddon in the form of a nuclear holocaust, and the extraordinary triviality of public services.

I would like to conclude with a well-known sequence in a Charlie Chaplin movie. All of us remember The Gold Rush (1925). In that movie, there is a scene in which Charlie is starving in a hut and is forced to eat his boots. The audience becomes hysterical at certain points only, and these are points where the categories are in danger. The audience laughs at the moment when Charlie twists his bootlaces around his fork and treats them as spaghetti, and again at the point when he tentatively cuts the sole, tries a small piece of it, and savours it. Once again, a discrepancy is the source of the joke. It is in the nature of boots that they are in the domain of the inedible. Here, however, someone is applying to the radically inedible the demeanour, the decorum and the finesse which normally applies to something that is the epitome of the edible – in this case, spaghetti and a very finely broiled steak. In this scene we are being brought face to face with categories by which we live.

This example takes us back to the issues raised by Mary Douglas in her book Purity and Danger (1966). There, Mary Douglas talks about the distinction between the dirty and the clean, the pure and the dangerous. Boots are things which belong on the floor, and they become dirty when they arrive on the table. In exactly the same way, what makes us laugh in the scene from The Gold Rush is the jarring discrepancy in which an object is suddenly and forcefully reclassified by being taken out of the category of the radically inedible and placed into the category of the finely, the wonderfully edible. Once again, this scene rejuvenates our sense of what these everyday categories are.

The rehearsal of categories in humour need not necessarily entail their revision. The point about such rehearsals is not that they have short-term consequences or benefits, but rather that they allow us to play with concepts and categories and thus to put joints into life. We may not be faced with the possibility of having to eat boots. Nevertheless, by having gone through the delightful experience of humour, we have prevented ourselves from becoming the slaves of the categories by which we live. This is why humour is so often regarded as a dangerous and even a subversive thing: the joker and the satirist are regarded as dangerous fellows, and the card in the pack which upsets the hand is called the wild card, or the joker. I think what we are seeing here is the notion of the jocular as a kind of sabbatical section of the mind, in which ‘off-duty’ is celebrated. Being off-duty is bound up with refreshment and recreation. I would remind you that recreation is in fact re-creation. It is the rehearsal, the re-establishment of concepts.

In all procedures of life there are rules of thumb which enable us to go on to ‘automatic pilot.’ I am not suggesting that these rules of thumb are bad. Far from it, they are necessary labour-saving devices which give our activities some sort of momentum. We depend on the existence of these categories in order to go about our everyday business. Jokes allow us to stand back from these rules and inspect them. Anthropologists make a distinction between serious and humorous discourse, and Edmund Leach distinguishes between sacred and profane time.231 There is a time in which we conduct our normal business – profane time – but there are always interludes in which the normal categories, social and otherwise, are suspended for the express purpose of undergoing sabbatical subversion. At Christmas time, for example, everything is up for grabs, and things are turned upside-down. (The historian Christopher Hill uses the phrase ‘a world turned upside down,’ in connection with the English Revolution.)²³² At Christmas time the pantomime dame is played by a man, the principal boy is played by a girl, masters serve and servants sit at table, a lord is crowned Lord of Misrule, a bishop is made of a boy, and so on and so forth. In short, the world is briefly and safely subverted in carnival time, in festival time, in order to allow us briefly to rehearse and revise the categories by which we live for the rest of the year. When the New Year comes, and we undertake the incumbencies and offices of ordinary life, we do so hopefully, in the knowledge that the categories and concepts by which we have lived in the previous year have undergone some sort of revision. Through humour we are not so much the slaves of the rules of life as the voluntary survivors of them. So perhaps there is something in Bergson’s idea that humour restores us to the more versatile versions of ourselves, so that in joking we may be undertaking the most serious thing we do in our lives!