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An Anatomy Of Humor

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An Anatomy Of Humor

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Content T h im dissertation has bean - -
microfilmed exactly as received 67-17,703
STEWART, John Francis, 1935-
AN ANATOMY OF HUMOR.
University of Southern California, Fh.D., 1967
Language and Literature, general
University Microfilms, Inc., Ann Arbor. Michigan
Copyright © by
JOHN FRANCIS STEWART
1968
AN ANATOMY OP HUMOR
by
John Francis Stewart
A Dissertation presented to the
FACULTY OF THE GRADUATE SCHOOL
UNIVERSITY OF SOUTHERN CALIFORNIA
in partial Fulfillment of the
Requirements for the Degree
DOCTOR OF PHILOSOPHY
(English)
June 1967
UNIVERSITY OF SOUTHERN CALIFORNIA
THE GRADUATE SCHOOL
UNIVERSITY PARK
LOS ANOELE8. CALIFORNIA 0 0 0 0 7
This dissertation, written by
.........JOHN. FRANCIS,STEWART.............
under the direction of AiS Dissertation Com
mittee, and approved by all its members, has
been presented to and accepted by the Graduate
School, in partial fulfillment of requirements
for the degree of
DOCTOR OF P H ILO SO P H Y
i & Z & Z x g .....
^ D m *
Date. J\me..8,...1967
TABLE OP CONTENTS
INTRODUCTION . . .................................
Chapter
I. SURVEY OP CLASSICAL AND HISTORICAL THEORIES OP
THE LAUGHABLE , LUDICROUS, AND COMIC . . . .
Ritual Origins; Natural Joy and
Life-instinct
Freedom from Restraint
Delusion of "vain Conceit": Plato
Baseness and imitation of Low characters:
Aristotle
Comic Catharsis: Aristotle, Vexler, Clark
Comic Rhetoric; Cicero, Quintilian,
Scots Rhetoricians
Element of Surprise ("Admiratio") Added to
That of Baseness ("Turpitudo"):
Renaissance Aristotelians
Two Great Examples of prose Comedy:
Don Quixote and Gargantua
Theory of Humors, Humor-Comedy, and
Wit-Comedy
Superiority Theory: Hobbes, Bain, Ludovici,
Rapp
Comedy as Social Corrective: Jonson,
Moliere, Meredith, Bergson
Some Eighteenth-Century Attempts to Define
Wit and Humor: Locke, Addison, Steele,
Shaftesbury
Page
1
11
ii
Chapter
Page
II. THEORY OP LAUGHTER AND HUMOR IN THE
NINETEENTH CENTURY ......................... 93
Kant's Blend of Surprise and incongruity
incongruity Theories and Exaltation of Humor:
Schiller, Richter, Schlegel, Hegel
Anti-lntellectualist and Vitalist Theories
of Schopenhauer
Humorous incongruity Theories of English
Romantics: Coleridge, Hazlitt, Hunt,
Carlyle. Emerson
Laughter as Mechanism of incongruous
Perception: Spencer, Lipps, Freud
III. PROLIFERATION OF THEORETICAL APPROACHES IN
THE MODERN PERIOD............................178
Review of Theories Surveyed
Physiological Theories
Anthropology and "Aggression"
Genetics and Love
Spontaneity, Energy, and Play-Theory
Sociology and Communication
IV. MODERN PSYCHOLOGICAL AND PHILOSOPHICAL
APPROACHES TO THE C O M I C ..................... 271
Psychological and Subjectivist Approach
Philosophical and Objectivist Approach
V. MODERN AESTHETIC AND MYTHIC APPROACHES TO
THE PROBLEM OF HUMOR..........................402
Aesthetic Approach
Mythic-Ritual Approaches
CONCLUSION............................................ 473
1X1
Chapter Page
BIBLIOGRAPHY.......................................... 486
iv
INTRODUCTION
The topic of the present study was not arbitrarily
selected, but evolved gradually from an examination of
Laurence Sterne's techniques, no novel offers more varied
scope for illustration of humor than Tristram Shandy, which
has baffled and fascinated generations of critics and de
lighted generations of readers. At the same time, few
novels (perhaps only Ulysses and Finnegan's Wake in English)
lead one as inexorably to re-examine the whole basis of
literary humor.
Shandeism represents a curious mixture of comic ele
ments unified by the humorous tone of narration, if Sterne
was, to some extent, "an upstart crow [or starling] decked
out in other men's feathers" (as Greene said of Shake
speare), he was still a very singular bird. The skill with
which he pieced together his borrowed plumage, adding to it
from his own experiences, and coloring all with his volatile
temperament, displays his virtuosity in assorting a hoard of
humorous treasures, it also makes his work a provocative
1
2
starting-point for exploration of the meanings of humor.
Whereas the initial aim of this study concerned an
analysis of Sterne's techniques of creating humor in the
reader, its intermediary aim involved a classification of
the comic sub-genres which Sterne interweaves with such art
ful dexterity. The discrimination of interrelated modes
called for a series of precise formal definitions,^ which
in turn demanded a thorough investigation of the philosoph
ical background of humor. As the subject revealed succes
sive layers of interest, it became increasingly clear that,
in literature, ideas— conscious or assumed— precede tech
niques, just as the existence of a sense of humor in the
writer precedes his communication of it to the reader. Thus
the problematical nature of humor itself soon became a sub
ject of all-absorbing research, accounting for the final
orientation of this study toward theory.
There is no shortage of available material related to
^Such classification presents vexing problems; it would
have to be descriptive and inductive. Rene Wellek and
Austin Warren are probably right in suggesting that the con
cept of genres as fixed forms went out with the eighteenth
century— see Theory of Literature (New York, 1956), pp.
216-225— and Sterne did much to dissolve their boundaries.
2
the subject of humor, but much of it is either inconclu
sive, or one-sided, or irrelevant to the problems of liter
ary techniques. Many of the most striking theories, from
Plato and Aristotle through Hobbes to Bergson and Freud,
are dependent offspring of larger philosophical systems.
Humor may be a common experience, but it has proved an
elusive concept, hard to isolate and define. This may
explain why so many studies of humor degenerate into
scrappy joke-books or whimsical essays, while others lose
themselves in metaphysics.
Original theories of humor are rare indeed, and many
writers seem content with wholesale borrowing; they even
steal each other's jokes in order to offer rival explica
tions. After coping with a mass of second-hand material,
some authors develop a pioneer-complex, and lay all humor
on a handmade "bed of Procrustes." Those authors who in
sist on a single rigid formula for all humor fall into the
2
Paul Lauter, in the introduction to his useful selec
tion, Theories of Comedy (New York, 1964), p. xv, contrasts
the relatively slim amount of writing on the comic with the
burgeoning mass of material on tragic art. Yet discussions
of laughter and humor have revealed such widespread mis
understandings and radical disagreements, that the amount of
material in this field seems multiplied by its diffuseness.
4
trap of comic pedantry, which Schopenhauer has described
(see below, pp. 115-116). Small wonder, then, if theoret
ical interest in humor has itself often been regarded as a
sign of humorlessness. Just as the sense of humor varies
widely among individuals, so do interpretations of humor
vary among theorists. Each theory may contain a grain of
truth, yet none seems complete in itself. This fact does
not inhibit many theorists from proclaiming from the roof
tops that they have discovered the secret of laughter and
wrapped it up in a single formula— thus becoming what they
had set out to define, namely objects of humor.
Certainly, the present "anatomy" does not pretend to
pluck out the secret heart of humor. The phrase "Anatomy
of Humor" signifies, rather, an eclectic survey of ideas
which are widely scattered but together form a common
corpus, collectively known as "philosophy of humor." The
title was suggested by two sources which converge in
Tristram Shandy. Among Sterne's favorite books was Robert
Burton's Anatomy of Melancholy, which he parodies in his
own impish anatomy of laughter (see below, p. 186). More
over, the eclectic range of Shandean humor, which seems to
run the gamut of all possible ludicrous effects, suggests
that omnivorous appetite for variety and detail which
3
marks the literary anatomist. The other source lies in
4
Northrop Frye's article, "The Four Forms of Prose Fiction,"
in which Frye distinguishes between (1) Novel; (2) Romance;
(3) Autobiography-Confession; and (4) Anatomy. The last
form involves an encyclopedic impression of the world, and
the term seems to have been invented to accomodate works
of sprawling comic genius, that elude the usual categories.
The present anatomy of ideas is intended to provide a
wider framework for discussions of humor in literature; it
aims to substitute a clearer perspective for confusing gen
eralizations and half-truths. As already indicated, the
scope of this study has been limited to allow full concen
tration on theory of humor; background has become fore
ground. Yet, as so much of the material presented here
3
Burton describes this intellectual gourmandizing as
"a roving humor," and prefaces his Anatomy with these re
marks :
"... being carried away by a giddy disposition . . .
out of a running wit, an unconstant, unsettled mind, I had
a great desire . . . to have some smattering in all, to be
Somebody in everything, Nobody in anything, which Plato
commends . . . as fit to be imprinted in all curious wits,
not to be a slave of one science, or dwell altogether in
one subject, as most do, but to rove abroad, the servant of
a hundred arts, to have an oar in every man's boat, to taste
of every dish, and sip of every cup ..." The Anatomy of
Melancholy, ed. Floyd Dell and Paul Jordan-Smith (New York,
1960), p. 13.
4
Hudson Review. II, n o. 4 (winter 1950), 582-595.
seems relevant to Tristram Shandy, and as the whole enter
prise is Shandean by birth, a compromise has been made with
original intentions; references to Sterne's techniques have
been included in the text, where they seemed directly illus
trative, or given in footnotes.
The eclecticism of this survey is further modified
by requirements of selectivity. No attempt is made at his
torical exhaustiveness, as the aim is to highlight original
and separable ideas of humor, not to deal with the philo
sophical contexts from which they spring, nor with the
minute facets which they subsequently acquire. Some over
simplification will inevitably result from this method of
isolation, but one hopes that major intellectual contribu
tions will thus emerge as parts of a total anatomy of
humor.
The general method of this study aims to distinguish
and contrast main lines of thought in classical and histori
cal theories of the laughable and ludicrous, and then to
classify and compare modern approaches to the subject, con
sidering the relevance of each to questions of literary hu
mor. This organization should reflect central interest in
an interlocking structure of ideas, rather than in continu
ity of historical development, primary grouping emphasizes
7
logical affinities or contrasts, while subsidiary organiza
tion is loosely chronological.
The theoretical groundwork is laid in Chapter I, with a
preliminary survey extending from ritual origins and the
classical theories of Plato and Aristotle to eighteenth
century attempts at normative definition. The idea of the
ludicrous is seen through various filters, represented here
by Roman rhetoric, Renaissance Aristotelianism, comic-epic
prose (Rabelais and Cervantes), medieval theory of "humors,"
Hobbesian naturalism, and the sophisticated morality of com
ic theatre.
Chapter II deals chiefly with romantic philosophy of
humor in the nineteenth century, with special attention to
the ideas of Kant, Schiller, Richter, A. W. von Schlegel,
Hegel, and Schopenhauer, and their paler reflections in
essays and lectures by Coleridge, Hazlitt, Hunt, Carlyle,
and Emerson. The chapter ends with a transition from meta
physical to physical explanations of laughter, marking
the rise of nineteenth-century scientism. A subsequent line
of development is traced from Spencer through Lipps to
Freud.
The remaining chapters deal with the proliferation of
theoretical approaches to humor in modern times, with a
view to focus and contrast, these approaches are divided
into nine separate branches, chapter ill contains discus
sions of six parallel methodologies and their related
theories. These sub-sections comprise: Physiology; Anthro
pology and Aggression; Genetics and Love; Spontaneity,
Energy, and Play; and Sociology and Communication.
Chapter IV contains a more extended comparison of
Psychological (subjectivist) and Philosophical (objecti-
5
vist) approaches to humor, showing how a distinct cleavage
develops in twentieth-century theory. The psychological
appraoch is divided into eight sub-sections, as follows:
pre-Freudian; Freud; post-Freudian psychoanalytics; in
stinctive-subjective; psycho-aesthetic; Gestalt and person
al; logical-cognitive; psychological-cognitive-aesthetic.
The philosophical approach is divided into ten sub-sections:
French logicians and intellectualists; philosophy of laugh
ter (Carus); philosophy of the comic (Bergson); philosophy
of comic surfaces (Everett); philosophy of comic impulse
(Santayana); intellectualism and psychologism; monism;
eclecticism; ideal logic of the comic (Feibleman); and
5
This clear-cut division constitutes a necessary over
simplification.
rational norms of the comic (Swabey).
Chapter V contains a brief review of Aesthetic and
Mythic approaches to the comic, with reference to
Baudelaire's views on the "romantic agony" of laughter and
the grotesque, Croce's pragmatism, and the aesthetic prin
ciples of harmony, distance, sublimation, reflection,
catharsis, popular art, and "sense of regain." More de
tailed consideration is afforded the symbolistic approach
of Cook and Langer, who concentrate on image and form.
Finally, the discussion of Myth-criticism centers on psycho-
mythic patterns (such as the "comic Oedipus situation"), the
family frame of comedy, and ritual origins.
Although an ever-increasing number of books and
articles has been written on humor from specialized points
of view, there has been little attempt to collate and syn
thesize these diverse contributions into a comprehensive
anatomy of humor. Thus theories of humor continue to pro
liferate, setting out from totally different disciplinary
6
assumptions toward conflicting conclusions. On the other
g
In this connection, Arthur 0. Lovejoy's essay, "The
Historiography of ideas," seems to advocate a pertinent cor
rective. Lovejoy ventures the opinion that
"we have now reached a juncture at which the indis
pensability of a closer and wider liaison— or, to better the
10
hand, there are many purely historical treatments of humor-
theory, some dull and some amusing, which, in their concern
with names, influences, and movements, fail to isolate and
contrast the ideas with sufficient clarity.
My purpose in the present study has been to assimilate
heterogeneous theories of humor, with a view to showing how
scientific or philosophical assumptions determine the ini
tial questions which can be asked about humor, and thus
control the direction of theoretical approaches. Nothing
human is entirely alien to the humorist, and I have there
fore attempted to gain a truer understanding of humor from
a variety of perspectives, it is hoped that this eclectic
survey will contribute toward an assessment of the compara
tive relevance to literary criticism and genre theory of
collateral approaches to the problem of humor.
metaphor, of a great deal more cross-fertilization— between
primarily distinct disciplines, is much more apparent and
more urgent than it has ever been before. . . .
"... it would not, I believe, be false to say that
increasing specialization has actually 'passed over,' like
a category in the Hegelian logic, into its own apparent op
posite, and now manifests itself as a demand for more his
torical synthesis— for the establishment of concrete and
fruitful interconnections at a large number of specifiable
points."
See Essays in the History of Ideas (New York, 1960),
pp. 6-7.
CHAPTER I
SURVEY OF CLASSICAL AND HISTORICAL THEORIES OF
THE LAUGHABLE, LUDICROUS, AND COMIC
Ritual Origins: Natural Joy and Life-Instinct
Sense of humor may be thought of poetically as a gift
of gods to men or as an expression of the human spirit;
practically, it plays an integral part in cultural evolu
tion. Humor represents a flexible compromise between de
sire and ability in the drive toward adaptation, and a de
lightful mastery of experience in the mirror of art. The
qualities of humor vary according to cultural context and
individual temperament; indeed, humor changes its hues like
the chameleon. Yet the familiar usage of the word "humor"
in a multiplicity of contexts, suggests an original core of
meaning, however blurred or diversified its connotations
may subsequently have become. An understanding of humor—
or the comic (to use a more generic term)— must therefore
involve a study of sources; to the student of humor as
11
12
literary art, this means an examination of its earliest
cultural manifestations in the "significant forms" of
laughter-making ritual and drama. (As ritual precedes
myth, and nature-worship precedes organized religion, so
comedy appears to precede tragedy among the arts of Western
man.)
Twentieth-century myth-critics have done much to un
cover the sources of comedy in ritual celebrations of the
cycle of seasons, fertility, and reproduction. Social
festivals in honor of Ceres or Bacchus were pervaded by a
holiday spirit of mirth and license. In The Origin of Attic
Comedy (London, 1934), Francis M. Cornford finds the basis
of all comedy in phallic ritual and fertility festival,
with the culmination in marriage representing the dominant
erotic tone of the earlier forms.1 Thus romantic comedy
of manners has evolved from cruder modes of sex-exploita-
tion. Yet these earlier forms were not simply a matter of
unmodified playfulness and license; propitiation of sterner
realities played an underlying part in Attic comedy as in
^In this context, the truncated ending of Sterne's
Tristram Shandy seems almost a burlesque of the fertility
marriage with the theme of impotence producing a comic
bathos in which the whole artful comedy dwindles to the
dimensions of "a cock and bull story."
13
ritual, in connection with structural patterns, Cornford
points out that: "comedy has its Agon, in which Usener has
detected the old strife of summer and Winter, or of the new
and old fertility spirits" (p. 69) .
In the Poetics, Aristotle discusses claims to the in
vention of comedy put forward by Dorians and Megarians on
the basis of linguistic evidence:
The outlying villages, they say, are by them called
"komai," by the Athenians "demoi": and they assume
that comedians were so named not from "komazein," "to
revel," but because they wandered from village to
village ("Kata komas"), being excluded contemptuously
from the city.2
Aristotle does not comment on the validity of this evidence,
but leaves the suggestion that "Comedy" may be linked in
the popular mind with low or rustic characters, outcasts
from society, regarded as inferior by more civilized city-
dwellers. One would expect their manners to be rougher and
their restless wanderings would keep them in closer touch
with rhythms of life and the seasons. A little further on,
Aristotle states plainly that Comedy originated with the au
thors of "the phallic songs, which are still in use in many
2
Aristotle's Theory of Poetry and Fine Art: The
Poetics. trans. S. H. Butcher, 4th ed. (London, 1920), III,
iii, pp. 13-15. All references are to this edition.
14
3
of our cities" (p. 19). According to Northrop Frye,
Comedy derives its name from "komos," the ritual dance which
was a part of marriage and fertility ceremonies. Etymologi-
cally, the word "comedy" seems to have suggested a ritual
combination of song, dance, and mime infused with the
exuberance of public festivals. The ritual triumph of New
Year over Old Year, Spring over Winter, and fertility over
sterility is further reflected in the Aristophanic theme of
rejuvenation which sets youth victorious over age and son
4
over father (as in the Clouds and Wasps).
The comic principle of Fortune or Chance (as contrast
ed with tragic Necessity) plays an important role in the
New Comedy of Menander. Cornford writes:
Fortune was the acknowledged divinity of the New Comedy;
and accident has always been allowed a large place in
the comic plot. In the construction we may demand neat
ness and a lightly balanced symmetry; but no one wants
a sense of closely knit necessity. (p. 197)
In the freer old Comedy of Aristophanes and his forerunners,
Cornford notes that character precedes and motivates action,
3
"The Argument of Comedy," English institute Essays
(1948), pp. 60-61.
4
Tristram turns the tables on his father and uncle;
as an infant he is the helpless victim of their negligence;
as narrator he has them in his power.
15
5
instead of fitting into a preordained plot. Tracing this
comic tendency in modern literature, Cornford adds:
In the still laxer form of the novel, great writers
have often described how their characters seem to come
alive and take the action into their own hands, carrying
it to conclusions undesigned by their creator. (p. 198)
While Sterne, for example, ironically reminds his readers
that his fictional world has no existence independent of
his own conscious control, Tristram's life-story and opin
ions are pushed out of the picture by the galloping "hobby
horses" (or obsessive interests) of Uncle Toby and Walter
Shandy. The air of irrepressible improvisation character
istic of Old Comedy is doubtless a carry-over from the free
dom of public expression in ritual. The plot-structure of
Attic Comedy was comparatively loose and random, whereas
that of tragedy was rigidly controlled by a formal aesthet
ic .
. . . Comedy [says cornford] keeps nearer to the old
ritual outline. ... In Comedy . . . the plots were
not "myths," but were freely invented. The proper term
for the comic plot is not mythos. but logos. The term
seems to mean the "theme ” or 'Idea,1 1 of the piece. There
5
"The Old Comedy in general is content with a much
laxer construction. It is not primarily the representation
of an 'action' or'experience,' to which character is secon
dary, but its bent is always towards the representation of
a set of characters, turned loose to bring about the action
by their interplay." (cornford, p. 198)
16
is no suggestion of a closely spun web of incidents
running all through. (p. 199)
The free play of chance, character, and invention in comic
construction reflects closeness to ritual rhythms and pat
terns of life. Tragedy, on the other hand, is closer to
solemn religious rituals and to fixed patterns of myth.
The energy of comic ritual and drama seems to have
stemmed from physical joy and resurgent life instincts.
Several modern theorists have stressed this persistent
strain of vitality as a significant feature of the comic.
g
For Henri Bergson, the comic involves "mechanical inelastic
ity" in place of that "wideawake adaptability" and "living
pliableness" which represent the rhythms of life. Susanne
Langer makes this principle of vital energy still clearer
in her chapter on "The Comic Rhythm" from Feeling and Form:
7
A Theory of Art (New York, 1953) . She describes the un
derlying feeling of comedy as a "sense of life," which can
be compared to Schopenhauer's "will to live" and Bergson's
"elan vital." Langer finds the roots of comedy in fertili
ty rites, spring festivals, social celebrations, and the
^Laughter: An Essay on the Meaning of the Comic, in
Comedy. ed. Wylie Sypher (New York, 1956), pp. 66-67. All
page references are based on this edition.
7
All page references are based on this edition.
17
various rituals that symbolize life-cycles, biological
rhythms, and changing seasons:
Comedy [she says] is an art form that arises naturally
wherever people are gathered to celebrate life, in spring
festivals, triumphs, birthdays, weddings, or initiations.
For it expresses the elementary strains and resolutions
of animate nature, the animal drives that persist even
in human nature, the delight man takes in his special
mental gifts that make him the lord of creation; it is
an image of human vitality holding its own in the world
amid the surprises of unplanned coincidence. (p. 331)
The action of comedy, she adds, is borne along by the same
perpetual wave of life that animates society;
[it] is essentially contingent, episodic, and ethnic;
it expresses the continuous balance of sheer vitality
that belongs to society and is exemplified briefly in
each individual. . . . (p. 333)
Compared with tragedy, which is a closed form dealing with
individual Fate, comedy, the "image of fortune," is a free
and open-ended form, in which chance and coincidence play a
large part.
Langer regards the buffoon of folk theatre, with his
irrepressible knack of getting tripped up and bouncing right
back, as the "personified elan vital" (p. 342); he is moti
vated by a random energy which is the amoral, persistent
rhythm of life itself. Punch and his kin are miniature
examples of how comedy "abstracts and reincarnates for our
perception, the motion and rhythm of living," and thus
18
"enhances our vital feeling" (p. 344). This vitality
"rises to a breaking point" in laughter. (The image once
more is of a wave of life sweeping all before it.) How is
this vital energy of comedy generated? primitive rituals
relied on open eroticism; modern comedy tends to be sparked
by a more or less sublimated sex-battle, which Langer calls
the most universal contest, humanized, in fact civilized,
yet still the primitive joyful challenge, the self-preser
vation and self-assertation whose progress is the comic
rhythm. (p. 346)
Comedy, she says, achieves its exhilarating effects through
an abstraction of "livingness," highlighted by humor, and
maintained by'h quickened pace of action" (p. 348). A
spirit of zestful play is carried over from mime and ritual
dance-rhythms. "The feeling of comedy is a feeling of
heightened vitality, challenged wit and will, engaged in the
great game with chance" (pp. 348-349).
Susanne Langer ends her chapter on "The Comic Rhythm"
by drawing direct parallels between the ritual origins of
comedy and its modern forms;
The same impulse that drove people, even in prehistoric
times, to enact fertility rites and celebrate all phases
of their biological existence, sustains their eternal
interest in comedy. . . . The sense of precariousness
that is the typical tension of light comedy was undoubt
edly developed in the eternal struggle with chance that
every farmer knows only too well— with weather, blights,
19
beasts, birds, and beetles. The embarrassments, perplex
ities, and mounting panic which characterize that favo
rite genre, comedy of manners, may still reflect the
toils of ritual and taboo that complicated the caveman's
existence. Even the element of aggressiveness in comic
action serves to develop a fundamental trait of the comic
rhythm— the deep cruelty of it, as all life feeds on life.
There is no biological truth that feeling does not re
flect, and that good comedy, therefore, will not be prone
to reveal.8 (p. 349)
Langer combines the ritual depth-approach to defining comedy
with a logical aesthetic of the finished comic construct,
which conveys a sense of "virtual life." One result of her
analysis is to show the importance of feeling, even when
highly generalized and sublimated in the comic art-form.
Certainly "dlan vital" can hardly coexist with "an absence
of feeling" as Bergson suggests. However, Langer argues
that the emotion of comedy is not particularized and subjec
tive as in tragedy; it involves a communal "sense of felt
life," a sharing in the forward-moving rhythm that unites
nature and society. The weight of personal destiny is
temporarily removed from the individual; the lightness
of comedy comes from ritual confidence in the renewal of
nature. Natural joy and celebration of survival, sex, and
the life-instinct represent a permanent positive pole of
Also quoted below in connection with the modern
mythic approach (see p. 469).
20
the comic sense.
While Susanne Langer integrates ritual into her theory
of comic art, Northrop Frye uses ritual and mythic keys in
literary analysis of comedy. Most interesting in the pres
ent context is Frye's image of comedy as the "drama of the
green world" of pagan rituals and fertility cults, whose
theme is once again the triumph of life over the waste
land, the death and revival of the year impersonated
by figures still human, and once divine as well. ("Argu
ment of Comedy," p. 67)
Frye compares Shakespeare's "green world of comedy” with
his "red and white world of history," and the "saturnalia"
of the Boar's Head Tavern with the ancient rituals "intend
ed to recall the golden age of Saturn" (pp. 70-71).
Freedom from Restraint
The golden age of Saturn emerges from its mythic con
text as a time of peace and freedom when men were equal with
the gods. Saturnalian festivals were marked by license;
social values were turned topsy-turvy, with masters serving
their slaves, while a king of the revels, or "lord of mis
rule," was chosen by lot. Such festivals were tolerated by
the authorities as a valuable outlet for the Dionysian
forces pent up in social man; so popular did they become
that they survived far into the Middle Ages, and the Church
21
found it advisable to let the common people and even the
monks enjoy a moral holiday on "All Fools'Day," an occasion
9
of thinly veiled paganism.
The ritual casting-off of moral and rational restraints
associated with phallic festivals is retained as a strong
element in the Old Comedy of Aristophanes but toned down in
the more polished New Comedy of Menander. Freedom from re
straint remains a basic aspect of the comic, however; thus,
without explicitly referring to ritual sanctions, Charles
Lamb used the argument for a moral holiday in favor of
Restoration Comedy:
. . . I am glad for a season to take an airing beyond
the diocese of the strict conscience— not to live always
in the precincts of the law-courts— but now and then,
for a dream-while or so, to imagine a world with no medd
ling restrictions— to get into recesses whither the hunter
cannot follow me— . . . I come back to my cage and my re
straint the fresher and more healthy for it. I wear my
shackles more contentedly for having respired the breath
of an imaginary freedom.10
The world of "artificial comedy" (the title of Lamb's essay
begs the question of Restoration drama's social relevance)
represents a "cloud-cuckoo land" of amoral fantasy, a
9
See Enid Welsford, The Fool; His social and Literary
History (New York, 1935).
^"On the Artificial Comedy of the Last Century," in
The Portable Charles Lamb, ed. John Mason Brown (New York,
1964), pp. 550-551.
22
fairy-land of irresponsible caprice, a "Utopia of gallantry,
where pleasure is duty and the manners perfect freedom"
(pp. 551-552) .
While Lamb sees the spirit of Restoration comedy as
imaginative freedom from moral restraint, Schopenhauer^
regards the comic as an escape from the bonds of strict
logic and reason and as a reassertion of the will to live.
Laughter expresses pleasure in the "incongruity of sensuous
and abstract knowledge" (I, 75), in the victory of partic
ular concrete facts over abstract general ideas, of sensuous
perceptions over intellectual conceptions. Perception is,
at the same time, more exhilarating and more relaxing than
thinking. Schopenhauer writes:
It must therefore be diverting to us to see this strict,
untiring, troublesome governess, the reason, for once
convicted of insufficiency. On this account then the
mien or appearance of laughter is very closely related
to that of joy. (II, 280)
He argues that the laughter at vanishing adversities, the
general good fortune, and the good humor of comedy also
stimulate the will to live.
If now we have found the tendency and ultimate intention
of tragedy to be a turning to resignation, to the denial
^The World as Will and idea, trans. R. B. Haldane and
J. Kemp, 3 vols. (New York, 1950). References are to this
edition.
23
of the will to live, we shall easily recognize in its
opposite, comedy, the incitement to the continued asser
tion of the will. (Ill, 218)
Thus Schopenhauer stresses both freedom from intellectual
restraint and celebration of the life instinct or will to
survival as important underlying elements of the comic
and laughter.
Delusion or "Vain Conceit": Plato
Mere freedom, as Sartre says, is a negative condition.
Explanations of laughter in terms of freedom or escape seem
to make their strongest appeal in periods when intellectual
and moral restraints exert most pressure on the individual.
Plato and Aristotle, however, put a moral construction on
laughter and ridicule, which they regard as reinforcing a
"golden mean" of rational conduct.
The influence of Plato and Aristotle on subsequent
theories is out of proportion to the actual amount of their
writings on the subject. Plato introduces his idea of the
"vain conceit" or self-delusion as source of the comic into
a discussion of the pleasure-pain nexus in the philebus.
There he singles out "the vain conceit of beauty, of wisdom,
and of wealth, [which] are ridiculous if they are weak, and
24
12
detestable when they are powerful," as three forms of the
ridiculous based on ignorance of self. These vain conceits
can be observed, says Plato, in our friends as well as in
the characters of comedy. The comic consists in seeing oth
ers as they fail to see themselves, in noticing real defects
in place of pretended virtues. The comic is therefore crit
ical and social in essence (Moliere and Bergson are among
those who agree with this approach). Plato shows that when
we laugh at folly, pleasure mingles with pain. His quanti
tative distinction between the ridiculous and the detestable
is based on the intensity of emotion aroused relative to the
strength or weakness of the vain object or person. Plato
does not expound the criterion of moderate emotion, which
receives more attention from Aristotle. The association of
laughter with relaxation is contingent here, as at many
13
points in the development of comic theory.
Plato also notes that degrading subjects can be treated
as comic when social repressions are removed, either by
12
See Philebus, 49, in The Dialogues of Plato, trans.
B. Jowett, 3d ed., IX (New York, 1937), 385.
13
Many modern theorists tend to regard emotional re
sponses as deterrent to the sense of humor. Bergson insists
on a complete absence of emotion in the comic, while Freud
and his psychological followers show how excess emotion
inhibits the comic sense.
25
communication, as among members of an audience, or in the
imaginative freedom of privacy. Plato tends to regard
laughter as a natural instinct restrained by pity, pro-
14
priety, and self-consciousness. Plato's contribution lies
mainly in pointing out the comic moral gap between a charac
ter ' s pretensions and his performance. Jonathan Swift made
this same disparity a source of agonized spleen and
15
satire. Sterne, who foresaw that Tristram Shandy would
"swim down the gutter of Time" with A Tale of a Tub, makes
the vain conceit an integral part of Shandean comedy. He
14
William McDougall and his follower V. K. Krishna
Menon treat laughter as an autonomous instinct, but this
has not proved a profitable line of inquiry.
15At the end of Gulliver's Travels, the narrator is
surely voicing Swift's own loathing of man's moral incon
gruity, a mixture of "vain conceit" and actual degradation:
"My reconcilement to the yahoo-kind in general might
not be so difficult if they would be content with those
vices and follies only which nature hath entitled them to.
I am not in the least provoked at the sight of a lawyer, a
pickpocket, a colonel, a fool, a lord, a gamester, a poli
tician, a whoremonger, a physician, an evidence, a suborner,
an attorney, a traitor, or the like; this is all according
to the due course of things: but when I behold a lump of
deformity and diseases both in body and mind, smitten with
pride, it immediately breaks all the measures of my pa
tience; neither shall I be ever able to comprehend how such
an animal and such a vice could tally together." Gulliver1s
Travels and other writings, ed. Louis A. Landa (Cambridge,
Mass., 1960), pp. 238-239.
26
loves to deflate the pomposity of solemn manners, and
quotes a maxim of La Rochefoucauld, which defines affected
gravity as "a mysterious carriage of the body to cover the
defects of the mind” (l,xi,26). The vain conceit of virtue
which is out of all proportion to the actual badness it
covers, is a form of blindness; as Socrates says in the
Philebus. it is the state of mind opposite to the Delphic
oracle's "know thyself." The concept of comic self-ignorance
may be seen as the moral prototype of theories of egoism and
incongruity, elaborated by eighteenth and nineteenth cen
tury philosophers and men of letters.
Baseness and imitation of l o w Characters: Aristotle
Aristotle's remarks on comic character are incidental
to his general discussion of drama, but they have been ab
stracted and repeated with such insistence, that of all
comic theories Aristotle's has been the most historically
influential. His dicta have the virtue of clarity rather
than profundity:
Comedy is, as we have said, an imitation of characters
of a lower type— not, however, in the full sense of the
word bad, the Ludicrous being merely a subdivision of
the ugly. It consists in some defect or ugliness which
is not painful or destructive. To take an obvious
example, the comic mask is ugly and distorted, but does
not imply pain. (poetics. v,i,21)
27
Thus Aristotle defines comedy in accordance with his
mimetic theory of the arts and with the more civilized
morality of the New Comedy which discriminated fit objects
of laughter from criminal and cruel ones. These painless
defects are ludicrous in relation to the implicit norms
of rational moral behavior. Distortion, which may be the
painful result of congenital defects, is not in itself
funny (at least not to a refined audience), but the kind of
distortion which implies an intentional or merely deluded
deviation from the norm is ludicrous, in further allevia
tion of coarseness, Aristotle prefers the aristocratic art
of ironical innuendo in New comedy, to the slavish use of
"abusive or obscene" language in Old Comedy, innuendo is
a kind of comic decorum, just as ironical jesting may be a
16
kind of rhetorical decorum.
According to Aristotle, social inferiority and harmless
distortion are common objects of laughter and comedy. Due
16
See The Nicomachean Ethics of Aristotle, trans. J. E.
C. Welldon (London, 1912), Bk. IV, chaps, xiii-xiv, pp. 127-
131; and The Rhetoric of Aristotle, trans. Sir Richard
Claverhouse Jebb, Bk. Ill, chap. xviii, sec. 7, p. 197.
This attitude may be contrasted with that of many English
critics, notably Thackeray, who find Sterne's pervasive use
of innuendo much more offensive than the forthright obscen
ity of Aristophanes and Rabelais.
to the exaggerated Renaissance reverence for Aristotle which
followed the Dark Ages, his theory remained virtually un-
17
modified until the time of Vincenzo Maggi's adaptation
(1550), which joined the notion of "admiratio" (wonder,
surprise) to that of "turpitudo" (ugliness). Aristotle does
point out that unexpectedness increases the effect of tick
ling, and adds, "laughter is a form of derangement and
18
deceit,” but he does not develop this suggestion, nor make
the element of surprise a part of his theory in the poetics.
"Deception" and "the unexpected" are listed among those
things which cause laughter in the Aristotelian fragment
19
known as the Coislinian Tractate. As it stands, however,
the Aristotelian theory is a bare and direct comment on the
conventions of character and action in comic drama, which
is the counterpart of tragedy, with low characters and low
life scenes in place of high. The audience laughs, presuma-*
bly, out of a sense of moral, intellectual, social, and
17
From "On the Ridiculous," trans. George Miltz, in
Theories of comedy, ed. Paul Lauter (New York, 1964),
pp. 64-73.
18
problems, II, trans. W. S. Hett (London and Cam
bridge, Mass., 1937), Bk. XXXV, vi, p. 235.
19
Translated in Cooper, An Aristotelian Theory of
Comedy (New York, 1922), pp. 224-226; in Lauter, pp. 21-23.
29
economic superiority, but indulgently, and with no twinge
of guilt, because the defects protrayed are not dangerous or
painful enough to arouse emotion.
Comic Catharsis; Aristotle. Vexler. Clark
Some critics, notably Lane Cooper, have attempted to
reconstruct a classical theory of comedy from allusions to
Homer's lost Maraites. which Aristotle says "bears the same
relation to Comedy that the Iliad and Odyssey do to
20
Tragedy," and from fragmentary comments on Aristotle's
21
own vanished theory of comedy, supposedly parallel to his
discussion of tragedy in the poetics. and including a
20
See Poetics, trans. Butcher, IV, ix, p. 17: "As, in
the serious style, Homer is pre-eminent among poets for he
alone combined dramatic form with excellence of imitation,
so he too first laid down the main lines of Comedy, by
dramatizing the ludicrous instead of writing personal
satire."
21
Some scholars have supplied the gaps in Aristotle's
analysis of the comic with ingenious inferences of their
own. W. G. Rutherford writes: "Even the scrimp and grudging
abstract, now sole relic of the section in the Poetics con
cerned with comedy, will convince anybody . . . that a Greek
had indeed read for Greeks the most secret heart of 'the
mother of comedy,' and, probe in hand, had made clear where
fore it beat, and what it was made of— unconventionality,
spite, malice, impudence, devilment, ribaldry, whimsicality,
extravagance, insincerity, nonsensicalness, inconsequence,
equivoque, drivel, pun, parody, incongruity in all sorts
and sizes.” From A Chapter in the History of Annotation:
being Scholia Aristophanica. ill (London, 1905), 435.
Quoted in cooper, p. 6.
30
similar psychology of "catharsis." professor cooper has
translated the Coislinian Tractate (4th-2nd cent. B. C.),
which appears to consist of notes outlining Aristotle's
lectures on the comic, and John Tzetzes' First Proem to
Aristophanes (12th cent.), which seems to reflect knowledge
of the same source. The Tractate lists causes of laughter
in comedy under the headings of "Diction" and "Things."
As tragic catharsis signifies purging of the noble emo
tions of pity and terror, so comic catharsis would seem to
have been a purging of gross thoughts based on bodily func
tions, not by crude expression but by containment within an
aesthetic framework.
The combination of beauty with the lower forms of the
ludicrous gives rise to a catharsis differing from the
effect of the obscene when unalloyed. Thus art follows
nature. Reproduction and excretion are in nature and
life united with beauty; and comedy is an idealized
representation of all the elements in life and nature.
(Cooper, p. 76)
It is interesting to speculate (with Cooper) as to how the
idea of comic catharsis might link Aristotle with Freud,
whose theory of wit as economy of expenditure of inhibition
22
and social release of repressions is essentially cathartic.
22
See Wit and its Relation to the Unconscious, trans.
A. A. Brill (New York, 1917) . All references are based on
this edition.
31
23
Another modern theorist, Julius Vexler, regards
laughter as a purgation of emotion, and catharsis as the
key to comedy.
The ruth of comedy is its catharsis, its riddance of
excess and hardened whim. Our vast foolishness is not
to be endured; disgust and sympathy are roused; they
unite to make laughter and purgation. (p. 293)
Laughter at human folly sublimates the emotional antipathy,
leaving the mind "calm and free" (as Goethe said of Sterne).
Vexler concludes;
. . . the laughter itself does not seem to be an emotion,
but rather a way to express emotions, and hence a method
of rising above them. Laughter is independent on con
tempt and sympathy; this makes the catharsis of comedy.
(p. 310)
24
According to Arthur Melville Clark, there is also a
catharsis of satire, the effect of which is not reform, but
"a kind of astringent pleasure."
Satire provides for the satirist himself and for us
his readers a licensed cathartic of envy, hatred, and
malice, and all uncharitableness. His satisfaction is
more or less immediate and particular, ours more or
less vicarious and general. (p. 39)
As there are many kinds of laughter, some uplifting, some
23
"The Essence of Comedy," Sewanee Review. XLIII, No. 3
(july-September 1935), 292-310. For further comment in re
lation to the modern aesthetic approach, see below, pp. 430-
432.
24
Studies in Literary Modes (Edinburgh & London, 1946).
32
degrading, the nature of comic catharsis remains a vexed
question. However there is general agreement that laugh
ter— especially that of comic literature— does one good,
morally, mentally, and physically. In Sterne's words,
laughter lengthens life (T.S.. I,i,3), drives out spleen
(T.S.. IV,xxii, 301-302), revitalizes the circulation, "and
makes the wheel of life run long and chearfully round"
(T.S.. IV,xxxii,337-338).
Comic Rhetoric: Cicero. Quintilian.
Scots Rhetoricians
Cicero recognized the value of laughter as a rhetori
cal weapon of attack or persuasion, and in On the Character
25
of the Orator. he is intent on laying down rules for pro
ducing comic effects in public or dramatic speeches, in
general theory, he follows Aristotle, emphasizing the ele
ments of "turpitudo et deformitas." As in the Coislinian
Tractate, causes of laucpiter are divided between "Diction"
and "Things," so Cicero distinguishes between sources of
the laughable in “thought" and in "mere language." (This
idea is the basis of Addison's distinction between "True
25
Book II, lviii, 235 to lxxi, 289. Translation based
on that by Barnes and Watson. Reprinted in Lauter, pp. 24-
26.
33
Wit" and "False Wit.") Cicero offers a brief classification
of the first variety of humor:
Jokes which lie in the subject and thought are, though
infinite in their varieties, reducible under a very few
heads; for it is by deceiving expectation, by satirizing
the tempers of others, by playing humorously on our own,
by comparing a thing with something worse, by dissembling,
by uttering apparent absurdities, and by reproving folly
that laughter is excited. (Lauter, p. 26)
Quintilian follows Cicero in stressing surprise, deceit, and
verbal distortion as causes of the comic. He considers
laughter something of a mystery, but offers the following
rhetorical analysis:
It is . . . always associated with something low (humile).
It may take any of six forms: urbanity (urbanitas) ,
gracefulness (venustum), piquancy (salsum), pleasantry
(facetum), jesting (iocus), and verbal attacks (dica-
citas). (De institutione Qratoria. vi,3)^6
Cicero's influence— based on that of Aristotle, and
filtered through Locke and Addison— was strong on the group
of eighteenth-century Scottish philosophers of rhetoric and
belles-lettres, which included George Campbell, James
Beattie, Dugald Stewart, Alexander Gerard, and Francis
27
Hutcheson. In The Philosophy of Rhetoric (1776), George
26
Quoted in j. Y. T. Greig, The Psychology of Laughter
and Comedy (London, 1923), p. 227.
27
References in text are based on scholarly edition of
Lloyd F. Bitzer (Carbondale, 111., 1963).
34
Campbell sets the trend with definitions of wit, humor, and
ridicule apparently based on the notions of Cicero,
Quintilian, and Locke. Campbell introduces these three
terms as branches of eloquence, associated with "the fancy,
the passions, and the will," respectively (p. 8). He
singles out "suddenness," "surprise," and "contrariety" as
prerequisites of wit, the surprise arising "not from any
thing marvellous in the subject, but solely from the imagery
she employs, or the strange assemblage of related ideas pre
sented to the mind" (p. 8). Incongruity, he asserts, is
largely a matter of rhetorical arrangement: "it is to the
contrast of dissimilitude and likeness, remoteness and rela
tion, in the same objects, that its peculiar effect is
imputable" (pp. 9-10). Campbell calls wit an "enchantress
28
who delights in reconciling contradictions" (p. 9).
Both wit and humor, he argues, reveal some "curious and un
expected affinity,1 1 the first by comparison (direct or im
plied) , the second by more general association (see pp. 19-
20). "The subject of humour," he says, "is always charac
ter," especially its minor quirks and vanities; the tech-
28
Cf. Jean Paul Richter's aphorism: "Wit is the dis
guised priest who unites every couple." Quoted in Freud,
Wit and its Relation to the Unconscious, p. 7.
35
nique of humor, he adds, involves diminishing and inverting
of objects, as in a concave mirror, to produce the ridic
ulous (p. 20) .
Following the oratorical tradition of Quintilian,
Campbell is interested in emotional effects of wit as rhet
oric. Wit, he thinks, is suitable to lighter discourse:
"Sublimity elevates, beauty charms, wit diverts"(p. 10);
the latter causes "an agreeable vibration" of the spirits.
Humor, he notes, produces the contrary effects of contempt
and laughter, a fact which suggests its emotional ambiv
alence. Campbell finds himself in general agreement with
Aristotle, but considers the latter's theory strictly
limited to "the ridiculous in manners" (p. 28); he is in
open disagreement with Hobbes, however, arguing that
"laughter doth not result from the contempt, but solely
from the perception of oddity . . ." (p. 29). He admits
that "men laugh at indecencies and mischances" (p. 31), but
he explains the relevant cause as "striking unsuitableness"
of association, not as the "sudden glory" of superiority.
Although sensory and imaginative causes of laughter are com
parable in effect, Campbell points out that the study of
rhetoric is concerned only with the imaginative forms of
wit and humor (p. 31) .
This group of Scottish rhetoricians shares a morally
and logically based theory of incongruity as the cause of
laughter and the ridiculous; Gerard calls wit "a surprising
29
and uncommon mixture of relation and contrariety";
Hutcheson, "contrast, or opposition, of ideas of dignity
30
and meanness"; while Beattie echoes both of them, and
generalizes Hutcheson's statement of incongruity as "an
opposition of suitableness and unsuitableness, or of rela
tion and the want of relation, united in the same assem-
31
blage." Beattie shows a neoclassic predilection for
classification, drawing distinctions between the ludicrous
and the ridiculous, between "natural laughter" and "unnatu
ral," and subdividing the former into "animal laughter"
(caused by tickling or gladness) and "sentimental laughter"
32
(caused by ludicrous ideas). in discussing the simple
modes of combination in incongruity— such as physical
29
An Essay on Taste. 1st ed. (London and Edinburgh,
1759), p. 66.
^"Thoughts on Laughter," in Works (Glasgow, 1772),
V, 107.
31
"An Essay on Laughter, and Ludicrous Composition"
(1764), in Essays: On poetry and Music. &c. (Edinburgh,
1778), p. 348.
32
Essays (Dublin, 1778), II, 328-330.
deformity— Beattie follows Aristotle, Cicero, and Quintil
ian. The moral and rhetorical emphases of this group are
also clearly evident in the lectures of Dugald Stewart, who
repeats Aristotle's definition of the ludicrous, and then
turns his attention to the rational and moral implications
of laughter. Laughter contributes both to amusement and
discipline (an idea popularized by Addison in the
Spectator) . it is a highly serious gift, bound up with the
"sense of duty," the "ability to reason," and the power of
moral judgment. Stewart concludes that:
The sense of the Ridiculous . . . has an intimate
connection with [the] highest and noblest principles.
In the education of youth, nothing requires more serious
attention, than its proper regulation. 33
The free spirit of laughter seems to have evaporated in the
grasp of the Ciceronian "dominie"; humor can hardly be
reduced to a set of rhetorical rules and moral precepts.
Stewart quotes Milton's lines, "Smiles from reason flow/
To brutes denied," and one is inevitably reminded of Lord
Chesterfield's advice to his son— a gentleman smiles, but
never laughs. The rhetorico-moral approach to laughter
tends to stifle its spontaneity— the sense of the ridiculous
33
See "Of the Sense of the Ridiculous," in Outlines of
Moral Philosophy. 5th ed. (Edinburgh, 1829), p. 161.
becomes over-civilized and attenuated, as stress is laid on
improving (utile) rather than pleasurable (dulce) charac
teristics. The progression from Old Comedy to New comedy
is taken a step further in the movement from classical to
neoclassical theories of humor. It took Laurence Sterne
to upset many of the conventional eighteenth-century notions
about the rhetoric of laughter.
Element of Surprise ("Admiratio") Added to That of
Baseness ("Turpitudo1 1 ) : Renaissance Aristotelians
After the long eclipse of the Dark Ages, Aristotle's
influence rose again in sixteenth-century Italy with the
commentaries on the Poetics by Francesco Robortello (1548)
and Vincenzo Maggi (1550). It joined the prior influences
of Horace (Ars poetica). Cicero, Donatus, and the critics of
Terence in shaping Renaissance rhetorical theories of
34
tragedy and comedy. In his essay "On Comedy," Robortello
discusses "Discovery" (or denouement) in the comic plot,
dividing it into five kinds: (1) by signs (inborn or arti
ficial) ; (2) by memory of likeness; (3) by inevitable
reasoning; (4) by paralogism (a dialectical fallacy); (5)
from conjectured likenesses examined (pp. 55-56).
34
Trans. Mervin T. Herrick, in Lauter, pp. 48-63.
The most original contribution to theory of the ridic
ulous made by this group, however, is Maggi's introduction
of the concept of "surprise.1 1 Maggi notes that Aristotle
has not explained the connection between baseness or ugli
ness and laughter. He sets out to prove that "in all ridic
ulous things ugliness or baseness are necessarily joined
with wonder radmiratio] ..." (in Lauter, p. 65). in con
nection with baseness, Maggi notes that a fall or decline
from the normal condition is ridiculous and laughable, which
may be a further foreshadowing of modern incongruity
theories. Moral defects and vices can be traced to "de
formed ratiocination," thus the comic is grounded on a per
ception of illogicality expressed in actions. The irration
al is ridiculous, as in the warped behavior of "humor-
character s" or in the hobby-horsical opinions of the Shandy
family, who are at the mercy of absurd, ingrained "trains
of ideas." Wonder or surprise produced by a departure from
physical, moral, or rational norms (which must be novel,
but not too shocking), is an important element of the comic.
Francis Bacon puts similar emphasis on suddenness in
producing a "Dilatation of the Spirits":
And for Suddenness, it is a great Part of the Matter;
For we see that any Shrewd Turn that lighteth upon
40
Another; Or, any Deformity, &c. moveth Laughter in the
instant; Which after a little time it doth not. So we
cannot laugh at any thing after it is Stale, but whilest
it is New. . . . 35
Novelty, suddenness, and surprise give that shock of delight
whose physical expression is laughter.
Two Great Examples of Prose Comedy:
Don Quixote and Gargantua
I wish now to turn from scholastic discussions of the
ludicrous to look briefly at two great examples of prose
comedy, which shine like beacons of genius in a dark time.
These are Frangois Rabelais' The Histories of Gargantua and
36
Pantaqruel (1533-1535) and Miguel de Cervantes' The Ad-
37
ventures of Don Quixote. Knight of La Mancha (1605).
The comedy of exaggeration,
exuberance. appetite. and
revolt: Rabelais
As a reaction against medieval monasticism, Rabelais1
sprawling burlesque seems to be impregnated with the heady
spirit of the old fertility rituals and saturnalia, obvious
35
Svlva Svlvarum: or. A Natural History. 7th ed.
(London, 1658), VIII, 721.
36
Trans. J. M. Cohen (Baltimore, 1965).
37
Ozell's revision of the translation of Peter Motteux
(New York, 1930).
41
phallic and Bacchic associations mingle with ecclesiastical,
military, and legal satire, and with sheer mad fantasy, the
play of a vigorous pent-up imagination, "pantagruelism,"
says Rabelais, "is a certain jollity of mind, pickled in the
scorn of fortune" (a concoction which Sterne made into
Shandeism, imitating Rabelais explicitly in "Slawkenbergius'
Tale"). The reader is led a merry dance, and often the joke
is at his expense (or aimed at mechanical conventions of
reading) as in the staggering catalogues of ridiculous ob
jects, monuments of comic pedantry, with no more point than
to lure unsuspecting readers into the absurd activity of
perusing them. These verbal tumults express an exuberant
sense of life which can be linked with comic ritual.
This orgy of language in a comic poet is at bottom
another manifestation of the abnormal gluttony and sus
pension of mores that takes place in sex and feasting
during the primitive comic ritual. It may also be ex
plained as a reflection of the comedian's obsession
with concrete, day-to-day, probable life.38
Grotesque feasting, phallic and martial scenes and images,
reminiscent of Old Comedy, tumble over one another in rich
profusion, animated by a spanking comic rhythm which keeps
38
Albert Cook, The Dark voyage and the Golden Mean: A
Philosophy of Comedy (Cambridge, Mass., 1949), p. 158.
All references are based on this edition.
42
the sense of ridiculous novelty on the alert. Sheer irrev
erent "joie de vivre" breaks down the barriers of medieval
melancholy and asceticism; Rabelaisian laughter is a revo
lutionary celebration of freedom from restraint, a reasser
tion of sensual life and illogical imagination. Erich
Auerbach has brilliantly analyzed these effects in a chap-
39
ter of Mimesis entitled "The World in Pantagruel's Mouth."
The forcefully realistic or obscene elements, too, are
made to seethe like an intellectual whirlpool by the
tempo of the presentation; and the ceaseless succession
of allusions, the storms of laughter which such passages
evoke, break through all the ideas of order and decency
which prevailed at the time. (pp. 238-239)
Oddly, the Rabelaisian carnival is intellectually stimulat
ing, although its spirit is that of Dionysian play. Scraps
of curious learning are tossed into the "intellectual
whirlpool," and the very energy with which they are charged
(apart from any intrinsic value they might have) generates
a corresponding mental energy (albeit radical or negative
with regard to scholastic philosophy) in the spectator. As
"whirl-king," Rabelais upsets established ideas of order,
leaving the mind free for sounder human reflections, and he
39
Mimesis: The Representation of Reality in Western
Literature (New York, 1957).
43
encourages his readers to look for a hidden meaning under
all the layers of madcap nonsense. Rabelais tests the
reader's mental agility as well as his comic sense, as
Auerbach illustrates in his analysis of the stylistic and
satiric "tour de force" of Judge Bridoye's defense (Bk. Ill,
chaps, xxxix-xlii):
. . . it is a fireworks display of wit, of juridical
and human experience, of contemporary satire and con
temporary manners and morals, an education in laughter,
in rapid shifts between a multiplicity of viewpoints.
(Mimesis, p. 240)
"Whirl is king" indeed, and energy and variety of ridiculous
invention, combination, and exaggeration are the principles
of Rabelais' fantastic performance. The total effect aimed
at is a freshening and liberating of the reader's mental
attitudes.
. . . Rabelais' entire effort is directed toward playing
with things and with the multiplicity of their possible
aspects; upon tempting the reader out of his customary
and definite way of regarding things, by showing him
phenomena in utter confusion; upon tempting him out into
the great ocean of the world, in which he can swim free
ly, though it be at his own peril. (Mimesis. p. 242)
The comedy of romantic illusions
versus realism: Cervantes
While Sterne's "Slawkenbergius' Tale" is only a par
tially successful foray into the Rabelaisian mode, his
entire concept of hobby-horse characterization, and of
44
contrasted pairs (e.g., Walter shandy and Uncle Toby,
Uncle Toby and Trim) is derived from The Adventures of Don
Quixote, in acknowledging his debt to both these comic
masters, he stresses the pre-eminence, for him, of Cervantes
and defines Cervantic humor as "describing silly and trif-
40
ling events with the circumstantial pomp of great ones."
Cervantes attacks a bygone code of chivalry which existed
chiefly in romances, as Sterne belabors the dead donkey of
scholasticism— although the speculative habit of mind does
still survive in certain circles. No comedy better illus
trates Plato's concept of "vain conceit" than Don Quixote.
Basically its humor, which is a combination of ridiculous
and pathetic, can be reduced to a series of incongruities
between ideal and real, between idealistic and practical,
between character and action, between the hero's subjective
idea of himself and the reader's objective idea of him.
All these contrasts between high and low throw the dispari
ty into relief, causing laughter. Yet the futility of Don
Quixote's ideals and ambitions is not merely a ridiculous
aberration, it takes on a dreamlike quality; the central
40
The Letters of Laurence Sterne to his Most intimate
Friends, ed. Wilbur L. Cross (New York, 1904), I, xlix,
184.
45
figure represents universal truths of the human condition
which are also marked by perplexing incongruities. Well
might Sterne choose Cervantes as his master. This mingling
of laughter with sympathy and underlying seriousness, this
blend of romantic appearance and mundane reality, this
laughter at humanity itslef, heralds the simultaneous rise
of the modern novel, as literary genre, and of modern
humor, as a response to life marked by a curious ambivalence
of emotional, contemplative, and philosophical overtones.
Theory of Humors. Humor-Comedy, and Wit-Comedy
in another sense— medical and psychological— the con
cept of "humor" had been evolving throughout the Middle
Ages, emerging crudely in the personified virtues and
Vices of the Morality plays, and, in more fashionable guise,
in the comedies of Ben Jonson. The original meaning of
"humor" included physical heat or moisture, and humor-
character was supposed to be determined by the proportions
of certain liquids in the body, in his lecture on "Wit and
Humor," Coleridge traces the word to the "science of
Pathology":
They [says Coleridge] considered the human body as
the repository of four humours, viz., blood, phlegm, bile
or gall, and the black bile, and according to the
46
predominance of either of these they believed the
character to be sanguine, phlegmatic, choleric, or
melancholy.41
Robert Burton's Anatomy of Melancholy (1621-38), a
serio-comic heaping-up of medical and psychological lore,
provides an amusingly erudite account of the physiological
causes of laughter, grafting rhetorical theories of the
42
Ancients onto medieval "humor" theory.
Aristotle mentions the comic mask, which is "ugly and
distorted, but does not imply pain," as a type of the ludi
crous. These masks imply rigid stereotypes; the characters
in Greek comedy were not individualized in the modern sense,
but represented easily recognizable qualities. Theoprastus'
prose "Characters" were even more concentrated abstracts of
moral behavior, organized with rigid (almost comic) consis
tency for illustrative purposes. The English characters of
43
Earle and Overbury, modelled on Theophrastus' style, are
41
Coleridge's Miscellaneous Criticism, ed. Thomas
Middleton Raysor (Cambridge, Mass., 1936), p. 112. All
references are to this edition.
42
Ed. Floyd Dell and Paul Jordan-Smith (New York,
1960), p. 362.
43
See The Characters of Theophrastus. trans. R. C.
Jebb, ed. J. E. Sandys (London, 1909).
47
epigrammatic, witty, and condensed portraits of social
types, parallel to "humor-characters" on the comic stage.
These humor-characters (such as Asper and Mitis in the
Induction to jonson's Every Man Out of His Humor [1599])
were evolved from traditional types in the New Comedies of
Terence (e.g., "Miles Gloriosus" and "Senex"), and from the
rigorously simplistic characterization of the Morality
Plays, where the world was divided into two armies, black
and white, the vices and virtues, in this drama, the
struggle for souls was externalized, and there was no ap
proximation to modern psychological realism. The religious
values upon which Morality Plays were founded, their
didactic purpose, and the simple-mindedness of the folk-
audience favored a deterministic approach to character.
Medieval "humor" theory could be naturally harnessed to the
portrayal of vices, although it placed morality on uncon
trollable physical foundations.
Sterne's hobby-horse characters are of a subtler breed,
deriving from "humor" comedy, by way of Cervantes and
Locke's associationism. They show the traditional bent of
riding hell-for-leather after an "id£e fixe" or "ruling
passion," but they also seem fully human, paradoxically
more so by reason of their futile "hobbies." Humor
48
undergoes a process of modulation between Swift's savage
satire and Sterne's gentle whimsy. Edwin Muir compares
Sterne's comic characters with Shakespeare's and claims
both have vaulted into a realm of universal humanity, far
above "humor" characters in scope of suggestion. "They are
not figures of comedy in a picture of society, but naturals
44
of humour in a world of universal forces.”
The "humor" characters in jonson's comedies do not
develop (as prince Hal, for example, does in Henry IV),
because they have no internal dynamism. They are simply
motivated toward the pursuit of fortune along predetermined
lines of innate humors. They are flat one-dimensional char
acters, dependent on plot as the dance that will set them
in motion. There is no tendency for them to grow and seem
to take the reins of action out of the author's hands, al
though a central figure may cast a giant shadow over the
action, as volpone does, in jonson's plays, the physical
basis of "humor" is retained, but the corrective thrust of
the comedy is aimed at those affected "humors" which repre
sent moral deformity or warping of character. The
44
Essays on Literature and society (London, 1949),
p. 56.
49
bluff Asper is made the mouthpiece for Jonson's "humor"
theory:
ASPER:
Why, Humour (as 'tis 'ens',) we thus define it
To be a quality of aire or water,
And in it selfe holds these two properties,
Moisture and fluxure . . .
. . . So in every humane body,
The choller, melancholy, flegme, and bloud,
By reason that they flow continually
in some one part, and are not continent,
Receive the name of Humours. Now thus farre
It may, by Metaphore, apply it selfe
Unto the generail disposition:
As when some one peculiar quality
Doth so possesse a man, that it doth draw
All his affects, his spirits, and his powers,
In their confluctions, all to runne one way,
This may be truly said to be a Humour.
CORDATUS:
He speakes pure truth now, if an idiot
Have but an apish or phantasticke strain,
It is his Humour!
ASPER:
Well I will scourge those apes;
And to these courteous eyes oppose a mirrour,
As large as is the stage, whereon we act:
Where they shall see the times deformitie
Anatomiz'd in every nerve, and sinnew, ^
With constant courage, and contempt of feare.
in its fashionable form, "humor" seems to have been made the
45
Induction to Every Man out of His Humour, in Ben
jonson. ed. c. H. Herford and Percy Simpson, III (Oxford,
1927), 431-432.
50
license for odd or eccentric behavior, and it was such vain
deviations that aroused Ben jonson's ire.
Henry Fielding agrees that "the only source of the
true ridiculous . . . is affectation," and names vanity or
46
hypocrisy as its causes. For Fielding, the essence of the
ridiculous lies in the surprise which accompanies the
penetration of a pretentious moral disguise (p. ix). (This
view may be regarded as a latent form of the moral incon
gruity theory.) Fielding departs from the simple Aristo
telian notion of "baseness" on moral grounds. The ridic
ulous lies in incongruity between affected "humor" and real
character (pp. ix-x).
With the re-opening of the theatres in 1660, after
twenty years' closure under the Commonwealth, Restoration
"Wit-Comedy" came to the fore. There were still a few
practitioners of Jonsonian humor-comedy, notably Thomas
Shadwell, whom Dryden pilloried in "Mac Flecknoe." Edward
47
Niles Hooker distinguishes two chief varieties of "humor"
46
Author's preface to The History of the Adventures of
Joseph Andrews, signet Classic (New York, 1961), p. viii.
47
"Humour in the Age of Pope," HLQ. XI, No. 4 (August
1948), 363.
51
in the Restoration period. The first, a violent passion,
struck a critical observer as "a powerful individual in-
48
clination, 'a Crookedness of the Mind, 1 a singularity
with deep emotional roots"; the second seemed '"a fainter or
weaker passion,' without any rule but the present whim';
. a toyish conceit,' or a 'wilfull fansie.'" The first
kind sets the humorous tone of Jonson and Swift, the second
that of Goldsmith and Sterne.
A lively debate sprang up between Dryden and Shadwell,
who used their prefaces as sounding-boards for rival
theories of "Wit-Comedy" and "Humor-Comedy, " with the argu
ment centered on which genre was the more difficult to
write and therefore the greater art. Dryden defends wit in
48
Samuel Butler's Character of a "A Humorist" may serve
to illustrate the scornful seventeenth-century attitude.
For Butler, humor is "commonly some out-lying Whimsie of
Bedlam"; while the Humorist is associated with the Extrem
ist, the Quack, the virtuoso, and the Zealot (all favorite
targets of conservative satire) . Butler's definition ex
presses, with peculiar virulence, the Renaissance-
Aristotelian idea of the ludicrous as mental deformity (cf.
Maggi) .
"Humor," he writes, "is but a Crookedness of the Mind,
a disproportioned Swelling of the Brain, that draws the
Nourishment from the other Parts, to stuff an ugly and de
formed Crup-Shoulder ..." See Characters. ed. A. R.
Waller (Cambridge, 1908), pp. 138-139.
52
these terms:
Some enemies of repartee have observed to us, that there
is a great latitude in their characters, which are made
to speak it; and that it is easier to write wit than
humour; because, in the characters of humour, the poet
is confined to make the person speak what is only proper
to it; whereas, all kind of wit is proper in the charac
ter of a witty person. But, by their favour, there are
as different characters in wit as in folly. Neither is
all kind of wit proper in the mouth of every ingenious
person.49
Shadwell, rather naively, argues that the invention and
consistent deployment of "humor-characters" calls for more
art than the elaboration of plot-design, and that the two
skills cannot be performed by the same man in the same
50
play. Dryden is more ambitious in this respect, believing
that humor and wit can be combined in comedy.
I will not deny [he says], but that I approve most the
mixed way of comedy; that which is neither all wit, nor
all humour, but the result of both. ... I would have
the characters well chosen, and kept distant from inter
fering with each other . . . But X would have more of
the urbana. venusta. salsa, faceta, and the rest which
Quintilian reckons up as the ornaments of wit; and these
are extremely wanting in Ben Jonson. As for repartee,
in particular; as it is the very soul of conversation,
so it is the greatest grace of comedy, where it is
49
Preface to An Evening's Love (1671), in The Works of
John Dryden. ed. Sir Walter Scott, rev. George Saintsbury
(Edinburgh, 1883), h i , 245.
50
See Preface to The Sullen Lovers, in Critical Essays
of the Seventeenth Century, ed. J. E. Spingarn (Oxford,
1908), II, 149.
53
proper to the characters. (preface to An Evening's Love,
pp. 244-245)
Shadwell argues that both wit and judgment were required
in Jonson's "correct and well-govern'd Comedies/' but that
judgment is the decisive quality in comedy as in life.
"Fancy rough-draws, but judgement smooths and finishes;
nay, judgement does in deed comprehend wit, for no man can
51
have that who has not wit." This statement seems to
apply more to the aesthetic and moral structure of comedy
than to its power to provoke laughter. Dryden keeps a
clearer view of laughter and pleasure as central to both
forms of comedy. It is the laughter at folly in humor-
comedy which is morally improving. The end of comedy,
which does not deal with serious crimes, is pleasure, and
the pleasure of wit-comedy is probably intenser than that
52
of the humor variety. The comedy of "humours," being
limited to a gallery of set-types, tends to become dull and
51
preface to The Humorists, in Critical Essays, ed.
Spingarn, II, 159.
52
”... the business of the [comic] poet is to make
you laugh . . . This being then established, that the first
end of comedy is delight, and instruction only the second;
it may reasonably be inferred, that comedy is not so much
obliged to the punishment of faults which it represents, as
tragedy ..." (preface to An Evening1s Love. pp. 248-249)
54
repetitious, like "twice-cooked cabbage" (preface to
An Evening's Love, p. 242).
In their published correspondence, William Congreve
and John Dennis continued the discussion of humor and wit
in comedy. Congreve begins his letter to Dennis, entitled
53
"Concerning Humour in Comedy" (1695) by stating the dif
ference between humor and wit and the difficulty of defining
them. "Humor-characters" need not lack wit, but the wit
should be appropriate in each case. Jonson had singled out
affected humors to bear the brunt of his attack, but
Congreve takes care to distinguish between "Humour,1 1
54
"Habit," and "Affectation." Congreve's definition of
"Humour" as an aspect of character, detaches it from its
(medieval physical base, modifies Jonson's theory of affecta-
i
tion, and gives it a more modern look:
But true Humour cannot be shewn without a Dissection
of Nature, and a Narrow Search to discover the first
Seeds from whence it has its Root and growth. . . .
I take it to be A singular and unavoidable manner of
53
In Spingarn, III, 242.
54
"Humour is the Life, Affectation the Picture. . . .
Humour is from Nature, Habit from Custom, and Affectation
from industry. Humour shews us as we are, Habit shews us
as we appear under a forcible impression. Affectation
shews what we would be under a voluntary Disguise. ' *
(In Spingarn, ill, 245-246)
55
doing or saving any thing. Peculiar and Natural to
one Man only, by which his Speech and Actions are
distinguish'ed from those of other men. (Spingarn,
ed., ill, 248)
According to this definition, humor resides in eccentricity,
in peculiar mannerisms of speech, posture, or action, rather
than in standardized, universally recognizable types of be
havior. This view of humor enables a sympathetic response
to replace scorn; harmless eccentricities may be lovable
and picturesque as well as amusing, in his hobby-horse
characters, Sterne fuses the odd with the sentimental to
create that precarious balance of humor and pathos which
distinguishes the Shandean style.
John Dennis does not add much to the theory of humor,
as he is chiefly concerned with poetry, and the aesthetics
of stage-comedy. His emphasis is interesting, however, as
he prefers low humor-comedy, which is more realistic, to
high wit-comedy, which he considers over-sophisticated and
degenerate. He says, "the grossest touches which are in
nature, will please the men of sense, more than the most
55
delicate strokes which are out of it." Dennis gives five
55
"A Large Account of the Taste in poetry, and the
Causes of the Degeneracy of it," Letter to the Honourable
George Granville, Esq. (1702) , in The criti cal Works of
John Dennis, ed. Edward Niles Hooker (Baltimore, 1939),
I, 282.
56
grounds for preferring humor to wit in comedy; (1) it is
harder to write, depending on judgment, where wit depends on
fancy, and therefore more artistic; (2) humor is a passion
and occasions action, which is the "Life and Soul of the
Theatre"; (3) humor "distinguishes the characters of Comedy
better than Wit," and is therefore (4) more agreeable, as
more rational, than wit; and (5) humor, as "subordinate
Passion,” is closer to the poetic essence of comedy than wit
is (p. 282). Finally, humor is to be preferred because it
has more of the ridiculous (exposure of baseness) than wit-
comedy, which at this time (1702) was becoming more senti
mental and seductive. Basing his argument on Horace's pre
cept that the arts must always be "delightful and instruc
tive," Dennis prefers the bawdry and obscenity of low comedy
(which are funny and shocking at the same time) to the
amorous sentimentality of high comedy, which he considers
more likely to corrupt. Low humor is characterized as
blunter, more masculine, and closer to real life than wit.
At mid-point in the eighteenth century, Oliver Goldsmith is
still protesting against the cult of refinement (love and
wit) which, he says, has ruined comedy:
When a thing is humorously described ... we compare the
absurdity of the character represented with our own, and
57
triumph in our conscious superiority. . . . Thus, then,
the pleasure we receive from wit turns on the admira
tion of another; that which we feel from humour, centres
in the admiration of ourselves ... in other words,
the subject of humour must be low. 56
During the first half of the eighteenth century, a
split occurs between the passionate "humor" of jonsonian
comedy, as displayed in Swift's satire, and the whimsical
"humor" of unstable fancies, as in Sterne's sentimental hu
mor. As E. N. Hooker shows, the English attitude to "hu
mors" changes during the period from scorn and ridicule to
amused tolerance and interest (HLQ. XI, 362-363). Vices,
of course, are still condemned, but follies are regarded
with a new psychological interest, which Hooker traces to
Pascal, La Bruy&re, and La Rochefoucauld (p. 370). Follow
ing Jonson, Judith Drake defines humor as "an apish manner
of imitation, a manner of conforming to fashion or example
which is forced against the natural bent of our own
57
temper." The light-brained poseur, who veers with every
wind of fashion, appears more ridiculous than the man who
is true to his inborn individuality. The vaguer concept
56
inquiry into the Present State of polite Learning
(1750), ch. ix, quoted in Greig, p. 239.
57
An Essay in Defence of the Female Sex (1696), pp. 66-
67, in Hooker, HLQ. XI, 372.
58
of a "ruling passion” also supports the notion of individ
uality, since it is believed to have been ordained by God
and to provide needful diversification in society. The
variety and richness of English humor became a source of
national pride, attributed to various sources, such as
the damp climate (an atmosphere favorable to melancholy
and whimsy), the liberal British constitution, and innate
genius. Hooker notes that the whole relation of the indi
vidual to society was changing and with it the concept of
humor. Addison, Temple, Steele, and Theobald all claim
a superiority for English humor based on the "unconstrained"
growth of original characters (see HLQ. XI, 375-380). As
a staunch Whig, Joseph Addison had created a model English
man in the genial old Tory squire Sir Roger de Coverley.
In the character of Uncle Toby, Sterne blends the new
enjoyment of native "humors," with more than a trace of the
old medieval variety.
His humour [Tristram tells the reader] was of that
particular species, which does honour to our atmosphere;
and I should have made no scruple of ranking him amongst
one of the first-rate productions of it, had not there
appeared too many strong lines in it of a family-likeness,
which shewed that he derived the singularity of his temper
more from blood, than either wind or water, or any modifi
cations or combinations of them whatever . . . (l,xxi,65)
The "humors" of the Shandean males are hereditary
59
peculiarities which give to each personality a comical
twist. Sterne inherits and incorporates older varieties
of humor, and his blood-ties are not limited to English
writers; his temperamental affinities lie as much with
Rabelais, Cervantes, and a host of French writers of the
sixteenth and seventeenth centuries, as with Burton, jonson,
or Swift. The key to Sterne's hobby-horse mechanism is as
much Lockean associationism, as the rustier one of Jonsonian
comedy. Sterne is playing with the humor tradition, a sign
that it is played out. Sterne himself inaugurates a new
era of sentimental humor.
Superiority Theory; Hobbes. Bain. Ludovici, Rapp
Thomas Hobbes f e naturalistic account of the nameless
passion of laughter is the most famous version of the
"superiority theory" which relates laughter to aggressive
instincts and socio-intellectual superiority. As honorary
philosopher to the Restoration court of Charles ll, Hobbes
had an opportunity to exercise his powers of observation
on wit-contests and intrigues among a group of brilliant,
worldly courtiers. Laughter, for Hobbes, existed not so
much in the jest as in the rivalry behind it.
Men laugh often, especially such as are greedy of
applause from everything they do well, at their own
60
actions performed ever so little beyond their own ex
pectations; as also at their own jests: and in this
case it is manifest, that the passion of laughter
proceedeth from a sudden conception of some ability in
himself that laugheth. Also men laugh at the infirmities
of others, by comparison wherewith their own abilities
are set off and illustrated. Also men laugh at jests.
the wit whereof always consisteth in the elegant discov
ering and conveying to our minds some absurdity of anoth
er; and in this case also the passion of laughter pro
ceedeth from the sudden imagination of our own odds and
eminency . . . I may therefore conclude that the passion
of laughter is nothing else but sudden glory arising from
some sudden conception of some eminency in ourselves,
by comparison with the infirmity of others, or with our
own formerly . . .58
The degree of self-interest suggested by Hobbes fe definition
indicates that this is a social, rather than a literary,
definition of laughter. Hobbes observes laughter in a
highly civilized setting, yet discerns in it strong traces
of primitive emotion, its origins, he suggests, lie in con
flict and ritual, and its modern forms express that quicken
ing of vitality which accompanies survival and triumph.
Laughter also expresses relief in a challenge overcome,
or a situation improved. Hobbes's theory, which is one of
the first modern psychological interpretations of laughter,
stresses subjective and emotional elements bound up with
58
"Human Nature, or The Fundamental Elements of
Policy," in The English Works of Thomas Hobbes, ed, sir
William Molesworth (London, 1840), IV, 46-47.
61
the individual's fears, anxieties, desires, ambitions, and
satisfactions. Laughter celebrates successful participation
in a game with high stakes, not the dispassionate amusement
of bystanders who have left their emotions at home.
Restoration wit-comedy leaned heavily on repartee (the
scoring of points against a rival in rapid verbal ex
changes) , and intrigue (the outwitting and double-crossing
of a rival with love or money as a prize). Hobbes's idea
was popular because it seemed to support prevalent fashions.
59
As Thomas H. Fujimura remarks,
the theory of laughter accepted by dramatists like
Etherege and Wycherley was, after all, the egoistic one
expounded by Hobbes, according to which men laughed
from a sudden realization of their superiority over
someone else. (Fujimura, p. 9)
Fujimura also notes Hobbes's remarks on the intellectual
pleasure of metaphors and striking similitudes, which is
a feature of wit-comedy.00
Hobbes, as Fujimura points out, added the Aristotelian
concept of pleasurable mental stimulation and exercise to
59
The Restoration Comedy of Wit (Princeton, 1952).
All references are based on this edition.
60
The Whole Art of Rhetoric, in The English Works.
VI, 496, quoted in Fujimura, pp. 30-31.
62
61
those of novelty and surprise in wit. Fujimura stresses
the function of sheer mental energy— naturalistic and
artistic— in the interchange of wit between characters, and
by extension, between the dramatist and his audience.
He writes:
According to this point of view, the experience of wit
is a titillation of the mind arising from the novelty
of the idea (a similitude, paradox, antithesis, etc.);
and the aesthetic pleasure is due as much to the excita
tion of the mind as to the intuition of new knowledge.
(Fujimura, pp. 32-33)
Fujimura regards wit-comedy as predominantly hedonic and
playful, yet "more intellectual and aesthetic than sen
sual"— however, it cannot be denied that the plays of
Etherege, Wycherley, Vanbrugh, and Farquhar accord with
Hobbes's theory, in that rivalry and sex-antagonism lie
behind the rapier-like thrusts of mental energy, which give
pleasure, not in a social void reserved for aesthetic
values, but in the competitive assertion of superior in
tellectual vitality.
Alexander Bain (The Emotions and the Will. 1859)
62
accepts Hobbes's notion of superiority, but turns the
61Cf. Bacon's remarks on novelty and suddenness in
Svlva Svlvarum. cited above, pp. 39-40.
62
"Not in physical effects alone, but in everything
63
focus to the other side of the coin— "degradation."
"The occasion of the ludicrous is the degradation of some
person or interest possessing dignity in circumstances
that excite no other strong emotion" (2d ed., p. 248).
Bain points out that the incongruous is not laughable
in itself. "The Comic, in fact, starts from the Serious."
There must be a situation of imposed restraint, of dignity
or ceremony, which is degraded by collision with something
trivial.
It is the coerced form of seriousness and solemnity,
without the reality, that gives us that stiff position
from which a contact with triviality or vulgarity re
lieves us to our uproarious delight. (1st ed., p. 283)
Decadent dignity, "hollow pretensions," sham, vanity, and
hypocrisy "are among the things that commonly induce
laughter, when brought into the embrace of meanness and
degrading inferiorities" (1st ed., p. 284). Those who find
reverence "irksome," are particularly prone to resort to
comic degradation for revenge and relief. In Bain's words:
The mirthful is the aspect of ease, freedom, abandon,
and animal spirits. . . . It is always a gratifying
deliverance to pass from the severe to the easy side
where a man can achieve a stroke of superiority, in surpass
ing or discomfiting a rival, is the disposition to laughter
apparent." (Bain, 1st ed., p. 153)
64
of affairs; and the comic conjunction is one form of
transition. (p. 284)
In so doing, the liberated laugher triumphs over the false
show that had asserted its claim to subdue and suppress his
spirits.
The physiological and anthropological investigations
of Herbert Spencer and Charles Darwin seemed to lend con
firmation to Hobbes's theory, but these will be dealt with
under "Proliferation of Modern Theories." It may be ap
propriate here, however, to mention the work of two twenti
eth-century philosophers of laughter who follow, or adapt,
63
Hobbes's theory of superiority— Anthony Ludovici and
64
Albert Rapp. in the "aggressive-laughter" theories of
Ludovici and Rapp (Freud's "tendency-wit" posits aggression
in a subtler form), echoes of the jungle still linger in
human laughter. Ludovici bases his theory on Hobbes's
concept of self-glory, and sees laughter as the expression
of "superior adaptation" to life (a Darwinian concept). He
divides this self-centered laughter into three kinds:
63
The Secret of Laughter (London, 1932).
64
"The Dawn of Humor," classical Journal. XLIII, No. 5
(February 1948), 275-280; The Origins of Wit and Humor
(New York, 1951).
65
It may be a purely subjective state, unprovoked by any
external object . . . or it may be a state of mind ex
cited by a comparison . . . Or it may be a bluff laugh
. . . pretended expression of superior adaptation when
one is really feeling inferior. (p. 62)
According to Darwin, "natural selection" favors the species
with superior adaptation, a concept summed up in the popular
phrase "survival of the fittest." Friedrich Nietzsche's
65
Thus Spake Zarathustra spread the gospel of the superman,
who was superior in every way, particularly in ruthlessness.
I want to teach men [says the prophet-surrogate] the
sense of their existence, which is the Superman, the
lightning out of the dark cloud— man. . . . (p. 12)
I make for my goal, I follow my course; over the
loitering and tardy will I leap. Thus let my on-going
be their down-going! (p. 16)
Zarathustran laughter is, in effect, the cruel expression
of conscious superiority and triumph.
Ludovici's marriage of Darwin and Nietzsche produces
some curious results which he is bold enough to take to
their logical conclusions. Treating laughter (or the smile):
as merely a facial grimace, and comparing man to cats, dogsj
!
serpents, and horses (as an animal with "superior adapta
tion"), he substitutes the phrase "show teeth” (the primi
tive aggressive gesture) for "smile" or "laugh." "To
65
Ed. Manuel Komroff, trans. Thomas Common (New York,
1936).
66
display teeth . . . is to make a claim of superior adapta
tion" (p. 70). If one accepts this view, man's sense of
humor is equated with his ferocity (which might be true of
certain satirists like Swift!) and his eminence in the
evolutionary race is due to the superiority of his arsenal
and his readiness to use it. Although man still snarls,
he has, of course, graduated to more deadly weapons than
mere teeth, and the smile has become a sublimated form of
aggression (pp. 71-72). This theory seems to have a certain
grim relevance to Nazi-dominated Europe in the 1930's, but
less relevance to what we understand as "humor.” Ludovici
argues, however, that laughter has become a sign of "supe
rior adaptation in general" and has lost its "original rela
tion to mere warfare, or the threat of warfare" (pp. 71-72).
The sense of superiority behind laughter has itself become
attenuated, leaving a Hobbesian residue of "sudden glory"
(p. 72). With the Hobbesian "sense of eminence," Ludovici
combines two other notions of laughter, which were implied
or touched on by Hobbes; first, the sense of social soli
darity, or identification with group strength (see p. 80);
second, compensation for the sense of inferiority (see pp.
108-109). Superior adaptation naturally involves status,
competition, and adjustment to a social group.
67
As Aristotle and Cicero pointed out, intensity of emo
tion— such as that generated in actual fighting by hatred
and fear— would preclude the lighter mood of the ludicrous.
Ludovici, however, despises the compromise between pain and
pleasure, sympathy and disgust, which Plato found at the
root of laughter, as it weakens the will to action and
power. For him, humorous laughing at troubles is not a way
to solve them; moreover, a superman does not laugh at him
self.
66
in a recent article, Angus Wilson has depreciated the
English sense ofhumor from an oddly comparable point of
view. He describes humor as a historical "civilizing
force," but considers that the progressive refinement of
humor, which started in the seventeenth century, has gone
too far.
. . . even in these early stages the new sense of humor
was a gelding weapon, turning Restoration wit into the
sentimental humor of She Stoops to Conquer . . . and
toning down the extravagant baroque style of seventeenth
century prose writers into the sweet, vapid elegance
of Addison and Steele.
Ever since then it has become an increasing enemy
of the exciting, the new, the serious or the extraordi
nary in the arts, for if in politics and society a sense
of humor means blinkered compromise, in the arts it means
66
"Only Fools Laugh at Their Woes," Saturday Evening
Post, CCX30CIX(May 21, 1966), 12, 14.
68
ghastly good taste, or Philistine academicism. . . .
Sense of humor seizes on whatever is fierce in satire
and invective, or whatever is crazy in farce, and tries
to make these elements "ordinary" or "lovable." (p. 12)
As author of Anglo-Saxon Attitudes. Wilson is primarily a
social observer with no philosophical ax to grind; but the
modern Hobbesian must face the fact that gentle or "com
placent" humorous laughter cannot simply be brushed aside
as inconsistent with theories of laughter as aggression.
Delving into pre-history, Albert Rapp gives stark, un
compromising statement to the aggressive theory of laughter:
"the single source from which all modern forms of wit and
humor have developed is the roar of triumph in an ancient
jungle duel" (Origins, p. 21). Rapp, who is determined to
cut through the confusion surrounding laughter (simplifica
tion seems to be characteristic of most aggression theories)
sees three branches stemming from "this antediluvian
'thrashing laughter.'" They are: "(1) ridicule; (2) the
contest of wits (roughly 'wit'); and (3) suppression
laughter, i.e., the laughter of victory over one's repres
sor." He adds; "They are all duels. Laughter is always of
victory. All modern'wit and humor*can be explained in terms
of these three" (CJ, XLIII, No. 5, 279). Rapp regards
humor as a kind of "contract" between ridicule and love, "a
69
device to retain laughter for its pleasure, in spite of its
hostile origin" (same, p. 279).
While Ludovici regards laughter as originating in a
67
threat of aggression, Rapp, following G. W. Crile, thinks
it can be explained as a "swift demobilization" of "'ener
gizing secretions'" after a tense struggle (origins, p.
68
24), a view in line with Herbert Spencer's and John
69
Dewey's physiological accounts. He notes that experiments
have located the motor centres of both laughter and tears
in the hypothalmus, and that both represent forms of
nervous relief.
But since laughter is relief for the victorious, and
weeping is relief for the beaten, it is clear that
there is a duel involved, and that the aggressive im
pulses underlie it all. (Origins, p. 24)
Rapp's remarks on wit as contest bear out Hobbes's defini
tion, but by telescoping the various gradations from
physical to intellectual, he throws the aggressive element
67
Man— An Adaptive Mechanism (New York, 1916), p. 332.
68
"The Physiology of Laughter," in Essays. Scientific,
political, and Speculative (New York and London, 1916), vol.
II. All references are based on this edition.
69
"The Theory of Emotion," Psychological Review, I,
No. 6 (November 1894), 553-569.
70
70
in-bo high relief.
Comedy as Social Corrective:
jonson, Molifere. Meredith. Bergson
A punitive or aggressive notion of laughter and a
sense of social solidarity lie behind the idea of comedy
as social corrective. This idea, based on Horace's maxim
in Ars poetica that poetry must be "utile et dulce," keeps
cropping up throughout the Renaissance, often with accre
tions from Aristotle's theory of catharsis (misinterpreted
as a form of moral purification) and from the rhetorical de
fenses of Terence and Plautus. Whenever comedy came under
attack from Puritan enemies of the theatre (as in England
from 1580 to 1640 and 1670 to 1710), its champions took
their stand on the moral usefulness of ridicule in exposing
vices to corrective laughter. Thus Lucio Olimpio Giraldi
upheld the moral worth of Terence:
Terence's intention was to show the ugliness of foul
things so that men would abstain from them, not so
that they would follow them; and to propose to them
the praiseworthy and virtuous and honest ones so that
70
"The 'brainy' branch of the laughter family, 'wit, '
is so often cruel, aggressive, and 'rapier-like.' It is in
tellectual, but it has stayed coldly intellectual, in some
of its popular modern forms, like repartee, it is merely
sophisticated savagery; not much less barbarous than its an
cestor in the jungle, the bloody duel of hairy arms."
(Rapp, Origins, p. 92)
71
they might embrace them and adorn themselves with them.
Just as tragedy purges men's minds, through terror and
pity, and induces men to abstain from acting wickedly,
so comedy, by means of laughter and jokes, calls men
to an honest private life.71
Similar definitions of comic laughter as moral criticism are
72 73
made by Giovanni Trissino and Antonio Minturno. The
latter unequivocally condemns "pleasure without reason,1 1
and prefers to regard comedy as "reason with pleasure," the
pleasure coming from imitation of ridiculous manners and the
exercise of moral criticism.
71
Prom Ragiomento in difesa di Terentio. trans. Bernard
L. Weinberg, in Lauter, pp. 39-40.
72
Trissino lays emphasis on "the teaching of comedy,
whose function is not to elicit laughter at all costs, with
all means, but only with those which are its own, that is,
by biting, criticizing, and making fun of the ugly and of
the corrupted." (See Lauter, p. 45)
73
Minturno draws his examples from the conventions of
New Comedy:
"The New Comic poets imitate the life of private persons, so
as to induce everyone to correct the manners which he sees
criticized in others, and to imitate those which he sees ap
proved . . . Although most of the time they show us bad man
ners, they do it to make us see what to avoid because we
have a tendency, because of a defect in our making, to aban
don ourselves to the desires of the body and to the things
which give pleasure without reason because they are easy,
sweet, and ready; we do not do that for virtue, to which
the road is hard and difficult." (See Lauter, p. 78)
Ben jonson's Asper announces:
My strict hand
Was made to seize on vice, and with a gripe,
Squeeze out the humour of such spongy natures
As lick up every idle vanity.
(Quoted in Lauter, p. 118)
In Timber, or Discoveries (1640) , Jonson repeats the Greek
idea of comic playwrights as teachers, and places instruc
tion above delight in the aims of comedy; he considers
laughter as commonly degrading— "a fowling for the people's
delight, or their fooling" (in Lauter, p. 139). Shadwell,
in his preface to The Humorists, announces:
My design was in it to reprehend some of the vices and
Follies of the Age, which I take to be the most proper
and most useful way of writing Comedy. (In Spingarn,
II, 153)
Shadwell equates humor-comedy with Satire, and considers
satiric laughter a much more effective punishment than
hatred or death (same, pp. 153-154). Dryden, himself a most
versatile professional entertainer, puts delight above in
struction as the end of comedy (see above, p. 53) .
Moliere, on the other hand, adapts Aristotelian argu
ments to his own defense in prefaces and critical essays,
glorifying comedy as a moral agent, and asserting that
satires have more reformative power than sermons, in the
preface to Tartuffe (1669), he writes:
73
To expose vices to the ridicule of all the world is
a severe blow to them. Reprehensions are easily
suffered, but not so ridicule. People do not mind 74
being wicked; but they object to being made ridiculous.
The social assumptions of Moliere's comic sense can be dis
cerned behind this statement which reflects the vanity of
the society he portrayed. Aristotelian and Horatian atti
tudes blend in Moliere's critical theory. Comedy is "an
ingenious poem, which, by its agreeable teaching, seeks to
75
point out the faults of mankind" (same, p. 158). The
morality of Moliere's comedy is based on social "raison,"
and the laughter of ridicule is directed at socially or
morally inferior behavior, and aimed to deflate any kind of
excess. This philosophy of the ridiculous involves the
74
Trans. Henri Van Laun, in Lauter, p. 157.
75
Jean Jacques Rousseau, in his Lettre a D'Alembert,
rejects the morally corrective theory of comedy and accuses
Moliere of corrupting, rather than refining, the public
taste. He writes: ". . . quand Moliere corrigea la scene
comique, il attaqua des modes, des ridicules; mais il ne
choqua pas pour cela le gout du public, il le suivit ou le
developpa, comme fit aussi Corneille de son cote." Rousseau
argues that the passions of each nation are reflected in its
arts. Thus, "Un peuple badin veut de la plaisanterie et du
ridicule," just as the Romans craved bread and circuses.
Each nation, says Rousseau, takes pleasure in the kind of
entertainment which encourages its propensities instead of
modifying them. See Complete Works of Rousseau, ed. Dalibon
(Paris, 1824), il, 26-27. Quoted in Ralph Piddington, The
Psychology of Laughter (New York, 1963), p. 165.
74
critical functions of moral judgment and discrimination; it
applies the standards of taste and "raison" to the behavior
of the individual in society. The anonymous author of the
"Letter on Tartuffe" (1667)— who may be Moliere himself—
states his case with almost syllogistic intensity:
The ridiculous is therefore the exterior and palpable
form which the providence of nature has connected to
everything senseless, so that we can perceive it and be
constrained to flee it. in order to know the ridiculous,
one must know the good sense, the default of which it
signifies, and to see in what that consists.76
In other words, Moliere's comedy is to serve as a training
and sharpening of the moral intelligence in detecting ego
istic, solipsistic, dull, narrow, or warped thinking which
77
lies behind much ridiculous appearance and behavior. De
spite Moliere's greater wit and subtlety, there is a sense
in which these aims approximate Jonson's attack on "humors."
Moliere attacks avarice (in L'Avare) and hypochondria (in
Le Malade imaginaire) together with all kinds of behavior
76
Trans. Mrs. George Calingaert and Paul Lauter, in
Lauter, p. 147.
77
Cf. Vincenzo Maggi: "The ignorance of a deformed
disposition is that which is born of deformed ratiocination.
This clearly has many species: diligence paid with too
much affection, boasting, pusillanimity, mendacity, and oth
er kinds of vices, which certainly stem from a deformed ra
tiocination." From On the Ridiculous (1550), in Lauter,p.68.
75
I
or mannerism which reveal a rigid mental set or "ruling
78
passion." The theatre of Moli&re was censured in eccle
siastical circles for its worldliness, vanity, and foppery,
and its lack of spiritual values. According to the defense,
however, the art of ridicule was passionless, anti-
sentimental, trivializing, intellectually stimulating, and
morally bracing. Moliere, or his representative, argues
that comedy is ascetic, and destructive of the impulse to
sentimental self-indulgence.
That ridicule is the coldest of all the sentiments is
evident because it is a simple, pleasant, and lively
judgment of the thing offered for consideration; now
there is nothing more serious than that which has a
tincture of passion; therefore there is nothing more
contrary to the passionate feeling of amorous pleasure
than the intellectual pleasure which ridicule affords.
("Letter on Tartuffe," in Lauter, p. 150)
This statement may be compared with John Dennis' remarks
on the bawdy ridiculum in low comedy, which is forthright
rather than suggestive and instructive rather than pleasing
(see above, p. 56). Dennis, however, means to elevate
78
James Sully writes: "in Moliere we have, what Cole
ridge tells us is wanted in Ben Jonson, the presentation of
the laughable defect as 'a prominence growing out of, and
nourished by, the character which still circulates in it. '
The simple-minded ambition of the Bourgeois gentilhomme, the
pious over-confidence of Orgon, the intractable misanthropy
of Alceste— these, as traits broad-based in the character,
offer large possibilities of comic development." Essay on
Laughter (London, 1907), pp. 364-365.
76
humor by calling it a passion and by comparing it to
poetry, while the Molifere-critic contrasts the light and
graceful rationality of humorous ridicule with the stupefy
ing effects of passion, especially love. T. H. Fujimura
weights the balance of Restoration wit-comedy on the side
of aesthetic rationality rather than sensual passion (see
above, p. 62).
79
George Meredith looks on comedy as the highest art of
civilization and on Moli&re as the supreme practitioner of
that art. Meredith, however, treats comedy as an instrument
of "cultural uplift" rather than as a social corrective.
Like Moliere, he stresses the intellectual, social, and ob
jective aspects of comedy. Sir Willoughby Patterne, central
figure of The Egoist, is really a humor-character, blinded
by selfish vanity which reduces him to the brink of humilia
tion. Egotism is a type of rigidity which presents a clear
contrast with the flexible intelligence of the comic spirit.
You may estimate your capacity for comic perception by
being able to detect the ridicule of them you love
without loving them less) and more by being able to see
yourself somewhat ridiculous in dear eyes, and accepting
the correction their image of you proposes. ("Essay
on Comedy," in Sypher, p. 42)
79
"An Essay on Comedy," in Comedy. ed. Sypher.
77
If -this rising-above-self seems more characteristic of the
sense of humor, Meredith points out that the latter, "as in
the case of Sterne, 1 1 is often capricious, sentimental, and
indulgent of private feelings. "Comedy, on the other hand,
is an interpretation of the general mind, and is for that
reason of necessity kept in restraint" (p. 45). Meredith
sees the function of comedy as normative, public, and
rational, dealing with social morality.
The comic poet is in the narrow field, or enclosed
square, of the society he depicts; and he addresses the
still narrower enclosure of men's intellects, with ref
erence to the operation of the social world upon their
characters. (p. 46)
This emphasis on narrowness, restriction, and exclu
siveness contrasts with the original democratic spirit of
looseness and freedom in the "primitive Aristophanic com
edy" with which "the English public are most in sympathy"
(p. 39). Meredith finds the basis of the comic— "an esteem
for common sense"— in that kind of public and that kind of
comedy. It is a rudimentary response, however, capable of
80
much greater refinement; development of the comic sense
80
Meredith grades satire and comedy on a scale of re
finement: "The laughter of satire is a blow in the back or
the face. The laughter of comedy is impersonal and of un
rivaled politeness, nearer a smile— often no more than a
smile. It laughs through the mind, for the mind directs it;
and it might be called the humor of the mind." (p. 47)
78
reflects general cultural development.
One excellent test of the civilization of a country . . .
I take to be the flourishing of the comic idea and com
edy; and the test of true comedy is that it shall awaken
thoughtful laughter. (p. 47)
"A perception of the Comic Spirit'1 qualifies one for member
ship in a cultural £lite (p. 49). Meredith's raising and
narrowing of the comic field has prepared the way for his
concept of an aristocracy (or meritocracy) of the Comic
Spirit. If one is not stirred by the idea of that "high
fellowship," that "selecter world," Meredith's notion of
the comic will seem correspondingly empty, shallow, and
sophisticated.
Moliere's intellectual emphasis on social adaptation
and his ridicule of mental rigidity seem to have influenced
81
Henri Bergson in framing his well-known theory of the
comic. Bergson insists that "the comic . . . appeals to
the intelligence pure and simple; laughter is incompatible
with emotion" (p. 150). Intellectual appreciation of the
ridiculous requires an "absence of feeling," a temporary
suspension of sympathy, the warm feeling which is so impor
tant in humor, indeed, so cold is this sense of the comic
81
"Laughter: An Essay on the Meaning of the Comic,"
in Sypher.
79
that it calls for "a momentary anesthesia of the heart"
(p. 64) which suggests a punitive mood as much as a clear
head. Laughter, as a social gesture, "restrains eccentric
ity, " and "softens down . . . mechanical inelasticity"
(p. 73). As social corrective, it excludes sympathy or
i
kindness.
Laughter [he writes] is, above all, a corrective. Being
intended to humiliate, it must make a painful impression
on the person against whom it is directed. By laughter,
society avenges itself for the liberties taken with it.
It would fail in its object if it bore the stamp of
sympathy or kindness. (p. 187)
The objects of the comic, for Bergson, are clumsiness,
absentmindedness, physical automatism, rigidity, and the
kinds of habitual machine-like action which are easily
thrown out of gear by unexpected circumstances. A trace of
humor-theory survives here in subtilized form— vices have
the automatism of marionettes, a physical comic reflecting
"curvature of the soul," which is a form of mental rigidity
or over-simplification (see below, p. 135). The ludicrous
vice provides an external, petrifying frame of "humor,"
which seems native to comedy with its traditional trend to
moral generalization.
The unconscious self-exposure of characters in ridic
ulous speech, dress, mannerisms, or actions, may afford the
80
audience a sudden insight into this "curvature of soul"
(or mental deformity) provoking laughter or amusement. The
comic is "something mechanical encrusted on the living"
(p. 84), and the comic sense consists in intellectual per
ception of the gap between appearance and reality, mechanism
and life, especially in moral terms. According to Aris
totle's mimetic theory of the arts, "comedy is . . . an
imitation of characters of a lower type" focussing on ludi
crous deformity (Poetics. V, i, 21). For Bergson,
mimesis, where it means mimicry or highlighting of external
mannerisms, is inherently comic because it separates ges
tures from the mental energy that gives them life. The
imitable is precisely that "mechanical uniformity" (e.g.,
stereotyped gestures) which is "alien to our living person
ality, " and is the "essence of the ludicrous." Therefore,
"imitation gives rise to laughter" (p. 81).
Bergson's comic principle of "the body taking prece
dence of the soul . . . the manner seeking to outdo the
matter, the letter aiming at ousting the spirit" (p. 94) is
appropriate to the comedies of Moliere and to the court of
Louis XIV. Bergson sees that the standards of society it
self may be comic objects when they stifle individual vital
ity. Mechanical tampering with nature (p. 88), ceremonial
81
form and "automatic regulation of society" (pp. 89-90), and
"appearance seeking to triumph over reality" (p. 96), are
all ridiculous. The comic poet "will duplicate what is
ridiculous professionally with something that is ridiculous
physically" (p. 96); that is, the mental rigidity of an
illiberal mind (e.g., that of the humor-character or comic
pedant) is underlined by some "mechanical inelasticity" of
82
gesture. These techniques serve to deflate pompous and
pretentious manners. Bergson summarizes comic effects as
follows:
The comic is that side of a person which reveals his
likeness to a thing, that aspect of human events which,
through its peculiar inelasticity, conveys the impres
sion of pure mechanism, of automatism, or movement
without life. Consequently it expresses an individual
or collective imperfection which calls for an immediate
corrective. This corrective is laughter, a social ges
ture that singles out and represses a special kind of
absentmindedness in men and events. (p. 117)
Whereas Moliere regards comedy as ridiculing and correcting
abuses in society, Bergson describes its function as that of
separating the dynamic elements of culture from the dead
wood.
82
Bergson notes that "there is a natural relationship
. . . between . . . the mind crystallising in certain
grooves, and the body losing its elasticity through the in
fluence of certain defects" (p. 97).
82
Some Eighteenth-Century Attempts to Define Wit and
Humor: Locke, Addison, Steele, Shaftesbury
Moli&re's brilliant practice, supported by lucid criti
cal defenses, set new aesthetic criteria for European comedy
of manners, stimulating fresh discussion of the comic.
Meanwhile, in "Enlightened England," the theory of wit
and humor acquired new bases in the rationalist, empiricist
philosophy of John Locke. In the section of his influen
tial Essay Concerning Human understanding (1690) called "Of
Discerning and other Operations of the Mind," he drew
the famous distinction between wit and judgment, which was
to be repeated so often, despite the fact that some acute
thinkers, including Sterne, considered it a misleading
over-simplification. In this well-known passage, which I
quote in full, Locke makes an arbitrary distinction between
wit and judgment, implying that they are mutually exclusive
qualities, the one light and superficial, the other solid
and even profound, wit seems playful and irresponsible,
judgment analytic and morally serious.
For wit lying most in the assemblage of ideas, and
putting those together with quickness and variety, wherein
can be found any resemblance or congruity, thereby to
make up pleasant pictures and agreeable visions in the
fancy; judgment, on the contrary, lies quite on the other
side, in separating carefully, one from another, ideas
wherein can be found the least difference, thereby to
83
avoid being misled by similitude, and by affinity to
take one thing for another. This is a way of proceeding
quite contrary to metaphor and allusion; wherein for the
most part lies that entertainment and pleasantry of wit,
which strikes so lively on the fancy, and therefore is
so acceptable to all people, because its beauty appears
at first sight, and there is required no labour of thought
to examine what truth or reason there is in it.83
It will be seen that this definition is derived, not from
Hobbes's well-known remarks on the psychological causation
of laughter, but from his less often quoted remarks on the
84
verbal construction of wit. Hobbes's incidental distinc
tion between imagination and intellect becomes Locke's
explicit distinction between wit and judgment. Judgment
was, of course, regarded by the plodding majority as of much
more value than wit, which seemed ephemeral in comparison.
85
Kenneth Maclean, who calls Sterne "the most industrious of
all Locke's apostles in the Eighteenth Century," points out
his total disagreement with Locke's separation of wit from
judgment. Maclean notes that Pope (surprisingly) agrees
83
Ed. Alexander Campbell Fraser (Oxford, 1894), I,
Bk. II, ch. xi, 203.
84
See The Whole Art of Rhetoric, iii, 9, in The English
Works. VI, 496.
85
John Locke and English Literature of the Eighteenth
Century (New Haven, 1936).
84
with this separation, while Sterne is horrified at the
implied devaluation of comic literature:
. . . Sterne, the born humourist, viewed with such actual
alarm the barrier Locke had placed between wit and judg
ment that the thought troubled him as he wrote Tristram.
Yorick ponders while riding his horse, "that brisk trot
ting and slow argumentation, like wit and judgment, were
two incompatible movements" (l,x,20) . And so, when
Sterne finds time to pen his "Author's preface," which
appears as the twentieth chapter of Book Three, he
strives practically in self-defense to demolish the wall
separating wit and judgment. . . . (pp. 67-68)
in a scathing satiric passage, Tristram-Sterne defends
the value of Shandeism— in which context "judgment" may be
taken as implying truth to the irreducible variety of ex
perience— against humorless pedants and sober-sided critics,
who lack the intellectual resilience to follow the wandering
fires of wit and would therefore divorce it from judgment
by a rigorous distinction slavishly borrowed from their
master Locke:
Now, Agelastes (speaking dispraisingly) sayeth, That
there may be some wit in it, for aught he knows;--but no
judgment at all. And Triptolemus and phutatorius agree
ing thereto, ask, How is it possible there should? for
that wit and judgment in this world never go together;
inasmuch as they are two operations differing from each
other as wide as east from west— So, says Locke,— so are
farting and hickuping, say I. (Ill,xx,193, quoted in
Maclean, p. 68)
Maclean finds this contemptuous rejection of Locke's "locus
classicus" particularly significant coming from Sterne, who
85
ranked the Essay alongside the Bible as a perpetual fund of
wisdom, apparently considering it the rational counterpart
86
of spiritual law.
Joseph Addison was probably foremost among those who
undertook to expound and popularize Locke's ideas, in
87
Spectator. No. 62 (Friday, May 11, 1711), he quotes Locke's
differentiation of wit and judgment with approval (and only
slight reservations), but adds the elements of "Delight" and
"Surprize" as essential to wit, noting that there must be
a due distance between the ideas associated in the witty
"assemblage." In the same number, Addison goes on to make
a famous distinction of his own— that between "True Wit,"
"False Wit," and "Mixt Wit." The first consists in
86
Here is Maclean's comment including quotation from
Sterne: "Yorick rarely disagrees with his master in philos
ophy, but 'the great Locke, who was seldom outwitted by
false sounds— was nevertheless bubbled here. . . .— it was
his glory to free the world from the lumber of a thousand
vulgar errors;— but this was not of the number.' Locke's
statement of the incompatibility of wit and judgment has,
Sterne argues, 'been made the Magna Charta of stupidity ever
since— ,' which, I think, is the last word to be said on
this theory. Sterne leaves us simply to imagine the vast
multitudes of Eighteenth-Century dullards who under the pro
tection of Locke were left unmolested in their enjoyment of
the superior faculty of 'judgment."' (p. 68)
87
The Spectator, ed. Donald F. Bond (Oxford, 1965), I,
263-270. -------
86
"Resemblance and Congruity of ideas"; the second, "in re
semblance and congruity of Letters (as in anagrams), of
Syllables (as in rhymes), of words (as in puns), of whole
Sentences or poems imitating certain shapes; or in physical
mimicry"; and the third, "partly in the Resemblance of
Ideas, and partly in the Resemblance of Words" (as in the
metaphysical poetry of Cowley) (I, 265) . Finally, Addison
adds that "not only the Resemblance but the Opposition of
Ideas does very often produce Wit . . . " (p. 270) .
Burlesque had been a popular form since the success of
Samuel Butler's Hudibras (1663-64), and the more polished
form of the mock-epic was to become a favorite of the
Augustan age. In Spectator, No. 249 (December 15, 1711)
Addison draws some useful distinctions between comedy and
burlesque and between high and low burlesque.
The two great branches of Ridicule in Writing are
Comedy and Burlesque. The first ridicules Persons by
drawing them in their proper Characters, the other by
drawing them quite unlike themselves. Burlesque is
therefore of two kinds, the first represents mean Per
sons in the Accoutrements of Heroes, the other describes
great Persons acting and speaking, like the basest among
the people. (Bond, ed., II, 467)
Burlesque, then, involves two kinds of distortion, the
first inflationary, the second deflationary.
In his preface to Joseph Andrews (1742), Fielding
introduces his concept of the "comic epic in prose," and
defends the modern genre of burlesque, against Shaftesbury,
on the grounds that "it contributes more to exquisite mirth
and laughter than any other [genre]" (Signet ed., p. vii).
He contrasts the comic, which arises from the ridiculous
in nature, with the burlesque, which is made by applying
high manners to low subjects or vice versa. Fielding wryly
adds that there is no need for the comic poet to deviate
from nature, which supplies the ridiculous in much more
abundance than the sublime (p. vi).
Spectator. No. 249 is an essay on laughter, and
Addison, the philosopher of cheery optimism, concludes by
arguing that the metaphor "laughing" is applied to nature
in bloom because laughter "is in it self both amiable and
beautiful” (II, 468). In Spectator. No. 598 (Friday,
September 24, 1714), however, he warns that, while cheer
fulness is admirable in conversation, indiscriminate ridi
cule and excessive laughter are "the Mark of Folly" (see
V, 43-44).
In 1713, Sir Richard Steele included an essay on
88
laughter in The Guardian. Steele regarded laughter as a
88
(London, 1767), I, 115-120 (No. 29, Tuesday,
April 14, 1713).
88
sincere expression of "some inward satisfaction/' but noted
that the laughter of wit is constrained, while the laughter
of fools is the most natural. He takes the ancient classi
fication of kinds of laugh— "Chian," "ionic," "Risus,"
"Syncrusian," and "sardonick"— as the suggestion for a cor
responding classification of modern laughers. These are the
"Dimplers," "Smilers," "Laughers," "Grinners," and "Horse-
Laughers," and each is defined with humorous details drawn
from social observation (p. 117). Steele defines laughter
in general as "a vent of any sudden joy that strikes upon
the mind, which being too volatile and strong, breaks out in
this tremor of voice" (p. 120). He echoes Addison on the
natural beauty of laughter, and calls it "The Chorus of
Conversation."
The third Earl of Shaftesbury attributed the exaggerat
ed fashion for "raillery" to a lack of true liberty in con
versation, and saw the social use of wit as a sign of
rebelliousness.
If Men are forbid to speak their minds seriously on
certain Subjects, they will do it ironically. . . . 'Tis
the persecuting Spirit has rais'd the bantering one:
And want of Liberty may account for want of a true
Politeness, and for the Corruption or wrong use of
89
89
Pleasantry and Humour.
According to Shaftesbury, the suppression of wit and humor
stultifies the expression of reason; "without Wit and
Humour, Reason can hardly have its proof, or be
distinguish'd" (p. 73) .
An article by John W. Draper, entitled "The Theory of
90
the Comic in Eighteenth-Century England," provides a useful
summary. During the first half of the century, comedy re
mains on the defensive; theories are predominantly moral and
Horatian (on reformative powers), or psychological and neo-
Aristotelian (on relaxing or cathartic effects). By mid
century, the aesthetics of comedy was freeing itself from
the "half-understood shibboleths" of Aristotle, jonson, and
Hobbes, and beginning to forge systematic theories of comic
genres (see p. 222). Draper stresses the homogeneity amid
transition of eighteenth-century comic theory and notes that
its forward thrust, "connecting it with ethics, psychology
and aesthetics," was accompanied by a falling-off in the
practice of comedy and satire. The chief critical ideas of
89
"Sensus communis: An Essay on the Freedom of wit and
Humour," in Characteristicks of Men. Manners. Opinions.
Times (London, 1711), I, 71-72.
9°JEGP, XXXVII (1938), 207-223.
90
the century can be summarized under four heads as follows:
(1) Comedy should give a realistic picture of life with low-
class or unimportant characters; (2) definitions of the comic
linked it sometimes with satire, and sometimes with bur
lesque; (3) comedy often exposes human affectations (a
survival from the practice and theory of jonsonian humor-
comedy); (4) comedy "represents an incongruity of style or
character heightened with the piquancy of surprise" (Draper,
p. 222). The concept of incongruity was based on the
philosophy of Locke and Addison, and suggests the vein of
humor-theory which was to be most deeply mined by German
philosophers of romanticism in the nineteenth century.
I have been discussing some eighteenth-century
attempts to define wit and humor because this was the direc
tion taken by the normative mind of "the Enlightenment,1 1
with its love of balanced distinctions. The theory of comic
sub-genres seemed to provide a valid approach to literary
laughter in that rationalistic period.
Before approaching Romantic and Modern theories of
laughter and its literary varieties, I should stipulate that
I will be using the terms "comic" and "humor" in the broad
est general sense and not strictly differentiating them
according to a formal classification of sub-genres. The
91
reason for this is that the present discussion operates on
a general philosophical level "below" the surface effects of
literary techniques, where such distinctions have their
proper application. The present study is intended to
anatomize the origins and nature of humor through a survey
of theoretical approaches antecedent to such a classifica-
91
tion. The relative distinction of "genres" is a highly
91
I am using "genre," not in the classical or neoclas
sical sense of a traditionally set literary form with in
built rules of structure, but more generally as a variant
kind or sub-species. The interpretation of comic genres in
the latter sense is flexible and frankly speculative. In
teresting comic scales have been devised by James Feibleman
and Marie Collins Swabey. Feibleman arranges the comic
forms, as varying degrees of criticism, on a descending
scale from broadly disinterested, aesthetic, and objective
species to narrowing aspects of personal animosity. Read
ing vertically down the list his schema runs as follows:
joy, Divine Comedy, Humor, irony, Satire, Sarcasm, Wit,
Scorn (see In praise of Comedy [New York, 1962], p. 205).
(The first and last kinds are not strictly sub-species of
the comic, but rather general emotional attitudes.) Miss
Swabey produces a horizontal scale of comic species and
gives a more accurate aesthetic definition, by considering
the nature of the object and the question of emotional in
volvement. She diagrams the comic spectrum— under the
generic heading of "the comic or ludicrous"— as follows;
the Comic, wit, Hhmor, Satire, irony, etc. (Comic Laughter:
A Philosophical Essay [New Haven and London, 1961], p. 5).
These species are differentiated according to range as well
as quality. While the comic covers more ground than humor
(being generally found in "characters, situations, or
events"), humor is more profound. Satire and irony are con
sidered as "two distinctive forms concerned with the fun
of disapproval and criticism" (p. 6). The whimsical,
92
complex matter, which would constitute a theoretical
transition between the basic aims of this study and an
analysis of literary techniques in such a profusely inven
tive humorous writer as Laurence Sterne.
in the following chapters, therefore, I frequently use
"comic" as a generic term to describe the laughable, and
"humor" as a sub-species of this. The latter (sometimes
related to medieval "humors" of body and mind, and often
pertaining to character) is an attitude to life, as much as
a literary form, which becomes progressively noted for
wisdom and mellowness, and for a tendency to balance oppo
sites: pleasure and pain, laughter and tears, the high
and the low, oddity and loveableness in the object, ridicule
and sympathy in the observer.
grotesque, and ridiculous are briefly considered (Swabey,
p. 5, n. 1) as minor sub-genres. Affinities are also
drawn between the grotesque and the "weird," which lies
beyond the limits of the comic scale.
CHAPTER II
THEORY OF LAUGHTER AND HUMOR IN THE
NINETEENTH CENTURY
During the last four decades of the eighteenth century,
a ferment of ideas was going on in Europe, which was to
issue in intellectual and political revolution. While
France was the center of the new social philosophy, a
radically new philosophy of art was being evolved in Ger
many. Gotthold Lessing, whose Laokobn appeared in 1766, and
Johan Herder, whose Fragmente appeared the following year,
are generally considered the twin pillars of German roman
ticism, although Alexander Baumgarten's Aesthetica (1739),
which Kant admired, had previously introduced a key term
and concept.
Theory of humor was bound up with the new aesthetics;
Jean Paul Richter, for instance, makes the contrariety of
ridiculous and sublime his starting-point. Moses Mendels
sohn dissociates laughter from simple pleasure and says
93
94
that, like weeping, it originates "in a contrast between
perfection and imperfection" which must be light to be
laughable.1 This idea achieved prominence when it was re
peated by Lessing in Laokoon:
"The ridiculous," he said, "requires a contrast between
perfections and imperfections. ... I would add that
this contrast must not be too sharp and decided, but
that the opposites must be such as admit being blended
into each other."2
Goethe described the ludicrous as "a moral contrast which is
brought into unity for the mind in harmless fashion," and
Novalis called it "a mixture which comes to nothing." The
basic notion is of opposition and mixture, with a Hegelian
synthesis sometimes forming a third humorous entity, as in
Theodor vischer's Aesthetik (1846) (see Eastman, p. 215).
Kant's Blend of surprise and incongruity
It was with the publication of Immanuel Kant's
Critique of Pure Reason (1781) followed by the Critique of
Aesthetic Judgment (1790) that the new aesthetic philosophy
had its most positive inauguration, in place of the
1Philosophische Schriften. II, 23, quoted in Max
Eastman, Sense of Humor (New York, 1922), p. 214.
2
Quoted in Eastman, p. 214.
95
strictly sensationalist philosophy of Locke, Kant applied
a transcendalist logic and metaphysic to the problems of
art. His idea of the comic constitutes a subtler blend
of surprise and incongruity than can be found in any previ
ous theory. He sees the comic as springing from a logical
absurdity, a "non-sequitur," or contradiction of reason.
The balance of expectation is momentarily upset, giving the
effect of a cold douche or small shock of anticlimax.
Something absurd (something in which, therefore, the
understanding can of itself find no delight) must be
present in whatever is to raise a hearty convulsive
laugh. Laughter is an affection arising from a
strained expectation being suddenly reduced to nothing.
This very reduction, at which certainly understanding
cannot rejoice, is still indirectly a source of very
lively enjoyment for a moment.-*
The comic process might be summarized in psychological terms
as expectation— disappointment— relief (and laughter), or,
with physiological reference, as tension— sudden relaxa
tion— release of surplus energy (in laughter).
The direction of subsequent investigation was in
fluenced by Kant's inquiry into the subjective mechanisms
of comic laughter. The theories of Spencer, Lipps, and
Freud are linked to Kant's discovery of this comic syndrome.
3
Critique of Aesthetic Judgment, trans. James Creed
Meredith (Oxford, 1911), p. 199.
From the point of view of intellectual history, it would
therefore be defensible to treat the theories of Kant
(metaphysical-psychological), Spencer-Lipps (physiological),
and Freud (psychological), as a developmental sequence.
Such a procedure, however, would cut across the internal
chronology of this chapter, leaping from the beginnings
of romantic theories of humor to the eventual mechanistic
reaction against them; perspective would thus be distorted
and the full flowering of romantic theories ignored. At
the same time, a unified treatment of the Kantian idea,
showing how it was transformed to meet physiological and
psychological assumptions, would cut across organization
by subject-field as used in Chapters III, IV, and V. I
have attempted to resolve this difficulty, on both chrono
logical and intellectual counts, by dealing with the origi
nal adaptations of Kant's suggestions by Spencer, Lipps,
and Freud, under the common heading "Laughter as Mechanism
of Incongruous Perception," at the end of the current
chapter on humor in the nineteenth century. This section
will therefore serve as a bridge between the ferment of
romantic ideas in the nineteenth century and the prolifera
tion of scientistic theories in the twentieth century (al
though in the latter case it will also be necessary to
97
supplement the discussion by tracing developments from
earlier periods).
Kant characterizes laughter, as Voltaire did hope and
sleep, as intellectual and emotional refreshment, a brief
escape from the strains of living. More generally, he re
gards laughter as freedom from artificial restraints, and
illustrates this in the case of delighted laughter at
naivety, which momentarily breaks through the strain of
keeping up social appearances.
Naivetd is the breaking forth of the ingenuousness
originally natural to humanity, in opposition to the
art of disguising oneself that has become a second
nature. We laugh at the simplicity that is as yet a
stranger to dissimulation,but we rejoice the while
over the simplicity of nature that thwarts that art.
. . . That the outward appearance, fair but false,
that usually assumes such importance in our judgment,
is here, at a stroke, turned to a nullity, that, as
it were, the rogue in us is naturally exposed, calls
forth the movement of the mind, in two successive and
opposite directions, agitating the body at the same
time with wholesome motion. But that something in
finitely better them any accepted code of manners,
neunely purity of mind . . . has not become wholly
extinct in human nature, infuses seriousness emd rev
erence into this play of judgment.4
Laughter at naivetd provides Kant with a good instance of
4
Critique of Aesthetic judgment, p. 202. Cf. Freud's
discussions of "The Naive," and the "Source of Comic
Pleasure in the Naive," in Wit emd its Relation to the
Unconscious. pp. 290-302.
98
"an affection arising from a strained expectation being
suddenly reduced to nothing," and he underlines this aspect
in his analysis. The unintentionally comic— such as chil
dren's remarks— increases the pleasure in perception of in
congruity. in Kant's concept of laughter, deceitful ap
pearance and incongruity appear to be fused, with a trace
of self-consciousness. Exposure of natural simplicity be
hind a code of artificial manners, is an aspect of the fun
damental incongruity of real and ideal, natural and sophis
ticated, true and false. At the same time, there flashes on
the perceiving mind an awareness of its own strained pre
tenses, which, for the moment, seem ridiculous.
By humor, Kant understands an upside-down logic of
temperament, which can improvise moods at will, and maintain
them with a certain internal consistency.
Humour, in a good sense, means the talent for being
able to put oneself at will into a certain frame of
mind in which everything is estimated on lines that
go quite off the beaten track,(a topsy-turvy view of
things,) and yet on lines that follow certain prin
ciples, rational in the case of such a mental tempera
ment. (Same, p. 203)
Where eccentric moods are involuntary, they are "humors"
in the old bad sense; where they are voluntary, they are
humorous in the good Kantian sense. This humorous incon
gruity lies in a union of ludicrous and rational, or
99
rather, of logic contained within an absurd view of things.
Surprisingly in view of his disciples' elevation of
humor, Kant denies the humorous manner any truly artistic
quality; "It belongs to originality of mind ('des
Geistes'), though not to the talent for fine art." It is
"agreeable" but not aesthetic, because it lacks "intrinsic
worth" and "seriousness in its presentation" (same, p. 203).
Kant must surely be drawing a line between the humor of
speech and social intercourse, and that of literature. Jean
Paul Richter and Goethe, on the contrary, regard humor as
an interplay of finite and infinite, laughter and tears,
which "harmonizes the soul," raising it above the cares and
frustrations of everyday life.
The influential core of Kant's theory is to be found
in the phrase "a strained expectation being suddenly reduced
to nothing." Kant sees the comic as a psychological proc
ess, with a definite sequence of reactions. The sudden de
feat of logic in the overthrow of a chain of reasoning
with its affective accompaniment, is celebrated by laughter.
This idea of sudden release from tension is paralleled by
Schopenhauer's discovery of comic pleasure in the victory
of percept over concept. The relation of the comic emotion
to logic will be discussed in connection with Schopenhauer
100
and later philosophies of the comic (see below, pp. 111-119,
321-352) .
incongruity Theories and Exaltation of Humor:
Schiller. Richter. Schlegel. Hegel
Amid the explosion of romantic philosophies which fol
lowed the Enlightenment in Germany, theory of humor takes an
important place. Comedy is unharnessed from the yoke of
moral utility and enters the freer sphere of Kantian aes
thetics. The new trends can be observed in Friedrich
5
Schiller's essay "On Simple and Sentimental Poetry" (1795).
The chief aspects of comedy which emerge from this discus
sion are incongruity, liberation, and idealism. Incongruity
in human society— "the distance at which things are from
nature, and the contrast between reality and the ideal"
(p. 290)— is the basis of two kinds of poetic art: tragic
satire and mirthful satire. Schiller regards neither pun
ishment nor amusement as the true end of poetry, which is
a serious play aimed at the infinite. He combines the con
cepts of liberation and objectivity: comedy appeals not to
the emotions, which it objectifies and transcends, but to
5
In Essays Aesthetical and Philosophical (London,
1875), pp. 262-332.
101
understanding or aesthetic contemplation, it aims to
liberate man from passion by setting human absurdities
at a comic distance, and, in this respect, Schiller places
comedy above tragedy. ideally, comedy has a purifying and
calming effect.
The aim that comedy has in view is the same as that
of the highest destiny of man, and this consists in
liberating himself from the influence of violent pas
sions, and taking a calm and lucid survey of all that
surrounds him, and also of his own being, and of see
ing everywhere occurrence rather than fate or hazard
. . . (p. 294)
This is what Goethe meant when he said Sterne's humor
"leaves the soul calm and serene." The achievement of
Olympian objectivity through freedom from emotion seems to
parallel the condition of catharsis. Catharsis, however,
iworks by stimulating vicarious passions, which abstract
and drain the energy from real ones, while Schiller's
comic sense operates from a mood of "tranquil reasoning”
independent of emotion, comedy hides "a serious inten
tion": it combats for the ideals of truth or sentiment,
beauty or thought. Here Schiller includes a tribute to
Sterne: "How deeply and strongly our hearts are moved by
the jests of Yorick when he pleases!" (p. 295).
Jean Paul Richter, in his "inquiry into the
102
g
Ridiculous," stresses subjectivity, incongruity, contrast
(depending on lack of understanding), and freedom (depending
on maturity). He locates the comic not in objects perceived
but in the percipient: "the comical— like the sublime—
never dwells in the object, but in the subject" (p. 315).
Actually his theory calls for an act of imaginative projec
tion which links an objective error or incongruity with
subjective consciousness of it, thus producing a sense of
absurdity. Jean Paul introduces a carefully modified ver
sion of the incongruity theory, in which laughter is caused
by "completely unintentional fruitless marriages of the
most dissimilar things" (p. 316). Deception and false logic
are necessary elements, for mere juxtaposition of the high
est and lowest is not laughable. Perception of contrast
between the interior psychology of a character (intentions,
desires, etc.), and his external appearance or actions, may
also be comical. In some cases, "only through knowledge of
the interior of someone external to ourselves does the ex
ternal vividness become comical" (p. 316). Mere error or
ignorance— deception— is not comical unless combined and
contrasted with a consciousness of the truth, thus producing
g
From Introduction to Aesthetics (1804), trans. Lee
Chadeayne, in Lauter, pp. 314-323.
103
an incongruous and surprising tension of true and false.
Richter says that
no one can appear ridiculous in his actions to himself,
except at a later time when he has become his second
self and falsely attributes insights to the first self.
(pp. 317-318)
He reduces the ridiculous— physical perception of lack of
understanding— to three "ingredients": (1) objective con
trast (between the essence of a thing and its circumstance);
(2) the physical context or circumstance itself; and (3)
subjective contrast (between mind and thing, and mind and
circumstance) (p. 319). As Richter admits, it may be "dif
ficult to follow the arid rule in the exuberance of a living
feeling" (pp. 318-319), and the trouble with his theory is
its logical abstractness and remoteness from comic practice.
i
jFinally, Richter considers comedy "older" than tragedy,
not only historically, but in its control of emotion.
Comedy requires freedom and freedom requires maturity,
based not on violent experiences, but on "lengthy exposures
to the smiling sun" (see pp. 321-322).
7
August Wilhelm von schlegel's xdeas on comedy seem
^Lectures on Dramatic Art and Literature, trans. John
Black, 2d ed., rev. A. J. W. Morrison (London, 1904).
104
more concretely expressed than Richter's and hence more
fertile in suggestion. He takes incongruity, exuberance,
ideal fantasy, "regulation of life," and intellect to be
the keynotes of comedy. According to his moral incongruity
theory, the ludicrous arises from a disharmony of body and
mind which is fundamental to human nature, schlegel is one
of the first modern critics to recognize the importance of
sensual energy in comedy, which breaks through restraint and
forms a vital link with fertility ritual and the Old Comedy
of Aristophanes. But for schlegel the effect of comedy is
not simply vitalization, but also an intellectually amused
perception of incongruity, physical desire, for instance,
is often presented as mere buffoonery by setting it in in
congruous circumstances; even today, according to Schlegel,
the infallible and inexhaustible source of the ludicrous
is the same ungovernable impulses of sensuality in colli
sion with higher duties; or cowardice, childish vanity,
loquacity, gulosity, laziness, &c. (Lecture XI, p. 149)
Amorousness in old age is doubly ridiculous, since in such
an instance "reason has only served to extend the dominion
of the senses beyond their proper limits," and drunkenness
approximates the "comic ideal," presumably because it de
grades rational man to a condition of illogicality, which
contrasts with the ideal without being painful to the
105
victim.
Schlegel describes the pattern of comedy as one of gay
abandon; it presents fantastic contrasts in a familiar
setting.
As tragedy delights in harmonious unity, Comedy flour
ishes in a chaotic exuberance; it seeks out the most
motley contrasts, and the unceasing play of cross
purposes. it works up, therefore, the most singular,
unheard-of, and even impossible incidents, with allu
sions to the well-known and special circumstances of
the immediate locality and time. (Lecture XI, p. 149)
Sterne's Tristram Shandy, with its air of hilarious improvi
sation, which conceals skilful interweaving of contrasting
moods and motives, is a brilliant example of this kind of
comic structure.
The aesthetic freedom of comedy allows the artist to
transpose his commonplace, realistic material into a world
Of ideal fantasy, where the only principles are those of wit.
The freedom of wit is paramount there, and schlegel insists
that the action may be
as arbitrary and fantastic as possible; it may even be
unconnected and unreal, if only it be calculated to
place a circle of comic incidents and characters in the
most glaring light. (Lecture XI, p. 150)
One should note that if the artificial light and rhythms
and the sense of manipulation become too strong, the comedy
begins to resemble a puppet-show or masque. As comic
106
narrator, Tristram sometimes produces these effects by self
consciously speeding up or slowing down the action to
suit associative rhythms, thus reminding the reader that the
whole story is a series of mental images first, and a fic
tion only second.
While Schiller, for his part, links comedy with the in
finite through aesthetics even as Jean Paul does through
logic, Schlegel considers aspirations toward the infinite
as the subject of tragedy; while comedy (at least since New
Comedy) "remains always within the sphere of experience"
(Lecture XIII, p. 177). Destiny is replaced by Chance as
the presiding force of comedy, because "the latter is the
empirical conception of the former as being that which lies
beyond our power or control." Similarly, morality is re
placed by practical intelligence as the principle of action.
Schlegel calls the morality of New Comedy "a theory of
prudence," and approves the ancient saying that "Tragedy
is a running away from, or making an end of, life; Comedy
its regulation" (Lecture XIII, p. 177). The tragic spirit
is self-destructive or escapist in its opposition to the
inevitable, whereas the comic spirit is one of cheerful
acceptance and adaptation based on flexible intelligence.
Where Old Comedy deals in fantastic illusion, New Comedy
107
stresses reality, reason, and moderation.
Schlegel next discusses comic characterization; he
recognizes the need for skilful grouping and contrast, but
criticizes rigid handling of motivation and the use of comic
stereotypes. Compositional rigidity may take the form of
systematic matching of "symmetrical opposites," or of domi
nation by a single "humor-character." schlegel ridicules
the one-sided humor-character as a lifeless dummy and in
sists on a degree of psychological verisimilitude— "as if
an individual could thus be made up entirely of one single
peculiarity, and must not rather be on all sides variously
modified and affected" (Lecture XIII, p. 183).
Amused perception and display of internal incongruity—
between one's "animal being" and one's "mental powers"—
Schlegel calls the "Self-Conscious comic":
This species always supposes a certain inward duality
of character, and the superior half, which rallies and
laughs at the other, has in its tone and occupation
a near affinity to the comic poet himself. (Lecture
XIII, p. 184)
Hobbes had shown that laughter could be caused self-con
sciously by a "sudden conception of some present eminency
in ourselves as compared with former infirmity," and Jean
Paul had supposed that a "second self" could use "post
facto" knowledge to cast actions of the earlier self in a
108
ridiculous light. Schlegel does not stress the time-lag
between action and perception, nor the age-lag between in
fancy and maturity or different stages of personal develop
ment, but rather the psycho-physical gap between intellect
and sensuality, which can only be bridged by the spark of
comic perception. When a self-conscious comic character is
allowed to dominate a play (or fiction), he exaggerates
his own duality and conspires with the audience (or readers)
to reduce the other characters to ridicule. Schlegel calls
this the "Comedy of Caprice," and in its central figure
he traces a mythico-ritual archetype of "the privileged
merry-maker" with his "licentious enthusiasm" (Lecture
XIII, p. 184). By assuming a jester's motley, Yorick-Sterne
places himself in the main tradition of self-conscious
comedy.
Schlegel's emphasis on the basal in comedy leads him
to make a comparison with Fable: ". . .in the Fable we
have animals endowed with reason, and in Comedy we have men
8
serving their animal propensities with their understanding"
8
Cf. Albert Cook: "As tragedy shows the godlike in
man, so comedy shows the bestial. Man as beast, as social
animal, is predictable and probable. Basic to all comedy is
beast fable, in its protean forms throughout the world.
. . ." (Dark Voyage and Golden Mean, p. 46)
109
(Lecture XIII, p. 185). The noble altruism of tragedy
is paralleled by the low selfishness of comedy— "true
comic personages are complete egotists," motivated by self-
interest, not by ideals. Comic values are intellectual
rather than moral.
It is not [the comic poet's] purpose to direct our
feelings to a sense of the dignity or meanness, the
innocence or corruption, the goodness or baseness of
the acting personages; but to show us whether they
act stupidly or wisely, adroitly or clumsily, with
silliness or ability. (Lect. XIII, p. 185)
Comedy presents a witty and inventive assemblage of con
trasts and cross-purposes, and lets this confusing spec
tacle challenge the onlooker's judgment. Schlegel con
cludes: "Comedy is intended to sharpen our powers of dis
crimination, both of persons and situations; to make us
shrewder; and this is its true and only possible morality"
(Lect. XIII, p. 187).
9
G. W. F. Hegel departs from the traditional view of
comedy as mimetic, social, and realistic, to regard it as an
expression of man's illusory self-assurance and sense of
mastery.
In comedy we have a vision of the victory of the intrin
sically assured stability of the wholly personal
9
The Philosophy of Fine Art. trans. F. P. B. Osmaston
(London, 1920).
110
soul-life, the laughter of which resolves everything
through the medium and into the medium of such life.
The general basis of comedy is therefore a world in
which man has made himself, in his conscious activity,
complete master of all that otherwise passes as the
essential content of his knowledge and achievement;
a world whose ends are consequently thrown awry on
account of their own lack of substance. (IV, 301)
Hegel warns against confusing the merely low and ridiculous
— which he takes to be the natural condition of a democrat
ic society— with the comic. Laughter does not always sig
nify the comic, which is a matter of higher taste than mere
enjoyment of folly. Democratic and undiscriminating
laughter can be caused by simple incongruity, regardless of
the dullness or impropriety involved. Hegel contrasts
simple laughter, which is "little more than an expression
of self-satisfied shrewdness," with a higher response.
What on the other hand is inseparable from the comic
[he says] is an infinite geniality and confidence
capable of rising superior to its own contradiction,
and experiencing therein no taint of bitterness or
sense of misfortune whatever, it is the happy frame
of mind, a hale condition of soul, which, fully aware
of itself, can suffer the dissolution of its aims and
realization. (IV, 302)
This expansive intelligence and smiling superiority to
fate resembles Schiller's idea of comic contemplation rising
above emotion.
Ill
Anti-lntellectualist and vitalist Theories
of Schopenhauer
Arthur Schopenhauer's view of the comic combines
intellectualist and vitalist approaches, reason defeating
itself or suddenly being reduced to nothing by the evidence
of the senses. There is a "descending incongruity" (cf.
Spencer) in the relapse from intellect to sense perception,
but there is also an inverse influx of vitality or "felt
life" (cf. Langer), which expresses itself in laughter. The
change is seen as an escape from sterile intellectual striv
ings to a fresher level of sense experience; this trend
links Schopenhauer's theory to currents of romanticism from
Rousseau to D. H. Lawrence.
The intellectualist-vitalist combination is a striking
one, consisting itself of an apparent incongruity. Follow
ing Locke, Schopenhauer starts from the assumption that
"abstract rational knowledge is the reflex of ideas of per
ception, and is founded on them.This basic aspect of
all knowledge is also the source of comic incongruity. The
mental reflex "never corresponds . . . quite accurately"
to the data of sense perception; an element of distortion,
10The World as Will and Idea. I, 76.
112
appears, as in traditional theories of the ridiculous based
on "vain conceit" (Plato), "deformed ratiocination" (Maggi),
or momentary delusion (Kant). Sometimes thought usurps
the role of the senses with ridiculous results, which might
also be tragic (Hamlet's paralysis of will and D. H.
Lawrence's hatred of "white consciousness" illustrate the
problem). Schopenhauer offers a universal, intellectual
definition of laughter:
This very incongruity of sensuous and abstract knowledge,
on account of which the latter always merely approximates
to the former, as mosaic approximates to painting, is the
cause of a very remarkable phenomenon which, like reason
itself, is peculiar to human nature, and of which the
explanations that have ever anew been attempted, are
insufficient: I mean laughter. . . . The cause of laugh
ter in every case is simply the sudden perception of the
incongruity between a concept and the real objects which
have been thought through it in some relation, and laugh
ter itself is just the expression of this incongruity.
. . . All laughter then is occasioned by a paradox, and
therefore by unexpected subsumption, whether this is ex
pressed in words or in actions. This, briefly stated,
is the true explanation of the ludicrous. (I, 76-77)
Schopenhauer regards the comic as arising from the mind's
sudden awareness of its own narrowness emd insufficiency in
the face of the multiplicity and variety of sense phenomena.
The mind becomes self-conscious and gains a degree of
objectivity in regarding its own abstractive processes
as a limited game, not as the ultimate truths which they
are sometimes claimed to be. The comic sense is like a
113
breath of fresh air from the outside world of sense percep
tion, blowing through the stuffy chambers of the mind and
revitalizing the blood, in his chapter "On the Theory of
the Ludicrous" (II, 270-284), Schopenhauer adds a quanti
tative comment based on the element of surprise. "The
greater and more unexpected, in the apprehension of the
laugher, this incongruity is, the more violent will be his
laughter" (II, 271).
In Schopenhauer's theory, there must be tension be
tween the twin poles of intellect and sense (or, in
Hegelian terms, there must be an intellectual "thesis,1 1 a
sensuous "antithesis," and a comic "synthesis"). Paradoxi
cally, Schopenhauer's concept of the sudden or momentary
overthrow of reason is expressed in highly intellectual
terms, despite his protest that "it is so simple and compre
hensible that it does not require" illustration (I, 77). He
divides the ludicrous into two species: wit and folly.
The first is an intentional linking of "different real
objects, ideas of sense perception," under a single concept
(a construction which closely resembles Locke's "assemblage
of ideas . . . with quickness and variety . . ."); the
second is the application of a single preconceived concept
to really different objects. These definitions might be
114
represented by two simple diagrams, in which A and B
are sense-objects, and C is the mental concept; arrows indi
cate the direction of the mental process, and crosses (X)
its starting-points.
C C
2. Folly 1. Wit
A
Wit is an intentional, inductive production of the ludicrous
through association of ideas; while folly Ts an unintention
al deductive production of the ludicrous, through failure
to discriminate between sense ideas (percepts) subsumed
under a single concept. The art of the comic— or of the
jester— is to produce consciously, but deceptively, the
effects which folly produces through error.^ Thus the
Schopenhauer's theory receives indirect corrobora
tion from the great practitioner of comedy and provoker of
mirth, Charlie Chaplin, who bought three volumes of The
World as Will and Idea on his second vaudeville tour of the
United States and read it sporadically for over forty
years. Chaplin, who ought to know, defines humor as
follows:
". . . it is the subtle discrepancy we discern in what
appears to be normal behavior, in other words, through
humor, we see in what seems rational, the irrational; in
what seems important, the unimportant. It also heightens
115
real incongruity of the objects falsely associated is sud
denly revealed, and a shock of surprise sparks the comic
sense into action.
Schopenhauer takes pedantry as an example of comic
folly. This is an attempt to compensate for weak judgment
by exaggerated dependence on "general concepts, rules, and
maxims." in pedantry, a "clinging to the form, to the
manner, to the expression and word . . . takes the place
of the real nature of the matter" (I, 78). The abstract
concept "with its generality and rigid definiteness . . .
can never accurately apply to the fine distinctions of
difference and innumerable modifications of the actual"
(I, 78). This idea of mental rigidity opposed to a vital
intelligence which relies more closely on sense perception
receives fuller development in Bergson's philosophy of the
comic. Schopenhauer accuses Kant of encouraging rigidity
in insisting that moral life be subjected to the canons of
our sense of survival and preserves our sanity. Because of
humor we are less overwhelmed by the vicissitudes of life.
It activates our sense of proportion and reveals to us that
in an overstatement of seriousness lurks the absurd."
Mv Autobiography (New York, 1966), p. 226.
For Chaplin, then, humor consists in those glimpses
of irrationality which appear when the mask of rationality
slips.
116
pure reason. Hobby-horses in general, and Walter shandy's
application of scholastic philosophy to the bringing-up of
Tristram in particular, are excellent examples of this kind
-of comic pedantry.
Schopenhauer further illustrates his theory in the
case of "False Wit" (to use Addison's term)— i.e., verbal
plays, puns, equivocations, and "doubles entendres."
Just as the witticism brings two very different real
objects under one concept, the pun brings two differ
ent concepts, by the assistance of accident, under one
word. . . . in the case of the witticism the identity
is in the concept, the difference in the reality, but
in the case of the pun the difference is in the concepts
and the identity in the reality, for the terminology
is here the reality. (I, 79)
This theory of pun seems a little strained; as Schopenhauer
shows, the pattern is similar, if inverted, to that of wit,
but the basic notion of an interchange between intellect
and sense has gone— verbal wit occurs entirely on the con
ceptual level, for words are identified with concepts. As
there is no sensory reality in this case, Schopenhauer
places his pole of reality in the words themselves, which
may be ingenious and justifiable, but is not quite in accord
with the idea of wit which he originally stated (terminol
ogy and sense perception can hardly be equated in this way),
This may be why Schopenhauer calls these forms of wit
117
"spurious"— they are illegitimate because they fail to fit
his theory.
in his later chapter "On the Ludicrous," Schopenhauer
expands his theoretical bases to accomodate this form of
wit. The sense-pole is now replaced by an imagination-
pole, closer to the opposing pole of reason; that is,
imaginative perception takes over the function of sense
perception in comic incongruity. The argument becomes in
creasingly abstract as Schopenhauer offers to reduce the
ludicrous to syllogistic form,
with an undisputed major and an unexpected minor, which
to a certain extent is only sophistically valid, in
consequence of which connection the conclusion partakes
of the quality of the ludicrous. (II, 271)
Realizing that his theory could be criticized for abstract
ness, Schopenhauer promises concrete illustrations for the
benefit of "mentally inert" and "passive" readers. To com
plicate matters, Schopenhauer adds to the algebraic pattern
of the syllogism an equally bemusing geometrical example.
According to the logic of his theory, the angle between the
circumference and tangent of a circle is comical in that
it appears to be an exception to an abstract rule, and
Schopenhauer asserts that "this will easily excite a smile"
(II, 272).
118
Comic folly depends on abstract preconceptions collid
ing with incongruous reality to produce laughable absurdi
ties or foolish actions. Schopenhauer quotes Voltaire to
the effect that comic misunderstandings or mistakes produce
the most universal outbursts of laughter in a theatre audi
ence (II, 277), and illustrates his theory more specifically
from the case of Don Quixote, who "subsumes the realities
he encounters under conceptions drawn from the romances of
chivalry, from which they are very different" (II, 278).
Any illogical association of incongruous ideas— such as
the animal and human— may provoke the comic sense. For
example,
certain animal forms . . . sometimes appear to us ludi
crous because something about them resembling man leads
us to subsume them under the conception of the human
form, and starting from this we perceive their incongru
ity with it. (II, 279)
Here is another idea seized on by Emerson, who calls man
"the only joker in Nature," and by Bergson, who goes so far
as to assert that "the comic does not exist outside the pale
of what is strictly human," and that the animal is comic
only by incongruous suggestion of human attributes (see
Laughter, in Sypher, pp. 62-63). If Bergson means that all
comic objects must carry human connotations, his statement
would contradict Schopenhauer's geometrical example (unless
119
this were regarded as an objectification of mental
processes, primarily). One notes that both Schopenhauer's
and Bergson's theories are fundamentally intellectual, de
spite Schopenhauer's Rousseauistic revolt against the
restraints of pure reason, and Bergson's vitalism.
Vitalism is the other side of Schopenhauer's paradoxi
cal theory of the ludicrous. Laughter, he argues, is not
caused merely by one idea striking out another in a mental
game of incongruities; it is the springing up of sudden
joy in a renewed sense of life, an awareness of unison
with natural rhythms and of belonging in a "green world."
A sense of comic pleasure overflows consciousness, breaking
down barriers between mind and object, knowledge and sensa
tion. This is what Schopenhauer means by the shift from
conceptual to perceptual levels of experience; here the
sense of life (which Langer regards as a comic essence)
is doubly strong, stemming first from surplus energy re
leased from mental exertion (the negative factor), and
secondly from an upward surge of latent physical vitality
(the positive factor) . Schopenhauer describes comic
pleasure as a variety of primitivism.
In every suddenly appearing conflict between what is
perceived and what is thought, what is perceived
120
is always unquestionably right; for it is not subject to
error at all, requires no confirmation from without, but
answers for itself. Its conflict with what is thought
springs ultimately from the fact that the latter, with its
abstract conceptions, cannot get down to the infinite
multifariousness and fine shades of difference of the
concrete. This victory of knowledge of perception over
thought affords us pleasure. For perception is the orig
inal kind of knowledge inseparable from animal nature,
in which everything that gives direct satisfaction to
the will presents itself. It is the medium of the pres
ent, of enjoyment and gaiety; moreover it is attended
with no exertion. With thinking the opposite is the
case . . .It must therefore be diverting to us to see
this strict, untiring, troublesome governess, the reason,
for once convicted of insufficiency. On this account
then the mien or appearance of laughter is very closely
related to that of joy. (II, 279-280)
From a phenomenological standpoint, sense perception is con
sidered the basis of all knowledge, and the element of dis
tortion in sensory ideas, which had been pointed out earlier
as a source of the comic, appears to be overlooked. The
comic sense of life seems to become confused with sense
perception as a way of knowing, as the vitalist and intel-
lectualist trends of Schopenhauer's theory overlap. Coming
from a philosopher, it is a striking theory: the source
of the comic lies in a devaluation of illogical concepts
by contrast with sensuous facts. The comic victory of
percept over concept would seem to parallel a victory of
sensationalist psychology over the philosophy of "real"
ideas (at which Schopenhauer struck a comic blow in his
121
remarks on Kant in relation to comic pedantry).
Like Freud, Schopenhauer closely associates comic
sense with the pleasure principle. The “satisfaction to
the will" of which he speaks (the opposite of that expendi
ture of will that characterizes thought), appears to come
from a sense of union with the never-ebbing flow of life
itself— the cycle of birth, growth, desire, satisfaction,
and regeneration celebrated in the old phallic rituals— and
release from the ever-narrowing sense of isolation in modern
self and higher consciousness. This irrepressible laughter
which celebrates the life-force is Dionysian in its destruc
tion of concepts. According to Schopenhauer,
it is the conceptions of thought that often oppose
the gratification of our immediate desires, for, as
the medium of the past, the future, and of seriousness,
they are the vehicle of our fears, our repentance, and
all our cares. (II, 280)
Dionysian festivals ritualized the release of sensual man
from the taboos and obligations of society, giving tolerant,
even gleeful, recognition to energies which are held in
check by civilization and yet sustain its very fabric.
Laughter and mad mirth were licensed through ritual as a
kind of instinctive group therapy. Nowadays, a Freudian
might interpret Schopenhauer's statement as a revolt of the
id against a repressive or over-demanding super-ego. in
122
this connection, the term "troublesome governess," signify
ing intellectual conscience which chokes laughter at the
springs suggests the parent-child relationship of super-ego
and ego, which Freud finds in humor, and the unconscious
desire to return to the freedom and low psychic expenditure
of infancy, which Freud finds in wit and dreams. In the
case of Schopenhauer's theory, a parallel may be drawn be
tween ritual and psychogenetic explanations of laughter.
Finally, Schopenhauer sees the comic sense in life and
art as an assertion of the will to live, a buoyant sense of
success and good humor. He brings out the vitality and
optimism of comedy by contrast with tragedy.
If now [he writes] we have found the tendency and
ultimate intention of tragedy to be a turning to resig
nation, to the denial of the will to live, we shall
easily recognize in its opposite, comedy, the incitement
to the continued assertion of the will, it is true that
comedy, like every representation of human life, without
exception, must bring before our eyes suffering and ad
versity; but it presents it to us as passing, resolving
itself into joy, in general mingled with success, victory,
and hopes, which in the end preponderate; moreover, it
brings out the inexhaustible material for laughter of
which life, and even its adversities themselves are
filled, and which under all circumstances ought to keep
us in good humor.12 (Ill, 218)
12
According to Susanne Langer's vitalist aesthetic,
comedy concentrates "the illusion of life," and accentuates
"the light rhythm of thought [which] is the rhythm of
life." Langer, as it were, clarifies Schopenhauer's
123
This account of comic vitality recalls Hegel's description
of comedy as a victory of illusion over reality (see above,
pp. 109-110); Schopenhauer adds in attenuation, "Certainly
it must hasten to drop the curtain of joy, so that we may
not see what comes after . . . "— a remark which suggests
the puppet-like manoeuvrings and accelerated rhythms of
comedy.
If vitality is a key to the comic sense, so is intel
lect, and Schopenhauer never really loses sight of this
fact. After describing the descent from intellect to
"animal nature" and sense perception, he says: "On account
of the want of reason, thus of general conceptions, the
brute is incapable of laughter, as of speech" (II, 280).
Whether animals have a sense of the comic or not, sense
perception is not of itself comic, but only becomes so as a
statement about the vitality and optimism of comedy:
"There is no permanent defeat and permanent human
triumph except in tragedyJ for nature must go on if life
goes on, and the world that presents all obstacles also
supplies the zest of life, in comedy, therefore, there is
a general trivialization of the human battle. Its dangers
are not real disasters, but embarrassments and loss of face
That is why comedy is 'light' compared to tragedy, which ex
hibits an exactly opposite tendency to general exaggeration
of issues and personalities." (Feeling and Form, pp. 348,
349)
124
counter-current to incongruous processes of mind. One must
be alert to catch the comic which arises from the interplay
of sense and mind. Schopenhauer's appreciation of "lower"
instinctual life is partly anarchic, partly affirmative of
acts of freedom. In terms of pure reason, his theory is
an anarchic rebellion against the discipline of thought; in
terms of will (which chooses its own level of satisfaction)
and the senses (representing what D. H. Lawrence called
"blood knowledge"), it is an affirmation of vitality
and faith in life.
It is interesting to compare Friedrich Nietzsche's
13
early work, The Birth of Tragedy (1872), with the comments
of his master, Schopenhauer. While Schopenhauer contrasts
tragedy, as death-wish, with comedy, as will-to-live,
Nietzsche regards both tragedy and comedy as increasing the
sense of life and power. For Nietzsche, comic ritual ab
stracts this sense of life, which is only latent in tragedy,
and objectifies it in the satyr-chorus:
The metaphysical comfort— with which, as I have here
intimated, every true tragedy leaves us— that, in spite
of the flux of phenomena, life at bottom is indestructibly
powerful and pleasurable, appears with objective clarity
13
Trans. Clifton p. Fadiman (New York, 1927).
125
as the satyr chorus, the chorus of natural beings, who
as it were live ineradicably behind every civilization,
and who, despite the ceaseless change of generations and
the history of nations, remain the same to all eternity.
(p. 208)
Nietzsche notes that the comic is not only vitalizing, but
normative also; it adjusts the balance of psychic life.
Kant, Schopenhauer, Nietzsche, and Freud all insist that
the comic may be experienced as relief from intellectual
strain; it may offer no articulate answer to the problems
of existence— other than a laugh— but it reduces the
psychic pressure of the question. Nietzsche asserts that
all art imposes order on experience, and that comedy,
like tragedy, provides catharsis for pent-up emotions and
restores the will-to-live.
. . . when the will is most imperiled, art approaches,
as a redeeming and healing enchantress; she alone may
transform these horrible reflections on the terror
and absurdity of existence into representations with
which man may live. These are the representation of
the sublime as the artistic conquest of the awful, and
of the comic as the artistic release from the nausea
of the absurd. (p. 210)
Nietzsche's definition of the comic provides a striking
link with the modern philosopher of the absurd, Albert
Camus, in the chapter on "Absurd Creation" in The Myth of
14
Sisyphus (1942), Camus notes that fiction is an oasis of
14
Trans. Justin O'Brien (New York, 1955).
126
ephemeral human values in an absurd world, in order that
thought may not destroy the thinker, says Camus, it must
be reduced to an aesthetic dimension: "The absurd joy par
excellence is creation. 'Art and nothing but art,' said
Nietzsche; 'we have art in order not to die of the truth'"
(p. 69) . The absurd artist creates a world of experience
in terms of images and symbols, but resists the temptation
to give it meaning. "creation [says Camus] is the great
mime. 1 1
The artist, Camus believes, must not be deluded into
seeking an absolute theme or purpose in the passing shows of
existence; he must resist hope in order to see more clearly
what lies around him. "Everything [he says] begins with
lucid indifference." The artist is a reflector whose con
tribution is awareness. His only power is to stamp the
quality and consistency of his own consciousness on the flux
of phenomena; with this limitation, he invents the meaning
of his art, which can be communicated through its symbols
to another sensitive consciousness. Shandeism, for example,
is a world of comic imagination, brought into existence by
Sterne's consciousness and communicated through the medium
of an art which reflects the paradoxes of human nature, but
does not attempt to solve them. (No further equation is
127
15
intended between the "sentimental absurd" of Sterne and
the metaphysical-nihilistic absurd of Camus, for they are
totally different in spirit.) Disappointment of expectation
(the Kantian absurd, as one might call it) may be either
comic or tragic; it figures prominently in both these writ
ers, but in Sterne it is a playful literary device, which
puts him closer to the reader, while in Camus it is treated
on a cosmic scale, representing the Fall of Man and his
predicament.
Schopenhauer's theory of the ludicrous can be related
to the whimsically "absurd" fiction of Sterne on the one
hand, and to the rigorously "absurd" philosophy of Camus on
the other. The victory of sense perception over thought
constitutes the victory of secretly desired absurdity and
is therefore laughable; at the same time it is the victory
of natural "will" (or life force) over the individual's will
to control his world through mental and verbal concepts, and
is therefore not only exhilarating but also disturbing.
Absurd art resembles Schopenhauer's definition of
the comic in that stubborn percepts refuse to be subsumed
15
See Ernest H. Lockridge, "A Vision of the Sentimental
Absurd: Sterne and Camus," Sewanee Review, LXXII, No. 4
(Autumn 1964), 652-667.
128
under general concepts. Like the comic it is mimetic and
self-conscious. The absurd involves a perception of incon-
16
gruity for which there is no resolution, only a tension
which can be sustained and expressed in art. it is a
neutral condition which may be put to either comic or
17
tragic use. For Schopenhauer, the absurd defeat of reason
by sensuous facts is not an occasion for despair, but rather
for rejoicing; what the comic subtracts from mental fulfil
ment it restores in freedom and vitality.
Humorous Incongruity Theories of
English Romantics
English romantic theories of the laughable in
16
". . . the feeling of absurdity . . . bursts from the
comparison between a bare fact and a certain reality, be
tween an action and the world that transcends it. The ab
surd is essentially a divorce. It lies in neither of the
elements compared; it is born of their confrontation."
(Camus, pp. 22-23)
17
Chaplin (see above, p. 114) exploited the absurd m
human behavior for comic purposes, while fully conscious of
its tragic implications, under the "incandescent1 1 moon of
Hollywood, he “would hold forth [to the idealistic Douglas
Fairbanks, Sr.] on the futility of life.1 1 The inimitable
pathos of Chariot's humor was based on a personal philosophy
of the absurd, in which laughter and suffering were inex
tricably mixed: “I did not have to read books to know that
the theme of life is conflict and pain, instinctively, all
my clowning was based on this." see Mv Autobiography,
pp. 214, 226.
129
literature were derived chiefly from two sources: (1)
widespread interest in the psychology of Shakespeare's
characters (e.g., Falstaff), which was sometimes contrasted
with the humor-psychology of Jonson's comedies; and (2)
partially assimilated extracts from German philosphers,
notably Schlegel and Richter. The two sources meet in the
powerful influence of Coleridge, whose Shakespeare criticism
took many insights from Schiller and Schlegel, while his
humor theory was largely a re-phrasing of ideas from Jean
Paul Richter. The theory of imagination (based on Kant and
Hegel) is Coleridge's best-known piece of formal criticism,
but the influence of his lectures and conversation was in-
18
calculable; one must go to the lecture on "Wit and Humour"
(published from extempore notes) to find his opinions on
that subject.
English literary criticism has traditionally concerned
itself with wit and humor rather than with the comic (an
exception is Meredith's Essay). Coleridge follows this
trend, but grafts German metaphysics onto medieval humor
psychology and Lockean empiricism to exalt wit and humor to
a quasi-religious level.
18
In Coleridge's Miscellaneous Criticism, ed. Raysor.
130
Humour Is also displayed In the comparison of finite
things with those which our imaginations cannot bound;
such as make our great appear little and our little
great; or, rather, which reduces to a common littleness
both the great and the little, when compared with
infinity. (Raysor, ed., p. 113)
Raysor traces this sentence to a passage in J. P. Richter's
Vorschule der Aesthetik, sec. 32. Humor here arises from
perception of incongruity between the material and spiritual
in human nature. The vantage point of such philosophic humor
must be truly Olympian, suggesting laughter of the gods
at the human comedy far below them. Schiller describes
this lofty distancing of human emotions as the highest
aim of comedy, "a calm and lucid survey of all that surrounds
[man], and also of his own being"; and Hegel as "an infinite
geniality and confidence capable of rising superior to its
own contradiction ..." (see above, pp. 101, 110).
The relation of this theory of humor to Coleridge1s
theory of imagination is apparent. Humor bridges the gap
between Lockean sensation and Kantian intuition, imagina
tive projection into the infinite changes the normal aspect ,
of things to humorous smallness. From an infinite point
of view, everything human is absurdly reduced in scale, as
if seen through the wrong end of a telescope. At this
comic distance, great troubles dwindle to insignificant
131
proportions. A theory of humor as "ascending incongruity"
("comparison of finite things with those which our imagina
tion cannot bound"), turns out to be also a theory of
"descending incongruity" ("which reduces to a common little
ness both the great and the little, when compared with
infinity"). The levelling down of finite values parallels
Kant's reduction to nothing of expectation, and there must
be a corresponding sense of relief involved, although
Coleridge does not stress this. The finite-infinite con
trast may be traced through Richter back to Longinus' aes
thetic contrast of sublime and ridiculous. The Coleridgean
dichotomy suggests a comparison with Schlegel and Schopen
hauer. Taking human rationality as norm, Coleridge places
the source of comic incongruity above the median line in
a contrast with the infinite, while Schlegel and Schopen
hauer place it below, the former in sensuality and moral
defects, the latter in sense perception and animal nature.
If one were to call their theories forms of "descending
incongruity" on the scale of human experience, then
Coleridge's theory might be seen as a form of "ascending
incongruity" after all.
However, Coleridge makes clear distinctions between the
simply ludicrous or laughable and this higher kind of
132
humor:
The pure unmixed ludicrous or laughable belongs ex
clusively to the understanding plus the senses of eye
and ear; hence to the fancy. Not to the reason or the
moral sense. . . . (In Raysor, p. 117)
This statement recalls Coleridge's distinction between
fancy and imagination, the former an association of ideas
(in the Locke-Hartleian sense), based on sense-perception
and understanding ("Verstand"), and the latter an act of
creative will and intuitive reason ("Vernunft"). Fancy is
a comparatively passive and mechanistic assorting of "fixed"
ideas, while imagination is a god-like act of creating
19
something new out of the raw materials of experience.
Accordingly, the sense-bound ludicrous or laughable has, for
Coleridge, no real aesthetic value, although it may be an
element in wit ("the assemblage of ideas . . . with quick
ness and variety").
Coleridge makes disinterestedness the criterion of
humorous laughter.
. . . the laughable is its own end. When serious satire
commences, or satire that is felt as serious, however
comically drest, the free laughter ceases; it becomes
19
See Biographia Literaria, ed. George Watson (London
and New York, 1962).
133
sardonic. . . . The truly comic is the blossom of the
nettle. (In Raysor, p. 118)20
In this view, laughter is incidental to literature; it is
either free enjoyment or a destructive gambit. Coleridge
seems doubtful of the artistic quality of "serious" satire.
He compares merely laughable incongruities of character,
i
with the cosmic incongruities that constitute humor. Blend
ing Kant with Richter, Coleridge notes that "humorous
writers ... as Sterne in particular, delight to end in
nothing, or a direct contradiction." Raysor (pp. 118-119,
n. 7) offers a quotation from Richter for comparison.
"Therefore humour often delights in a direct contradic
tion or impossibility. . . . Therefore the love of
humour for the emptiest of conclusions. . . . so, for
example, Sterne often speaks long and deliberately on
certain occurrences, until he finally concludes— not
a word of it is true."
This technique of comic disappointment or deception bears
out Kant's theory of "a strained expectation being suddenly
reduced to nothing."
Having first explained Sterne1s hobby-horse characters
in terms of medieval pathology of humors, Coleridge now
20
Raysor notes that image and idea are taken from
Richter's Aesthetik. sec. 29. "'Humour (der Scherz) knows
no other purpose than its own existence. The poetic
blossom of the nettle does not sting. '"
134
relates them to Richter's romantic theory of humor.
Coleridge writes:
That there is something in this [i.e., Richter's theory]
is evident; for you cannot conceive a humorous man who
does not give some disproportionate generality, univer
sality, to his hobby-horse, as Mr. Shandy; or at least
[there is] an absence of any interest but what arises
from the humor itself, as in uncle Toby. There is
the idea of the soul in its undefined capacity and
dignity that gives the sting to any absorption of it
by any one pursuit, and this not as a member of society
for any particular, however mistaken, interest, but as
man. Hence in humor the little is made great, and the
great little, in order to destroy both, because all is
equal in contrast with the infinite. (In Raysor, p. 119)
Two aspects of hobby-horse humor, the intellectual and
temperamental (represented roughly by Walter and Toby
Shandy respectively) are mingled in this description. The
one is a kind of comic pedantry or imbalance between favo
rite ideas and reality; the other is a little closer to
the idea of humorous constitution, which predetermines the
over-development of certain interests to the exclusion of
others. Both aspects of Sterne's hobby-horse characters
are modified by Locke's psychology of association, and this
Coleridge fails to notice. (Locke's notion of mechanistic
chains of ideas based on sense perception would appear in
congruous in the context of Richter's idealism.) Hobby
horses are very human as they seem to crystallize the
peculiarity of personality; they show how a certain mental
135
or temperamental set is logically reflected in habits of
thought or action. They are human, but narrowly so; one
might almost say the hobby-horse wears blinkers. This
being so, free play of soul is impossible, its expression
restricted to a few mechanically repeated gestures. This
is what Bergson means by "curvature of soul." And this is
what Coleridge calls "absorption [of the soul] by any one
pursuit," contrasting it with the idea of the soul in its
potential freedom. Like Bergson, Coleridge believes in
flexibility. The contrast is between a rigid reality and
a flexible ideal, between the limited and the expansive,
or, as Coleridge wishes to prove, between finite and
infinite. Thus Coleridge weaves together strands from the
physical theory of humors, and from the metaphysical theory
of humor.
For Coleridge, literary humor is chiefly a matter of
characterization. He gives the source of that odd tender
ness and pathos connected with hobby-horse humors as (1)
"respect," based on absence of self-interest in the charac
ter, whose lack of self-knowledge amounts to naivetd, sug
gesting simple-mindedness as much as simple-heartedness; and
(2) "Acknowledgment of the hollowness and farce of the
world, and its disproportion to the godlike within us"
(p. 119; cf. Camus' "Absurd," with its sense of religious
deprivation). Thus the sense of humor, elevated and purged
of grossness, is closely linked with the religious sense.
The spectacle of human oddity produces, first, a glow of
charity and sympathy for harmless simplicity, and then an
almost ascetic recoil from the imperfections of human
nature. Coleridge himself was unable to reconcile his
humanist interests in poetry and philosophy with his reli
gion. Perhpas only a superhuman sense of humor could have
enabled him to do so! He might then have expounded the
psychological incongruity of simultaneous attraction and
repulsion as a source of humor. Motives of love and hate,
ridicule and pity— or subtle gradations of these— are inex
tricably joined in humor, which accounts for the ambivalence
of humorous emotion. Where sympathy predominates over con
tempt, the result is humor.
In humor, says Coleridge, follies can be treated
either with abhorrence or indulgence, depending on whether
they are motivated by self-interest or mere temperament.
"All follies not selfish, it pardons or palliates. The
danger of this [is] exemplified in Sterne" (Raysor, ed.,
p. 119). Selfish motivation had been a recognized comic
principle from Plato to Schlegel; the latter says: "As
heroism and self-sacrifice raise the character to a tragic
elevation, so the true comic personages are complete ego
tists" (Lect. XIII, p. 185). Humor-characters are egotisti
cal in their single-minded absorption in "hobby" or "ruling-
passion," and their utter disregard for other points of
view. Coleridge's remark on Sterne in this context seems
cryptic. Does he mean that the reader pardons Sterne's
"betises" and "doubles entendres" on account of the author's
genial humorous emotion? Or that Sterne is too indulgent
to the luxuriant growth of humors at Shandy Hall because
they are amusing and lovable without being harmful (to any
one but Tristram, that is)? probably the remark is intend
ed as a warning against condoning the knowingness of
Sterne's humor, his "dallying with the devil" (see Raysor,
p. 121), and of being led by the charm of his humorous
characterization into accepting a sentimental morality.
Coleridge divides the faculty of humor between the
"humourist" (who makes himself an object of humor) and the
"man of humour" (who objectifies humor). The first has a
subjective power of perceiving humor in himself and his
surroundings, the second has an objective power of embody
ing humor in characters. The jester or buffoon who attracts
laughter to his own pranks and oddities would be called a
138
"humourist," the artist who constructs universal symbols of
humor would be a "man of humour." The former is more pas
sive and fanciful than the actively imaginative shaper
of characters; Coleridge regards "man of humour" as the
more honorific title. Sterne's quick-ranging fancy, his
sensitivity for trivia and their fleeting associations,
make him a "humourist, " while his power of embodying these
qualities in universally appealing human figures, makes
him a "man of humour." Coleridge, however, seems to place
Sterne more often on the side of humoristic fancy (the tal
ent for seizing on minute characteristics) than of imagina
tive humor. He distinguishes between
the man of humor, the effect of whose portraits does
not depend on the felt presence of himself as a humorist,
as Cervantes and Shakespeare, nay, Rabelais— and those
in whom the effect is in the humorist's own oddity—
Sterne (and Swift?). (In Raysor, p. 123)
21
William Hazlitt's lecture "On Wit and Humour" is
a more connected piece of writing than Coleridge's notes
and jottings. Like all of Hazlitt's essays it is remark
able for gusto and would serve as a good introduction to
the theory of incongruity, but its ideas, if less
21
in Lectures on the English poets and the English
Comic Writers, ed. William carew Hazlitt (London, 1906).
All references are based on this edition.
139
metaphysical and more clearly expressed, are no more origi
nal than Coleridge's. As a liberal humanist, Hazlitt
opens his lecture with a mutual compliment to man and
laughter.
Man is the only animal that laughs and weeps; for he
is the only animal that is struck with the difference
between what things are, and what they ought to be. We
weep at what thwarts or exceeds our desires in serious
matters; we laugh at what only disappoints our expecta
tions in trifles. (p. 1)
This statement rapidly condenses the uniquely human aspect
of laughter and tears, the difference between them in emo
tional intensity, the incongruity of real and ideal, and
the Kantian notion of expectation disappointed. Hazlitt
notes the relation of this incongruity to the mingling of
pleasure and pain in human nature (the axis of Freudian
theory). "Disagreeableness" and "disaster" are inextric
ably mixed with "oddity" and "absurdity," but when "the
ludicrous prevails over the pathetic," without exciting
stronger emotions, the comic sense is activated (p. 2).
Hazlitt points out that a sense of the ludicrous partly
cauterizes the sympathetic nerves and acts as a buffer
between sensibility and some of the "natural shocks which
22
flesh is heir to." in a couple of words— "vanity" (cf.
22Cf. Freud's "economy of sympathy" and William
McDougall's "antidote to sympathy."
140
"vain conceit") and "weakness" (cf. "baseness")— he suggests
the theories of Plato and Aristotle, combining them with his
own loosely psychological view.
Hazlitt is highly eclectic, subsuming all aspects of
humor under the general heading of incongruity, in a
Kantian analysis of laughter and tears, he traces both to
perceptions of change, which may be slight and pleasant, or
schocking and unpleasant; he emphasizes the lively stimulus
which the comic sense receives from "baulking [of] expecta
tions" and redirection of energies (see p. 3). Hazlitt
has an amazing flair for picking up and throwing out hints;
in a way that foreshadows twentieth-century genetic studies
of humor, he illustrates his theory by referring to infant
psychology. For instance, a sudden playful handclap in
front of an infant will cause laughter, but if it is too
near or too loud the result will be tears. Hazlitt also
adduces the example of "hide-and-seek or blindman's buff,"
games which trigger laughter in children by contriving a
series of playful shocks and surprises. After dealing
with the importance of suddenness in humor, Hazlitt returns
to the element of interruption. which he regards as supply
ing a shock to the nervous system which reverberates
through the body and issues in laughter (p. 4) . still
141
mining suggestions from Kant's definition, he turns to the
element of relaxation; taking the serious as the usual level
of mental stress, he considers the tragic as increase above,
and the comic reduction below this median (p. 4).
As a popularizer of current philosophies, Hazlitt
probably reached a wider audience than Coleridge, and his
version of incongruity serves as a link between classical,
empiricist, intuitive, and modern psychological theories
of humor. He sums up his central notion as follows: "The
essence of the laughable then is the incongruous, the dis
connecting one idea from another, or the jostling of one
feeling against another" (p. 5). Hazlitt distinguishes
three degrees of the laughable: the merely laughable is
"contradiction between our expectations and the event";
the ludicrous occurs where this contradiction is "heightened
by some deformity or inconvenience"; and the ridiculous
("the highest degree of the laughable") is "that which is
contrary not only to custom but to sense and reason, or is
a voluntary departure from what we have a right to expect"
(p. 5). Hazlitt adds that the ridiculous is "the province
of satire," leaving one to infer that the ludicrous con
stitutes the province of comedy (p. 6).
With characteristic gusto, Hazlitt reels off a
142
plethora of objects of laughter, all of which are based on
incongruity and can be classified in one of the three
classes above. Among laughable objects receiving brief
mention are: absurdity, unmasking of deceit, deformity,
caricature, pantomime, ribaldry, contrasts of shape and
size, the unfamiliar, extremes of fashion, insignificant
distress, a loved one, a despised one, misfortunes of
friends, freaks, drunks, madmen, mischief, "what we do not
believe," illogical argument, self-satisfaction, superiori
ty, inferiority, fools, pretentious people, simplicity,
awkwardness, hypocrisy, affectation, insensibility to ridi
cule, self-conceit, moral cant, "that in others which is
a serious matter to ourselves," "display of cross-purposes"
(in others), restraint of the spontaneous impulse to laugh,
"a secret, a loose word, a wanton jest," wicked intrigue,
double meaning, gravely decorous things, misunderstandings,
and "unconsciousness in the person himself of what he is
about" (pp. 6-9).
Hazlitt discusses the logic of absurdity in comic
characterization (than which, he says, "there is nothing
more powerfully humorous"), illustrating first from Don
Quixote and Sancho Panza, then from Sterne's Uncle Toby.
"Keeping in comic character is consistency in absurdity;
143
a determined and laudable attachment to the incongruous and
singular" (p. 10). Hazlitt excels above all in impression
istic literary criticism and his enthusiastic understanding
of the characters of Cervantes and Sterne provides some re
freshingly original insights into these more concrete cases
of literary humor. The following passage is worth consider
ing in relation to Sterne's techniques of hobby-horsical
characterization:
The most curious problem of all, is this truth of
absurdity to itself. That reason and good sense should
be consistent, is not wonderful: but that caprice, and
whim, and fantastical prejudice, should be uniform and
infallible in their results, is the surprising thing.
But while this characteristic clue to absurdity helps
on the ridicule, it also softens and harmonizes its ex
cesses; and the ludicrous is here blended with a certain
beauty and decorum, from this very truth of habit and
sentiment, or from the principle of similitude in dis
similitude. The devotion to nonsense, and enthusiasm
about trifles, is highly affecting as a moral lesson:
it is one of the striking weaknesses and greatest
happinesses of our nature. (p. 10)
On the strength of these reflections, perfectionism,
idealism, and a leaning toward the infinite, all of which
mark the theory of Richter and Coleridge, seem almost in
compatible with appreciation of humor; a man should rather
be a pragmatist with a robust enjoyment of the oddity of
human nature and no will to change it; otherwise pity, dis
pleasure or indignation might supersede the sense of humor.
144
i
Hazlitt shows o££ his verve for parallelisms in a
running contrast of humor and wit in relation to the
ludicrous.
Humour is the describing the ludicrous as it is in
itself; wit is the exposing it, by comparing or contrast
ing it with something else. Humour is, as it were, the
growth of nature and accident; wit is the product of art
and fancy. . . . (p. 15)
He defines wit by fusing the attributes of wit and judgment
discriminated by Locke, thus dissolving an artificial oppo
sition unacceptable to the literary mind.
In a word, the shrewd separation or disentangling of
ideas that seem the same or where the secret contra
diction is not sufficiently suspected, and is of a
ludicrous and whimsical nature, is wit just as much as
the bringing together those that appear at first sight
totally different. (p. 20)
"Mere Wit," as opposed to the reasonable and creative type,
involves a coincidental connection or disconnection of
ideas, not a discovery of objective similarity or dissimi
larity; it is merely verbal where the other is intellectual
(p. 21). This is a thinly veiled paraphrase of Addison's
distinction of "True" and "FalseV Wit; however, Hazlitt
considers Addison's definition too restricted in denying
wit to "the form of expression" as distinct from the
assemblage of ideas expressed (p. 25). Real wit is not a
matter of passive fancy, but of imaginative design. It
145
conveys a sense of the absurd by forming surprising associa
tions. Hazlitt gives wit more artistic value than it re
ceives in the definitions of Locke or Coleridge. It is
still subordinate to imagination, however.
Imagination may be said to be the finding out something
similar in things generally alike, or with like feelings
attached to them; while wit principally aims at finding
out something that seems the same, or amounts to a momen
tary deception where you least expected it, namely, in
things totally opposite. (p. 26)
In this aesthetic equation, imagination must be given the
value of judgment in Locke's rationalist equation; it is
seen as a profounder power of combination, deploying "ag
gregate masses of our ideas," where wit deploys incongruous
pairs, imagination discovers real similarity; wit proposes
an apparent similarity, which is deceptive and challenges
the intellect with the unexpected.
In a subsequent lecture, "On the Comic Writers of the
Last Century," Hazlitt blames the dull decorum and unifor-
23
mity of modern life for the decline of comedy. "The
genuine source of comic writing," he says, "is undoubtedly
to be found in the distinguishing peculiarities of men and
23
"... there was gaiety in the nineteenth century,
but there was no comedy. ..." See James Feibleman, In
Praise of Comedy; A Study in Its Theory and Practice (New
York, 1962), p. 67.
146
manners"(p. 205). Education has leveled down the rich
variety of humors; and the effect of comedy, which depends
on novelty, has been blunted by repetition. The limitations
for which Dryden had censured humor comedy are exposed once
more by Hazlitt:
. . . in proportion as we are brought out on the stage
together, and our prejudices clash one against the other,
our sharp angular points wear off; we are no longer rigid
in absurdity, passionate in folly; and we prevent the
ridicule directed at our habitual foibles by laughing at
them ourselves. (pp. 206-207)
Following Coleridge's lecture of 1818, Hazlitt observes
that "the proper object of ridicule is egotism," while
examples of colorful and unabashed egotism are hard to find
in modern society which erodes comic individuality, turning
out faceless "non-descripts," that "present no mark to the
foeman" (p. 207). in a vigorous, earlier culture, he says,
literature held the mirror up to life, but in modern society
24
life imitates literature, and men become spectators
24
In the topsy-turvy vision of a contemporary"anti
novelist, " life tries unsuccessfully to ape the narrative
patterns of the traditional novel. People get their ideas
about life from novels (or the cinema) and not their ideas
about novels from life. Loneliness, unorganized sense per
ception, and unconscious physical processes, for instance,
play a far more important part in life than in fiction.
(Whether they should play a proportionate part in fiction is
debatable.) See Jean Paul Sartre, preface to Nathalie
147
instead of actors. Hazlitt regrets that the savor of "the
grosser indications of absurdity" has lapsed from modern
comedy in deference to genteel taste. A degree of honest
grossness is the salt of the comic, and a basic ingredient of
native English humor.
In this theory [says Hazlitt] I have, at least, the
authority of Sterne and the Tatler on my side, who
attribute the greater variety and richness of comic
excellence in our writers, to the greater variety and
distinctness of character among ourselves, the roughness
of the texture and the sharp angles not being worn out
by the artificial refinements of intellect, or the fre
quent collision of social intercourse. (p. 208)
Hazlitt's preference is clear; not only was the eighteenth
century rougher in texture, it had more true refinement,
which, as far as comic literature goes, is seen to consist,
not in "general knowledge," but in "individual distinction"
(p. 209) . This coirfoination of roughness and refinement
might be described as vividness; it infuses the Aristotelian
elements of baseness and deformity (or their milder forms,
simplicity and eccentricity) with the sense of vitality
which is of the essence of comedy.
25
Leigh Hunt's longer essay on "Wit and Humour" invites
Sarraute's Portrait of a Man Unknown, trans. Maria Jolas
(New York, 1958).
25
Wit and Humour. Selected from the English poets: with
an illustrative Essay, and critical comments (London, 1846).
148
comparison with the lectures of Coleridge and Hazlitt; it
is remarkable rather for lively phrasing and literary exem-
pla than for ideas, indeed, its representative quality
is worth noting; apparently the incongruity theory of
humor was becoming a commonplace among English men of
letters. Hunt, following the Locke-Addison-Hazlitt tradi
tion, defines wit as "Arbitrary Juxtaposition of Dissimilar
Ideas, for some lively purpose of Assimilation or Contrast,
generally of both" (p. 9). Where Locke and Addison had seen
wit mainly in resemblance of ideas, Hunt holds that active
incongruity generates the spark of wit.
Wit is the clash and reconcilement of incongruities;
the meeting of extremes round a corner; the flashing of
an artificial light from one object to another, dis
closing some unexpected resemblance or connection. (p. 9)
Hunt notes the connection of "humour" with "moisture in the
bodily temperament," and defines it as "a tendency of the
mind to run in particular directions of thought or feeling
more amusing than accountable" (p. 11). Hunt extends the
theory of incongruity to include humor-characters: humor,
he says, "deals in incongruities of character and circum
stance, as Wit does in those of arbitrary ideas" (p. 12).
Like Coleridge, Hunt implies a convergence of two kinds of
humor in Sterne's characterization— psychology of humors
149
and romantic incongruity. "Such is the melting together
of the propensities of love and war in the person of ex
quisite uncle Toby" (p. 12).
In the course of his essay, Hunt enumerates various
forms of wit, all of which are related to the theory of in
congruity. These are: simile, metaphor, "the poetical
process" of omission, irony of statement (incongruity of
what is said and meant), irony of tone (incongruity of
what is said and how it is said), epigrammatic wit, "good-
natured" irony (exposing absurd pretentions with a mild
manner), burlesque, parody, exaggeration, ultra-continuity
(repetition), extravagance, juxtaposition of ideas or
pleasant verbal sounds, cross-purposes, unconscious absurdi
ty in character, "conscious humors indulged," "humors of
nations and classes," humors of temperament, "moral or in
tellectual incongruities," and "genial contradictions of th
conventional" (i.e., eccentricity) (see pp. 14-67).
There follows a eulogy on the humorous character of
Uncle Toby, whom Hunt apostrophizes as "thou quintessence
of the milk of human kindness" (see pp. 68-69). In this
passage (which is too rhapsodical to quote in full) one
notes the high praise of Sterne's humanity and of the harm
less geniality of his characterization, which strikes Hunt
150
as a delightfully modern quality.
. . . he who created thee was the wisest man since the
days of Shakespeare, and that Shakespeare himself,
mighty reflector of things as they were, but no antici
pator, never arrived at a character like thine. No
master of bonhomie was he. (p. 69)
(Hunt's preference for the modern "humourist" over the
Elizabethan "man of humour," in this respect, is admittedly
somewhat droll.) Hazlitt had called Sterne's portrait of
Uncle Toby "one of the finest compliments ever paid to
human nature," and it seems fitting that Hunt should close
his discussion of humorous incongruity with a flourish of
trumpets in praise of Sterne's characterization (not with
out comic exaggeration worthy of good-hearted Uncle Toby
himself) .
As long as the character of Toby Shandy finds an echo
in the heart of man, the heart of man is noble. It
awaits the impress of all good things, and may prepare
for as many surprises in the moral world, as science
has brought about in the physical. (p. 69)
Hunt makes it very clear that the popularity of Uncle Toby
as a humorous creation lay in Sterne's sentimental morality.
If his enthusiasm sounds a little like singing "There'll
always be an England," one may recall that a more intellec
tual admirer of Uncle Toby, Bertrand Russell, has made
similar statements— in humbler language— about love and war,
151
science and morality.2* *
Hunt selects some passages from Tristram Shandy as il
lustrative of comic genius and of variety and richness in
wit and humor. Where Coleridge had spoken of Sterne's
"dallying with the devil," Hunt speaks of his "principle
of turning evil to good" (p. 72). Even among the equivocal
passages, he finds some that are "destined to be of impor
tant service to mankind" (p. 72). in order to underline the
relevance of "incongruity" to Sterne's art, he announces:
". . . if I were requested to name the book of all others,
which combined Wit and Humour under their highest appearance
of levity with the profoundest wisdom, it would be Tristram
Shandy" (p. 72) .
Thomas Carlyle presents his own philosophy of humor in
an essay entitled, appropriately enough, "Jean Paul
27
Friedrich Richter” (1827). in an idealized description of
humor, he stresses its positive affinities with love, play,
26
See "Can Scientific Man Survive," The Saturday Re
view. XL (December 21, 1957), 24-25. In his Principles of
Mathematics (London, 1937), Russell used the title "Tristram
Shandy” to designate a peculiar paradox in the realist
philosophy of time. See ian Watt, "Realism and the Novel,"
Essays in criticism. II, No. 4 (October 1952), 389.
27
In Critical and Miscellaneous Essays. Complete Works
of Thomas Carlyle (New York, 1901), XV, 3-25.
152
harmony, and beauty. "The essence of humour is sensibility;
warm, tender, fellow-feeling with all forms of existence"
(p. 17). It is the "sport of sensibility . . . as it were,
the playful teasing fondness of a mother to her child"
(p. 17). Carlyle sees humor as an expansive, affectionate
emotion far removed from ridicule.
True humour springs not more from the head than from
the heart; it is not contempt, its essence is love;
it issues not in laughter, but in still smiles which
lie far deeper. (p. 18)
Carlyle rhapsodizes in the manner of Richter himself.
Humor, he declares, expresses
a nature in harmony with itself, reconciled to the world
and its stintedness and contradiction, nay finding in
this very contradiction new elements of beauty as well
as goodness, (p. 18)
Humor, therefore, represents one of the highest functions
of human character, "exalting . . . what is below us" with
generous affection, and integrating all levels of experi
ence into a mature acceptance and enjoyment of life, it
is, for Carlyle as for Hegel, "a hale condition of soul."
Carlyle1s view of humor has a marked tinge of Christian
idealism; like Hunt, he values Sterne's humor more highly
than Shakespeare's, because it is tenderer and more subtle,
and considers Sterne the "finest specimen" of English humor.
Carlyle's judgment in this matter seems to be based on
153
Sterne's qualities as "man of humor," or objective creator
of genial characters, rather than as a projector of his own
whimsicalities, in which role Coleridge cast Sterne as
an exemplary "humorist." Cervantes, however, is "the purest
of all humorists" for Carlyle, because his humor is the
gentlest, warmest, most ethereal, and most harmonious. The
use of the adjective "ethereal" here indicates the quasi
religious light in which Carlyle and the Romantics tend to
view humor. Such spiritualization of the concept consti
tutes the antithesis of Aristotelian and Hobbesian theories
of baseness and superiority and shows what a long way the
idea of humor has evolved from savage laughter.
German idealism and Kantian aesthetic influenced Ralph
Waldo Emerson in the development of his transcendalist
28
philosophy. Emerson's essay on "The Comic" (1843) pre
sents a theory of incongruity combined with Kant's concept
of expectation disappointed. Emerson's ideas are closer to
their German source than those of literary critics like
Hazlitt and Hunt; they belong on a level of speculation sim
ilar to those of Coleridge or Carlyle. Emerson, however,
28
In The Complete writings of Ralph Waldo Emerson.
2d ed. (New York, 1929), vol. II. All references are based
on this edition.
154
interweaves a man of the world's "taste for fun" with his
metaphysical vein. Like Lessing, he begins by noting the
admixture of imperfection always present in the laughable.
Reason by itself (as Schopenhauer noted) excludes a sense
of the ridiculous.
in his essay on the comic, Emerson expresses dissatis
faction with the bare Aristotelian definition of the ridic
ulous; using Kant's ideas, he describes the comic in his
own words.
The essence of all jokes, of all comedy, seems to be an
honest or well-intended halfness; a non-performance of
what is pretended to be performed, at the same time that
one is giving loud pledges of performance. The balking
of the intellect, the frustrated expectation, the break
of continuity in the intellect, is comedy; and it an
nounces itself physically in the pleasant spasm we call
laughter. (II, 775)
The comic effect, he suggests, requires an artful building-
up of interest, which arouses anticipation and sets going a
logical train of thought (the expectation); this runs ahead
of itself only to be cut off short of fulfillment by the
denouement. This sequence appears in the unpredictable pat
tern of comic plot, with its sudden turns of chance.
Like Richter, Coleridge, and Carlyle, Emerson regards
finite and infinite as alternating lenses of humorous
vision. When matter is regarded from a transcendental
155
viewpoint, objects look ludicrous in their very separate
ness. phenomena cannot exist independent of the World-soul;
to treat them as if they did, to lift them from their nat
ural context and disregard the network of interrelation
ships that radiate from them (and define their meaning)
would reduce them to the status of the ludicrous, says
Emerson.
The perpetual game of humor is to look with considerate
good nature at every object in existence, aloof, as a
man might look at a mouse, comparing it with the eternal
Whole; enjoying the figure which each self-satisfied
particular creature cuts in the unrespecting All, and
dismissing it with a benison. Separate any object, as
a particular bodily man, a horse, a turnip, a flour-
barrel, an umbrella, from the connection of things, and
contemplate it alone, standing there in absolute nature,
it becomes at once comic; no useful, no respectable
qualities can rescue it from the ludicrous. (II, 775)
These detached objects are not ludicrous because of any
human connotation (which Bergson insists laughable objects
must have); they are simply comical in their isolated
29
"thingness." This is comic distance increased to
infinity— the distance between spirit and matter. The
"game of humor" here, is one of imaginatively grasping the
incongruity between finite object and infinite space or
29
Similarly Sterne proposes floating chapters on
"things," which are ludicrous in their total disconnected
ness (whiskers, buttons, noses, etc.).
156
spirit. There seem to be affinities between transcenden-
talist humor and comic surrealism.When the logic of
physical gravity is suspended, the world becomes a weight
less chamber in which objects float by, revolving ludicrous
ly in their separate essences. Detachment between ideas in
the realm of sense perception, as well as in those of
philosophy, morality, intellect, and emotion, is a comic
31
principle discovered by modern art and fiction.
Emerson's view of the comic, like Bergson's, is intel
lectual and objective. According to Emerson, "the activity
of our sympathies may for a time hinder our perceiving the
fact intellectually . . . The comedy is in the intellect's
perception of discrepancy" (II, 776). Moral and emotional
objectivity combine to create the comic distance from which
incongruity can be perceived. The man with a sense of the
comic has double vision; he has one eye on the chaos of
human society and the other on the "pure ideal"— both of
30 ,
According to Andre Breton, "Humour is a paradoxical
triumph of the pleasure principle over real conditions at
a moment when they may be considered to be particularly un
favorable." Quoted in Feibleman, pp. 259-260, from Herbert
Read's Surrealism (London, 1936), p. 103.
Consider the paintings of Salvador Dali, the philos
ophy of Albert Camus, the novels of Alain Robbe-Grillet.
157
which may be embodied in the same institution (e.g., the
church, marriage, government). Like Schopenhauer, Emerson
points to the disparity between abstract ideal and sensuous
fact as a fundamental source of the comic.
There is no joke so true and deep in actual life as
when some pure idealist goes up and down among the in
stitutions of society, attended by a man who knows the
world, and who, sympathizing with the philosopher's
scrutiny, sympathizes also with the confusion and indig
nation of the detected, skulking institutions. His per
ception of disparity, his eye wandering perpetually from
the rule to the crooked, lying, thieving fact, makes the
eyes run over with laughter. (II, 776)
Incongruity between real and ideal can be observed in
nature, Emerson says, but "the comedy is enhanced whenever
that ideal is embodied visibly in a man." Man is a living
symbol of rational conduct and any departure from that
standard may appear ridiculous. Falstaff, for instance,
prates of "Reason," but acts according to self-interest and
the senses. This absence of rationality coincides with the
spectator's assumption of its presence; expectation is re
duced to nothing by Falstaff's acts, which are "the negation
of reason," thus producing the comedy of "non-performance"
or "balking." Falstaff is totally lacking in the capacity
for self-criticism, which is a feature of comic awareness;
he is a highly humorous character, but he does not have an
158
32
objective sense of the comic.
Emerson regards the comic sense as an important moral
quality without which there can be no fine character or
intellect.
If the essence of the comic be the contrast in the
intellect between the idea and the false performance,
there is good reason why we should be affected by the
exposure. . . . A perception of the Comic seems to be
an essential element in a fine character. ... We feel
the absence of it as a defect in the noblest and most
oracular soul. (II, 776)
Where comic sense (or sense of humor) is lacking, the comic
principle of egotism is likely to strike home, blinding the
victim to his own defects, preoccupation with personal
appearance, dress, or manners is "food for the comic," and
personal vanities must seem especially ridiculous in the
light of transcendental philosophy. The unhumorous egotist
is a prisoner self-isolated. Emerson emphasizes the impor
tance of the comic as a form of social communication and a
sign of social health.33
32
Cf. Freud's discussion of the "humoristic" characters
of Falstaff and Don Quixote in Wit and Its Relation to the
Unconscious. pp. 376-377, n. 1.
33
Cf. j. c. Gregory: "Resentment at implication of the
lack of humour is probably stirred in part by a sense of be
ing imperfectly qualified for society by inability to join
in one of its characteristic enjoyments and part by the
lack of insight that the imputation implies. ..." (The
Nature of Laughter, p. 37)
159
The perception of the Comic is a tie of sympathy with
other men, a pledge of sanity, and a protection from those
perverse tendencies and gloomy insanities in which fine
intellects sometimes lose themselves. A rogue alive to
the ludicrous is still convertible. If that sense is
lost, his fellow men can do little for him. (II, 776)
It seems surprising that more writers have not pointed out
the close connection between the comic and friendly social
intercourse; literary humor is a genial form of communica
tion, on a deeper and more sustained level than social
mirth.
Humorous incongruity can be treated as taking either
of two forms, one supra-mundane, the other psychological.
The first (that of Richter, Coleridge, Carlyle, and Emerson)
lies in a dualistic act of intuition, in which the idea of
something finite and particular is either diminished to
zero or thrown into absurd relief by the idea of infinity.
The second and more traditional form (which Plato calls
"vain conceit") lies in perception of discrepancy in some
one else's character, as between lofty ideals and base acts,
usually involving unmasking of pretensions, since the char
acter is either unaware of, or hides, the discrepancy.
Where pretentious self-interest is not present, one finds
the whimsical "Cervantick humour" of the hobby-horse
160
34
character. in this case, the reader's emotional response
(for humor is not merely intellectual) changes from con
tempt (the Aristotelian notion) to love, or at least a
mingled feeling of pity and affection. The hobby-horse
character is a compound of incongruity and "humours"; the
humor-character itself, as Coleridge pointed out, reveals
a contrast between temperamental narrowness and rigidity,
and ideal largeness of soul.
The perception of both kinds of comic incongruity may
be linked with a sense of superiority, although these
theories are usually considered antagonistic. Emerson's
"man who knows the world" can sympathize simultaneously
with the real and the ideal, so there is no sense of supe
riority here, but when a "pure idealist" momentarily iden
tifies his own viewpoint with that of the infinite, there i?
in him a sense of spiritual superiority over the mundane
34
The two forms of incongruity merge when the artist
is, at the same time, "humourist" and "man of humour": the;
first (or psychological form) is reflected in technique, thd
second (or transcendental form) is reflected in the objec
tive character-construct. Sterne says that "the happiness
of the Cervantic humour'1 lies in "describing silly and
trifling events with the circumstantial pomp of great ones,"
a remark which passed on to Coleridge through Jean Paul
Richter. See The Letters of Laurence Sterne to his Most
Intimate Friends. I, xlix, 184.
161
which amounts to a comic illusion of freedom and grandeur.
According to Richter and Coleridge, humorous consciousness
asserts itself by inverting the natural order of little and
great. The resultant sense of serene superiority, however,
may be merely an illusion of ease and mastery based, as
Hegel says, on "a world whose ends are consequently thrown
awry on account of their own lack of substance" (Philosophy
of Fine Art. p. 301).
just as the metaphysical and idealistic view of
humorous incongruity may involve a sense of spiritual supe
riority, so humorous perception of psychological incongruity
in others implies a comic sense of superior development in
the observer. Humorous perception of one's own incongruity
— the Hegelian comic sense— is a more philosophical form of
humor, which amounts to an egoistic triumph of the self over
its own emotions and desires. The same enjoyment of hobby
horse incongruity in literary characters, which implies
emotional sympathy for them, also implies intellectual su
periority and self-satisfaction. It is an attitude of play-j
ful indulgence toward inferiority.
Although an analysis of wit and humor can be made to
reveal incongruity in nearly all cases, there is no essen
tial connection between incongruity and comic pleasure.
162
Sensing this fact, Hazlitt and Emerson brought in Kant's
notion of sudden relief from strained expectation to cover
the inadequacy of incongruity-theory. Incongruity is not,
by itself, a cause of the ludicrous or laughable. As
Alexander Bain observes:
It is commonly said that the ludicrous is caused by
incongruity; that it always implies the concurrence of
at least two things or qualities, that have some sort
of oppositeness of nature in them. But the question
comes, what kind of incongruity or oppositeness is it
that inevitably causes laughter? There are many incon
gruities that may cause anything but a laugh. A decrepit
man under a heavy burden, five loaves and two fishes
among a multitude, and all unfitness and gross dispro
portion . . . whatever is unnatural; the entire catalogue
of the vanities given by Solomon,— are all incongruous,
but they cause feelings of pain, anger, sadness, loathing,
rather than mirth.35
Jean Paul Richter himself, to whose ideas all modern theo
ries of incongruity return, had originally pointed out that
natural incongruities, which are "completely unintentional
fruitless marriages of the most dissimilar things," must
momentarily be regarded as intentional deceptions if they
are to become laughable.
Without that hasty attribution, as it were, a syllogism
of feeling, the pairing of even the most dissimilar
things would not produce laughter; for what quite dis
similar things are not together at the same time without
comic force, for example, under the night sky: nebulae,
35
The Emotions and the Will (London, 1859), p. 283.
163
night cap, galaxies, stable-lights, night-watchmen,
villains, etc.? what am I saying? Is the universe not
filled every second with the lowest to the highest in
close proximity, and when would the laughing cease if
mere proximity s u f f i c e d ? 3 6
This obvious fact has sometimes been overlooked by propo
nents of the incongruity theory. Incongruity is not a final
answer to the problem of humor. It is a clue, rather, to
the construction of humor, as in literary characters, and
a way of analyzing humor into separable parts.
Laughter as Mechanism of Incongruous Perception:
Spencer. Lipps, Freud
37
Herbert Spencer's theory of "descending incongruity"
is a physiological relative of Kant's theory of tension re
lieved. Spencer quotes Bain's statement of comic "degrada
tion":
It is the coerced form of seriousness and solemnity
without the reality that gives us that stiff position
from which a contact with triviality or vulgarity re
lieves us to our uproarious delight.38
This is true, says Spencer, in cases where "mirth is caused :
36
introduction to Aesthetics (1804), in Lauter, p. 316.
37
"The Physiology of Laughter," in Essays, scientific.
Political, and Speculative. Vol. II.
38
Bain, p. 283. in Spencer, p. 460.
164
by the gush of agreeable feeling which follows the cessa
tion of unpleasant mental strain" (same, p. 460). But, as
Spencer suggests, Bain's theory does not explain laughter
at incongruous interruptions of pleasantly absorbing occa
sions, such as those provoked by a sneeze between movements
in a symphony, or by a goat wandering onto the stage in the
middle of a lovers' reconciliation. One would expect the
shattering of an harmonious mood to be unpleasant, not
laughable. Spencer explains such laughter purely in terms
of redirected energy. A certain amount of energy has been
amassed to meet expected demands on emotion and attention;
then the expectation is reduced to nothing and that outlet
is blocked. The new channel of emotions and ideas opened
by the interruption is too small to carry off the previously
i
' I
accumulated energy; and so the excess is discharged in the
"purposeless" muscular convulsions of laughter.
Spencer's theory is plausible within physiological
limits, but otherwise inadequate. Nineteenth-century sci
entism has drained laughter of its human meaning and re
duced it to the status of a nervous tic. in selecting
examples of "descending incongruity," Spencer is over-
critical of Bain; after all, it seems reasonable that relief
from high-level aesthetic concentration would parallel
165
relief from "coerced seriousness" (Bain's term)— which
Spencer interprets narrowly as imposed from outside— as a
cause of laughter. As Spencer's examples suggest, laughter
may (in Freudian terms) be a release from the demands of the
super-ego, or (as in Schopenhauer's view) a welcome recogni
tion of the animal element in human experience. The incon
gruous juxtaposition of sublime and ridiculous results in a
reduction of tension to the comic mood. Kant calls this
an "affection," recognizing the emotional content of laugh
ter, which Spencer ignores, incongruity necessarily implies
a contrast of levels, while "ascending incongruity" is un
likely to be the sole cause of laughter, as it could easily
call for increased seriousness. "Descending incongruity,"
that is to say, is one of the commonest causes of laughter,
but Spencer's description is too exclusively mechanistic to
account for the psychological subtlety of the comic sense.
39
Theodor Lipps, adapting ideas from Kant, Richter, and
Spencer, believes that "the real contrast to the comical is
the surprisingly great. The comical is the surprisingly
39
"The Comical and Related Things," trans. Lee
Chadeayne, in Lauter, pp. 393-397. From The Foundation of
Aesthetics (1903), Pt. VI, chap. vii. All references are
based on this extract.
166
insignificant" (in Lauter, p. 393). The comic sense is
stimulated by a quick substitution of the insignificant for
the relatively great or sublime. Briefly, it involves in
flation followed by deflation, puffing-up followed by sudden
"melting away." This can occur in two ways: (1) great ex
pectations followed by insignificant outcome; (2) the in
significant masquerading as the great is revealed as
"nothing" (p. 393). So far, this is simply an elaboration
of Kant's theory.
Lipps goes on to apply his version of relief theory
to the "Motive of Joy" (Lustmoment) and "Motive of Dis
pleasure" (unlustmoment) in the comical. The peculiar
light, free-floating joy of the comic is explained in
(Spencerian) terms of excess energy resulting from a sudden
(Kantian) annulment of expectation:
This peculiar joy can be of the most intense sort . . .
[but] it remains light, meager in content, thin, empty;
and it remains on the surface, a tickling sensation that
has nothing to do with the soul.
The feeling of such light joy arises, as we know,
when the natural readiness of the mind to conceive an ob
ject is in excess of the claim the object by its nature
makes on my ability to conceive it. (p. 394)
(This suggestion of Lipps was developed by Freud in his
cathartic theory of "economy.") Lipps clarifies his theory
with the metaphor of the mountain laboring to bring forth
167
a mouse, an extreme illustration of comic deflation or
"descending incongruity." Lipps sees the internal psychic
reflections of outward incongruity as a prepared space for,
and quantum of, nervous energy in excess of the required
response; the resultant sense of leftover energy, he says,
evaporates into a "feeling of comical joyfulness" (see
Lauter, pp. 394-395). But along with the holiday feeling
of excess energy, comes a feeling of energy cheated of its
goal: disappointment.
. . . this motive of displeasure is inherent in the
comical along with the motive of joy. Or, rather, the
former combines with that motive of joyfulness in a
new feeling, that is, specifically, the feeling of the
comical. (p. 395)
Comical disappointment, which fluctuates in degree according
to the intensity of desire accompanying expectation, can
also take the form of an unpleasant sense of the ridiculous
or of the bitter "laughter of despair" (pp. 395-396). The
first may result from ability and promise without perfor
mance, causing an uncomfortable sense of frustration; the
second, from realization of inability and failure to achieve
a lifetime's plans, or when someone "sees his entire life
with all its pretensions crumble away" (p. 396). Such sud
den reductions to nothing of fondly cherished hopes and
plans could, of course, be quite heartbreaking, and
emotional logic seems to call for a tragic rather than a
comic response. The springs of tragedy and comedy, however,
lie closely adjacent in the same experiences. Comic laugh
ter in these circumstances seems a puzzling reaction, which
Lipps does not attempt to explain. But perhaps it can be
accounted for in terms of his theory: the shock of realiza
tion of failure or futility causes a sudden cessation of
effort, which in turn causes a sudden reflux of surplus
energy and a feeling of relief. There is almost a giddy
appreciation of the sense of futility which has sanctioned
the release, and an indulgence in the sense of impotence as
in a warm enervating bath. This may be an important clue
40
to Sterne's comedy of impotence; the mountain laboring
to produce a mouse is an apt image for the hobby-horse
schemes of Shandy males. On the other hand, Sterne's run
ning joke on the reader is Kantian in technique— he inflates
the reader's curiosity, salacity, or sentiment, then pricks
the bubble with a descending incongruity which dissolves ex
pectation into laughter. (The reader is more or less con
sciously laughing at himself while Sterne is laughing at
40
See Joan Joffe Hall, "The Hobbyhorsical World of
Tristram Shandy." MLQ. XXIV, No. 2 (June 1963), 131-143.
169
him too.)
41
Freud's wit and its Relation to the Unconscious did
not "spring full-blown from the head of jove," as it were,
but was the fruit of merging the theories of Kant, Spencer,
Lipps, and others, with the author's own characteristic
study of dream-work, the unconscious, and sexual repres
sions. My purpose here is simply to outline the development
of Freud's ideas from Kant's concept of suddenly disappoint
ed expectation and the Spencer/Lipps theories of surplus
energy. Essentially, Freud regards the comic as a pleasure-
mechanism resulting from "the economy of psychic expenditure
or alleviation from the pressure of reason" (p. 194). The
first half of this definition suggests the dissipation of
"strained expectation" resulting from the "descending incon-?
gruity" of Kant, Spencer, and Lipps; the latter half, comic
relief in descent from intellectual to sensual levels of
perception, proclaimed by Schopenhauer as the victory of
percept over concept. Freud synthesizes these converging
lines of theory, adapting them to his own work on dream-
analysis.
In his introduction, Freud, discussing some previous
41
Trans. A. A. Brill.
170
notions of wit such as "brevity," notes that Kant had
singled out momentary delusion as a feature of the comic
in general (p. 9). However, Freud concludes that mere
verbal economy in proportion to ideas suggested does not ex
plain the pleasure of wit, because such compression calls
for even greater mental expenditure than usual. He repeats
that "brevity and laconisms are not witty in themselves,"
because
whatever might be saved by the use of the same words
or by avoiding new thought connections would surely be
of no account when compared to the colossal expenditure
of our mental activity. (p. 243)
However, Freud seems to refute this, partially, with
examples of significant expenditure in business producing
compensatory profit^ and of the pleasant efficiency of
electric light switches in relation to gas lamps. The per
son who enjoys increased profits or conveniences will not
mind the expenditures that preceded them, and so, Freud
argues, the person who appreciates wit will not have his
pleasure reduced by the complexity of the wit-work— this is
outbalanced in the wit-maker by release of inhibitions and
safe communication of a tendency, in his audience by rapid
enlightenment. Freud might have clarified this point by
referring to the frequent emergence of wit from the
171
unconscious— in many cases, as he says elsewhere, there is
little expenditure of conscious effort involved, but rather
a happy stroke of "inspiration."
Seeking a physiological basis for his theory in the
mechanism of laughter, Freud quotes Herbert Spencer's
statement that "laughter naturally results only when con
sciousness is unawares transferred from great things to
small— only when there is what we call a descending incon
gruity. 1 1 Freud also notes the connection of this theory
with Bain's notion of laughter as "a relief from restraint"
(p. 226). He then presents the following modification of
Spencer's theory, from which the specific concept of
“descending incongruity" has been omitted.
We would say that laughter arises when the sum total
of psychic energy, formerly used for the occupation of
certain psychic channels, has become unutilizable so
that it can experience absolute discharge. (p. 226)
“Absolute discharge" of psychic energy would be equivalent
to Kant's "reduction to nothing” or Lipps's “melting away,"
and would manifest itself in the muscular spasms described
by Spencer. But Freud goes on to assume that the "dis
charge" may take the form of a transference from one “chan
nel" to another, and from this innovation in theory he de
rives his concept of "Displacement Wit."
At this point one notes that comic theory has become
wholly absorbed in subjective mechanisms; the objective
causes of laughter— whether these lie in a descending in
congruity or surprising baseness— have vanished from sight.
This stage had been long preparing, since Hobbes's "sudden
glory" and Kant's dissolving expectation switched the spot
light from exterior objects to internal processes. Freud,
who is aware of an opening for criticism in his subjectivist
approach, defends his general philosophy of psychopathology
in which wit and dreams are related as day-time and night
time aspects of the unconscious. He defends his novel con
cept of the unconscious, based on analysis of neurotic
states (see pp. 254-255), his parallel treatment of wit-work
and dream-work (see pp. 262-264), and his hypothesis of the
unconscious wit-work (see pp. 283-284). The conflicting
claims of subjective (psychological) and objective (logical)
approaches to the comic will be considered in more detail in
the section on "Proliferation of Modern Theories" (Chapter
III) .
Freud modifies and broadens Lipps's theory of "concep
tual activity" in relation to expectation and disappoint
ment. First he analyzes the theory into three components:
(1) Conceptual Mimicry ("expenditure for the representation
173
of bigness and smallness"); (2) Expectation Expenditure
("expenditure for the tension of attention") and (3)
Abstraction Expenditure (which Freud neglects to define, but
which may be taken as referring to the logical process in
volved) (p. 319). Then he proceeds to subsume (2) and (3)
under the single criterion of "bigness and smallness,"
approving of Lipps's attention to "quantitative” (mechanis
tic) rather than "qualitative1 1 (aesthetic) contrasts as
"the source of comic pleasure," and choosing, for his part,
"the comic element of motion as the starting-point of our
imagination." Freud adds:
In working out Kant's thesis, "The comic is an expecta
tion dwindled into nothing, " Lipps made the attempt in
his book, often cited here, to trace the comic pleasure
altogether to expectation. (p. 320)
Freud considers Lipps's concept suggestive, but too narrow
and forced.
One might venture to simplify the Lipps-Freud theory
as follows: where input of psychic energy ("expectation")
exceeds output ("expenditure") there is economy of effort.
i
Effort is associated with pain, while relaxation is
pleasant; therefore pleasure results. Freud has explained
a source of pleasure, but not why it is specifically "comic*1
(nor indeed what that term means).
f
174
in his chapter entitled "Wit and the Various Forms of
the comic," Freud points out that "economy of sympathy is
one of the most frequent sources of humoristic pleasure"
(p. 374). He shows how Mark Twain uses this technique
in several of his stories. Alarm and sympathy are aroused
on behalf of some character, and then suddenly reduced to
nothing by an incongruously droll or caustic conclusion.
Similarly, economy of contempt and indignation are seen
as keys to the humoristic character of Falstaff.
In a section on "Forms of Humor," Freud introduces
the concept of "broken humor" which somewhat resembles
Lipps's "feeling of the comical" based on fusion of the
"motive of joy" and "motive of displeasure." Freud dis
tinguishes two basic kinds of humor, one preventive of
emotion, the other modifying a painful emotion with a
pleasurable one.
In the first place, humor may appear fused with wit
or any other form of the comic; whereby it is entrusted
with the task of removing a possible emotional develop
ment which would form a hindrance to the pleasurable
effect. Secondly, it can entirely set aside this emo
tional development or only partially, which is really
the more frequent case, because the simpler function
and the different forms of "broken" humor, results [sic]
in that humor which smiles under its tears, it with
draws from the affect a part of its energy and gives
instead the accompanying humoristic sound. (p. 378)
Sterne1s shandean humor did much to popularize such a
175
42
sentimental blend of emotional incongruities — the ready
mingling of laughter and tears— which was to become exalted
in kinship with romantic irony, and which (in humbler terms)
is still a common form of humor.
In a bold attempt to fashion formulae for "the various
forms of the comic," Freud finally splits his theory into
three parallel branches.
It has seemed to us that the pleasure of wit originates
from an economy of expenditure in inhibition, of the
comic from an economy of expenditure in thought, and of
humor from an economy of expenditure in feeling. (p. 384)
Freud traces the resultant comic euphoria back to the light
psychic expenditure of childhood, which preceded develop
ment of the separate senses of comic, wit, and humor.
Freud's conclusion is amazingly neat in its parallel
categorization, but it leaves rather a baffling impression
of abstractness. Of course, a general scientific defini
tion is necessarily abstract, and Freud has cited many
examples of the various comic forms, but he has done so in
order to abstract underlying psychic processes. The reader
may feel that his "strained expectations1 1 have been reduced
42
See Edith Birkhead, "Sentiment and Sensibility in the
Eighteenth-Century Novel," Essays and Studies. XI (1925),
92-116.
176
to nothing concrete, to which one can point as objectively
comic. The general notion of economy seems rather a nega
tive one (although in a sense it implies a converse squan
dering of pent-up vitality), and it treats laughter as a
passive mechanism. By a slight shift of emphasis, the
various forms of pleasure involved may be regarded as forms
of tension and release. The pairings of Freud's formulae —
wit with inhibition, comic with thought, and humor with
feeling— are suggestive in themselves, wit involves tension
and release of inhibition (of hostility, sexual aggression,
or obscenity), the comic involves tension and release of
thought (mental strain— cf. Schopenhauer), and humor in
volves tension and release of feeling (or emotions and
passions— cf. Schiller, Hegel). Paradoxically, the activity
involved in these forms of pleasure seems to be one of expen
diture as well as of economy. Wit involves some use of in
hibition in the masking and control of cruder aggressive and
sexual impulses in polished verbal forms; the comic at times
demands considerable expenditure of intellect— as in the
theories of Schopenhauer, Bergson, or Feibleman, and in the
cerebral novels of Sterne or Vladimir Nabokov; and humor—
not always "serene and calm"— may involve notable expendi
ture of emotion in the form of "laughter and tears."
Freud, however, has outlined psychic bases for the
comic genres, which are relevant to the writer's motiva
tions and techniques as well as to the reader's responses.
His work has added relevance in the case of a self-conscious
narrator such as Tristram-Sterne.
CHAPTER III
PROLIFERATION OF THEORETICAL APPROACHES
IN THE MODERN PERIOD
Review of Theories Surveyed
The foregoing survey of classical and historical
theories of the laughable and ludicrous serves as a specu
lative background for the more scientific studies of the
subject undertaken in the twentieth century, investigation
of laughter and the comic branches out into a wide variety
of fields, modern methods and data providing new lines of
approach, in comparison with such proliferation, the his
torical background takes on a rather blurred homogeneity
out of which a few peaks emerge into clearer view. Before
attempting to unravel some of the new approaches, I shall
summarize briefly the main points covered so far.
1. The Classical-Aristotelian theory located the
source of the ludicrous in baseness, ugliness, or deformity,
of a painless or harmless kind, in physical objects or
178
179
persons— to this should be added Plato's notion of "vain
conceit" in character.
2. The Renaissance-Aristotelian theory accepted
ugliness ("turpitudo") as basic element, but added the sense
of surprise ("admiratio"). The relation of "deformed
ratiocination" to overtly ridiculous acts and appearances
was also stressed.
3. in Medieval Psychology of Humors mental deformity
based on temperamental imbalance was systematized and in
tensified in the narrow confines of a "ruling passion."
From this source, combined with Cervantes' fiction, were de
rived the gentler hobby-horse humors, in which ridiculous
obsession was toned down to a milder eccentricity or whim
sicality, favored by the English pride in individuality.
4. The Hobbesian theory of superiority characterized
laughter as "sudden glory arising from some sudden concep
tion of some eminency in ourselves . . . ' * which seemed apt
in relation to the amorous intrigue and wit-contests of
Restoration court and stage.
5. German Romantic philosophy produced two major con
cepts of humor: (a) sudden relief: Kant's "strained expec
tation being suddenly reduced to nothing"— which usually
took the form of an intellectual descent and in Schopenhauer
180
that of a sensuous relief from thought altogether; and (b)
incongruity: perception of a gap between reality and the
ideal (Schiller), finite and infinite (Jean Paul), sensuali
ty and morality (Schlegel), real and illusory substance
(Hegel), concept and percept (Schopenhauer).
In outlining the direction of more recent inquiries
into the comic and humor— physiological, anthropological,
genetic, sociological, psychological, philosophical, aes
thetic, mythic— my purpose is not so muct to reproduce
technical discussions, as to examine basic assumptions as
well as conclusions that may be relevant to the problem of
literary genres. Literary humor, wit, irony, satire, etc.,
are not genres in the technical sense, as they follow no
set pattern of expression, but they are all refined from
the crude ore of the ludicrous. Specialized approaches such
as those developed by the social sciences and psychology,
can afford a variety of insights into the nature and genus |
of humor which are fundamental to a full understanding of
its literary forms. |
The theoretical diversification which I wish to discuss
in this chapter, is the result of a movement which gathers
momentum at the beginning of the twentieth century. This
I
movement concerns the infiltration of humanistic studies
181
by analytic and inductive methods of scientific research.
As early as the mid-seventeenth century, physical sciences
began to make inroads into the territory of humor, and to
challenge (by ignoring them) the assumptions of speculative
philosophers and essayists who had previously held the
field, in the latter half of the nineteenth century, the
physiological method gained some ascendancy over the meta
physical, although the awkwardness and limitation of this
approach, which denied the hidden springs of laughter and
described effects more convincingly than causes, became ap
parent before the turn of the century. During the same pe
riod, psychological studies were gathering momentum, in the
last two decades of the nineteenth century, the physiologi
cal and psychological approaches joined hands, and a flurry
of articles and investigations (mainly by French theorists)
appeared, with the emergence of Freud as a dominant intel
lectual force, psychology asserted its hegemony over the
theory of wit and humor. The claims of subjective deter
minism were later challenged by philosophers interested in
humor as a logical construct, and by literary critics con
cerned with aesthetics and with techniques of communicating
humor within the objective framework of language art.
While the body of this chapter, then, deals with
182
developments in the twentieth century, it will be necessary
to offer "flashback" summaries to show how pioneer studies
of laughter and humor within the separate fields have
given rise to the range and sophistication of more recent
work. Modern theories of humor usually rest their claims
to validity on the norms of some particular science or field
of study; general humanistic essays of humor,* based on
reading, observation, and opinion, have gone out of fashion,
and now seem totally inadequate unless seasoned with logical
or psychological arguments. Faced by the maze of studies
produced in the present century, I have first of all found
it necessary to classify those I had read, according to
field. Comparison of the kind of work being done in various
fields inevitably raises certain questions. The purpose of
my survey is to compare the relevance of these contributions
from different angles to the problems of literary humor. I
I am thinking of such graceful but dilettante essays
as those of Hamilton Wright Mabie, "A Word about Humour,” in
Essays in Literary interpretation (New York, 1892); Ian
Maclaren (pseud.), "Humour: An Analysis,1 1 in Books and
Bookmen and Other Essays (New York, 1912); James Russell
Lowell, "Humour, Wit, Fun, and Satire," in The Function of
the Poet and other Essays, ed. Albert Mordell (Boston and
New York, 1920); Max Beerbohm, "Laughter," in And Even Now
(New York, 1921), and "The Humour of the Public," in Yet
Again (New York, 1951); and Charles Hall Grandgent, Getting
a Laugh and Other Essays (Cambridge, Mass., 1925).
believe this radial method will clarify the issues and set
the arts of humor in sharper perspective. To this end, I
shall classify modern humor-theories according to the fields
from which they emanate, subordinating chronological orga
nization within the following main divisions: Physiologi
cal, Anthropological, Genetic, and Sociological in the
current chapter (III), Psychological and philosophical in
Chapter IV, and Aesthetic and Mythic in Chapter V. The
rationale of this arrangement lies in a series of parallels
and contrasts, which are latent in the discussion and may be
allowed to link the fields of inquiry in the sequence indi
cated above. I have retained the somewhat arbitrary device
of headings, as I consider it essential to my purpose, to
preserve clear-cut distinctions between approaches which
might easily become blurred by their tendency to overlap.
Physiological Theories
One of the first attempts to account for the emotion
of laughter in physiological terms was that given by Rene
2
Descartes in his Passions of the Soul (1650). in explain
ing why laughter is incompatible with strong emotion, he
2
In Descartes Selections, ed. Ralph M. Eaton (New York,
1927), Articles cxxiv, cxxv.
184
suggests that sheer joy has to be balanced or restrained by
a contrary emotion of "wonder or hate" before it can cause
laughter.
But although it seems as though laughter were one of the
principal signs of joy, nevertheless joy cannot cause it
except when it is moderate and has some wonder or hate
mingled with it. For we find by experience that when we
are extraordinarily joyous the subject of this joy never
causes us to burst into laughter, and we cannot even be
so easily induced to do so by some other cause as when we
are sad. And the reason of this is that in great joys
the lung is always so full of blood that it cannot be
further inflated by repeated gushes. (pp. 388-389)
Here Descartes presents a conjectural physiological ex
planation basing it on personal observation of laughter.
Starting from the assumption that laughter is an ex
pression of mingled pleasure and pain, Erasmus Darwin de
scribes the relation between physical sensation and laughter
in even stranger terms:
The pleasurable sensations, which occasion laughter, are
perpetually passing into the bounds of pain; for pleasure !
and pain are often produced by different degrees of the
same stimulus . . . When the pleasurable ideas, which ex- |
cite us to laugh, pass into pain, we use some exertion,
as a scream, to relieve the pain, but soon stop it again,
as we are unwilling to lose the pleasure; and thus we j
repeatedly begin to scream, and stop again alternately.
So that in laughing there are three stages, first of
pleasure, then pain, then an exertion to relieve that
pain.3
3
Zoonomia; or. The Laws of Organic Life. 3d ed.,
4 vols. (London, 1801), IV, 14.
185
Herbert Spencer regards laughter as an affect without an
effect, a release of psychic energy into "half-convulsive''
muscular action which is intrinsically purposeless. His
theory of "descending incongruity" has already been dis
cussed as a physiological link between Kant's metaphysics
and Freud's psychology of the comic (see above, pp. 163-
165). Spencer adds a physiological suggestion about the
genial glow of humor that seems to spread through the bodily
frame as accompaniment to laughter.
The sudden overflow of an arrested mental excitement,
which, as we have seen, results from a descending incon
gruity, must doubtless stimulate not only the muscular
system, as we see it does, but also the internal organs:
the heart and stomach must come in for a share of the
discharge. And thus there seems to be a good physiologi
cal basis for the popular notion that mirth creating ex
citement facilitates digestion.4
5 6
Humor and heaviness, laughter and health, are associated
4
"Physiology of Laughter," Essays. II, 464.
5
Albert Rapp sees lack of aggressiveness as the asso
ciative link here: "There's a strange affinity between hu
mor and heaviness; an amiability connected with avoirdupois.
It may be because we associate with the fat person such
qualities as loving to eat and drink, lack of belligerence,
geniality; lack of ambition (which makes him less competi
tive) ; lack of desire to strike back (because of lack of
ability)." (Origins of wit and Humor, p. 64)
g
"Dr. James J. Walsh, in his book entitled Laughter
and Health, suggests that laughing provides for most people
186
in the popular mind. Spencer's scientific view of laughter
seems to support the widespread notion that humor, which
provokes outbursts of laughter, appeals to the "heart" or
emotions, while the comic, which provokes the slighter
physical reaction of smiling, appeals to the mind, and
remains chiefly cerebral. Tristram defends Shandean humor
in a passage of comic pseudo-physiological jargon which
might have been taken from Burton's Anatomy. but also finds
a clear echo in Spencer.
"If 'tis wrote against any thing,— 'tis wrote, an'
please your worships, against the spleen; in order, by
a more frequent and a more convulsive elevation and de
pression of the diaphragm, and the succussations of the
intercostal and abdominal muscles in laughter, to drive
the gall and other bitter juices from the gall bladder,
liver and sweet-bread of his majesty's subjects, with
all the inimicitious passions which belong to them, down
into their duodenums.” (IV,xxii,301-302)
Again, Tristram declares that humorous laughter stimulates
life-prolonging physical rhythms:
"True Shandeism. think what you will against it, opens
the heart and lungs, and like all those affections
which partake of its nature, it forces the blood and
other vital fluids of the body to run freely thro' its
channels, and makes the wheel of life run long and
chearfully round." (IV,xxxii,337-338)
badly needed exercising, 'massaging' (as he calls it) of
the lungs, the heart, the liver, the pancreas, and the
intestines." (Rapp, Origins. p. 170)
187
It appears that Shandean humor can be connected, through the
physiological effects of laughter, with ritual purgation of
7
the emotions and modern theories of vitalism.
Spencer's essay was published in 1863 and Charles
Darwin's Expression of the Emotions in Man and Animals in
g
1872. Darwin starts by noting that laughter seems to be
9
the physiological expression of an emotion with simple
physical causes— health, play, vitality, and exuberance
based on physical satisfaction. Such "meaningless laughter"
is typical of children and young people at play, as of
Homeric feasting and jollity, on which occasions it is an
expression of sheer high spirits and "joie de vivre"
(p. 198). Scarcely going beyond these simple emotions,
Darwin merely mentions the complexity of the subject. He
7
See, for example, Susanne Langer, Feeling and Form,
p. 340.
g
(New York, 1896). All references are based on this
edition.
9
Harald Hoffding (among others) points out that:
"Laughter may arise from purely physical causes, and so need
not be an expression of emotion at all." He mentions "vio
lent cold," "a herb grown in Sardinia"(causing "sardonic
laughter"), hysterical convulsions, wounds in the diaphragm,
and tickling, among the causes of laughter. See Outlines
of Psychology, trans. Mary E. Lowndes (London, 1919),
pp. 290-291.
188
offers a cursory synthesis of theories— "Something incon
gruous or unaccountable, exciting surprise and some sense
of superiority in the laugher, who must be in a happy frame
of mind, seems to be the commonest cause" (p. 200). He
points out that the degree of emotion aroused must not be
too intense, and that physical or mental predisposition to
laughter plays an important part. "If the mind is strongly
excited by pleasurable feelings, and any little unexpected
event or thought occurs," then there may be such a discharge
of excess energy as Spencer describes.
Max Eastman (Sense of Humor) rejects Spencer's physiol
ogy as too rigid for his own version of the "play-theory,"
in which humor is instinctive and its expression spontane
ous (see below). in order to ridicule automatism, Eastman
reduces Spencer's discharge-theory to the homely image of
pump and siphon.^ Eastman also reviews Darwin's basic
10"It was characteristic of science in the later nine
teenth century to drop all these vague but significant emo
tions [of romantic metaphysics] and go in for an explanation
of laughter upon the mere ground of cerebral mechanics.
. . . Spencer undertook to explain all laughter— or at leasti
all comic laughter, for he sensed the existence of other
kinds— in the same manner that you would explain the opera- ;
tion of a pump or a siphon. It is simply an overflow, along
the most ready and available channels, of nervous energy
from a reservoir that has been stored up too full. It oc
curs when we have prepared our minds for something big and
momentous, and there follows something small and inconsid
erable." (p. 175)___________ _________________
189
strategy o£ tracing the expression of the emotions to
instinctive physical acts in primitive man. "The sneer/'
for instance, "is an uncovering of the canine tooth for
action" (see p. 207)^ Eastman suggests that Darwin was
"almost on the point of naming the social or gregarious in
stinct" as the cause of laughter as a communal "expression
of satisfaction" (p. 209). He considers that more might
well be made of Darwin's comments on laughter as a signal
of social conviviality, and adds:
. . . we may well distrust any theory of humor— no
matter how mechanical or neuro-dynamic or psycho-
pathological it may be— which does not find itself in
accord with them. (p. 210)
A year after Charles Darwin's Expression of the
Emotions and a decade after Spencer's essay "On the Physiol
ogy of Laughter," there appeared a treatise by the German,
Ewald Hecker, which combined physiological and psychological
approaches in a detailed study of neural response to
i
tickling. Hecker's dominant idea— that laughter and the
comic are stimulated by a rapid interchange of pleasure and ;
pain— seems to owe less to Spencer's physiology and Charles
i
l
i:LCf. Anthony Ludovici on "showing teeth" and "superior
adaptation" in The Secret of Laughter (see above, pp. 65-
66) .
190
Darwin's anthropology of the comic, than to the medical
speculations and sensationalist psychology of that eccentric
eighteenth-century doctor, Erasmus Darwin (grandfather of
Charles). Erasmus Darwin's curious notion of laucpiter as
alternate convulsions of pain and pleasure related to
screaming— he treats laughter under "Diseases" and may have
been thinking of the hysterical form (see above, p. 184)—
foreshadows Hecker's theory of the comic as oscillations of
pleasure and pain:
Hecker holds that the essence of comedy is an intermit
tent stimulus of the sympathetic nervous system, and
that there is a rapid oscillation between pleasure and
pain . . . Pleasure is passing over into pain and pain
is passing over into pleasure. This is his explanation
of wit due to ambiguity of meaning.I2
The comic stimulus, in Hecker's view, amounts to a
kind of shock treatment with therapeutic value; he affirms
that laughter is beneficial to the human organism. Laugh
ter, enjoyment, and health had long been associated in the
popular mind, of course, but nineteenth-century physiol
ogists were beginning to explore the mechanism of this in-
12
Comment on Die physiologic und Psychologie des
Lachens und des Komischen (Berlin, 1873), pp. 76-83, in G.
Stanley Hall and Arthur Allin, "The Psychology of Tickling,
Laughing, and the Comic," American Journal of Psychology.
IX, No. 1 (October 1897), 37.
191
terrelationship in more detail. Hall and Allin, following
Hecker, expatiate upon the physical benefits of laughter in
a modern scientific way quite worthy of Democritus-Burton or
Tri stram-Sterne:
Mad, wild, weird and almost barbaric though laughter
sometimes seems, perhaps, reversionary and dissolutive
in its nature, often convulsive in its intensity, on
the whole, no doubt, like occasional crying for babies,
it is good for the voice, lungs, diaphragm and digestion,
produces needed increase of blood pressure to irrigate
new forming tissues, develops arterial tonicity and elas
ticity, tends to range, flexibility and vigor of emotion
al life, gives an optimistic trend against its evils, and
tones down into settled and less paroxysmal states and
grades of pleasure as maturity advances.13
As interpreted by Hecker and by Hall and Allin (who
all approach the subject through a focus on tickling),
laughter is the middle term in a physiological equation: it
is caused by neural stimulus, and, in its turn, causes
physical invigoration of the whole organism by means of in
termittent or sustained stimulus of the circulatory system.
Physiological explanations of laughter, taking their cue
from Kant, tend to treat the cause of the original neural
stimulus as "nothing" in itself— a mere negation of expecta
tion followed by discharge of energy— and to focus on a
series of neural and motor responses, in part, this
13
Hall and Allin, p. 41.
192
scientism was a reaction against the metaphysical mysticism
of Jean Paul Richter and his followers. Certainly the two
approaches present contrasting extremes: while laughter
may be said to be typically human, the one school treats it
as divine, the other as animal or mechanical. This illus
trates the range and depth of the comic sense in human
nature.
Boris Sidis associates laughter primarily with love,
energy, and play; he seems to attempt a synthesis of
Spencer and Darwin when he likens the exuberance and con-
14
fidence of laughter to "the fighting instinct." Excess
energy spills over into either aggression or play (these two
activities are linked in Karl Groos1s concept of "fight-
ing-play"; see below, pp. 221-222). Assuming the evolution
ary concept of man as a "favored species," Sidis finds the
"Laughter would never have come from the mere point
ing out of defects, failures, and shortcomings; it mainly
comes from exuberance of spirits, from latent reserve, sub
conscious energy which it awakens to activity. This reserve
energy making man more active, more daring in regard to
superior persons and objects of life, giving rise to the
feeling of the joy of life which accompanies the free mani
festations of subconscious reserve energy, making man feel
more courageous, more energetic, and apparently careless as
to consequences, greatly resembles the fighting instinct."
Psychology of Laughter (New York and London, 1913), p. 72.
193
impulse to laughter in playful confidence that there is
energy to spare from the struggle for existence:
Laughter is the outburst of power, the manifestation of
inner energy, in fact, the consciousness of waste, the
consciousness that such extravagance is possible for us,
the assurance that we possess great supplies of energy,
such a state of consciousness is the very source of the
feeling of superiority and joy, it is the main cause of
laughter, ridicule, and the comic. (p. 70)
in civilized man this condition of exuberance occurs espe
cially in conjunction with relief after strain. Thus sidis
combines the anthropological and physiological views of
laughter as surplus energy with Kant's intellectual theory
of a sudden void in thought: "A situation that brings
about relief of a psycho-physiological state of high tension
appears as contrast giving rise to laughter and the ludi
crous" (p. 78).
j
Sidis' theory of glorious waste contradicts Freud's
concept of economy of expenditure:
Laughter never comes from economy, but from superabun
dance of energy. Laughter is by no means due to an
economizing process, it is essentially a dissipation
of energy. The ludicrous, the comic is the trigger
that opens in the audience stores of accumulated reserve i
energy. (p. 225)
According to Sidis, laughter is a psycho-physiologically
extravagant act, although (as Hall and Allin showed) it
may have a tonic effect. Sidis suggests that the
194
psychological elation expressed in laughter and the comic
comes from a sense of freedom and spirit of play.
The first forty years of the twentieth century saw a
tremendous output of literature in a variety of fields on
the causes of laughter and nature of humor. Speculation
took its stand on new scientific bases, but opinion often
still held sway, physiology and psychology had directed
attention to the nerual mechanisms and emotions of laughter
and humor, and battle raged between two opposing camps—
those who saw laughter in all its forms as an expression of
love, as in play, and those who saw it as hatred or supe
riority, as in aggression. Both these divergent generaliza->
tions about laughter could claim support from Darwin's
works, the former from Expression of the Emotions, and the
latter from his earlier work On the Origin of Species by
Means of Natural Selection or the preservation of Favoured j
Races in the struggle for Life (1650) . Both, but especially
the latter, could also claim support from Freud's wit and
Its Relation to the Unconscious. And both drew on a host
i
of treatises from Aristotle to Bergson (indeed most studies
were nine-tenths summary and one-tenth theory). The per
suasive notion of twin poles of love and hate in laughter
appears throughout the period in a mass of theses and
195
arguments. Rather than divide this discussion according
to such loose categories, however, I shall treat Aggression-
theories in relation to physiology, Anthropology, and Evolu
tion; Plav-theories mainly in relation to Anthropology and
Genetics.
Anthropology and “Aggression1 1
The theories of Hobbes (superiority) and Freud
("tendency-wit") complement more directly anthropological
arguments in favor of the aggressive view of comic laughter*
The influence of Hobbesian "superiority," leading back to
primitive aggression, has been noticed in the works of
Sully, Ludovici, and Rapp (see above). Freud's theory of
indirect aggression in wit will be discussed below in rela
tion to the psychological Approach. My main concern at
this point is with theories of aggression or superiority
in the comic, deriving from Spencer, Darwin or other
anthropological sources. One such— issuing chiefly from
Darwin's Expression of the Emotions— is Harald Hoffding's
interpretation of the primitive comic as pleasure in self-
preservation. Laughter is here regarded as a primitive
expression of superiority whereby dangerous opposition is
met, overthrown, and suddenly reduced to nothing. It is
196
thus an expressive action which celebrates both conquest
15
and relief in survival. (This is a primitive analogue of
Kant's intellectual theory.) Hoffding connects the anthro
pological argument with Hobbes's "sudden glory." He notes
that Hobbes's naturalism stressed "struggle," "self-esteem,"
and "power" as elements in laughter, but criticizes Hobbes's
failure to study their modulations in relation to causes
(p. 293). Hoffding identifies four primitive emotions from
which the comic is derived; relief after challenge, joy in
survival, triumph in conquest, and sense of superiority.
From such primitive emotions relating to the struggle
for survival, Hbffding derives the modern (humanized) sense
of humor, with its complex variety of causes and modulations
of tone. As part of the process of evolution, man compro-
I
mises between conquest of, and adaptation to, his environ
ment and the other species which share it. While man
strives to manipulate a physical environment and, later, to;
study his fate, mind is brought more critically into play.
As a result, the subjective elation and depression, with
which Hoffding characterizes primitive emotions, are grad
ually modified by man's ability to see himself objectively
15
See Outlines of Psychology, p. 293.
197
as a limited being. A growing self-consciousness accom
panies the developing sense of humor, as man realizes his
superiority is merely relative to lower species. Humor
seems to involve dual consciousness of superiority and in
feriority; it serves to fortify man against temporary re
buffs and defeats, and to inhibit over-extension of human
powers or futile assaults upon the infinite.
Man's superior knowledge, then, brings a sense of ex
ultation, but, at the same time, makes him aware of his
powerlessness against the laws of time and nature, "in
humour," Hoffding remarks, "we feel great and small at the
same time, and sympathy makes laughter humorous, just as it
changes fear into reverence" (p. 298). Sense of humor, in
other words, involves simultaneous appreciation of a situa
tion from the viewpoints of winner and loser, higher and
lower. Anthropologically, laughter seems to be the privi
lege of success; in civilized forms, however, the subjective
sense of ego-satisfaction is modified by imaginary projec
tion into, or empathy with, the object of humor.^
16
The pathos of this kind of identification with an
inferior object can be studied in Robert Burns1s Ode "To a
Mouse," with its dramatic sense of relativity and shared ex
perience in all nature: "The best laid schemes of mice and
men gang aft agley," has the levelling pathetic humor of
much folk-wisdom.
198
(Contemplation of inferiority involves sharing the inferior
viewpoint— see Groos, below p. 221.) In this way, the
duality which seems to lie at the heart of the comic is
traced to the conditions of evolution.
17
J. C. Gregory's The Nature of Laughter (London, 1924)
is a broadly eclectic survey of theories. Laughter, argues
Gregory, can be based on a variety of emotions, including
primitive ones:
There is laughter of triumph and laughter of scorn;
there is also laughter of contempt, superiority, and
self-congratulation. When lovers laugh as they meet
they are not contemptuous, nor are they amused. The
pure laughter of play, like the laughter of greeting,
is as innocent of amusement as it is of contempt. . . .
Amused laughter, with its characteristic and indefinable
sense of the ludicrous, is a third variety ... in
humour sympathy blends with the sense of the ludicrous
and laughter is transformed from the animosity of
triumph or scorn into geniality and friendliness. (p. 3)
There is no single "laughter," but rather there are as many
"laughters" as there are occasions of humor. With the ardor
of a new science, however, evolutionary studies prompted the
tendency to trace all humor (even the sophisticated modern
blend) to a single source: namely, the cruel laughter of
savage conflict. The serious-minded George Eliot probably
based her ideas on those of Herbert Spencer and Darwin. As
17
All page references are based on this edition.
199
Gregory notes:
A directness of ancestry between the laughters of
triumph and humour was implied by George Eliot: "Strange
as the genealogy may seem, the original parentage of that
wonderful and delicious mixture of fun, fancy, philosophy
and feeling which constitutes modern humour was probably
the cruel mockery of a savage at the writhings of a
suffering enemy."18
This statement by George Eliot fits in with the "biting
laughter" of Ludovici and the "thrashing laughter” of
Rapp (see above, pp. 64-69).
Ludovici's theory of "superior adaptation" involves a
direct application of Darwin's theory of evolution and of
Nietzsche's "superman," in turn based on Darwin's "preserva
tion of favoured races"; as well as of Hobbes's "sudden
glory." Ludovici writes: "We laugh when we feel that our
adaptation to life is superior"; and, "To display teeth,
19
therefore, is to make a claim of superior adaptation."
Ludovici's use of anthropology in tracing the evolution of
laughter as an "ingrained habit" over "millions of years"
is frankly speculative. The "secret of laughter" appears
to be its primal savagery, but the exclusion of all joy and j
18
Pp. 31-32. Quoted from George Eliot, Essays. in
"Laughter," Edinburgh Review. CCXV (April 1912), 390.
19
Secret of Laughter, pp. 62, 70.
200
playfulness makes this theory untenable, it is an extreme
view of laughter as aggression.
Albert Rapp's views, which also stress the aggressive
origins of laughter, are based on anthropology and the
humor of the classics. He regards ridicule, wit, and humor
as three stages of development emerging from primitive
"thrashing laughter." "The laugh of triumph in the primi
tive all-out duel" is the first stage. But Rapp does not
regard all subsequent laughter as more or less sublimated
aggression. Humorous laughter, he says, begins with a
"merging of ridicule and love that requires objectivity,
20
tolerance, mellowness." He points out that all "genial
smiling or laughing" in the Iliad or Odyssey takes place
between members of a family group, thus linking love, or
affectional ties, with the earliest instances of humorous
laughter in literature.
While laughter may be fundamentally savage and aggres
sive in origin, says Rapp, it undergoes progressive civili
zation in the forms of wit and humor, cruel laughter, or
triumph, at others' misfortunes begins to be modified by
20
"The Dawn of Humor," Classical Journal. XLIII, No. 5
(February 1948), 279.
21
the braking action of "sympathetic pain." Laughter may
have a single source, as anthropological critics insist,
but if so it has most certainly gone through numerous
phases of modification, in Rapp's view, humor consists of
a miraculous union of opposite emotions, whose formula is
"ridicule plus love" (Origins, p. 57). He notes that
laughter at oneself, or humorous self-conquest, is a trans
formed version of "the feeling of superiority that quite
naturally accompanied victory over an enemy" (p. 68).
Rapp moreover points out the transformation of physical
aggression into "a contest of intelligence and imagination"
(p. 70), expressed in wit, not blows. (At this point, the
distinction between "aggression" and "play" begins to be
come blurred.) Rapp agrees with Freud that all humor has
its source in "an aggressive act," namely "the tense physi
cal duel between two savages, and the laughter of sudden
victory" (p. 154). But the strain of primitive conflict is
eased by laughter which marks the cessation of hostilities,
and acts as a catharsis (or discharge) of violent emotions.
As sympathy modifies ridicule, "sense of humor takes an
experience which is fundamentally painful; and transmutes
21
Origins of wit and Humor, p. 39.
202
it into pleasure, relaxation, and spreading cheer" (p. 167).
Rapp merely notes that this is "alchemy extraordinary." The
problem of the relation of pain to pleasure in humor is a
basic one (see Hecker, above, p. 190), which leads to anti
thetical theories of laughter as aggression and as love.
Genetics and Love
In humor theory, hostility is associated both with
the element of pain ("cruel mockery") and of pleasure
("sudden glory"). Love, although associated mainly with
the pleasure of humor, is also associated with sympathetic
pain or pity. The modern idea of laughter as an expression
of love draws most of its evidence from genetics and child
psychology. The strategy here is to approach the comic
through an analytic study of its first manifestations in
infancy and childhood. This study involves inquiry into
such genetic questions as : the organic stimulus of first I
smiles, the interpretation of these smiles as response
mechanisms, the technique of tickling as stimulus with the
nature of laughter so provoked, and the causes and quality j
of children's laughter in play. The genetic assumption,
like the anthropological, is developmental, it assumes
direct descent from the original germ-cell of the comic to
203
the most sophisticated £orm of humor, just as it assumes
a direct descent from jungle laughter to the laughter of
the "salons." Darwin is the source of such ideas and his
Expression of the Emotions stands at the head of genetic
study of the comic. More than a century before Darwin,
however, David Hartley had adopted a genetic approach to
the problems of wit and humor, in his observations on Man
(1749; London, 1791) he identifies a rapid movement from
surprise to fear to relief and joy as the causal process
of laughter:
. . . young children do not laugh aloud for some months.
The first occasion of doing this seems to be a surprize,
which brings on a momentary fear first, and then a
momentary joy in consequence of the removal of that fear,
agreeably to what may be observed of the pleasures that
follow the removal of pain. This may appear probable,
inasmuch as laughter is a nascent cry, stopped of a sud
den; also because if the same surprise, which makes
young children laugh, be a very little increased, they
will cry. (Pt. I, ch. iv, p. 437)
According to this analysis, at least a shadow of pain is
antecedent to laughable pleasure. Hartley also points out
the contagious effect of laughter: "children learn to
laugh" by imitation, "as they learn to talk and walk"
(same). Hartley adds that the social factor helps to
spread laughter "even in adults," especially when this is
combined with a physical or affectional predisposition to
204
laughter.
in support of his idea of laughter, Hartley points out
that it seems consistent with the reaction to tickling, de
scribed by him as "a momentary pain and apprehension of
pain, with an immediately succeeding removal of these and
22
their alternate recurrency . . ." (p. 438). in this con
nection, he notes the relation of laughter and tears to
volatile sensibility generally. According to Hartley,
good-natured adult laughter at childish naivet^ springs
from a "general pleasurable state" of "love and affec-
23
tion"; it could thus be referred to genetic origins of
laughter in the infant's sense of comfort and security.
Charles Darwin placed the date of the first smile in
infancy somewhere in the sixth week, about the forty-fourth
day. As a reflex action, the slight lifting of the corners
of the mouth when the baby is removed from the breast seems
to denote oral pleasure and satisfaction of hunger. The
22
Cf. Hecker's notion of "oscillation between pleasure
and pain" (see above, p. 190).
23
The idea of humorous predisposition to love and
pleasure is given full theoretical development in J. Y. T.
Greig's concept of "love-behaviour" (see below, pp. 207-
209) .
205
smile of the well-fed baby lying in its crib appears to be
an expression of warmth, comfort, and a sense of security
in protective affection. It is a sign of emotional health—
physical well-being is being translated into love. At this
early stage, the smile is associated first with sense-
pleasure, then with love. Laughter in childhood and young
adulthood continues to be an expression of the basal sense
of physical well-being and energetic health. Laughter,
in this case, involves a discharge of excess energy which
needs no artificial buildup. J. Y. T. Greig applies this
theory of Spencer to infant laughter, the cause of which
he interprets as a "ruffling" then "calming" down again of
love-behavior.
Darwin, pointing out the insensitivity of the body to
self-tickling, argued that an element of surprise or shock
is essential to both tickling and the comic sense. Of the
former, he says:
. . . it seems that the precise point to be touched must
not be known; so with the mind, something unexpected— a
novel or incongruous idea which breaks through an habitualj
train of thought— appears to be a strong element in the 1
ludicrous.
I
24
See The Psychology of Laughter and Comedy (London,
1923), p. 70.
25
Expression of the Emotions, p. 207, quoted in Greig,
p. 33.
206
This suggestion, however, fails to establish any positive
relationship between the physiology of tickling and the
psychology of the comic.
An early experimental application of Darwin's teachings
was made by G. Stanley Hall and Arthur Allin, and published
as "The Psychology of Tickling, Laughing, and the Comic"
(see n. 12 above). They concluded that wit is related to
shock as tickling is to touch: "Two factors are necessary—
suddenness and a light touch" (p. 27). Tickling, in this
View, would be the physiological prototype of all humor.
But as tickling is a surface bodily sensation, while a sense
of the comic involves an act of perception, a simple, common
motivation for both forms of laughter seems doubtful.
There may be more to be learned about the comic from
children's laughter at play, although one recalls that
Darwin termed this "meaningless laughter." J. y. T. Greig's
point of departure is the moment when the child first learns
i
detached or objective laughter. Greig writes:
As soon as a child has learned to laugh at something,
without attempting to meddle with it, he has fulfilled
the primary condition that makes art possible. He has
turned his head in the direction which leads, at the
last, to the great comedies of the world. The comic is
the laughable raised to a higher power and made fit
for the uses of art. (Greig, pp. 69-70)
207
Mental realization of the comic as an idea, rather than
mindless laughter at physical sensation, is here taken as
the starting-point. Such free aesthetic contemplation
appears to be a prerequisite to appreciation of the comic in
literature.
Greig's book is one of the most notable statements of
the "love-theory" of the comic. He notices a fact very
often overlooked by theorists— the importance of a genial
predisposition to laughter, which he calls "a vague pre
paredness for love" (p. 89), using "love" in the broad
affectional sense of either tenderness or sex. The literary
technique of arousing this predisposition in the reader is
illustrated from "the first sexual joke" in Tristram shandy
(i.e., the begetting of Tristram). Greig shows how Sterne
captures attention, then dallies with it, stimulating ex
pectation while reinforcing the sexual disposition by subtle
phrases. The sudden reduction to nothing (literally the
word "Nothing" in this case) is postponed until the final
paragraph. The affectional predisposition to laughter in
the reader is aroused and maintained in such a way as to in
volve him emotionally and intellectually in the writer's
humor. Greig offers the following theoretical account of
208
humor as literary process and technique:
Love behaviour, or its derivative, hate behaviour, is
first stimulated more or less faintly in the person
who is to be made to laugh, and this behaviour is then
ruffled for a moment and smoothed out again. The comic
writer carries out the ruffling deliberately, either
by momentarily accentuating one side or the other of
behaviour inherently ambivalent, or by introducing an
interruption from some extrinsic source. But he does
not always complete the smoothing-out process. He may
merely hint at it and leave it to the laugher to finish
off: a joke is broken off short at the point. (p. 93)
This analysis of the humorous mood is highly relevant to
Sterne's techniques, for Sterne is famous for the creation
of an ambivalent disposition to "love-behaviour," either
sentimental or sexual, indeed, if Bergson's theory of the
comic seems to be based on Moliere's practice, Greig's
theory often looks like a commentary on Sterne's.
Love-behavior and hate-behavior in themselves leave no
room for laughter, but Greig believes that given an impar
tial spectator with divided sympathies, even "personal
violence is effective for laughter, because it provokes an
ambivalent love-hate behaviour" (p. 120). Violence is not
usually regarded with detachment and the spectator's excite
ment tends to be too strong for laughter, unless he thinks
the contest is stupid and harmless, it should be noted in
this case, however, that sympathy for both parties (rather
than detachment) is involved, and that an emotional
209
tug-of-war goes on in the spectator. At the same time, the
violence must not be great enough to cause anxiety. Both
intense emotion and complete detachment are incompatible
with the love-hate response, and with Greig's own thesis
that "laughter is essentially a love-response" (p. 122).
Nevertheless, there is a comic balance between sympathy and
contempt in much humorous laughter ("ridicule plus love" as
Rapp calls it). Greig shows how ambivalent reactions to vice
and festivity are the source of the comic in Falstaff's
character (p. 147). Satiric laughter in general, is re
garded by Greig as ambivalent. Originating in hate (the
"frustration of love"), it is moderated by fear and partially
suppressed love, so that the tone of satire "tends to be
ambiguous" (p. 175). in wit, adds Greig, "the general
conditions of laughter are always present, namely, love
behaviour interrupted, or hate behaviour restrained."
C. W. Kimmins, in The Springs of Laughter (London,
26
1928), describes how, as pre-school children make contact
with literature through fairy-stories,
verbal humour is thus gradually entering into competition
with visual humour as a source of childish pleasure, and
playing with words is reaching a higher standard. (p. 88)
26
All page references are based on this edition.
210
Playful experimentation with funny sounds and joke-words
leads to play with the meanings and associations of words.
The idea emerging here is that of humor as intellectual
play. Like Greig, Kimmins stresses the need for a pre
conditioned mood of enjoyment or play before the comic sense
can function, "The appreciation of humorous situations," he
says, "is conditioned to a very large extent by the atmo
sphere, joyous or otherwise, in which this appeal is made"
(p. 5). Humor, accordingly, requires readiness, but, as
Lord Karnes points out, it is also "requisite to unbend the
27
mind from serious occupation." Laughter is associated
with relaxation in maturity, as it is with play in childhood
and love in infancy.
As anthropological critics of humor have shown,
laughter rendered primitive man defenseless; it was there
fore typically indulged in when danger had been suddenly
removed or overthrown, and the savage could disarm and
throw back his head in a shout of triumph and relief. As
the surplus energy not expended in the aggressive act was
discharged in laughter, hostility subsided, vindictive
contemplation of the fallen foe may sometimes have given
27
Quoted from Karnes's Elements of Criticism* in Kimmins,
p. 21.
211
way to a twinge of "sympathetic pain," aggression and love
being, after all, related contraries. As civilization
evolved and societies formed, the hostility in humor was
increasingly tempered by understanding or love. J. C.
Gregory sums up the process in neat neo-Kantian terms;
"Sympathy, as its progressive humanization of laughter re
veals, has constantly flowed in through the interruption
of animus by relief ..." (Nature of Laughter, pp. 33-34).
This process of humanization culminates in the sentimental
humor of Sterne, Dickens, and Thackeray, where love is
directed to everything good and unfortunate, hatred to
everything bad and pretentious. According to Thackeray,
. . . the humourous writer professes to awaken and
direct your love, your pity, your kindness— your scorn
for untruth, pretension, imposture— your tenderness
for the weak, the poor, the oppressed, the unhappy.28
This serio-sentimental humor aims to awaken the reader's
conscience by ringing the changes on his emotions.
Looking backward to Plato and Aristotle, Alexander
Bain singles out "degradation" as the key to comic incon
gruity. Gregory regards this as a factor of diminishing
importance. "The humanization of laughter,1 1 he says, "is
28
The English Humourists of the Eighteenth Century
(London, 1912), p. 2. Quoted in Gregory, p. 34.
212
clearly reflected in a marked dissociation of the ludicrous
from the degrading" (Nature of Laughter, p. 110). He calls
civilized laughter "more a means of letting sympathy in
than of keeping it out" (p. 162). Unlike Greig, Gregory
does not regard motives of love or hate as always present
in laughter— "purely comic laughter may be dispassionately
free from either animus or sympathy" (p. 220)— but he does
identify the "highest humour" with the noblest emotions,
29
love and pity.
Boris sidis makes a point of refuting the Hobbesian
notion that malice (self-glory and contempt for others) is
the key to the comic. He offers a cathartic view of laugh
ter, in which sympathy drives out malice; after all, laugh
ter celebrates a cessation of hostilities;
Laughter is directed against the inferior from the
standpoint of the superior, who is thus purified from
all sense of malice. Laughter purges the superior
from anger and vindictiveness with the inferior.
(Psychology of Laughter, p. 140)
Like Thackeray, Sidis sees ridicule as sympathy with truth
and life, in opposition to sham and pretence (see p. 141) .
29
Gregory (p. 220) quotes Walter Pater, who "rightly
identified humour, certainly the highest humour, with 'the
laughter which blends with tears, and even with the subtle
ties of the imagination, and which, in its most exquisite
motives, is one with pity. . . .'"
213
He regards laughter, not just as something savage refined
by the rising values of society, but almost as a personal
means of grace. "Through laughter man becomes purged
of animal malice and rises to the highest forms of human
sympathy and divine love."^ Sidis has an exalted view
of humor. Not only is it peculiarly human, it is humaniz
ing. Not only does it mark the end of aggression, "it is
the beginning of reconciliation with our opponents. When
we can laugh we are ready to forgive. Laughter is the
beginning of love" (p. 145) . So far does Sidis disagree
with the Hobbesian notion of malice, that even scornful
laughter and smiles have, for him, a hint of toleration and
a "gleam of peace" (p. 145) .
All the authors in this group would probably agree
with Max Eastman that humor, even if it is descended from
Sidis, pp. 140-141. For a treatment of laughter in
terms of popular religion, see Dudley Zuver, Salvation by
Laughter; A Study of Religion and the Sense of Humor (New
York, 1933). Historically, on the other hand, official re
ligion has often attempted to suppress humor. Eastman de
fends humor against religion as follows: "its essence is
flexibility instead of fixation. Its food is not unity, but
variety. It is superior to religion in its hospitality to
ward the continual arrivals of truth. It is a more conge
nial companion of science. . . . in softening the reign of
the passions it removes the chief obstacle to the process
of verification." (Sense of Humor, p. 25)
214
the barbarous laughter of pre-history, has gone through
many phases of cultural evolution. In Eastman's words;
One of the most interesting processes in cultural history,
and most indisputable, has been the steady playing down
of cruelty, and playing up of sympathy, in laughter.31
Here it occurs most clearly that the genetic approach to
humor provides a miniature analogue to the anthropological;
the evolution of humor in the race— from "thrashing laugh
ter" to "divine love"— parallels the development of a sense
of humor in the individual— from childish mockery to mature
sympathy. Eastman makes use of this argument to identify
ridicule with the primitive stages, peaceful laughter with
the civilized stages, of social and personal development.
To my mind [he says] the overstressing of ridicule in
laughter belongs to a juvenile stage of development. It
belongs to the period, both in the individual and the
race, when prestige and self-glorification are of dis
proportionate concern. Dr. Kimmins reports, on the basis
of a statistical study that "the misfortunes of others
as a cause of laughter" rise to a high proportion at
the age of seven and after that gradually decline. It
is well known that derisive humor plays a stupendous role
in primitive society, and that this role has diminished
with the development of mind and culture. (Same, p. 232)
Here the evolutionary approach is used, not to focus atten
tion on a deterministic primitivism in laughter, but on a
process of reconstitutive change and refinement.
31
Enjoyment of Laughter, p. 176.
215
Many writers have noted this relation between laughter
and love (affability and easy manners) in society; to these
observers, there seems to be a progressive humanization of
laughter by civilization and of civilization by laughter.
32
in "The Freedom of Wit and Humour" (1711) the third Earl
of Shaftesbury had considered laughter and wit as essential
to a free, healthy society and warned against their suppres
sion. Hegel had regarded the rise of comedy as a forerunner
of revolutionary change in society and a sign that the so
cial objects of ridicule were already decadent and about
to crumble before the free spirit expressed in laughter. A
similar view is supported by Harald Hoffding, who asserts:
"The appearance of comic poetry (Aristophanes, Moli&re,
Holberg) always . . . denotes a crisis, at which the con
sciousness of freedom breaks out" (Outlines, p. 294).
Stendhal, for his part, considers geniality, which he much
prefers to ridicule, as a natural accompaniment to the
pursuit of happiness in an enlightened liberal society. He
describes pleasant laughter as
32
"Sensus Communis; An Essay . . . ," Characteristicks
of Men. Manners. Opinions. Times (London, 1711), I, 59-150.
216
open, frank, joyous, harmless, requiring only a society
of light and kind-hearted people who search for happiness
along all the paths by which it may be found.33
All these thinkers are notably optimistic about the quality
of laughter which they link with social improvement.
George Meredith describes this highest stage of social
advancement in terms of an aristocracy of the comic, which
is to be the index of true culture. He writes;
One excellent test of the civilization of a country . . .
I take to be the flourishing of the comic idea and comedy;
and the test of true comedy is that it shall awaken
thoughtful laughter. (Essay, in Sypher, p. 47)
Achievement of an aesthetic sense of the comic thus becomes
the fulfillment of that first detached laugh, which Greig
considers a turning-point in the child's play (see above,
pp. 206-207).
Spontaneity. Energy, and Plav-Theory
Studies of the transition from smiles to humor in chil
dren (involving genetics), with the associated theory of
humor as predominantly affectional (love-behavior), have
posited a parallel development from infantile to mature
attitudes in the individual and in society. The signifi
cance of this process would seem to lie in the fact that
33
From Racine et Shakespeare (1823), ch. ii, quoted in
Greig, p. 252.
217
mature humor retains some of the spontaneity, energy, and
playfulness of children's laughter, "the euphoria . . . of
a bygone time," as Freud puts it. As critics of culture,
Shaftesbury, Standhal, Meredith, and Matthew Arnold (with
his gospel of "sweetness and light") all consider humor as a
sign of graceful ease and mastery, the attribute of a soci
ety which knows how to enjoy its leisure with moderation.
Mr. Spectator's aim "to enliven morality with wit" suggests
that a spirit of humorous play may quicken the pulse of a
society and perform an important role in education. Playful
humor, which implies a predisposition to love rather than
aggression, may be allied with seriousness (and cultural
evolution), but never with pedantry.
Voltaire affirmed that "laughter always arises from a
gaiety of disposition, absolutely incompatible with contempt1
34
and indignation." About a hundred years later, Darwin, in
observing children at play, also argued that laughter is j
i
chiefly an outlet for spontaneous high spirits, noting that i
i
laughter presupposes "a happy frame of mind" (see above,
!
pp. 187-188). Children laugh excitedly, for example, when
released from the concentration or boredom of the classroom.:
34
Quoted in Eastman, Enjoyment of Laughter, p. 330.
219
Whereas the investigations of physiologists like
Herbert Spencer had tended to reduce laughter to the status
of a neural mechanism void of volition or cognition, L. W.
Kline, following Bergson and Penjon, opposes this view.
For Kline, humor breaks up the monotony of life, by intro
ducing a daimonic element of chance into patterns of routin-
ization:
The humor stimulus [he says] gives glimpses of the
world of uncertainties, of spontaneities, and of life,
and in so doing creates the sense of freedom of which
the sense of humor is the obverse side. ... it stands
guard at the dividing line between free and mechanized
mind, to check mechanization and to preserve and fan
the sparks of genius.37
With Kant and Schopenhauer, Kline sees laughter as relief
from strain; with Penjon, as liberty and spontaneity which
break through repression. It involves alternate stimulus
and relaxation. Kline describes this process graphically
concevoir ni esp^rance ni crainte et ne nous semble en meme
temps ni avantageux, ni nuisible k personne; il vaut par
lui-meme ce qu'il vaut, sans qu'il s'ajoute a la connais-
sance que nous en prenons aucune consideration de fin ou
d'id^al. L'^motion comique est done essentiellement une
Emotion de jeu, et nous sommes ainsi ramen^s k notre theorie
d'apres laquelle le rire et la liberty sont inseparables."
(Penjon, pp. 115-116)
37
"The Psychology of Humor, " American journal of
Psychology. XVIII, No. 4 (October 1907), 421-441.
218
Voltaire's and Darwin's notion of spontaneity in laughter
appears to be closely associated with those of "play" and
"relief from constraint," considered relevant by Max East
man. in his chapter, "Laughter as Liberty" (Sense of Humor,
Pt. II, ch. vii, pp. 184-189), Eastman traces the develop
ment of a spontaneity-theory of laughter, running from
Shaftesbury, through Bain and Charles Renouvier, to Albert
35
penjon's "Laughter and Liberty." As Eastman notes,
Penjon authored the idea, elaborated by Freud,
that comic speech and behavior is "the sudden eruption
of a spontaneity," and that "nature," which is "in a
large sense synonymous with liberty," is what breaks
through the constraints of civilization in jokes and
humorous laughter. (p. 187)
Laughter, according to Penjon, is simply "the end of a con
straint," or "liberty visible," expressing non-intellectual
satisfaction. Penjon concedes that the comic emotion may be
36
mixed, but argues that it is essentially one of play.
35
in Revue Philosophique. XXXVI (July-December 1893),
113-140.
36
L'^motion comique [he writes], a la prendre en elle-
meme, est essentiellement desint£ressee. Sans doute, elle
offre rarement cette puret£ . . . Mais si l'on fait abstrac
tion, comme il le faut, des causes qui la defigurent trop
ais^ment et en font une emotion de m^chancete ou d'amertume,
l'dmotion comique paraitra purement d£sint4ressee. J'entends
par la que l'objet ou l'^venement qui en est 1'occasion
exclut toute id£e de perte ou de profit, qu'il ne nous fait
220
as "cutting the surface tension [and] taking the hide off
consciousness as it were. . . ." More specifically, he
argues that "the cognitive element in the humor process con
sists, (1) of the perception of the stimulus, (2) the sense
38
of freedom." Kline draws the following important conclu
sions:
The humorous process, then, like play, is its own end
and justification. The kinship between humor and play
not only suggests relationships between humor and free
dom, which penjon has so well worked out, and between
humor and aesthetics long ago indicated by Kant and
recently treated by Lipps, but that mental activities
long interpreted as play should be credited to humor.
(pp. 434-435)
Distinctions between humor and play, and the relation of
both to aesthetics are problematic. (The matter will be
discussed below in connection with the work of Johan
39
Huizinga.) For Kline, the outstanding quality of humor
i
is freedom, and he subordinates other theoretical aspects,
such as superiority, morality, sociality, and play, to this!
broad concept. The spirit of freedom and pleasure links
38 !
"No stimulus, perhaps, more mercifully and effectual-*-
ly breaks the surface tension of consciousness, thereby
conditioning it for a new forward movement, than humor."
(p. 421)
i
39
Homo Ludens; A Study of the Play-Element in Culturei
(New York, 1950). See below, pp. 237-240.
221
humor with play and aesthetics, revealing the common cul
tural basis of all three.
An interesting combination of aggression and play
theories is that advanced by Karl Groos in The Play of
40
Man. Groos finds an "undeniable" element of superiority
in the comic, which he accordingly places "in the category
of fighting plays" (p. 233). The reason for this rather
paradoxical classification appears to be the ambivalent
mingling in the comic response of a sense of aesthetic con
templation with a sense of aggressive superiority:
By far the most significant feature of the process is
the fact that the observer alternates between aesthetic
feeling or inner imitation and the external sense of
triumph. . . . It is a psychological law that sufficient
observation of any object stirs the imitative impulse
to such a degree as to cause us inwardly to sympathize
with the object, and the law holds good with regard to
what we consider inferior if it impresses us as amusing
as well. Our feeling, then, is so far from being pure
malice that we actually spend an interval in inward
participation in the inferiority, though at the next
moment, it is true, exulting triumphantly in our own
superiority. All this is a play grounded on the in
stinctive indulgence of our fighting impulse, aided and
enlarged by the idea of contrast, the two together con
stituting appreciation of the comic. (p. 234)
Thus Groos argues that empathy with inferiority mingles with
delight in superiority to produce laughter; he concludes
40
Trans. Elizabeth L. Baldwin (New York, 1901). All
references are based on this edition.
222
that "enjoyment of the comic depends in the large majority
of cases, though not in all, on the union of fighting play
with the idea of contrast" (p. 236). He subdivides
fighting-plays into aggressive and defensive varieties,
but doubts that the second are evolved from the first, be
cause both appear in children's play at an early age.
in Laughter. An Essay on the Meaning of the comic
41
(1900), Henri Bergson analyzes the "usual processes of
classic comedy” by comparison with the games or tricks that
amuse children. For illustrative purposes he selects three
such tricks: (1) the "jack-in-the-box"5 (2) the "dancing-
jack"; and (3) the "snow-ball." The "jack-in-the-box"
causes "a repressed feeling that goes off like a spring, and
an idea that delights in repressing the feeling anew."
These jack-in-a-box effects can be observed in "a comic
repetition of words" (in Sypher, pp. 105-108). The
"dancing-jack" is simply a puppet that gives an illusion of
independent action. By way of illustration, Bergson re
marks that:
1
There are innumerable comedies in which one of the char
acters thinks he is speaking and acting freely, and
41
in Comedy, ed. Sypher.
223
consequently, retains all the essentials of life, whereas,
viewed from a certain standpoint, he appears as a mere
toy in the hands of another, who is playing with him.
(p. H D
Hegel had already argued that an illusion of freedom, which
makes "this baseless fabric of a vision" (to use Shake
speare's phrase) seem for a moment substantial, constitutes
the essence of comedy. For Bergson, it is a function of
comedy to expose this illusion to ridicule; for example, a
character thinks he is acting in accordance with static con
cepts, while it is life itself which calls the moves. The
"snow-ball" effect involves a comic chain reaction, in which
trivial events go on triggering consequences until they have
piled up a disproportionate importance. This device is
similar to Locke's "train of ideas," and is used by Sterne
j
in exposing the mental processes of hobby-horse characters.
The guiding principle in all three devices, Bergson defines
as "mechanization of life," contrasting a series of auto
matic actions with the vital flow of life itself, i.e.,
puppet-show with reality, in all three cases, laughter is
I ;
intellectual and directed at the play, which, because of its
lack of spontaneity, is a poor imitation of life. Bergson
contrasts a sterile kind of play with the vital fluidity of
life; for instance, comic absurdity involves a non-produc-
224
tive playing with ideas, a kind of free-association which
lacks any creative urge toward an outcome. Comedy, for
Bergson, is intellectual play with a serious intention—
that of ridiculing stiffness in thought and action, while
serving the cause of vital intelligence.
42
James Sully, interprets the causes of primitive
laughter as (1) "gladness" (defined as sudden pleasure);
(2) "sudden relaxation of mental strain," and (3) "sense
of relief from pressure." He deduces from the aggregate
of all three sources a "deep kinship between laughter and
play" (p. 145). Sully finds that laughter contrasts with
work in the same way that play does: "It is light pleasur
able activity in contrast to the more burdensome activity
of our serious hours" (p. 146). As play is by definition
free from compulsion, so is laughter free "from the compul
sion of the practical and other needs which keep men, in
the main, serious beings" (p. 146). Play "ceases to be
pure play," when the ends of gain or victory become too im
portant to the player, and so does laughter when "the in
vention of a witticism" becomes a matter of emulation and
42
An Essay on Laughter; Its Forms, its Causes. Its
Development and Its Value (London, 1907). All references
are based on this edition.
225
prestige (p. 147).
Sully uses the approach of genetic psychology to de
rive the complex and ambivalent emotions of mature humor
from the alternation of aggression and pity, as simple modes
of play, in infancy. The two moods in infant play are "dis
tinct though contiguous," while in humor they form a subtle
blend. Childish glee, Sully argues, is "a pure primitive
gaiety, uncomplicated by reflection and sadness." Neverthe
less, he says, "it can be seen to disclose faint embryonic
tracings of the main lines of differentiation in the devel
opment of human laughter" (p. 219). in other words, the
sense of humor, as an aspect of personal development,
is evolved from play. Likewise, literary humor has evolved
a long way from primitive harshness to the sympathy and
freedom from animus of its modern form. Sully calls it
the laughter altogether farthest removed from the stand
point of the interested person: there is in it nothing
of the crowing over the vanquished, hardly anything of
a consciousness of . . . superiority . . . (see pp. 298-
299)
Humor seems to be characterized by moderation and a balance
of moods. It involves "a quiet survey of things, at once
playful and reflective," and "an outward, expansive movement
of the spirits met and retarded by a cross-current of some
thing like kindly thoughtfulness ..." (p. 299). Humor
226
requires a fully-rounded "Gestalt" vision of things in their
variety and interrelationship;
it is a mental habit of projecting things against their
backgrounds, of viewing them in their complete settings—
so far as this involves those relations of contrariety
which . . . are of the essence of the ludicrous . . .
(p. 301)
A paradoxical element of "imaginative reflection" occurs in
the higher forms of humor, and Sully points out that "this
meeting of the playful and the serious in the mood of humor
has its intellectual condition in an enlarged mental grasp
of things." Similarly, play in childhood is regarded as a
condition of mental adaptation and growth.
There seems to be a definite correlation between the
sense of humor and intelligence. The mind demonstrates its
agility by playing tricks with ideas, such as humorous in
version, in which "man and beast, father and son" exchange
43
places. The proportion of seriousness to play in humor
varies, of course. Yet in all humor, according to Sully,
"the rational element itself, affected by its alliance, puts
on a half-festive attire, so that after all the whole mind
43
The former example is relevant to fable. and the lat
ter to the comic inversion of the Oedipus myth in New com
edy. Cf. also Bergson on Comic inversion as reversal of
roles, "topsyturvydom," or "a situation which recoils on the
head of its author" (Laughter. in Sypher, pp. 121-122).
227
may be said to join in the play" (p. 304). Humor implies
more than an inversion of roles or perception of incongru
ity; it involves a playful frame of mind in which "the
whole consciousness is for the time modified by the taking
of a new attitude or mood" (p. 304) .
In childhood, as Darwin suggested, a pure unconscious
laughter of play is natural, but in maturity an-element of
sober reflection or sadness underlies the humorous mood.
The laughter of experience seems less spontaneous, more
ambivalent. "To be aware, however indistinctly, that the
world has its serious side, is to lose the child's note of
pure mirth . . ." (p. 305). Sully calls the blending of
a gay and sad tone in modern humor "a new type of emotional
consciousness" (p. 307), and contrasts it with the "mere
mixture of pleasurable and painful ingredients" as in
Plato's theory of the ludicrous (p. 308). in modern humor,
laughter and seriousness interpermeate. Yet the comic sense
as aesthetic contemplation of the ludicrous remains an es
sentially "playful attitude" (see p. 375), derived from the
44
spontaneous laughter of childhood.
44
Happiness, novelty, and energy remain important ele
ments of humorous laughter which contains "something of the
child's joyous surprise at the new and unheard of;
228
Boris sidis also considers the "play-instinct" vital
to the development of humor:
We shall find [he says] that the play-instinct is prob
ably the most fundamental instinct of animal life— it
gives rise to the highest activities characteristic of
human life. The play instinct is one of the broadest,
the deepest of human interests that work in man, giving
rise to the highest artistic, moral, and intellectual
life of which the human mind is capable. (Sidis, p. 11)
He regards the comic as involving ')?lay with the realities of
life," with an interplay of reality and illusion in which
the "social, moral, religious, and family bubbles" of pre
tension are playfully exploded (pp. 101-102), thus "being
suddenly reduced to nothing" (Kant). Sidis' view of humor
ous laughter is basically that of Spencer and Darwin. He
asserts:
If we come to analyze the comic we find that its object
is the awakening of the subconscious surplus energy of
man, bringing to the foreground the play of free, unim
peded activity, giving rise to pure joy, resulting in
laughter. (p. 283)
A gradual evolution takes place from the "malice and cruel
ty" of primitive laughter to sympathy with the inferior or
ridiculed object, as in Dickens, as well as refinement of
something, too, of the child's gay responsiveness to a play-
challenge; often something also of the glorious sense of ex
pansion after compression which gives the large mobility to
freshly freed limbs of young animals and children" (Sully,
p. 153).
229
iemotion, increasing emphasis is put on intellectual play,
especially in the evolution of literary laughter. Sidis
notes that Aristotle had upheld free or artistic use of
mind as a source of great intrinsic pleasure. That is why
the comic often contains an intellectual challenge. As
Sidis puts it;
. . . in a joke, as in all good wit, the hint is given
and the rest if left to the listener or the reader. If
the whole mass of associations heave up at the hint
given and the target aimed at is hit by the reader or
listener, the latter feels the joy of free activity . . .
(p. 204)
This imaginative leap as an aspect of intellectual play in
wit, is given detailed consideration in Arthur Koestler's
chapter on "The Cognitive Geometry of the Comic Stimulus"
(see below, pp. 330-331).
According to M. L. Dugas (psychologie du Rire. 1902),
the laugher asserts his imaginative freedom by substituting
45
fantasy for reason, and treating reality as absurd.
Dugas considers all forms of laughter to be dependent on
enjoyment or play:
45
Le rieur est orgueilleux sans doute en ce sense qu'il
s'arroge le droit ou s'octroie la permission de juger toutes
choses au gr^ de sa fantaisie et les juge volontiers ex-
travagantes ou absurdes." (Quoted in Greig, p. 271)
230
Tous les caract&res du rire [he writes] trouvent ainsi
leur explication derni&re dans cet ^tat de notre esprit,
dans cette forme de notre humeur, qu'on appelle 1'enjoue-
ment. ou, plus g4n£ralement, le jeu (ludus, jeu et
plaisanterie, en franpais, badinage). (Quoted in Greig,
p. 271)
On the basis of this theory of free play, Dugas, according
to Greig, "cannot admit any function in laughter. Laughter
is a-social and amoral, an accident, an epiphenomenon,
neither good nor evil in itself. ..." (same).
Precisely because of this element of free play, which,
as it were, asserts the will to happiness and life, even in
adverse circumstances, Max Eastman considers laughter "the
imost philosophical of all the emotions":
It seems [to Eastman] . . . that nature, in her necessity
to make us happy when we play . . . has triumphed over
the very terms of life. For she has ordained it in the
inmost structure of our minds that playful failures have
a peculiar interest for us, and playful dreadfulness
instead of hurting makes us laugh. (Sense of Humor,
p. 14)
Thus Eastman introduces his bold thesis that "sense of
humor" is a primary human instinct. The prodigious vitality
and fantasy of Rabelais seem to offer a direct illustration
of the uninhibited play of instinct in literary humor.
. . . Rabelais [says Eastman] is the sovereign of the
world's humor, exactly because all his jests and vagaries
are conceived, born, and bred to flourish in their native
home and atmosphere, the attitude of play. With that
gigantic mental and poetic equipment which we attribute
231
besides only to Plato and Shakespeare, this genius of
exuberance simply romped and gambolled all over the
universe. (Humor, pp. 18-19)
Like Dugas, Eastman believes that the philosophic play of
humor comes to rest in a wise freedom from moral preoccupa
tions. Sense of humor tends to level down the exaggerated
sense of importance which the emotions attach to abstract
moral concepts and to infuse "a gay wisdom among our emo
tions" (p. 22) .
Humor involves a play with reality, not devoid of
coolness and courage. Eastman shows how Montaigne's culti
vation of the play-attitude makes him "the humorist's
philosopher," and suggests that all great humorists have a
trace of bold skepticism in their metaphysical makeup. But
above all, humor, for Eastman, means the ability to treat
unpleasant things playfully. Children "laugh at anything
that is really nothing,1 1 but adults require at least an aura
of intelligence, and so they laugh at jokes. Applying his
theory, Eastman defines a joke as
a little node, or gem-like moment in our experience,
created by the exact coincidence of a playful shock or
disappointment with a playful or a genuine satisfaction.
(p. 28)
Eastman follows the successive modifications of the
derision-theory (which incidentally he rejects), through
232
the work of several German psychologists and philosophers,
46
towards the play-theory. He also exposes the subjective-
objective, aggression-love dichotomies which underlie such
speculations to a wider perspective, by comparing the ori
gins of modern European theory of humor with suggestions
taken from Oriental philosophy. Eastman contrasts Aris
totle's derision-theory (from the Poetics) with ancient
Sanskrit treatises (the PcEsarupa and Sahitya Darpana),
46
In the subjective theories of Ziegler and Groos, the
comic appears as playful scorn or fighting-play, respective
ly; but in the objective theory of Stephan Schutze the comic
lies in perception of nature's game with man (see Eastman,
p. 142). These conflicting theories are reconciled by otto
Schauer, who accepts both subjective and objective forms of
the comic ("the jokes in which we triumph and the jokes in
which we are triumphed over"), as subordinate to a general
concept of "teasing." Teasing, argues Schauer, involves a
harmless combination of aggression and play, and, as he ex
plains, "it belongs to the nature of play that one enjoys
it not only when others are hoodwinked or overcome, but also
in the cases when one must himself play the role of the
hoodwinked and overcome" (quoted, p. 143). Eastman rejects
Schauer's "assumption that egotistic hostility is fundamen
tal in laughter," but considers him "the maturest of those
who have tried to explain away a gratuitous assumption."
Eastman also rejects Jean Paul's metaphysics, which he finds
"fruitless of true meaning," but approves of his "mellow
assertion that 'the jest has no other purpose but its own
being— the poetic bloom of its nettle does not sting, and
one can scarcely feel the blow of its flowering switch full
of leaves . . .'" (p. 169).
233
which notably omit mention o£ derision and simply place
the cause of the comic in "'one's own or another's strange
actions, words, or attire . . . (Sense of Humor, p. 163).
Finally Eastman reveals his own position, in which he
stresses the benignity and uniqueness of humor and opposes
the whole trend of "derision" and "superiority" theories,
along with their anthropological assumptions. Humor,
Eastman maintains, is an element which does not yield to
analysis, because it is a basic instinct.
The sense of humor [he argues] is a primary instinct
of our nature, functioning originally only in the
state of play, and related not remotely in its develop
ment to that gregarious instinct of which smiles and
smiling laughter appear to be an inherent part.
That humorous laughter belongs among the hereditary
instincts is indicated by the fact that it appears so
early and so spontaneously. We never have to teach chil
dren when to laugh; we have to teach them when not to
laugh. . . . (pp< 226-227)
Eastman reinforces his argument that sense of humor is an
instinct, by reference to the fact that laughter in small
children seems to be either spontaneous or an inherited re
sponse to play-tactics. His philosophy of instinctive
i
humor is thus closely linked to genetic investigations and
play-theories; it has affinities, for example, with Penjon's
notion of natural liberty, Darwin's idea of "unconscious"
laughter, sidis* association of laughter and "play-instinct
234
and Dugas1 suggestion that humor constitutes an "epiphenom-
enon."
The basic idea of humor as a playful instinct is
elaborated (with many examples from contemporary jokes and
comic acts) in Eastman's later book. The Enjoyment of
47
Laughter (New York, 1948). in that book, he offers the
following definition:
Humor is playful disappointment— or it is disappointment
arising when your brain and nervous system, and your
whole organic being, are in a state of free play. (p. 8)
Unpleasantness taken playfully remains Eastman1s key to
the comic. He translates Aristotle's theory of comic masks
into more homely terms, as "making terrible faces play
fully, " and Kant's definition of the laughable as "reaching
after something and finding that it is not there" (p. 9)—
as in play-tactics sprung on the baby. The basic "laws" of
the comic, he insists, are (1) a playful disposition in the
subject; and (2) an unpleasant element in the object (see
p. 21). There remains, for Eastman, the problem of explain
ing how the unpleasant is changed into an object of comic
pleasure. He does so in line with his theory of humorous
instinct, arguing that comic pleasure occurs "not
47
All references are based on this edition.
235
by a process of reflection, but by a neural mechanism,"
sponsored by a playful predisposition of mind (p. 26).
He follows this assertion with another strong statement of
instinct-theory.
Humor is [he says] a unique quality of feeling. It be
longs with anger, fear, hunger, lust, among the irre
ducible elements of our affective life. Like them, it
is the inner feeling of a specialized bodily response
to special situations. These are, however, situations
in which our deep life-interests are not engaged. (p. 27)
Eastman is at pains to eliminate "superiority," that close
cousin of derision, from the inner circle of the comic. The
autonomous comic feeling is not to be confused, he says,
"with a feeling of the prestige relation between the laugh
er and the laughee" (p. 128). He stresses the ambivalence
of this relationship, which may be one of superiority or of
envious admiration. "In *naive humor' we are amused a£ a
person's stupidity; in wit we are amused bjr his ingenuity"
(p. 128).
Eastman regards laughter as the playful expression of
48
painful emotions (p. 87), jokes as "unpleasant experiences
48
Chaplin, who was a friend of Eastman, gives qualified
acceptance to this concept, emphasizing its masochistic im
plications:
"Max Eastman analyzed it in his book The Sense of
Humor. He sums it up as being derived from playful pain.
He writes that Homo sapiens is masochistic, enjoying pain
236
playfully enjoyed" (p. 41), and wit as "a practical joke
. . . played upon the mind" (p. 54). He even regards satire
as play, not aggression. Laughter, to him, does not bite,
and satire does not snarl; the latter involves a destructive
play without aggression, in which the victim may be insult
ingly treated as a mere plaything or "bagatelle." This re
duction of the satiric object to trivial absurdity con
stitutes a technique "much more devastating, when success
ful, than any snarling onslaught could be" (p. 242). While
"hostile humor . . . does play a vital role in social evo
lution, " Eastman argues that the dominant factor in ridicule
is not aggression or repression, but "a more sustained and
universal interest . . . in having playful fun" (p. 243).
Asserting, as he does, that humor is a basic instinct
expressed in play, Eastman must account for all types of
in many forms and that the audience likes to suffer vicar
iously, as children do when playing Indians; they enjoy be
ing shot and going through the death throes.
"With all this I agree. But it is more an analysis of
drama than of humor, although they are almost the same.
. . ." See Mv Autobiography, p. 226.
Chaplin used his genius for affective detail to refine
the crude knockabout farce of Keystone comedy into an au
thentic art-form, abounding in poetical and psychological
touches of characterization; physical masochism was trans
muted into emotional pathos.
237
humor, especially those that appear to be based on aggres
sive impulses. Aggression-jokes themselves he regards as
harmless and playful sublimations of cruel impulses which
thus lose their bitterness.
They release organic drives that have been repressed,
and are full of spring, and go off with a particular
bang, and fill the mind with a rank and noisy kind of
glee. Slapstick belongs with obscenity; and from
Aristophanes to Minsky that is where you will find it
at its best. (p. 247)
Eastman rejects the "adult jocular pattern" of "tension-
shock-relief," as unscientific and incompatible with genetic
origins of laughter. "The mirth response itself," he in
sists, "the act of laughter, is adequate 'relief' for people
merrily at play, and no tension need precede a funny image
49
or perception" (p. 287). The play-mood— amounting to
expectancy of amusement— rather than unexpected release of
tension, is considered the precondition for humor.
Where looser theorists have confused laughter with
play, Johan Huizinga— Homo Ludens; A Study of the Play-
Element in Culture (New York, 1950)50— attempts to draw
i
i
49
Footnote comment on a then unpublished dissertation
by Richard N. Sears, "The Dynamic Factors in the Psychology
of Humor," Harvard University, 1934.
50
All references are based on this edition.
238
clear distinctions between the comic sense and the play-
impulse. There may often be a play-element in comic art,
he argues, but play itself need not be an occasion for
laughter. Laughter constitutes a specifically human and
psychological phenomenon, while all animals indulge freely
in play.
Laughter . . . is in a sense the opposite of seriousness
without being absolutely bound up with play. Children's
games, football, and chess are played in profound serious
ness; the players have not the slightest inclination to
laugh. . . . The Aristotelian animal ridens characterizes
man as distinct from the animal almost more absolutely
than homo sapiens. (p. 6)
Huizinga contrasts the comic, which constitutes a special
ized form of the laughable, with play, which he considers
a natural impulse "sui generis" (see p. 6). Play often in
volves a high degree of absorption on the part of players
and spectators, and sometimes it takes on imitative or
symbolic overtones. Huizinga points out that comic art in
volves serious and studied skill on the part of the
performers.
When we call a farce or a comedy "comic," it is not so
much on account of the play-acting as such as on account
of the situation or the thoughts expressed. The mimic
and laughter-provoking art of the clown is comic as well
as ludicrous, but it can scarcely be termed genuine
play. (p. 6)
While the comic appears "closely associated with folly, in
239
the highest and lowest sense of that word, " play can be con
sidered neither wise nor foolish (p. 6). "Play, laughter,
folly, wit, jest, joke, the comic, etc." constitute a group
of related but irreducible terms— "Their rationale and their
mutual relationships must lie in a very deep layer of our
mental being" (p. 6). This applies especially to play.
The more we try to mark off the form we call "play"
from other forms apparently related to it, the more the
absolute independence of the play-concept stands out.
(p. 6)
Common elements do exist, however, in play and the comic;
"In nearly all the higher forms of play [including the aes
thetic play of literature] the elements of repetition and
alternation (as in the refrain), are like the warp and woof
of a fabric" (p. 10). Playfulness is often an aspect of the
most graceful and elegant society; after an anthropological 1
survey of the play-impulse in primitive and ancient society,
Huizinga turns his attention to more modern times and se
lects "music, the wig, frivolous Rationalism, the grace of
rococo and the charm of the salon, " and "merely trifling
j
pen-combats" as "an essential part of that playfulness whichj
nobody will deny the eighteenth century, and for which we
are often tempted to envy it" (pp. 156-157). sheer playful-*
ness or whimsy also constitute the key to that unique
240
quality which Saintsbury called "the charm of Sterne."
The wavy lines which Tristram draws to illustrate the pat
tern of his plot, and the marbled pages inserted with ab
stract irrelevance in the text show a peculiarly modern,
surrealistic sense of play. Huizinga considers a similar
play-element to be characteristic of modern art and society.
. . . esoterics [he says] requires a play-community
which shall steep itself in its own mystery. Wherever
there is a catch-word ending in -ism we are hot on the
tracks of a play-community. (p. 203)
One has only to think of Shandeism to see how Sterne was
ahead of his times in this respect.
Sociology and Communication
If refined humor may be regarded as social or artistic
playfulness, the next step will be to examine the modes in
which it may be transmitted among members of a group, or
from writer to reader, sociologists have naturally stressed
the social relationships and functions involved in humor,
striving to correct the common tendency to treat humor as a
matter of individual perception somehow existing in a social
vacuum. Sociologists emphasize the fact that laughter in
volves an act of communication and that sense of humor ex
presses community values. Society without laughter or
humor would be unbearable; and without society it seems
241
doubtful whether there would be any occasion for the comic.
A sense of humor may be stimulated and quic kened by social
occasions, conversation, the theatre, and literature.
Laughter tends to be infectious, and in social groups, where
a predisposition to playful mirth mingles with a sense of
security, people have the boldness to laugh at sayings or
situations which would normally seem shocking or distaste
ful. Plato, censuring comic art, pointed out this tendency
in the Republic.
There are jests which you would be ashamed to make
yourself, and yet on the comic stage, or indeed in
private [i.e., at home among friends], when you hear
them, you are greatly amused by them, and are not at
all disgusted at their unseemliness; . . . having stim
ulated the risible faculty at the theatre, you are
betrayed unconsciously to yourself into playing the
comic poet at h o m e .51
The comic is learned in a social situation which arouses
laughter; then the participant in that laughter tries to
produce the same effect in others by a process of imitation.
52
Davxd Hartley noted that just as children learn to
laugh by imitation, the tendency to laughter "even in
51
Trans. B. Jowett (New York, 1937), Bk. X, dcvi,
p. 864.
52
Observations on Man. Pt. I, ch. iv, p. 437. See
above, p. 203.
adults" is strengthened by numbers. A child, with excess
energy to spend in play, will catch this contagious laughter
from others out of sheer sympathy. This mode of transmit
ting laughter occurs particularly in situations of group re
straint, as Bain and Kimmins (the latter with his classifi
cation of comic classroom incidents) have shown. A laugh
may run like wildfire through a class of children or stu
dents, a theatre audience, or the auditors of a solemn
speech, without all the laughers having a clear idea of its
cause. The response is not intellectual but simply social,
like a combination "wave of life" (Langer) and "sigh of
relief" (Dewey). It may be a transition from the "coerced
serious" to "the easy side of affairs" (Bain), or simply
the expression of a preconditioned attitude of play. A
stranger may be excluded from the laughter of the in-group,
because this springs from common experience or a humorous
i
communion of minds. "Laughter of the parish" may be unac
countable to an outsider.
pre-eminently social theories of laughter are not
always directly sociological in origin. Like those theories
which link laughter with aggression and play, they may draw
on the conclusions of anthropology. Darwin had commented on
the function of sounds as social signs; he suggests that,
243
although laughter seems non-purposive from a physiological
point of view, it might have been a signal for family or
group relaxation:
We can see in a vague manner [he writes] how the utterance
of sounds of some kind would naturally become associated
with a pleasurable state of mind; for throughout a large
part of the animal kingdom vocal or instrumental sounds
are employed either as a call or as a charm by one sex
for the other. They are also employed as the means for
a joyful meeting between the parents and their offspring,
and between the attached members of the same social
community. (Expression of the Emotions, p. 207)
A contrast to the anthropological kind of communication
theory may be found in the cultural criticism of Mme. de
Stael's Literature Considered in Its Relation to Social
53
Institutions (1800), which contains comments on literary
mirth and national humor, especially "English Joking." The
forms of "plaisanterie" vary from country to country, giving
a unique index of the national character and culture. This
observation surely implies that social communication and
values, and perhaps (as the author maintains) race and
climate also, condition choice of objects and tone of humor
among members of a given group. Mme. de Stael's view of
the comic is fundamentally communicative: "Alone, one is
53
Extract trans. Paul Lauter in Lauter, ed., Theories
of Comedy, pp. 182-187.
244
serious; one is merry for others— above all in one's
writing" (in Lauter, p. 182) . Wit she regards as more or
less the art of conversation, but comedy requires a high-
level act of communication between a creative artist and a
discriminating audience. "Witty mirth is easy for all witty
men; but only the genius of one man and the good taste of
several others can inspire genuine comedy" (pp. 182-183).
Mme. de stael contrasts English "humour" with French
"wit"; the former, which tends to be gross, contrasts with
the English native character, while the latter is in perfect
harmony with the French "esprit." She finds something inex
plicable in French mirth: "It is a sort of electricity
communicated by the general 'esprit1 of the nation"
(p. 185). Sparks from the racial unconscious leap freely
among the individuals of a social group, taking the form of
wit. There is pleasure in such deft communication and in
the sense of identification with a powerful group. Mme. de
Stael may not be entirely free of national bias in matters
of wit and humor. She detects "misanthropy" in English
joking and "sociability" in French, and adds: "the one
should be read when one is alone, the other is striking in
proportion to the size of the audience" (p. 186). Where
she sees English mirth as reflective or "philosophic" in
245
intention, she sees French "plaisanterie" as active, "often
[having] only pleasure itself as an end" (p. 186). She
attributes this difference to the fact that Englishmen are
solitaries or eccentrics who live in the country (rather
a narrow opinion in view of Restoration and Eighteenth-
century urbanity), while Frenchmen are polished to a high
gloss of sophistication by society. Certainly Sterne rusti
cated for twenty years at Sutton in the Forest, observing
eccentricity at first-hand, before the success of his book
enabled him to indulge in a hectic round of London dinners.
Yet from Paris he wrote to Garrick, "I Shandy it away fifty
54
times more than I was ever wont . . . and
I Shandy it more them ever, and verily do believe, that
by mere Shandeism, sublimated by a laughter-loving people,
I fence as much against infirmities, as I do by the bene
fit of air and climate. (Letter lxiii, p. 224)
Sterne's humor was always intended as a laughter-provoking
public performance, and while it had its serious "English"
side, symbolized in Yorick, it also partook of French
"esprit," involving a sort of electric communication between
the author and his readers on various levels of understand
ing.
54
Letters. ed. Cross, letter lxii, p. 218.
246
George Meredith shares some of Mme. de Stael's cultural
assumptions, seeming to base his exalted view of comedy on
French, rather than English, models. In his Essay on
Comedy. Meredith gives no meaningful sociological explana
tion of the comic; the "Comic Spirit" remains something
of a "deus ex machina." However, he interprets comic genres
according to the social and cultural levels they seem to
represent. Thus humor is associated with the low but robust
culture of the English public; comedy, at its best, with the
high and delicate social discrimination of Moli&re. In
Meredith's view, culture conditions comic sense, and the
Comic Spirit raises and refines the social arts. Comedy is
an expression of enlightened society: "There has been fun
in Bagdad. But there never will be civilization where com
edy is not possible; and that comes of some degree of social
equality of the sexes1 ' (Essay, in Sypher, p. 32) .
For Meredith, the uses of the comic Spirit are to
support and further the values of a social elite. His rela
tion of comic genres to sod al values is clearly illustrat
ed in his comment on Byron, who had "splendid powers" of
humor, satire, and irony, but was comic only in the defi
ciency of his philosophy. "He had no strong comic sense,
or he would not have taken an anti-social position, which
247
is directly opposed to the comic" (p. 44). To put oneself
beyond the social pale is to become ridiculous. The comic
poet is seen as the spokesman of society, and his subject-
matter is limited to the "narrow field, or enclosed square"
(p. 46) of a particular social setting. His function is
to make people think about their social roles and "the
operation of the social world upon their characters" (p.46).
Revealingly, perhaps, in Meredith's case, comedy appeals
to a desire for cultural status.
A perception of the comic Spirit gives high fellowship.
You become a citizen of the selecter world, the highest
we know of in connection with our old world, which is
not supermundane. Look there for your unchallengeable
upper class! (p. 49)
Meredith's idea of a super-civilization of the comic
Spirit has some affinities with Bergson's socio-intellectual
view of the comic. Both treat the comic as a socio-cultural
dynamic, and Bergson specifically links the uses of the
Comic Spirit with the forces of creative Evolution, society
is the repository of these forces, and Bergson's view is
profoundly social. He cannot accept laughter as an isolated
outlet for surplus energy independent of social context; it
is, on the contrary, an intimate form of social communica
tion. in Bergson's words, "However spontaneous it seems,
laughter always implies a kind of secret freemasonry, or
248
even complicity, with other laughers, real or imaginary"
(Laughter, in Sypher, p. 64). This vital spark of under
standing in comic communication is probably what Mme. de
Stael meant by the "electricity" of French "esprit,"
although it obviously knows no national boundaries. Lively
intelligence is a good conductor of the comic; dull wits,
like damp earth, put out the spark. The comic exposes lack
of adaptation to society, which begins to show itself in "a
growing callousness to social life," which may develop into
eccentricity, absent-mindedness, or self-absorption (see
pp. 147-148). A sense of the comic calls for predominantly
social forms of intelligence— alertness and flexibility.
James Sully connects the social "freemasonry" of
laughter with its corrective function.
From this frank acceptance of other's overtures of a
friendly laughter to the practice of a humorous self-
criticism, there would seem to be but a step.55
The common principle here is a "sympathetic self-projection
into the object of contemplation," which should be appli-
56
cable also to the self. Wilson D. Wallis combines the
55
An Essay on Laughter, p. 321.
"Why Do We Laugh?" Scientific Monthly. XV (1922),
343-347.
"superiority" and "corrective" views of laughter as a social
phenomenon. According to him, laughter "implies a common
standard and is an efficient instrument in holding the group
to that standard," drawing its strength at once from fear
of ridicule and the pleasure of superiority. For Wallis,
laughter at oneself reflects social, not transcendental,
values (as with the Hegelians); he sees it as a "self
policing" and self-preserving application of group stan
dards. Wallis goes on to subsume superiority, intellectual
ity, and psychological elements (e.g., pleasure, tendency)
under his general theory of the social-corrective function
of laughter. Anti-social or subversive laughter is simply
dismissed as a "misuse" of this "normal" function. E.
57
Dupr^el claims that "laughter is purely a sociological
problem and does not concern psychology or metaphysics."
Ralph Piddington summarizes Dupr^el's contribution as
follows.
For Dupr^el there are two social reactions involved in
laughter, namely, the laugh of inclusion and the laugh
of exclusion. Laughter is primarily an expression of
joy; man, being a social animal, finds pleasure in com
panionship and expresses this by laughter ...
(Psychology of Laughter, pp. 218-219)
57
"Le probl&me sociologique du rire," Revue
Philosophique. CVI (September-October 1928), 213.
Summarized in Piddington, p. 219.
250
But perhaps the clearest statement of the socio-
anthropological view of laughter is that of Donald Hayworth
58
in his paper "The Social Origin and Function of Laughter.”
His theory is that "laughter was originally a vocal signal
to other members of the group that they might relax with
safety" (p. 370). "Whether it is an original part of our
equipment (instinctive) or is acquired by learning no one
knows." Hayworth subordinates the concepts of joy, tension
and relaxation, and play to his theory of social communica
tion. He treats laughter and joy as separate effects of
the same cause, "sudden realization of safety":
Laughter as a signal came to be automatic, it was a
response to a given type of situation, and was retained
and developed in the economy of human society because it
performed an important function. . . . It is natural that
laughter and joy should be found together. But there
was originally no causal relationship between the two.
(p. 372)
Hayworth has not conclusively proved that realization of
safety, relief, joy, and laughter do not occur in a causal
sequence. He himself cites a case of laughter causing
symptoms of joy, namely the exceptional case of "volitional"
or "forced" laughter. Even if laughter and joy were
58
Psychological Review. XXXV, No. 5 (September 1928),
367-384.
251
separate expressions of relief, the one has ages since be
come the conditioned response of the other making them in
separable. Moreover, many previous theorists have demon
strated a variety of situations in which laughter is not the
sign of joy (it may be sardonic, derisive, or purely physi
cal) , or in which joy is not expressed in laughter (deeper
joy may be silent or tearful).
The virtue of Hayworth's thesis is to set forth the
anthropological case with maximum clarity, and its chief
defect is that the anthropological origins described are not
flexible enough to cover the multiple functions of laughter
in literature and society. According to Hayworth,
. . . laughter always follows bodily tension and is
accompanied by relaxation. Tension and relaxation have
been incident to anticipating danger and then realizing
suddenly that there is no danger after all. And laughing
has been incident to relaxation and expelling the breath
merely as a social signal. (p. 373)
The relation of this social-signal theory to the tension-
relaxation theories of Kant, Spencer, Lipps, and Dewey will
be apparent. Hayworth goes on to draw some sociological
conclusions. Not only will laughter spread rapidly by
contagion through a group (as Hartley and Mme. de Stael
suggested), individual utterance will be louder and more
uninhibited according to numbers.
252
A person will laugh more heartily [says Hayworth] in a
large group than in a small one. There are more to whom
one may communicate his realization that the danger is
over. And his method of communication is more pronounced
in a large group, else he will be ignored. (p. 373)
Laughter, then, is an act of social communication, like
speech, which is amplified on a quantitative social ratio.
Play, especially, is punctuated by frequent laughter,
because in that situation challenge and victory combine
with a general atmosphere of safety and group-solidarity.
Hayworth modifies Sully's play-theory, by noting that some
forms of play are not laughter-provoking, and concludes that
when play causes laughter it involves some sort of triumph.
He continues:
Failure is not dangerous except for a certain amount of
social humiliation. But success has the rather pale joy
of playful triumph made more intense by the general sense
of well-being that pervades the whole activity. So, be
cause play is filled with little thrills and triumphs,
and because the whole affair is safe, it is easy to see
why the signal of laughter should be given frequently
and loudly. (pp. 374-375)
And yet it is not so clear why a wholly safe activity should
provoke "sudden realization of safety" expressed in vocal
signals— unless one adopts Karl Groos's concept of "fighting
play" and regards primitive play as a kind of training for
real dangers and exorcism of fear.
Hayworth considers social solidarity a pre-condition
253
of all laughter and states "the most important group of
facts" as follows:
. . . anything which disturbs the feeling of social
safety or individual triumph has its corresponding
effect on laughter. No one normally laughs unless he
and his group are safe. Different groups have different
causes of laughter. (p. 377)
With regard to the central proposition here, one might note
that there are several less normal cases, such as laughter
from physical causes (e.g., tickling) and bitter, desperate,
or defiant laughter, where safety is not involved. Second
ly, although safety may normally be a condition of laughter
(as the play-attitude and superiority have been said to be),
there is no direct causative effect between them, except in
the case of "sudden realization of safety" following tension
i
or danger. Even in this case, if the tension were great and,
the survivor not particularly robust, a weeping fit might
just as well ensue as a burst of laughter. Moreover, the '
i
reactions of the two sexes in a similar situation might be ;
different.
If the anthropological hypothesis seems inadequate in
i
some respects, at least it brings into prominence some use- '
ful social observations. Laughter has a communicative
function, although it might be better to broaden the defini
tion of this from "sudden realization of safety," to a
254
general sense of well-being and friendliness, superior adap-
tation, or solidarity with group standards and beliefs.
Hugh Dalziel Duncan's Language and Literature in
59
Society (Chicago, 1953) offers a more detailed and pene
trating application of the sociological approach to such
literary problems as laughter, humor, irony, wit, and ridi
cule. Duncan's view of social laughter (as communication)
corroborates Hayworth's to some extent, although Duncan,
setting aside the Bergsonian idea of social correction,
takes humorous laughter to be the direct cause of joy-in-
solidarity, which is the desired social objective. He
points out that blocked "emotional drives" are often satis
fied safely and vicariously through mass media of communica
tion, and adds:
The social basis of make-believe art is very marked in
humor. When we laugh together, we close ranks, so to
speak, in the face of something that threatens the
solidarity of our group. . . . Laughing at the ludicrous
is done not so much to punish the object of our laughter
as to create a feeling of euphoria among ourselves.
(P. 49)
Duncan proposes to use literary techniques— the manipulation
of verbal symbols to produce laughter— in analysis of
"social euphoria." As laughter spreads through the group
59
All references are based on this edition.
255
it binds the members together as a social unit. Similarly,
literature provides its reader with a"secret freemasonry" of
shared experience and shared humor. Duncan stresses the
paramount importance of "social ends" in understanding
humor, and analyzes its operation in the group as follows:
The simplest social situation in which laughter occurs
is in the primary group, where the contagion of laughter
suggests a choral function.60 After a few moments of
exposure, every member of the group feels his solidarity
with the others greatly increased. Once we laugh together
we are committed to each other for the duration of the
situation. In a highly diversified society . . . we are
dependent on literature to supply us with jokes, tales,
novels, and dramas as symbolic objects which we can use
to re-experience the comic ritual. (p. 50)
As this passage suggests, the ritual origins of comedy are
probably more significant for literature than its remoter
anthropological origins, shrouded as these are in mists of
speculation.
As well as the motive of joy, Duncan notes the motive
i
of degradation in the comic: "The use of laughter to degrade
persons or to 'desanctify' objects or actions we wish to
act differently toward ..." (p. 50). Bain had used
60
Cf. Sir Richard Steele, The Guardian, No. 29:
". . . conversation never sits easier upon us, than when
we now and then discharge ourselves in a symphony of laugh- '
ter, which may not improperly be called, 'The Chorus of
Conversation.'" I
256
the phrase "uproarious delight" for the laughter which
shatters a "coerced form of seriousness and solemnity" when
brought into "contact with anything degrading or vulgariz
ing" (see above, p. 63), and, no doubt, euphoria (although
closely linked with freedom from restraint and superiority)
is the dominant feeling in this case. But if humor and
comic degradation are used to create social euphoria, ridi
cule may be directed toward hostile social action.
Malign ridicule [according to Duncan] is never reflexive
(like laughter arising out of great art). I may turn a
joke, but not ridicule, upon myself. We protect our
selves from being laughed at by others when we laugh at
ourselves first. We cannot use ridicule, as we do make-
believe humor, to create fantasies which dissipate the
force of our will to act, or as we use great comedy, to
create and sustain high degrees of conscious elaboration
of possibilities in action, in savage ridicule we reduce
the burden of consciousness through arousing hate. Once
the deviant person is hated, we can act, for now our will j
has the strength necessary to ward off doubt and
ambiguity. (p. 23)
Ridicule is often deadly in a social sense, if seldom liter
ally so, as in the case of Swift's satire on the astrologer,
Partridge.
Duncan makes the notion of will central to the role of i
language and literature in society. Following the path laid,
out by Ernst Cassirer's philosophy of symbolism, he sees
society largely formed and manipulated by the power of
"the word"— verbal symbols projected in a variety of
257
contexts (newspapers, mass media, advertisements, oratory,
61
and literature). The lower, "loaded" forms of communica
tion, such as political propaganda and advertising, aim to
arouse the will to specific actions; the lower, "aesthetic"
forms of communication, such as television and movies, may
be linked to consumership or merely provide an "opiate of
the masses," pablum which deadens the will; the higher
aesthetic forms of communication, such as literature,
either dissolve the will-to-action in pleasurable contempla
tion, or sublimate it in "virtual action" (which may involve
a catharsis of emotions as in Freud's "tendency-wit"). In
either case, literature leaves the will free, without
prompting it to specific actions. But in the case of subli
mation, or in Duncan's example of the insights of great
comedy, the will may become more aware of itself and develop!
that flexibility of potential which Bergson associates with
the comic intelligence.
The laughter of comedy, Duncan notes, is not simply
directed outward at a pretentious or inferior object; it
broadens the experience of self in relation to society.
61
Cf. Herbert Marshall McLuhan, understanding Media:
The Extensions of Man (New York, Toronto, London, 1964).
258
"Great laughter is reflexive; we laugh at ourselves as
others laugh at us. in doing so, we internalize a community
attitude toward the self" (p. 54). This lesson in objectiv
ity and generosity helps to drive out self-isolating egotism
(sworn foe of the comic sense), and make way for improved
social communication in an atmosphere of love and under
standing. In Duncan's words,
We learn in great laughter that it is possible to love
those we laugh at, as well as those we laugh with. . . .
As our capacity for comic perception deepens, we are able
to detect the ridicule of those we love, without loving
them less, and, through being able to see ourselves as
somewhat ridiculous in cherished eyes, to accept the cor
rection their image proposes to us.62 (p. 54)
Reflexive laughter is adaptive; that is, the laugher is
concerned with his relation to others in a social group. As
he grows less self-centered, he becomes proportionally more
self-aware of himself as a social being existing also in the
minds and hearts of others. "Laughter is an appeal to
others; such appeals are possible only when they are com
municable" (p. 56)— there is the communication-theory in a
62
This seems to be a close echo of Meredith's original
statement: "You may estimate your capacity for comic per
ception by being able to detect the ridicule of them you
love without loving them less; and more by being able to
see yourself as somewhat ridiculous in dear eyes, and ac
cepting the correction their image of you proposes."
(Essay on Comedy, in Sypher, p. 42. See above, p. 76.)
259
nutshell. Duncan applies this theory to Freud's study of
the social situation of wit.
in his analysis of wit [says Duncan] Freud is more con
cerned than elsewhere with the structure of communicative
functions. Wit must be intelligible to at least three
people— the person making the witticism, the object of
it, and a third who acts as audience. Wit is always an
appeal from the speaker to this audience, and if we are
to understand the function of wit, we must understand the
expectations and values of the audience as well as the
motivations of the speaker or writer. . . . The hearer
must be in psychic harmony with the first person, he must
possess the same inner inhibitions which the wit-work
has overcome in the first person. As Freud stresses,
"Every witticism thus demands its own public, and to
laugh over the same witticism is proof of absolute
psychic agreement." (p. 89)
This wit-triangle is a logical rather than practical
arrangement, as the object of the witticism, the "butt," may
only be present in the consciousness of the wit-maker and
his audience. But communication at psychic as well as
verbal levels, and a definite social situation, are
prerequisites for wit.
Ralph Piddington (The Psychology of Laughter: A Study
63
in Social Adaptation. 2d ed. [New York, 1963]) combines
a logico-objectivist analysis of the comic with the socio
logical approach. He interprets elementary laughter as a
social phenomenon indicating contentment with the "status
63
All references are based on this edition.
260
quo." This kind of laughter, he says,
is an expression of a pleasant mood in which the organism
feels no need to make any adjustment to its environment
beyond the one at the moment existing; elementary laughter
might thus be said to express an attitude of complete
satisfaction with things as they are. (p. 125)
Piddington assumes that social situations give rise to the
comic directly; this can only be through some incongruity
or conflict that baffles the will for a moment.
Ludicrous situations [he argues] always involve the
applicability of two conflicting social evaluations.
. . . Simple ludicrous quality, therefore, depends
upon two factors, namely, the extent to which the
social evaluations apply to the situation, and the
extent to which they conflict. (pp. 103-104)
This is, indeed, a radically sociological view of the
comic. By way of illustration, one might consider how
comedy is generated by the overlapping and conflict of
social evaluations in the mixed-caste society of E. M.
Forster's A Passage to India. The relationship between Dr.
Aziz and Fielding is fraught with comic misunderstandings
which arise from "conflicting positions referring to minor
social values." Consider, for example, the amusing scene
j
where Fielding is dressing for dinner and his new acquaint
ance, Aziz, talks to him through the open bedroom door, in
an impulsive act of amusing symbolic significance, the
Indian tears off his own collar to supply the Englishman
261
with a gold stud. Then, hoping to gain a foothold in Anglo-
Indian society by displaying his cosmopolitan culture, Aziz
starts a discussion of Post-Impressionist poetry, which
Fielding brushes aside as if it were inappropriate and pre
tentious. When "social evaluations" take on the intensity
of religious or racial prejudices— as in Ronnie Moore's
belief that all Indians are "bounders" or rapists, Aziz*
belief that Hindus are dirty ("'I wish they did not remind
me of cow-dung1"), or Mr. Das the magistrate's belief that
'"some Moslems are very violent'"— the implications for
human misunderstanding grow more serious and comedy evap
orates. piddington states the principle of comic incongru
ity or friction of social norms in the following general
terms:
• , i
Laughter at the ludicrous, then, arises fundamentally
from the multiplicity of social evaluations and the
possibility of conflict between them. In the more
serious conflicts other social reactions are necessi
tated, since many of them cannot be "laughed off." But
where the conflict does not involve deep emotional ten
dencies, laughter serves very well as a compensatory
reaction; faced with an irreconcilable conflict in social '
evaluations, society takes over a biologically determined j
reaction, and by a process which certain neurotics use
to secure anti-social individual adjustments (exaggera
tion of the opposite character) obviates the possibility
of an anti-social affective readjustment. (p. 130)
The release of tension in laughter preserves the social
norms; it is a harmless outlet— what one laughs at one does1
262
not attack more seriously. Functionally, this laughter is
related to "elementary laughter." it expresses a will to
social adjustment, which is stronger than resentment at
conflict in values.
Piddington finds the social center of the ludicrous in
contrasting attitudes to rank and sex. "Evaluations of
rank or social status readily give rise to ludicrous effects,
because there are so many ways in which they may be denied"
(p. 141). A reputation for knowledge, skill, or social
superiority, which puts claims on the layman's respect, is
also likely to invite comic degradation; of a famous finan
cier it might be said, "He couldn't change a $1 bill with
both hands in the till," or of a leading marksman, "He
couldn't hit a haystack in broad daylight at five yards."
The multiplicity of divergent attitudes to sex— involving,
as it does, relationships which are biological and ideologi-;
I
i
cal, psychological and social, private and public— makes j
that a fertile field for the comic (see p. 142). While
i
obscenity may be taboo in civilized society, innuendo,
which pays lip-service to the prevailing mores, seldom fails
to raise a laugh. Sterne exploited sexual suggestiveness
(as in the conception of Tristram and the courtship of uncle;
i
Toby) partly for the allied comic effect of exposing
263
conflicting social evaluations, and partly (according to
J. Y. T. Greig), to create a pervasive atmosphere of "love-
behaviour" conducive to the comic (see above, pp. 205-209).
Piddington claims that his theory of "social compensa
tion" incorporates the general idea of degradation, without
accepting the narrower limitations implied by "superiority"
and "degradation," coercion and release.
The compensatory theory of laughter at the ludicrous
[he claims] is not open to the objections which we have
seen to hold against "degradation" theories, though it
does not run counter to any of the facts urged in favour
of such theories. Whenever, as frequently occurs, a
ludicrous situation arises as a result of the failure of
some person to live up to his social obligations, the
laugher may, and frequently does, feel superior, and
for this reason ridicule may be used as a social weapon.
But the degradation is a secondary matter and not a neces
sary associate of the ludicrous. (p. 149)
For Piddington, the comic arises from what one might call a
conflict in social logic, that is, the perception of incon
gruity between opposing sets of values which apply to the
same social situation. Although the setting and content of
the comic in compensation-theory are sociological, its
dynamics are psychological (personal adjustment) and its |
analytics logical (perception of "irreconcilable conflict").
George Orwell gives a more popular psychological
version of social compensation in laughter, in an essay on
264
comic and obscene postcards, in Orwell's opinion:
Whatever is funny is subversive, every joke is ultimately
a custard pie, and the reason why so large a proportion
of jokes centre round obscenity is simply that all soci
eties, as the price of survival, have to insist on a
fairly high standard of sexual morality . . . Society
always has to demand a little more from human beings
than it will get in practice. . . . When it comes to the
pinch, human beings are heroic. . . . it is only that
the other element in man, the lazy, cowardly, debt-bilking
adulterer who is inside all of us, can never be suppressed
altogether and needs a hearing occasionally.64
Sex-jokes may contain "a sort of mental rebellion, a momen
tary wish that things were otherwise." The individual
libido comes into friction with social mores and finds its
outlet in "tendency-wit," indirectly aimed at society it
self. But "a dirty joke is not, of course, a serious attack
upon morality"; it is rather (to apply Piddington's theory),
the comic arising from a conflict of social and anti-social
attitudes to sex. Orwell also mentions the exploitation of
such anti-social tendencies as cowardice, laziness, and dis
honesty in popular humor. Such jokes flout official ideals
of heroism and self-sacrifice, and flaunt the self-indul
gence and self-love of the average sensual man. To Orwell, ;
music-halls and comic postcards represent "a sort of
64
"The Art of Donald McGill," Horizon. IV, No. 21
(September 1941), 161.
265
saturnalia," giving playful expression to anarchic desires
restrained in practice by society. He regards the vulgar
humor of the "lower classes" as a harmless outlet for
frustrations and buffoonery, analogous to the low scenes in
Shakespearean tragedies, but now (at least in the 1940's)
syphoned off from literature. The laughter of the public
thus purges anti-social undercurrents of political bitter
ness.
Some ideas on literary communication relevant to
theory of humor are to be found in the writings of Henry
Green and Jean Paul Sartre. In "A Novelist to his Readers;
65
Communication without Speech,” Henry Green discusses the
relation of conversation to communication between writer and
reader. He holds that "communication between human beings
has now come to be almost entirely conducted by conversa
tion, " and that the novelist, of all artists, has a chance
"to communicate direct with the imagination of his readers."
This recalls Sterne's dictum that "writing, when properly
managed, (as you may be sure I think mine is), is but a dif
ferent name for conversation" (T.S..II.xi.108). Properly
managing the conversation between narrator and reader is not
65
The Listener. XLIV (November 9, 1950), 505-506.
266
a simple matter; it calls for an art that conceals art.
Green maintains that the aim of dialogue in fiction is not
to record the patterns and phrases of everyday speech, but
to create life through art, by communicating the author's
response through choice of language. Thus "non-representa-
tional dialogue," with its flexible use of idiom, forms a
bridge between writer and reader. This bridge is greatly
reinforced by humor, which is an important element of
real-life conversation. The quickest way a writer can com
municate with his readers is by tapping the electric under
currents of a shared sense of humor. For this reason,
66
Green, in an article on "The English Novel of the Future,"
sees humor— the "make-believe humor" of aesthetic fantasy
tinged with social observation— as increasingly important
in fiction. The themes of Green's novels are kept deliber
ately opaque so that they can "mean all things to all men."
The dialogue suggests humorous gaps between the worlds of
conversation, of psychological meaning, and of fact; the
reader is invited to a game of humor in which he must recon
struct the theme and reinterpret the characters, through
subjective intuitions based on uncertain clues. The
66
Contact, I (August 1950), 21-24.
267
spontaneity and guesswork involved in this procedure lead
the reader to participate in a humorous exchange with the
writer. John Russell comments:
While we are being confused and delighted, the writer's
sentiment need not be bared. Humor is the bridge as
theme remains obscure. . . . Between writer and reader,
says Green, "it is the presentation of the theme which
creates the communication . . . and as dialogue in life
consists largely of humour, to create life between
writer and reader humour should in future be the
bridge."67
In the symbolist novels of Henry Green, "non-representa-
tional" but familiar dialogue balances the complex use of
imagery, and humor constitutes a key to the whole aesthetic
structure; as Russell says, "it fosters the illusion of
life," creating a sense of living reciprocity between
writer and reader.
To Jean Paul Sartre, on the other hand, literary com
munication is an aspect of social commitment, in What is
68
Literature? he describes it as very much a two-way
process with the reader participating in the re-creation
and revivification of the literary text, or rather, of the
67
Henry Green: Nine Novels and an unpacked Bag (New
Brunswick, N. J., 1960), pp. 37-38. Russell is quoting
from"The English Novel of the Future."
68
Trans. Bernard Frechtman (New York, 1965).
268
ideas, images, and emotions which are the referents of its
69
verbal symbols. without the reader's active consciousness,
which interprets these symbols in the light of his own day
and experience, literature has no existence (except that of
an archaeological deposit). Now, if this definition of
literature is true in terms of social and philosophical
ideas, it is truer still in terms of humor. Humor in liter
ature depends every bit as much on the reader's response
(re-creative) as on the writer's verbal construct (embodying
the original creative response to experience). Literary
humor is a social relationship with aesthetic overtones,
70
involving the "secret freemasonry” of minds. Genius m
69
in "Le Rire et la Libert^" (see above, p. 218),
Albert Penjon discusses the form of subtle collaboration in-*
volved in literary humor: "une oeuvre d'art, en general,
peut etre definie un ensemble, un syst&me de signes
sensibles par lesquels 1'artiste essaie de communiquer aux
autres 1'^motion qu'il ^prouve lui-meme. Le spectateur,
l'auditeur interprete ces signes, et 1'oeuvre d'art r^sulte
en reality de la collaboration, in^gale mais necessaire, de
1'auteur et de ceux qui voient ou qui entendent ce qu'il a
fait. Nulle part, peut-etre, de cette collaboration n'est
plus sensible que lorsqu'il s'agit d'une oeuvre comique.”
Revue Philosophique. XXXVI (July-December 1893), 132.
70
As w. K. Wimsatt notes in his perceptive resum^ of
comic theories: "There is much room in the laughing situa
tion, much need, for 'empathy.' And this is especially
true of the situation in comic art, for art is a reflexive
work, a thing contrived of the human object only as this is
269
this genre is sure intuition for the reader's responses—
a kind of social sixth sense. Nothing better cements the
understanding between reader and writer than laughter. No
writer realized his dependence on the reader's sense of
humor more clearly than Sterne.
It is too much to write books and find heads to under
stand them. . . . it is not in the power of anyone to
taste humor. however much he may wish it— 'tis the gift
of God— and besides, a true feeler always brings half
the entertainment along with him. His own ideas are
only call'd forth by what he reads, and the vibrations
within, so entirely correspond with those excited, 'tis
like reading himself and not the book.71
Laughter thus comes from delight in recognition, self-
discovery, re-creation, and communication of minds, as much
as from literary objects of humor. Theory of literary
humor seems particularly complex, because here one is deal
ing simultaneously with an objective construction (which
has an inbuilt logic of form), and with a subjective re
sponse (which has a personal or unconscious logic of its
own). Sterne's dual use of associationism, as character-
caught in the light of responses thrown upon it." "Intro
duction: The Criticism of Comedy," in English institute
Essays (New York, 1954-1955), p. 13.
71
Letter to Dr. John Eustace, in Letters, ed. Lewis
P. Curtis (Oxford, 1935), ccxxii, p. 404.
270
device and as narrative-technique, links objective-
subjective aspects of fiction, stimulating the reader's
freedom of response, and encouraging him to use his own
humorous invention (sometimes even mocking the way he,
predictably, does so). Great writers realize their depen
dence on an audience and the need to create the taste by
which they are appreciated. Literature obviously involves
communication on broad and subtle levels, often co-present
in the same work. Nowhere are this two-way process and
its subjective response more crucial than in humor, where
individual differences play a part. As Shakespeare says:
A jest's prosperity lies in the ear
Of him that hears it, never in the tongue
Of him that makes it.
(Love's Labour's Lost. V.ii.869-871)
CHAPTER IV
MODERN PSYCHOLOGICAL AND PHILOSOPHICAL APPROACHES
TO THE COMIC
Psychological and Subjectivist Approach
The chief modern area of investigation of the comic
is the psychological. Studies in this area tend to stress
the subjective responses by which a sense of the comic makes
itself known, and to deny the significance, or sometimes
even the existence, of a comic object. Experimental,
clinical, psychoanalytical, and statistical analyses of
the comic often have very little relevance to the aesthetic
objectification of the comic in literature. However, the
narrower scientific emphasis is balanced by the dominating
example of Freud, who had a deep interest in (if somewhat
biased approach to) the problems and techniques of litera
ture, and whose influence on twentieth century writers and
critics has been almost unfathomable.^ Moreover, several
*See, for example, Frederick J. Hoffman, Freudianism
and the Literary Mind. 2d ed. (Baton Rouge, La., 1957).
___________ 271
272
prominent psychologists, including Carl Gustav Jung,
Ernst Kris, and Theodor Reik have also made contributions
2
to the study of literature. in venturing into the field
of psychology, the present writer must acknowledge his
lack of qualification for technical discussions, and reit-
I
erate his claim to abstract those findings and suggestions
which seem most relevant to the problems of literary
humor.
The period immediately preceding the appearance of
Freud's work on wit (say 1890-1905) may be regarded as
transitional in comic theory— the influence of Darwin and
Bain (with lingering overtones of Kant and Hegel) seems to
have been the most pronounced in psychological discussions
Of laughter and the ludicrous. Theorists tended to define
their positions in relation to the pioneer work of Spencer
and Darwin. John Dewey, for instance, begins by disagreeing
2
See, for example; Jung, The Spirit in Man. Art. and
Literature, trans. R. F. C. Hull, in The Collected works of
C. G. Jung. ed. Herbert Read, Michael Fordham, and Gerhard
Adler, Vol. XV (New York, 1966); Kris, Psychoanalytic
Explorations in Art (New York, 1952); and Reik, The Secret
Self; Psychoanalytic Experiences in Life and Literature
(New York, 1952).
273
with Darwin's view that laughter is simply a physiological
expression of pleasure; he defines its occasion as "the end
ing (that is, the attainment of a unity) of a period of
suspense, or expectation, an ending which is sharp and
3
sudden." Dewey is slightly more specific than Spencer in
his account of the physical process of laughter, which he
describes, in terms of breath and vocalization, as sudden
interruption of a primarily intellectual strain by the
dawning of insight, causing an explosive utterance com-
4
parable to a "sigh of relief." Dewey's theory of laughter,
the formulation of which is incidental to his general
theory of emotions, thus represents a specialized
variety of Spencer's "relief and discharge" theory. Follow
ing the trend of Spencer and the physiological school
3
"The Theory of Emotion," Psychological Review. I,
No. 6 (November 1894), 553-569.
4
"Now all expectancy, waiting, suspended effort, etc.,
is accompanied, for obvious teleological reasons, with tak
ing in and holding a full breath, and the maintenance of
the whole muscular system in a state of considerable ten
sion. it is a divided activity, part of the kinaesthetic
images being fixed upon the immediately present conditions,
part upon the expected end. Now let the end suddenly
'break,' 'dawn,' let one see the 'point' and this energy
discharges— the getting the point is the unity, the dis
charge. This sudden relaxation of strain, so far as occur
ring through the medium of the breathing and vocal apparat
us, is laughter." (p. 559)
274
generally, Dewey treats laughter as a neurophysical phenom
enon, de-emphasizing the larger problem of humor. "The
laugh," he insists, "is by no means to be viewed from the
standpoint of humor; its connection with humor is secondary"
(p. 558).
In a widely noticed article on "The Psychology of
5
Tickling, Laughing, and the Comic," G. Stanley Hall and
Arthur Allin consider causes of laughter ranging from the
physical to the literary, offering a pragmatic account
rather than a general theory, in a later article "On Laugh
ter" (prompted by James Sully's Essay on Laughter). Allin
suggests that laughter is a form of play performed with
ease and mastery.6
Theodule Ribot, like Hall and Allin, tends to favor
an eclectic theory of causes, accepting both incongruity and
5
American Journal of Psychology. IX, No. 1 (October
1897), 1-41.
g
"... the only true criterion of play is the perfor
mance of an activity with ease and mastery and with the
spirit of pleasure. All else is work or indifferently work
or play, if this thesis is granted, then play must not be
confined to what we may call traditional forms of play, but
must be extended even to adult occupations when performed
with the spirit of pleasure and with ease and mastery. For
these reasons laughter may be classed as a form of play."
Psychological Review. X. No. 3 (May 1903), 315.
superiority as elements of the comic, but objecting to the
7
search for a universal cause of laughter. Ribot divides
the subject into "two aspects, one internal, subjective,
psychological, the other external, objective, physiologi-
g
cal." One notes that, although he calls these aspects
"subjective" and "objective," they both concern responses
and not stimuli. The physiological process of laughter he
finds "susceptible of an exact description," but he rejects
the assumption that laughter has a single internal cause.
It has, instead, many irreducible causes. which must be
studied separately.
9
L. W. Kline in his paper "The Psychology of Humor,"
notes Ribot's equal acceptance of "superiority" and
7
"Pour conclure, le rire se manifeste dans des cirCon
stances si h^t^rogenes et si multiples— sensations
physiques, joie, contraste, surprise, bizarrerie, dtrangetd,
bassesse, etc.— que la reduction de toutes ces causes h . une
seule reste bien probl^matique. Apr&s tant de travaux sur
un fait aussi banal, la question est loin d'etre compl&te-
ment ^lucidde." La Psychologie des Sentiments. 3d ed.
(Paris, 1899), p. 358. See also English translation, The
Psychology of the Emotions. 2d ed. (London and New York,
1911).
g
Psychology of the Emotions, p. 351.
9
American journal of Psychology. XVIII, No. 4 (October
1907), 421-440.
276
"incongruity" along with Hecker's "contrast and intermit-
tence," and adds to these the "liberty" theory of Penjon.
His own emphasis, like Dewey's, is placed on "relief." He
is interested in the way humor modifies the "stream of
consciousness” (using William James's phrase), and describes
10
this in terms of cognitive and affective elements.
The seminal work in this field is, of course, Freud's
Wit and Its Relation to the unconscious. i n preparing
his thesis, Freud made use of philosophical and physiologi
cal material in Kant, Spencer, and Lipps, and he also drew
many illustrations from the poets Heinrich Heine and Jean
Paul Richter. Condensation is the first wit-technique
which Freud examines, simple brevity is not "the soul of
wit" (p. 29). There must be condensation of ideas, either
in mixed words (pp. 18-25), with "modification and substi
tution" (pp. 25-30), word-division (pp. 32-35), or in
"double meaning and play on words" (pp. 40-49). The
^Same, p. 433: "The cognitive element in the humor
process consists (1) of the perception of the stimulus,
(2) the sense of freedom. Each of these cognitive elements
is suffused by pleasant affective elements which constitute
in their totality the unique and dominant humor tone."
"^Trans. A. A. Brill.
277
pleasure in this wit-work (which parallels condensation in
dream-work) comes from an economy of psychic expenditure,
Freud's key concept which has already been discussed in rela
tion to Spencer and Lipps (see above, pp. 169-175).
In his analysis of wit, then, Freud focuses on the
technique of condensation and the effect of economy. He
also distinguishes two major modes of wit: "displacement-
wit" and "tendencv-wit." (1) Displacement-wit (pp. 57-71),
which is illustrated through a series of jokes, is a form of
deliberate misunderstanding on the part of the wit-maker, a
"changing of viewpoint" or "displacement of the psychic
accent" (p. 62). Usually the words of a first speaker are
comically turned to account by a second, who reaches his
absurd conclusion with a show of logic (see the example of
"salmon with mayonnaise," p. 61) . The displacement may be
from one element of the sentence to another (as from the
object "bath" to the verb "taken" in the Jewish joke on
pp. 59-60), or from one meaning of a word to another (as
with the word "living" in the joke on p. 70). (2) Nonsense
is used as a technical means to condense some hidden meaning
or to convey a suggestion which might otherwise be censored
(pp. 72-78). The appreciation of these forms of wit
involves a process of "confusion and enlightenment" (a
278
concept borrowed from Lipps). At first, a remark seems non
sensical and meaningless, then, after a puzzled delay, the
witty idea suddenly dawns on the auditor's mind. (3) False
Logic, or "sophistic faulty thinking," as Freud calls it
(pp. 78-85), can usually be reduced to a play on double
meanings or omission of a term in the chain of reasoning.
(4) "Automatic Errors of Thought" (illustrated by three
stories about marriage agents, pp. 85-88) are caused by
mechanical patterns of thought which sooner or later break
down and expose themselves in a ludicrously inappropriate
expression. This species of the ludicrous "could just as
well be termed 'comical' as 'witty,'" as Freud concedes
(pp. 87-88). It comes from that "rigidity," "automatism,"
or "mental inelasticity," in which Bergson finds the root
of all the comic. Other modes of wit discussed are: (5)
"unification" (pp. 88-93), which often takes the form of
repartee or incongruous addition; (6) "representation
through the opposite" (pp. 93-96), which parallels a device
of dreams and fuses contrasting ideas in a single expres- j
sion; (7) "outdoing-wit" (pp. 96-100); (8) "indirect expres
sion with allusion" (pp. 101-107); (9) Omission (pp. 107-
I
111); (10) "Representation through the minute or the
minutest element" (pp. 111-113), a form of comic
279
degradation; (11) "Comparison" (pp. 113-121), often involv
ing "degradation" from lofty, abstract to concrete, everyday
expressions; and (12) "peculiar attributions" (pp. 121-124),
largely a matter of inventive phrasing.
It is unnecessary to examine these categories in detail
here. The significant factor is the relation of Freud's
classification of wit to his earlier work, The interpreta
tion of Dreams (1900). He discovers "the identical psychi
cal processes" in wit-formation as in dream-formation,
noting that
displacement, faulty thinking, absurdity, indirect
expression, and representation through the opposite—
each and all are also found in the technique of dreams.
(p. 125)
Both wit-formation and dream-formation operate according
to a logic of the unconscious, seeking disguised expression
for urges and desires not admitted into waking thought.
Freud's theory really stands or falls by this relation of
i
wit to dream through the unconscious. The wit-maker, how
ever, is in a very different state of consciousness from
that of the dreamer. He is alert and skilfully exploits hid
tendencies in aiming at a conscious effect. (Freud briefly
notes the contrast between asocial dream and highly social
280
12
wit, pp. 285-286.) Open expression of the "libido" may
be prohibited or inhibited by society, but it is not neces
sarily repressed from consciousness in the wit-work, as it
13
is in the dream-work. With this reservation, I approach
12
Cf. "No matter how concealed the dream is still a
wish, while wit is a developed play." (pp. 286-287)
13
in "The Relation of Wit to Dreams and to the uncon
scious" (ch. vi, pp. 249-287), Freud anticipates and parries
criticism of his dream-analysis approach to wit. It seems
to me that, while wit and dream may both have unconscious
motivations, the techniques of expression and the kinds of
pleasure involved are quite different. The long argument
need not be summarized here (Freud himself refers the read
er to The Interpretation of Dreams). The most convincing
part of it, in my opinion, is that entitled "Wit as an
Inspiration" (pp. 265-268). Freud stresses the "absence, or
sudden drop of intellectual tension" which precedes "an in
voluntary 'inspiration' or a sudden flash of thought,"
issuing in wit (p. 265). He asserts that a "witty allusion"
is either formed unconsciously— or it is not witty: "a
stream of thought is dropped for a moment and suddenly
emerges from the unconscious as a witticism" (p. 266). Wit-
formation also occurs through "association of ideas” which
is largely unconscious. The brevity of wit, Freud now
regards, not as the result of deliberate compression, but as
the end of a process of "unconscious elaboration,1 1 matching
that of dreams (p. 267). Freud believes that wit "origi
nates automatically" (cf. Coleridge on "fancy") and is not
willed. (Witticisms would truly, then, be sparks from the
unconscious.)
"Displacement" does seem to be a common device by
which dreams and wit evade "the censor of conscious thought"
(p. 271). And fantasy (or nonsense) is an element of both
dreams and wit, although Freud's explanation of it, first
as "masking" for a hidden "tendency," and then as a return
to infantile play, seems a little inconsistent— unless one
accepts the dual motivation as increasing the pleasure of
281
Freud's discussion of "tendency-wit," which has certain ana
logues with dream-construction, but belongs in a social
situation.
"Tendency-wit" (pp. 127-174) signifies disguised ex
pression of aggressive or sexual drives which gives pleasure
through economy of inhibition. It is entirely independent
from "abstract" or "harmless" wit (pp. 130-134). in
"harmless wit” pleasure derives from cleverness of technique
and sheer aesthetic satisfaction in intellectual exercise,
which Aristotle had considered one of the keenest pleasures,
but which Freud considers rather thin. Tendency-wit, the
main forms of which are hostile and obscene (pp. 138-142),
is not an end in itself, but a means of indirect aggression
or sexual exhibition. Freud maintains that the "smutty"
this kind of wit. Apparently, one must do so, as Freud
stresses the Janus-like quality of wit, which has earned it
the title "sense-in-nonsense" (p. 274).
Freud identifies the unconscious with the infantile
(pp. 269-270), and interprets wit and dreams as psychic
phenomena motivated by the desire for a return to infantile ;
pleasure and irresponsibility. This kind of reduction is j
characteristic of Freudian psychology, and, while it can be !
very revealing, the focus on infantile affective tendencies
in wit cannot wholly divert attention from its intellectual
structure. Freud himself maintains that children are in
capable of wit or any other form of the comic; wit-making
calls for a light and confident control of emotional ten
dencies, which is only acquired through adult social inter
course .
282
joke, which is "the intentional bringing into prominence
of sexual facts or relations through speech" (p. 139), "was
originally directed against the woman and is comparable to
an attempt at seduction" (pp. 139-140). Elaborating along
these lines, Freud comes to the conclusion that tendency-
wit, which is a politer form of the smutty joke, calls for
three persons:
Besides the one who makes the wit there is a second
person who is taken as the object of the hostile or
sexual aggression, and a third person in whom the pur
pose of the wit to produce pleasure is fulfilled.
(p. 144)
To gain social acceptance, the obscenity in tendency-wit
must be imported into the mind via allusion, and dressed up
with formal expertise. As with irony (veiled satire),
under statement is the key to its success. Freud says:
The greater the disproprotion between what is directly
offered in the obscenity and what is necessarily aroused
by it in the mind of the listener, the finer is the
witticism and the higher it may venture in good society,
(pp. 145-146)
This art of innuendo (which Aristotle called the "decorum"
of New Comedy) implies pleasure in the economy of wit-
technique itself and in refinement of expression. In their
different ways, Swift and Sterne were masters of this tech
nique of suggestion. The psychological function of
tendency-wit is to regain a pleasure that had been lost
283
through civilized repression. While direct obscenity
causes embarrassment and painful feelings, tendency-wit
makes the same source of amusement acceptable.
Similarly, tendency-wit may be an outlet for hostility
in the form of veiled insults or invectives. Society for
bids physical aggression as it does sexual aggression, but
the repressed impulses can achieve a degree of satisfaction
through the strategy of wit. Hostile wit can be socially
damaging, as it "permits us to make our enemy ridiculous"
(p. 150). It may be the only means of retaliating against
a powerful authority, or it may be a vehicle of cynicism,
blasphemy, and skepticism. Freud says of rebellious stories
with a "comical facade":
Every one who allows the truth to escape his lips in
an unguarded moment is really pleased to have rid himself
of this thought. This is a correct and far-reaching
psychological insight. (p. 156)
Thus the socio-communicative aspect of wit supplies some
relief from the pressure of individual tendencies. Absurdi-r
ty in wit parallels the enigma of dreams; it will often be
discovered to conceal a "tendency.“ As Freud puts it,
"absurdity in wit frequently stands for derision and criti
cism in the thought behind the witticism, wherein the
wit-work follows the dream-work" (p. 157).
284
Wit-work appears to be basically a pleasure-mechanism,
and the expression of hostile or obscene tendencies to be
subordinate to this function. In his chapter on the
"Psychogenesis of Wit" (ch. iv), Freud points out several
sources of the pleasure in wit. First there is gratifica
tion of impulses otherwise repressed, which is the key
to tendency-wit. This is explained in terms of "economy
in the expenditure of inhibitions or suppressions" (p. 180).
Other pleasure-sources in wit include "rediscovery of the
familiar," "recognition," "actuality" (including contempo
rary events), word-play and nonsense (a retreat from adult
reason into realms of childish fantasy), and "reproduction
of old liberties" (such as student hilarity and antics).
Freud sees all wit-work as a striving to revive the pre-
rational, uninhibited pleasures of childhood. To make these
psycho-genetic sources of pleasure available, wit must first
"remove inner inhibitions" (p. 199).
As already noted, Freud finds a physiological basis for
his theory in Herbert Spencer's notion of "descending incon-j
gruity" and consequent discharge of psychic energy. He
adapts this to his idea of the pleasure-mechanism as
"economy of expenditure in psychic inhibition" and adds:
"That the expenditure is expected and prepared for is a
285
factor which stands unmistakably in the foreground" (p. 244-
245), a statement which links his theory with that of Kant.
"Localized economy" (a happy compression of ideas, for in
stance) gives "momentary pleasure," but the energy thus
saved may soon be demanded elsewhere; "general alleviation
of the psychic expenditures" is a more pleasurable consumma
tion, in which the economized energy is discharged in
sharing the witticism with a third person (p. 245).
A final comparison between wit and dream seems appro
priate here. Freud relates all psychic processes to the
pleasure-pain axis and argues that dream-work and wit-work
involve parallel unconscious processes; yet he himself makes
a fundamental distinction between the functions of dream
and wit:
The dream [he writes] serves preponderately to guard
from pain while wit serves to acquire pleasure; in these
two aims all our psychic activities meet. (p. 287)
This is to say, dream and wit constitute different kinds of
outlet for repressions; the dream is palliative, inner-
directed, and unconsciously motivated; whereas wit is
hedonic, social or outer-directed, and (more or less) con
sciously constructed, unconscious humor or "naivet^" lacks
the conscious cleverness which "wit" connotes. The fact
that wit is a verbal construct shaped by patterns (and
286
sounds) of discourse, while dreams are predominantly visual
and silent, casts further doubt on Freud's analogous treat
ment of the techniques.
In order to clarify the nature of wit, Freud marks out
its boundaries with the comic and humor, in his analysis of
the comic, he follows Bergson in essentials, adapting his
notion of "mechanism" to the theory of psychic economy.
Freud describes general sources of the comic as follows:
The comical appears primarily as an unintentional
discovery in the social relations of human beings, it
is found in persons, that is, in their movements, shapes,
actions, and characteristic traits, in the beginning it
is found probably only in their physical peculiarities
and later on in their mental qualifi.es, especially in
the expression of these latter. Even animals and inani
mate objects become comical as the result of a widely
used method of personification. (p. 302)
The techniques of comic characterization which Freud men
tions are the traditional ones of "transference into comic
situations, imitations, disguise, unmasking, caricature,
parody, travesty, and the like" (p. 303). He adds: "it is
quite evident that these techniques may enter into the
service of hostile or aggressive tendencies" (p. 303).
Freud's account of the physical comic as "automatism"
or mechanical motion betraying inelasticity of mind, closely
follows Bergson. He even introduces the idea of creative
evolution in a manner reminiscent of Bergson or anticipating
287
14
Teilhard de Chardin:
. . . it is in accord with our personal development
towards a higher stage of culture, to limit our muscular
work and increase our mental work. . . . Thus it coin
cides with a uniform understanding that that person
appears comical to us who puts forth too much expenditure
in his physical activites and too little in his mental
activities; and it cannot be denied that in both cases
our laughing is the expression of a pleasurably perceived
superiority which we adjudge to ourselves in comparison
with him. (pp. 313-314)
in this case, projection into the psychic processes of the
comic object ("Einfuhlung") affords a perception of incongru
ity between ends and means: the onlooker perceives expendi
ture where he himself would have practised economy, and so
experiences a "virtual" economy and sense of superiority,
which give rise to comic pleasure.
Freud discusses different varieties of the comic (e.g.,
those of situation and expectation), revealing tendencies
wherever possible, in this connection, he acknowledges
indebtedness to Bain's theory of comic degradation.
Caricature, parody and travesty [he writes], like their
practical counterpart— unmasking, range themselves
against persons and objects who command authority and
respect and who are exalted in some sense— these are
procedures tending toward degradation. (p. 322)
Freud explains the process of degradation in each case. For
14
See Teilhard's concept of "noosphere,” in The
Phenomenon of Man. trans. Bernard Wall (New York, 1961).
288
example:
In the mechanism of "unmasking" one can also utilize
those processes of comic-making . . . which degrade
the dignity of individuals in that they call attention
to one of the common human frailties, but particularly
to the dependence of his mental functions upon physical
needs. (p. 326)
This kind of reduction has always been a fruitful source of
the comic, and was quite clearly described by A. W. von
Schlegel as "ungovernable impulses of sensuality in colli-
15
sion with higher duties" (see above, p. 104). This is one
of the basic incongruities of human nature and the comic is
profoundly human. But Freud continues:
Moreover, all efforts in this mechanism serve to lay
bare the monotonous psychic automatism which is behind
wealth and apparent freedom of psychic achievements.
(p. 326)
This statement might be taken as an echo of Bergson's
definition of the comic, if it did not seem to degrade the
"^lan vital" itself to the rigidity of deterministic in
stincts. Freud explicitly follows Bergson in his analysis
15
A similar kind of degradation is that which Freud
discusses under "The infantile and the Comic": "... the
comic situation is largely based on embarrassment, in which
we feel again the helplessness of the child. The worst of
these embarrassments, the disturbance of other activities
through the imperative demands of natural wants, corresponds
to the child's lack of control of the physical functions."
(p. 367)
289
of comic imitation, which is "in itself . . . an extraordi
narily rich source of comic pleasure" (p. 336). As he says,
"it is not easy to give a satisfactory explanation of this
if we do not accept Bergson's view ..." (pp. 336-337) and
he goes on to repeat Bergson's law of psychic automatism
(p. 337). Freud links this theory with Bain's; "We might
say, it is the degradation of the human to the mechanical
or inanimate" (p. 338). At this point, Freud is enabled to
connect automatism with his own theory of psychic economy,
which he does in the following terms;
Taught by experience that every living being is differ
ent and demands a definite amount of expenditure from
our understanding, we find ourselves disappointed when,
as a result of a perfect agreement or deceptive imita
tion, we need no new expenditure. But we are disappoint
ed in the sense of being relieved, and the expenditure
of expectation which has become superfluous is discharged
through laughter. (p. 338)
Freud applies this theory— patently derived from Kant,
Spencer, and Lipps— to "all cases of comic rigidity" as
discovered by Bergson. Other forms of the comic which Freud
discusses include the "comic of speech," the "comic of
inadequacy," and comic embarrassment.
Freud deals briefly with "Humor" (pp. 370-371), "Forms
of Humor" (pp. 377-381), and "The Relation of Humor to wit
and Comic" (pp. 381-383). The humorous genre impinges on
290
his analysis of wit-work, and he is ambitious to enlist
wit, comic, and humor under a single theoretical banner.
Humor is a mixture of pleasure and pain, in which painful
affects are suppressed and humoristic pleasure gained
through the consequent economy of affect (p. 371). Humor
[says Freud] is more independent socially than wit.
It is the most self-sufficient of the forms of the comic;
its process consummating itself in one single person and
the participation of another adds nothing new to it.
(p. 372)
As in self-objectifying "gallows-humor" ("Galgenhumor"), it
may take the form of a witticism which makes rueful fun of
one's own painful situation. The joke, which apparently
consists of a nonsensical "displacement," is a device for
trivializing or reducing the painful emotion to more man
ageable terms. Various emotions— "sympathy, anger, pain,
compassion, etc.," and unique states of feeling— can be
economized in this way, giving rise to multiple forms of
humor (pp. 377-378). Humor can merge with any other form of
the comic, draining off or only partly modifying a "possible
emotional development" (p. 378). Psychologically, "humor
is closer to the comic than wit," as the former pair are
products of "the foreconscious," while the latter is shaped
to a considerable degree by the unconscious (p. 381).
291
However, Freud sees a special relationship between wit and
the comic, in both of which contrasting degrees of expendi
ture may be elicited by the same thought process, in the
first place, he notes:
It is a condition for the origin of the comic that we be
induced to apply— either simultaneously or in rapid
succession— to the same thought function two different
modes of ideas, between which the "comparison" then
takes place and thus forms the comic difference.
(p. 381)
(Here Freud approaches the objective-intellectualist view
of the comic as perception of logical incongruity.) This
kind of simultaneous cognition is also experienced by the
auditor of a wit-work; an unconscious train of thought
follows "hints contained in the witticism . . . while the
other conception remains on the surface" in conscious
focus (p. 382). Freud suggests that the pleasure in this
Janus-like wit may come from the difference between simul
taneous operations of mind. Wit and the comic remain
basically cognitive in this analysis, although wit may have
a strong libidinal element, while humor is always more or
less affective. Freud rounds off his study with this
triple formula;
It has seemed to us that the pleasure of wit originates
from an economy of expenditure in inhibition, of the
292
comic from an economy of expenditure in thought, and of
humor from an economy of expenditure in feeling. (p. 384)
(See above, p. 175)
Finally, Freud traces all three psychic activities to a
"striving to obtain . . . the state of a bygone time in
which we were wont to defray our psychic work with slight
expenditure"; that is, to a wished-for return to the freedom
of childhood. Freud's theory of economy of expenditure,
compressed into this stark summation, strikes one as an ab
stract or negative way of defining the pleasures of wit,
comic, and humor, it is a definition in terms of absence
of intellectual pain or effort, with the pleasure coming in
a feeling of surplus psychic energy, which may overflow in
laughter, psychologically, it is just as mechanistic a
theory as Spencer's physiological one, on which it is
based. Although Freud reaches scientific generality
through analyses of many examples of wit-work, his purpose
is always to uncover the psychic processes involved. The
analysis of wit-technique seems more directly relevant to !
literary criticism, but Freud's general account of the j
16'
psychodynamics of the comic sense is much more memorable.
16
Cf. Albert Cook, The Dark voyage and the Golden
Mean, p. 31. There have been notably few Freudian inter
pretations of Sterne's work (compared with that of Dickens,;
293
In Wit and its Relation to the Unconscious. Freud
treated humor with tangential reference to his theory of
wit, as economy of affect. A fuller treatment of this sub-
17
ject is to be found in his paper on "Humour" (1928). He
begins with a restatement of the economy theory: "it is
from the saving of expenditure in feeling that the hearer
derives the humorous satisfaction" (p. 2) . The hearer re
produces the psychic process of the humorist. Freud is con
cerned here with the internal dynamics of humor, the problem
of how the humorist attains "that mental attitude which
makes the discharge of affect superfluous" (p. 2). Humor
for example), possibly because Sterne's pervasive innuendo
and mocking suggestiveness of tone seem to involve a con
scious and belittling play with transparent sex-symbols such
as noses, whiskers, and button-holes. The intimate tone of
Tristram Shandy makes it hard to draw a line between the
author's jokes and the reader's prurience, which he craftily
exploits. There are plenty of pitfalls here for the Freud
ian who lacks a sense of humor; moreover, it must be ad
mitted that Sterne's "doubles entendres" are really one
dimensional "jeux d'esprits." A solitary example of Freud
ian analysis might be mentioned in this context: Arie de
Froe's Laurence Sterne's Novels in the Light of Modern
Psychology (Groningen, 1925). However, the climate of Freud-
ianism has done much for critical appreciation of Sterne's
structural and humorous techniques; it is no longer possible
to dismiss him as a "foul satyr" (as Thackeray did in a
notoriously subjective judgment).
17
international journal of Psycho-Analysis. IX, Pt. I
(January 1928), 1-6.
294
is felt as a liberation from, or rising above, pain. This
is achieved by a retreat from reality, or, as Freud suc
cinctly puts it, through "the triumph of narcissism."
Like wit and the comic, humour has in it a liberating
element. But it has also something fine and elevating,
which is lacking in the other two ways of deriving
pleasure from intellectual activity, obviously, what is
fine about it is the triumph of narcissism, the ego's
victorious assertion of its own invulnerability. . . .
It insists that it is impervious to wounds dealt by the
outside world, in fact, that these are merely occasions
for affording it pleasure. This last trait is a funda
mental characteristic of humour. (p. 2)
Humor is aggressive in its assertion of the pleasure-
principle, wringing a laugh out of adverse circumstances; on
the other hand, it is defensive in its retreat from reality
18
and evasion of suffering. Humor, then, is basically
serious.
Owing to this connection, humour possesses a dignity
which is wholly lacking, for instance, in wit, for the
aim of wit is either simply to afford gratification, or,
in so doing, to provide an outlet for aggressive
tendencies. (p. 3)
Although humor is associated with psychopathological states,
paradoxically it has this nobility, and also a kind of
18
"Humour is not resigned; it is rebellious. It sig
nifies the triumph not only of the ego, but also of the
pleasure-principle, which is strong enough to assert itself
here in the face of the adverse real circumstances. ..."
(p. 3)
295
maturity. This is clearly seen in the humoristic attitude
to others (which may sometimes verge on the insulting or
unsympathetic). one treats them as children, trivializing
their troubles and assuming the role of a patronizing
father (see p. 3).
Freud then turns to the situation in which one treats
oneself humorously as a relief from suffering; a higher
part of the self seems to treat the ordinary self as a
child. Freud explains this in terms of the "structure of
our ego." The super-ego often acts as a severe parent,
ruling the ego according to its own desires. The humorist,
however, identifies temporarily with his super-ego, thus
diminishing the importance of the ego's claims (see p. 4).
This approximates the lofty attitude of humor described by
romantic metaphysicians as Olympian serenity of mind.
If wit was explained as "the contribution of the un
conscious to the comic," humor is now shown to be "a con
tribution to the comic made through the agency of the
super-ego" (see p. 5). Freud notes that this indulgence may
seem unusual for such a severe task-master as the super-ego
he concedes that "the pleasure derived from humor is never
so intense as that produced by the comic or wit," and that
"the super-ego is really repudiating reality and serving an
296
illusion" (see p. 5; cf. Hegel). But he notes also that "we
attribute to this less intensive pleasure a high value; we
feel it to have a peculiarly liberating and elevating
effect" (p. 5). The intention of humor is more important
than the jest itself. "Its meaning is: 'Look here! This
is all that this seemingly dangerous world amounts to.
19
Child's play— the very thing to jest about!'" Rare comic
vision, it might be added, sometimes achieves this distanc
ing and becomes humorous vision, as in Prospero's disillu
sioned juggling with reality and art, which projects a dis
solving vision in which "great things" melt away (as in
Lipps1s definition of the comic), reducing the spectacle
of life to a solipsistic chimera.
. . . These our actors,
As I foretold you, were all spirits and
Are melted into air, into thin air:
And, like the baseless fabric of this vision,
The cloud capp'd towers, the gorgeous palaces,
The solemn temples, the great globe itself, |
Yea, all which it inherit, shall dissolve
And, like this insubstantial pageant faded,
Leave not a rack behind.20
19
Same, p. 5. Max Eastman seizes on this "reductio ad
absurdum," in which, he says, Freud describes "this achieve
ment on the part of the ego as due to the super-ego's tell
ing him, as it were, to run and play" (Enjoyment of
Laughter. p. 345).
20
The Tempest. IV.i.148-156.
297
Freud notes that not everyone is capable of genuine humor:
. . . it is a rare and precious gift, and there are
many people who have not even the capacity for deriving
pleasure from humour when it is presented to them by
others. Finally, if the super-ego does try to comfort
the ego by humour and to protect if from suffering, this
does not conflict with its derivation from the parental
institution.21 (pp. 5-6)
The appreciation of humor in literature is a gift which
combines objective perception with subjective feeling. As
Sterne wrote to Dr. Eustace:
It is too much to write books and find heads to under
stand them . . . it is not in the power of anyone to
taste humor, however much he may wish it— 'tis the
gift of God— and besides, a true feeler always brings
half the entertainment along with him. (From Letters.
ed. Curtis, p. 404; see above, p. 269)
In Freud and the Crisis of Our Culture (Boston, 1955),
Lionel Trilling estimates the value of Freudian psychology
for literature. The relevance, says Trilling, of Freud's
science to literature is undeniable to the extent that both
deal with the life of the mind. But this relevance is
21
Freud's "narcissistic" theory of humor might be ex
tended to Sterne's artistic career; his triumph through
laughter over rustic obscurity, parochial harassment, mar
riage problems, illness, and the spectre of imminent death.
Laughter was to Yorick, what "usquabae" (whisky) was to
Tam o' Shanter: it set him "o'er a' the ills o' life victo
rious"— a Hegelian, as much as a Freudian, victory through
illusion and transcendence.
298
strictly limited by difference of aims. Freud is not con
cerned with compositional and structural integrity of the
art-work, but rather with art as an expressive process. As
Trilling says,
. . . however great a contribution to the understanding
of literature we judge him to have made, it must seem to
a literary man that Freud sees literature not from
within but from without. The great contribution he has
made to our understanding of literature does not arise
from what he says about literature, but from what he says
about the nature of the human mind. . . . But he is
always, I think, outside the process of literature. Much
as he responds to the product, he does not really imagine
the process. He does not have what we call the feel of
the thing. (pp. 15-16)
Yet the work of Freud and his followers contains many sug
gestions on the nature of wit and humor which may be val
uable for an understanding of their literary forms. Out of
a plethora of studies, I shall consider five representative
articles which extend and apply Freud's theories of wit and
humor.
In "Contributions to the problem of Humor," Alfred
22
Winterstein singles out the "regressive" element in
humor, which he traces to an infantile oral fixation (a |
striking contrast with the notion of humorous maturity!).
He associates the humorous predilection for small, low,
22
Psychoanalytic Quarterly. Ill (1934), 303-316.
299
trivial objects (cf. Swift-Sterne's "vive la bagatelle")
and the humorous flair for realism, with an affective
childish ego. According to Winterstein:
A sense for what is small and limited, despised and
foolish is characteristic of humor: the "little world"
which it so kindly describes represents as it were the
childish ego, or otherwise expressed: it is introjected
by means of a tender identification. Thereby also the
realistic trait in humorists who in other respects
successfully deny the claims of the outer world which
threaten their own narcissism. (pp. 309-310)
Winterstein, who is concerned with relating this psycho
analytic view of humor to its literary manifestations,
offers for comparison with his own view a passage of Hegel
ian metaphysics from the Berlin aestheticist Dessoir, who
describes humor as a painful-happy fusion of "superiority
23
and limitation."
24
Lucile Dooley, in "A Note on Humor" and "The Relation
23
'"By humor, we understand a mood in which an individ
ual is conscious at the same time of his importance and his
insignificance. Humor is the fusion of superiority and limn
itation. . . . The two outlooks on life progress "ad absur- ;
dum" in a remarkable mixture of self-effacement and self- I
importance, and release that painful-happy feeling which
human beings must experience when standing before the last
triumph of existence.'1 1 in Winterstein, p. 310. See M.
Dessoir, Aesthetik und allqemeine Kunstwissenschaft. 2.
Aufl. (Stuttgart, 1923) .
24
Psychoanalytic Review. XXI (1934), 49-58.
300
25
of Humor to Masochism,1 1 interprets case-studies in the
light of Freudian psychology of humor. She comes to the
conclusion that wit is sadistic, expressing aggressive,
outer-directed drives of the ego, while humor is masochis
tic, the super-ego extracting pleasure from the ego's
26
pain. This stark contrast may seem extreme at first
sight, but there is evidence to support it in literature.
Restoration wit-contrasts and the Hobbesian sense of "sudden
glory" are good examples of sadistic wit in action; while
the "larmoyant" side of Shandean humor, with its copious use
of cambric handkerchiefs and dwelling on death-bed scenes
(e.g., the passing of Le Fever) reveals a masochistic streak
which loves to mingle tears with laughter.
27
Sandor Feldmann goes further than Winterstein or
25psychoanalytic Review. XXVIII (1941), 37-46.
26
"Unlike wit, which, acknowledging no superego, is
frankly sadistic and wins its intense pleasure from an ex
plosive, instantaneous pushing aside of inhibition by the
Id, humor is never sadistic, it is an attitude toward life
that tends constantly to turn aside suffering. ..."
("Note," p. 50) "The case material hints at the existence
of a close relationship between humor and masochism, paral
lel, possibly to the relationship between wit and sadism."
(p. 57)
27
"A Supplement to Freud's Theory of Wit," Psycho
analytic Review. XXVIII (1941), 201-217.
301
Dooley in suggesting that humor, wit, and comic are all
forms of "regression . . . towards the illusory phase of
super-ego . . . 11 Feldmann stresses the negative, narcis
sistic elements in humor at the expense of those which
Freud called "liberating" and "elevating." The popularity
of the humorist, says Feldmann, depends on "his ability to
ignore narcissistically all of his difficulties,1 1 by in
dulging in "make-believe" (p. 201). Here Feldmann shifts
the focus from transcendental aspects of humor (identifica
tion with the super-ego) to regressive ones: in his view
the humorist avoids all confrontation with painful reality.
Freud, however, had not described the humorist as simply
an infantile escapist. The power of the humorist lay in
"economized expenditure of [painful] affect."
Similarly, Freud had defined the pleasure of wit as
lying in "economy of expenditure in inhibition." L. Eidel-
28
berg criticizes this rather negative view of pleasure by
citing the example of a student who has prepared diligently
for an examination and then is asked only a few easy ques
tions. Mixed with the pleasure of relief, he will feel a
28
"A Contribution to the Study of Wit," Psychoanalytic
Review. XXXII (1945), 33-61.
302
lingering tension and disappointment. To give comic
pleasure, the disappointment would have to be playful (as
Eastman insists) and slight.
Turning to sophisticated wit, Feldmann notes that
Freud had included in his classification of techniques,
"the semblance of logic which serves as a suitable facade
for faulty thinking" (p. 203). (Freud had deduced a dual
pleasure here, from nonsense-play and tendency-meaning.)
Feldmann proposes that "faulty thinking" is a device which
applies to "the entire range of the field of wit" (p. 204).
The interest in deviations from a logical process as a
source of the comic forms an important link between some
psychological studies and the philosophical approach to the
subject. I shall therefore deal with it at a transitional
stage in the argument (see below, pp. 323-337).
Freudian psychology consists of a series of hypotheses
about psychic structure, built on a mass of clinical evi
dence, interpreted by the daring scientific imagination of
Freud himself. The psycho-philosophy of William McDougall,
which was influential in its day, is more traditional in
29
tone. In a brief paper entitled "The Theory of Laughter"
29
Nature. LXVII (February 5, 1903), 318-319.
303
(1903), he cites James Sully's list of "laughable things,"
and concludes that "the ludicrous is essentially displeas-
30
ing, apart from the laughter it may provoke." The prob
lem, then, is why these distressing objects should provoke
laughter. McDougall groups together three observations:
(1) The things we laugh at are in themselves displeasing,
(2) laughter disperses our attention, (3) laughter pro
duces a general increase of the vital activities.
(p. 318)
From this conjunction of ideas, he deduces a theory which
approximates Freud's notion of humoristic "economy of
sympathy." McDougall's reasoning, however, is highly
speculative, and relies on that old-fashioned "deus ex
machina," "beneficent Nature." He argues that, given im
perfect adaptation to suffering and innate sympathy, human
beings have been endowed with laughter as a safety-device
which distracts attention from the painful spectacle and
provides counter-stimulation. (Humor, in this case, might
"If, then, we rid ourselves of the assumption that
laughter is the expression of pleasure, we shall admit that,
while on the one hand the noble, the beautiful, the harmoni
ous, the orderly and the sublime are pleasing but not laughs
able, on the other hand the mean, the ugly, the incongruous,
the riotous and the ridiculous are displeasing, although in
certain circumstances they may provoke laughter; we shall
admit, in short, that the laughable or the ludicrous is
essentially displeasing, apart from the laughter that it may
provoke." (p. 318)
304
well be called "narcissistic" or "regressive.") As
McDougall points out, this is a surprising reversal of the
normal view of humor:
These facts suggest, in short, a theory of the ludicrous
the exact converse of that which we may call the pleasure-
theory; they suggest that we laugh at the ludicrous, not
because it is pleasing, but because it is painful.31
This one-sided theory may be compared with Freud's, in which
a neutral condition of economy is substituted for the pain
of expenditure, thus producing pleasure. McDougall returns
to the subject in a late article, "New Light on Laughter"
32
(1937), in which he repeats what he had written earlier.
He claims that his theory of laughter as protective against
sympathy has revealed "its biological service, the ground of
its survival-value and, therefore, the ground of its evolu
tion" into a refined and delicate instrument (p. 314) .
33
V. K. Krishna Menon follows McDougall's general
One might refer here to the embarrassments and acci
dents which befall Chariot, but which he somehow manages to
survive.
32
Fortnightly Review. CXLII (September 1937), 312-320.
33
A Theory of Laughter; With Special Relation to
Comedy and Tragedy (London, 1931). All page references are
based on this edition.
305
psychology o£ instincts, but rejects his view of humor as
"antidote to sympathy." He summarizes his own viewpoint
as follows:
(1) Laughter is a demobilization of forces; (2) These
forces are psychological, instinctive; (3) That in some
elementary form it is common to all animals; and (4) that
its biological value lies in providing an outlet for
unused energy, and in providing the alternatives to re
pression and its attendant complications. (p. 27)
The noteworthy point here is that Menon regards the impulse
to laughter as instinctive. (This view may be compared with
Eastman's theory of an instinctive sense of humor.)
However, Menon makes a distinction between instincts and
sentiments, the latter involving a structuring of instinct
and experience. There is, he argues, a laughter of the in
stincts and a laughter of the sentiments (p. 30), a dis
tinction strongly reminiscent of Beattie's "animal laughter"
and "sentimental laughter." Menon admits that the distinc
tion is not a clear-cut one, as the two types often inter
mingle .
Although Menon's theory posits an instinctive basis
for laughter, he puts stress on a high degree of intellec
tual agility. The humorous mind, he argues, is receptive
to a rapid flow of ideas, which are quickly matched with
opposing ideas from experience. Humor and laughter arise
from "incongruity of perceptions," "shifting of attitudes,"
a conflict of ideas (p. 41). The mind which is "rich in
»
[varied] experience" and alive to new impressions will
naturally tend to excel in making humorous (i.e., incon
gruous) associations. Humor and intelligence are thus
associated aspects of the "curious, observant, and reflect
ing mind," which revolves ideas in the light of experi-
34
ence. But Menon makes a distinction between humorous ap
perception, which is a lively "hopping" among ideas, and
"the logical, gradual, consistent, and scientific manner of
knowing" (p. 43). Humor, from his viewpoint, seems to have
some of the jerky mobility of Hartley's associationism,
Coleridge's fancy, or Freud’s wit (see "The Automatism of
the Wit-process,* wit and the unconscious, pp. 235-239).
Yet for Menon humor involves a highly active intellectual
process of selection, comparison, and judgment. The factors
which distinguish humor from ordinary intellection seem to
be levity and lively rhythm— it is a performance in jig-time
as opposed to a slow march.
34
Menon quotes Dr. Johnson— "the size of a man's under
standing may be justly measured by his mirth"— and Goethe,
on the connection between humor and intelligence (see
pp. 43-44) .
307
Humor, then, in Menon's view, is intellectual, but
this does not mean that it is unemotional, as he takes care
to point out in his critique of Bergson. Menon makes an
explicit statement on this point: "Conceiving laughter as
a mode of instinctive expression (as McDougall defines an
instinct) we cannot grant that there is absence of feeling"
(p. 49). He appeals to common sense for evidence of this
feeling. The feeling of laughter is hard to define, he
implies, because it is not conative but instinctive. Sim
ilarly, he explains humorous detachment not as absence of
feeling, but as freedom of viewpoint. He insists that
"laughter is essentially 'passionate' in that it does in
volve emotional play" (p. 54). The idea of "total personal
detachment" seems inconsistent with personal interest and
perception. The detachment to which Menon refers involves
freedom to improvise on original instinctive impressions by
shifting one's mental attitude.
After treating humor as a mental process, Menon
emphasizes the subjectivist position, insisting that laugh
ter belongs to the mind and not to objects. As he force
fully expresses it;
. . . this question regarding the classification of
objects in their capacity to provoke laughter is, really
308
speaking, an idle inquiry. As I have said, we do not
laugh at a thing. We just laugh. Any object, live or
dead, will induce laughter in us in the degree in which
it affects us emotionally, in the manner required for
this kind of emotional expression. (p. 74)
Menon applies this subjectivism to literary humor, treating
it not as a matter of objective forms, but of subjective
communication. Literary devices— such as "exaggeration,
contrast, and degradation, rigidity, mechanization of life,
etc."— are not humor, he says, but means and methods of
stimulating humor in the reader:
The writer may use any device, and so long as he succeeds
in stimulating the sense of humor in his reader he is
humorous; but this humour is to be stirred, not in rela
tion to himself, but to the experiences which he presents
there. (p. 76)
I think this statement must be accepted, so far as it goes;
but it completely begs the question of aesthetic quality in
the object, which intensifies the pleasure of the response
in literary humor. Menon describes the genius for humor
pot qualitatively (how the reader gains his effects), but
quantitatively (how many laughter-provoking situations he
can discover). Adopting a psychological approach to litera
ture, he concentrates on subjective responses, on "a condi
tion of incongruous perceptions" (p. 76). Of course, neith
er objective nor subjective approach is self-sufficient,
the problem being to strike a balance between them.
309
The whole bearing of psychology on aesthetics and
creativity in general comes up for consideration in the
works of Ernst Kris, Martin Grotjahn, and Arthur Koestler.
35
In "Ego Development and the Comic," Kris applies psycho
analytic experience and Freudian psychology to such problems
as the comic situation and the relation of the comic sense
to emotional states. He maintains that the comic is always
directly or indirectly human, and begins with a distinction
between the objective comic found in life and the invented
comic. The first requires two people— observer and
observed. The second (as in Freud's definition of tendency-
wit), requires three people— actor, spectator, and passive
object of the jest. Humor (as in Freud) only requires one
person: "The play can be acted between the Ego and the
Super-Ego" (p. 78).
Kris considers the problem of abstracting a measurable
qualitative element from the comic. He suggests that tempo
of relief, or "the element of suddenness in [the] economic
process is responsible for the nature of comic pleasure"
35
International Journal of psychoanalysis. XIX, No. 1
(January 1938), 77-90, reprinted in Psychoanalytic Explora
tions in Art (New York, 1952). References are based on
Journal.
310
(p. 79). This would be true of wit, also, but Kris notes
that the quality of humor is more enduring as time plays no
part in the humoristic effect. If time is bound up with the
aesthetics of comedy, so is "distance." identification with
the ludicrous person precludes laughter and causes discom
fort. Kris regards a "dissociation ('Distanzierung') or
. . . relative detachment" as a precondition for comic
pleasure (p. 83). He explains that the comic sense can
only function in an aura of "complete security," of separa
tion from inferiority and danger. (To maintain this posi
tion one would have to stress aesthetic non-involvement as
a factor in the comic sense, making clear distinctions be
tween such detachment and the forced, or illusory, dissocia
tion of wry "humor of the trenches" and "gallows humor."
Laughter at the misfortune of others, which Germans call
"Schadenfreude," also involves emotion— of a cruel and un
pleasant kind.) Paradoxically, Kris locates the comic
source "beyond the pleasure principle" in an original
anxiety now overcome.
The comic alone cannot overcome emotion [he argues] for
it presupposes a certain control over anxiety before it
can become effective. Once it has come into being, how
ever, it combines a sense of mastery with a feeling of
pleasure. (p. 86)
In this connection, Kris cites Jean Paul Richter's saying
311
that "Wit brings freedom, and freedom wit," as a poetic in
sight confirmed by psychology (p. 86).
In following out the "economic and genetic” directions
of Freud's inquiry into the comic, Kris concludes,
that most comic phenomena seem to be bound up with past
conflicts of the ego, that they help it to repeat its
victory and in doing so once more to overcome half
assimilated fear. (p. 89)
This would be one way of explaining the mixture of pleasure
and pain, laughter and tears, which gives the comic its
curious ambivalence. This compromise, in turn, Kris re
gards as a "defence-mechanism" against anxiety and other
painful affects. The greater the anxiety conquered, the
greater the relief and consequent pleasure. Kris points out
that some movies exploit this fact intentionally, and calls
this trick psychic "quackery." He associates the sudden
transition from anxiety to laughter with the grotesque,
rather than the comic (cf. Baudelaire's aesthetic distinc
tion, below pp. 413-414). in the comic— as in mania, its
"pathological enlargement"— the ego's triumph is short-lived
(p. 90). But the humorous attitude to life, on the other
hand, involves "a permanent transformation of the ego."
Kris ends his article by rhapsodizing on the psychological
advantages of humor.
312
We begin to realize [he says] the value of the humorist's
achievement, for he banishes man's greatest fear, the
eternal fear, acquired in childhood, of the loss of love.
The precious gift of humour makes men wise; they are
sublime and safe, remote from all conflict. (p. 90)
In Psychoanalytic Explorations in Art (New York, 1952),
Kris explores the relation of psychic forces to the nature
of aesthetic responses. He adopts Freud's suggestion (first
mooted by Aristotle) that there is an aesthetic emotion re
sulting directly from psychic activity. He then raises the
question of whether aesthetic experiences can be evaluated
by a quantitative analysis of economy or discharge of
psychic energy (see p. 63). This, I think, puts too much
weight on erratic subjective responses and magnifies the
misleading mechanical tendency in Freud's theory. The pur
pose of Kris's psychoanalytic explorations is to reveal the
nature of these responses, a perfectly legitimate psycho
logical concern, but not an aesthetic one, as attention is
36
not centered on the work of art. This concern appears
36
Cf. James Feibleman: "Comedy cannot be explained in i
terms of its psychological aspects, but rather the reverse.
Laughter is not its own explanation. We laugh because we
have apprehended something external which is funny: the
comic elements in a situation. The laughter is the result
of the apprehension of these elements, but is certainly not
the elements themselves. Laughter can be studied as a
psychological reaction; but such a study, important as it
313
clearly in his suggestion that the aesthetic response may
not be limited to art (p. 63). in his chapter, "The
Psychology of Caricature," Kris sums up the aesthetics of
the comic as a balance between anxieties and "tendencies"
on the one hand, and the manner of expression on the other.
In his words:
The claims of instinctual life are satisfied by its
content [i.e., that of "the comic process"], the objec
tions of the superego by the manner of its disguise.
When the ego is able so to master the tension between
the two, pleasure can arise from unpleasure. (p. 185)
The comic, he reiterates, originates in conflict, and comic
pleasure comes from the sense of ease and mastery with
37
which unpleasantness is controlled.
This may be taken as the starting-point for a discus-
31
sion of Martin Grotjahn's Beyond Laughter (New York, 1957).
Grotjahn's theory of humor is a version of Freud's "economy
is from a psychological point of view, can never yield a
theory of comedy. At best it can yield a theory of the
psychological effects of comedy." (In praise of Comedy.
p. 188)
37
See also the same author's "Laughter as an Expres
sive process; Contributions to the Psycho-Analysis of
Expressive Behaviour,1 1 International Journal of Psycho
analysis . XXI, Pt. 3 (July 1940), 314-341.
38
All references are based on this edition.
314
of expenditure in feeling," which he interprets as
follows:
Anxiety must be mastered and controlled before reference
to it may be enjoyed in the comic situation or in humor.
Humor originates when painful emotions are stimulated and
an attempt at suppression is initiated but proves to be
unnecessary. (p. 18)
In an exposition of Freud's theory, Grotjahn shows how the
unconscious "combines the disguised aggression with playful
pleasure, repressed since childhood and waiting for a chance
to be satisfied" (p. 256). Thus staisfaction is doubled,
and when the wit-work is fit to emerge into consciousness,
it provokes laughter by a sudden release of energy no longer
required for repression.
The ideas of economy and freedom from repression
suggest the more positive idea of creativity. How is this
accumulated energy, conserved from the psychic necessities
of life, to be used up? One way is in the appreciative
laughter which greets wit or comedy. A more sustained
way of expressing the pleasure and confidence that arise
from surplus psychic energy lies in the actual process of
creating art. The sources of wit and humor, as occasional
inspirations, seem to be closely related to those of general
artistic creativity. While the wit-work finds explosive
consummation in a burst of laughter, the art-work attempts
315
to extend (and diffuse) the sense of mastery and control
by bringing a wider range of experience into unified
psycho-aesthetic focus. Grotjahn is concerned with the
relations between laughter and creativity, and also between
ego development and the comic. Following Freud, Dooley,
and Kris to some extent, he offers "characters" of the
humorist and wit. Like Dooley, Grotjahn tends to associate
39
humor with masochism, wit with sadism. Like Emerson, he
points out that the possession of a sense of humor is a
social mark of distinction and he accounts for this in terms
of ego-development. Humor is associated with self-command,
as "each conflict mastered at the different developmental
39
(1) "We then considerd the humorist as a personality
type. We found him to be related to the masochist and the
melancholic. He behaves as if he knows the misery of this
world but resolutely proceeds to disregard it. . . .He
illustrates for us the hope for the victory of infantile
narcissism over all experience. His victory is only partial
and temporary; what he may gain in inner strength and kind
ness, he will lose in the world of reality and adjustment.
He may be free but not necessarily happy or well adjusted to
his environment." (p. 257)
(2) "The wit as a person is closely related to the
sadist, under the disguise of brilliance, charm, and enter-*
tainment the wit— and we do not mean only the practical
joker— is a sadist at heart. He is sharp, quick, alert,
cold, aggressive, and hostile. He is inclined to murder his
victims in thought; if he inhibits himself and if he does
not succeed in transforming his brain child into a joke, he
may develop a migraine attack instead." (pp. 257-258)
316
stages is marked by a growth of the sense of humor"
(p. 258). This explains the pride people take in humor—
even when they don't really have it.
Humor may be generally associated with creativity, with
being alive and free. Taking his cue from Freud's analysis,
Grotjahn says:
Happiness is a function of creativity. The analytic
study of laughter is a study of creative communication
between the unconscious and the conscious, leading to
the experience of happiness in fulfilling one's poten
tialities. This is man's challenge, his destiny, and
the meaning of human life. (p. 255)
Thus sense of humor is a sign of internal harmony, and its
roots lie close to those of all artistic creation.
Anthropological and genetic theorists have assigned
various functions to laughter in the struggle for survival
and for personal adjustment, respectively. It has
alternately been called a signal of aggression, cruel
triumph, relaxation, sociability, play, or a sign of
satisfaction and love. A place has been sought for
laughter in the economy of nature and of psychic health.
But, as Herbert Spencer pointed out, the activity of
laughter is remarkable in being apparently purposeless;
it has no conative value. Arthur Koestler calls laughter
317
40
"a luxury reflex." This non-utilitarian aspect, which is
one of its most outstanding features, serves to link
41
laughter with aesthetic activity and freedom. Koestler
produces linguistic evidence to support this association.
By etymological analysis of the terms "wit" and "amusement,"
he illustrates the fact that "in some languages the words
which refer to comic invention also refer to creative
thought as such" (see p. 15). He is encouraged, he says,
40
Insight and Outlook: An Inquiry into the Common
Foundations of Science. Art. and social Ethics (New York,
1949), p. 7.
41
in considering what he calls "peak experiences" of
self-realization and creativity, Abraham H. Maslow discovers
that humor frequently intermingles with the act of creation
itself: both humor and creativity are at times distin
guished by a sense of ease and mastery. A concept of this
recurrent epiphenomenon, Maslow argues, "is needed for the
full understanding of the kind of godlike gaiety (humor,
fun, foolishness, silliness, play, laughter) which I think
to be one of the highest B-values of identity." (He con
trasts B-values~positive values of healthy Being— with
D-values— compensatory values of Deficiency and Becoming.)
Maslow regards human activity arising from "non-wanting" as
"a very illuminating base for the theory of godlike humor
and amusement, the theory of boredom, the theory of cre
ativeness, etc." He goes on to relate artistic creation and
humor to a theory of play, which is free activity. "I very
strongly feel," he states, "that playfulness of a certain
kind is one of the B-values."
See Toward a Psychology of Being (New York, 1962) ,
pp. 100, 104, 105.
318
to expect that an investigation of the specific type
of mental activity involved in the creation of comic
stimuli will lead us to the very core of creative
thought itself. (p. 15)
This exploration he himself undertakes in The Act of
42
Creation (New York, 1964).
Humor, associated as it is by many theorists with ego-
development and creativity, would obviously seem to be an
important element in the total personality. The functions
of humor as a personality factor have been explored in a
number of clinical tests and research surveys, in one
such mental study, published as "Individual Differences in
43
the Sense of Humor," p. Kambouropoulou differentiates
personal and impersonal types of humor. The former is sub
divided into "passive" and "directed" kinds; the latter
into "perception of incongruity in situations" and "percep- '
tion of incongruity in ideas" (or "perception of nonsense").
|
The terms "personal" and "impersonal," of course, refer to
the objects of humor. As far as these tests show, there is
a correlation between high mental ability and appreciation
i
42
All references are based on this edition. See below,
pp. 329-334.
43
American Journal of psychology. XXXVII, No. 2
(April 1926), 268-278.
319
of nonsense jokes; no correlation was discovered between
mental ability and other types of humor, which seem to have
more relation to temperament and character.
"Sense of humor," if used as a generic term, should
actually be considered a matter of intellect (cognition),
temperament (affection), and character (conation), thus
involving the total personality. On these grounds, H. J.
44
Eysenck criticizes Freud's "too rigid" classification
of laughter into genres of wit, humor, and the comic. His
objection is based on principles of "Gestalt" psychology.
Adopting this approach to humor, Eysenck asserts:
. . . the mind acts as a whole, and in every case of
laughter all three components must play their part,
although their relative importance may vary from case
to case. (p. 304)
However true and fundamental, this would seem to com
plicate the problem of detailed analysis. Norman R. F.
Maier attempts the task of holistic analysis in "A Gestalt
45
Theory of Humour," but his study is notably centered on
cognitive aspects. Point of view, direction, organization
44
"The Appreciation of Humour: An Experimental Study,
British Journal of Psychology. XXXII, Pt. 4 (April 1942) ,
295-309. See below, pp. 326—329.
45
British journal of Psychology. XXIII, Pt. 1
(July 1932), 69-74.
320
of fields and applied experience} he noteS} are factors in
Gestalt problem-solving. Humor} he argueS} is a kind of
46
problem with an unexpected conclusion. Working from this
Gestaltist assumption} Maier describes the process of
humor (here reduced to the status of jokes) in the following
terms:
A humorous incident is told so as to encourage a certain
point of view. Then in the end we are given a conclusion
(an organization of the facts presented) which is very
different from the one we anticipated. (Maier} p. 70)
Pleasure accompanies sudden insight into the humor-puzzle;
if it has to be explained} understanding (a slow enlighten
ment) , but not laughter} results. This resembles the pro
cess of confusion and clarification which Lipps and Freud
discovered in wit, with rhythm as an all-important factor.
Theories of incongruity are also interpreted by Maier
in terms of Gestalt problem-solving. The disharmony which
suddenly appears between concept and percept creates "in
congruity between the beginning and the end of the story"
(p. 71). Of course} sudden perception of incongruity need
46
As H. J. Eysenck puts it: "The total configuration
of ideas} attitudes, or sentiments built up in the first
part of the joke is changed, and we gain an insight into the
structure of the total field which previously was lacking."
(pp. 306-307)
321
not be humorous— it may cause alarm and £ear— so it is not a
self-sufficient cause of humor. According to Maier's
theory, things are in themselves neither comical nor tragi
cal. Such distinction depends on a total configuration of
events and the mental set with which it is approached.
Possibly reflecting the professional insensitivty of the
detached observer, Maier agrees with Bergson that comedy
(or humor) requires complete absence of sympathetic feeling,
while tragedy plays upon the emotions. The pre-arranged
mental Gestalt involves expectation of either trivial or
serious consequences from the same event. Maier offers the
following illustration:
in a moving picture comedy the hero is thrown out of a
window and we laughj in a tragedy the hero receives the
same treatment and we are terror stricken. What makes the
difference? The difference lies entirely in the setting
in which such behavior is imbedded; and because of such
differences in setting, our attitude in the one case is
entirely objective, in the other case subjective. (p. 71)
Objectivity is seen as a factor in the comic, but since it
is even more important in scientific thinking, it cannot
provide the answer. Maier makes a point of distinguishing
between humor and reasoning as responses to a situation.
For him, the ridiculous has a limited logic which applies
only in a certain setting. He concludes: "Humour, there
fore, may be inconsistent with reality as a whole" (p. 72).
322
Tragedy puts no such limitation on truth. The ridiculous,
being "quite out of the realm of our experience . . . is
therefore less likely to be anticipated" (p. 72). Insight
into a humorous story consequently strikes with greater
suddenness. Maier refers to Kant's description of the
ridiculous as reversal of viewpoint or logical "topsy
turvydom" of mind. Humor from this inverted point of view,
is ridiculous reasoning; that is to say, humor is a Gestalt
or frame of mind, which bears more or less inverse relation
to the rational outlook.
Ralph Piddington shows how either a comic Gestalt,
or more episodic elements, may take the forefront in a
humorous work of literature. He compares thematic and epi
sodic types of comic contrast as follows:
Two conflicting themes may run through the play or book,
and the total effect be one of contrast, or the work may
derive its ludicrous quality from a series of minor situa
tions each of which is by itself ludicrous . . .47
Piddington notes, however, that "in every good comedy . . .
the two methods are blended," which would provide a truer
Gestalt effect of aesthetic unity.
Comparatively few psychologists have applied the
Gestalt approach to humor. Twentieth century psychological
47
The Psychology of Laughter, p. 143.
323
approaches to the comic tend to be Freudian, instinctive,
or psycho-aesthetic on the one hand; Gestalt or logical on
the other. The first category is, broadly speaking,
Subjectivist, dealing chiefly with emotional responses; the
second combines Subjectivist and Objectivist approaches,
putting the accent on intellectual responses. Psychologists
in the second group (who are closer to the philosophers in
this respect) have conducted a series of experimental
studies on the cognitive aspects of humor and wit. An early
48
pointer in this direction was made by W. R. Carpenter.
He adapts Hobbes's theory of superiority to intellectual
terms and calls laughter "a glory in sanity," celebrating
"accuracy of judgment." For Carpenter, however, the comic
sense of superiority is individual rather than social; in
stead of implying the "infirmity of others" (as Hobbes
would have it), it expresses satisfaction with one's own
intellectual success in avoiding possible error. This
theory is based on the supposition that the comic, in all
cases, involves sudden insight into the falsity or decep
tion of an incongruity. Carpenter believes there may be
48
"Laughter, A Glory in Sanity," American journal of
Psychology. XXXIII, No. 3 (July 1922), 419-422; also
"Experiments on the Comic," American Journal of psychology.
XXXVI (April 1925), 309-310.
324
a correlation between the intensity of comic emotion and the
effort of judgment involved in overcoming deception. The
technique of comic incongruity, then, and its success in
stimulating laughter, will depend on the skill with which
falsehood is wrapped in an air of truth, in Carpenter's
words:
The wilder and more plausible the rejected idea, the
more sharply it throws open the valve that lets out a
gust of elation at reason's triumph.49
John M. Willmann, in "An Analysis of Humor and
50
Laughter," presents a version of the incongruity theory
with emphasis on the logical structure of humor. The
source of the ludicrous, he thinks, is to be found in an
incongruous mixture of affects.
Laughter [says willmann] occurs when a total situation
causes surprise, shock, or alarm, and at the same time
induces an antagonistic attitude of playfulness or
indifference. (p. 70)
The word "funny," in its colloquial sense of "strange," is
taken as an example of "the dual role of united incongru
ities," which are potentially either surprising or amusing:
"Funny things and strange things are identical in their
49
"Laughter," p. 420.
50
American Journal of Psychology. LIII, No. 1
(January 1940), 70-85.
325
logical structure" (p. 77) . The key to all humor, according
to willmann, is this comical strangeness or incongruity.
Thus humor may be defined as a compound of two logically
mismatched ideas; it arises from "the union of two ideas
which involve some sort of contradiction or incongruity"
(p. 72). willmann says that the mode of incongruous fusion,
which has often been neglected, occurs in three ways:
(1) the two ideas may be united by possessing important
common elements, (2) the one may simply be an inference
drawn from the other, or (3) they may be seen actually
to occur together in objective reality, in one or other
of these three ways we are compelled to consider the two
incongruous ideas as a logical unit. (p. 72)
"Logical structure" and "objective reality," as used by
Willmann, are key terms in this context; they show that the
investigator is looking for the comic source in external
objects or situations rather than in subjective responses.
Fused into a single term, "objective structure," they would
suggest the aspect under which problems of literary humor
may best be approached.
Willmann proceeds to account for the humor of
"inferiority" and "tendency" in terms of incongruity.
Inferiority is incongruous in contrast with the average;
tendency is incongruous in fusing a shocking idea with a
326
51
playful idea or manner. in either case, one might
infer that humor arises from a more fundamental incongruity
between an illogical fusion and a logical expectation.
in "The Appreciation of Humour: An Experimental
52
and Theoretical study," H. J. Eysenck starts by classify
ing humor into seven types (in accordance with Eastman's
Sense of Humor): these are, humor of "Quantity," of
"Incongruity," of the "Unexpected," of "Truth," of "Superi
ority," of "Repression," and of the "Ridiculous." This
article is important, not for advancing one or more of
these theories, but for comparing three basic lines of
approach to humor and the comic. These are: (1) the cog
nitive (intellect and logic); (2) the conative (volition,
desire, emulation); and (3) the affective (emotion).
Theorists in the first group stress "incongruity, contrast
between ideas, deceived ideational expectation, and the
51
"There are just four major types of such surprising
or shocking ideas employed in humor. These are tragedies,
insults, wickedness. and obscenity. Humor is produced
whenever such a shocking idea is united with some other
idea which, by way of contrast, is playful or mild or
commonplace." (p. 78)
52
See n. 44.
327
53
like." Theorists in the second group stress "the satis-
54
faction of the desire for superiority, or 'self-glory.'"
Theorists in the third group stress emotions, such as "pure
joy," or joy mixed with fear or anger or some other emotion.
55
Sometimes emphasis is put on "a contrast of feeling."
Prom the three starting points of cognition, conation, and
affection, the laughable node or joke is reached through
the comic, wit, and humor. This is represented by a
triangular diagram (see p. 304), which does not wholly con
ceal its derivation from Freud's formulae. "Economy in
inhibition" is connected with aggressive tendencies in wit
and stresses the conative; "economy in thought" is connected
53
P. 303. in this group Eysenck includes Cicero,
Quintilian, Dryden, Locke, Marmontel, Gerard, Campbell,
Beattie, Priestley, Kant, Jean Paul, Hazlitt, Brown,
Schopenhauer, Everett; and the followers of Spencer's
"descending incongruity": Lipps, Sidis, Marshall, Renouvier
and Prat, other modern "champions of cognition" named are
Schiller, Willman, and Maier.
54
pp. 303-304. In this group he places Plato,
Aristotle, Trissino, Hobbes, Hegel, Lamennais, Hunt, Bain,
Philbert, Michiels, Carus, and Bergson. Modern proponents
include Chandler, Kimmins, and Ludovici.
55P. 304. in this group Eysenck mentions joubert,
Descartes, Hartley, Laprade, Dumont, Hoffding, and
McDougall. Some writers have combined theories, as in
the cognitive-conative approach of Ribot, Sully, and
Santayana.
328
with the comic and stresses the cognitive; "economy in
feeling1 1 is connected with humor and stresses the affective.
Eysenck, however; has two main objections to Freud's theory:
first; "his uncritical acceptance of the mechanical Spencer-
Lipps theory of 'economy,' which is really foreign to the
remainder of his views [i.e., the relation between "wit-
work" and "dream-work"]" (p. 305); second, his too rigid
genre distinctions, which conflict with the Gestalt approach
to experience (see above, pp. 175, 292). Eysenck proceeds
to link "conative" and "affective" factors under the heading
"orectic" (i.e., appetitive), thus forming a closer con
trast with the cognitive (intellectual). Eysenck's own
experiments with jokes provided the following data on the
cognitive aspects of humor: (1) each joke contains "ideas,
attitudes, or sentiments" involving "contradiction or
incongruity"; (2) when these are integrated. which happens
as part of the process, laughter results; (3) the fusion
is sudden: if it is protracted there is no laughter;
(4) "the process of integration is accompanied by insight":
the "structure of the total field" of ideas is clarified
as the auditor gets the point; (5) the elements in the
joke "must be experienced objectively, not emotionally";
although an emotion of joy often results from perception of
329
^ • , 56
the joke.
Eysenck's conclusions (stressing the logical Gestalt
of humor) invite comparison with Arthur Koestler's criteria
of comic technique, which may be summarized as follows:
(1) surprise or originality; (2) facilitation of the
associative flow, i.e., simplification; this depends on
"choice of relevant stimuli," and omission of the non-
essential; (3) exaggeration. to drive home the comic effect;
(4) economy. which stimulates the reader's re-creative
powers by presenting them with a gap for intellect to
57
bridge. Koestler's basic thesis that the comic sense
provides direct clues to creative thought in general has
already been noted in connection with the psychoanalytic
explorations of Kris and Grotjahn (see above, pp. 316-317).
In the methodological detail of his searching psycho-
aesthetic analyses of laughter and humor (first propounded
in insight and Outlook, later elaborated in The Act of
Creation), Koestler concentrates on the cognitive dynamics
56
Pp. 306-307. These cognitive findings are summarized
in a single sentence; "... laughter results from the
sudden, insightful integration of contradictory or incon
gruous ideas, attitudes, or sentiments which are experienced
objectively."
57
See Insight and Outlook, pp. 30, 110.
330
of the comic sense. Koestler's intellectualist orientation
has affinities with Eysenck's objective positivism, and it
seems no mere coincidence that both men have recourse to
geometrical designs to illustrate their theories of the
58
comic process (Koestler's are the more specific).
Koestler claims that the criteria mentioned above
apply to the joke, literature, and art in general. His
classification is based on a highly technical version of
the theory of logical incongruity, in his chapter, "The
Cognitive Geometry of the Comic Stimulus,'1 Koestler alter
nates metaphors from geometry and electricity to describe
"the intersection of two independent and self-contained
logical chains" which stimulates the comic sense. One of
these "chains" represents the conscious mental direction
which the narrator gives the story and which the auditor
follows. (Koestler points out that "'logical chains' are
59
more accurately described as 'association streams.'") The
58
As a pioneer in the comic novel, Sterne had antici
pated graphic representation of the comic in the curvetting
squiggles and arabesques he used to parody linear narration
(see T.S..VI,xl,473-474). Cf. Koestler, The Act of Creation
(New York, 1964), p. 37, Pig. 3.
59
See pp. 25-26. Applying Koestler's theory to the
novel, one finds that, when "association streams" are sepa
rated by being assigned to two different characters, a comic
331
other, which abruptly short-circuits the first, represents a
hidden and incongruous train of thought which suddenly comes
into contact with the first, causing insight and a radical
shift of outlook over the whole field. At this point of in
tersection— perception of incongruity— an "emotional tension
or 'charge'" occurs, which may be modulated without changing
the structure of the joke. With reference to this comic
principle, Koestler coins the term "bisociation" to describe
"any mental occurrence simultaneously associated with two
habitually incompatible contexts" (p. 37). Of course, bi
sociation— of which ambiguity is a subcategory— need not be
comic, but comic narrative always contains bisociative pat
terns. Bergson's contrast between the spiritual and mechan
ical, for example, is now seen as one of many variant forms
of "the bisociation of two behaviour patterns" (p. 41).
In his chapter, "The Emotional Dynamics of the Comic"
(Insight and Outlook, ch. v), Koestler shows how bisociation
clash will occur if both rise to the surface simultaneously j
in response to a single stimulus with a double meaning (e.g.
a word). Hence the comic misunderstandings in Tristram
Shandy— between Dr. Slop and uncle Toby over "bridgesbe
tween Tristram and the reader over "noses"; or between Uncle
Toby and Walter Shandy over "train of ideas" itself. The
comic collision of hobby-horses involves an intersection
of straight lines of association in a field whose Gestalt
consists of cross-purposes.
332
of logical chains causes a dissociation of thought from its
habitual emotive accompaniment. According to his definition
of the term:
The abrupt transfer of a train of thought from one
operative field to another leads to its separation from
its original emotional charge. An idea or situation seen
in a sudden new light casts off its affective shadow.
This sudden dissociation of intellectual and emotional
state, the rupture between knowing and feeling, is a
fundamental characteristic of the comic, and incidentally
explains the affinity of laughter and madness. (p. 65)
As Koestler's diagrams of forces or "currents" show, the
comic stimulus (as distinct from the unbroken rise and fall
of tragic catharsis) is a kind of 'Explosion," sending off a
60
shower of sparks. in positing an electric "grid" for
61
comic forces, Koestler notes that humor presents a milder
but more sustained stimulus. As he says in the earlier
work: "The emotive dynamics of sustained humour is a con
tinuous, mild discharge of tension as opposed to the sudden
explosions caused by pointed comic effects" (Insight,
p. 97). A wavy line represents moderate, steady oscillation
between two intersecting grids or associative fields, as in
the humorous epic of Don Quixote, with its bipolarity of
60See Act of Creation, p. 34, Fig. 1.
61
P. 35, Fig. 2; p. 37, Fig. 3; p. 85, Fig. 5.
333
"romantic" and "trivial" worlds. A zigzag line represents
the more violent oscillations of the comic stimulus, mani
fested in episodic wit or jokes. The sense of humor usually
issues in smiles, while the comic tends to provoke laughter.
As noted above, bisociation need not produce comic
effects; herein Koestler envisages the linking of laughter,
intellect, and artistic creativity.
When two independent matrices of perception or reasoning
interact with each other the result . . . is either a
collision ending in laughter, or their fusion in a new
intellectual synthesis, or their confrontation in an
aesthetic experience. The bisociative patterns found
in any domain of creative activity are tri-valent; that
is to say, the same pair of matrices can produce comic,
tragic, or intellectually challenging effects. (Act of
Creation, p. 45)
Here Koestler seems to be treading the remoter frontiers of
speculation, but his ingenious illustrations show how the
theories of bisociation and dissociation may be applied to
literary techniques of humor and the comic.
Koestler's use of the terms "bisociation," "dissocia
tion," "collision," "fusion," "confrontation," and his con
stant use of electrical imagery, possibly reveal an underly
ing neo-Hegelian assumption that human creativity (at all
levels from joke to literary masterpiece) constitutes an
outflow or discharge of imaginative energy generated by some
334
kind of psychic tension. In Insight and Outlook he repre
sents this process as a meeting of planes or of forces from
different planes, which suggests that his theory of the
comic, despite its scientific guise, has affinities with
classical theories of incongruity. (indeed, most logical-
objectivist theories of the comic show an affinity for the
idea of incongruity). The unifying factor in Koestler's
view of creativity appears to be the Gestalt approach. As
frontispiece to The Act of Creation, a curved triptych shows
"three domains of creativity which shade into each other
without sharp boundaries: Humour, Discovery, and Art"
(p. 27).
Philosophical and Obiectivist Approach
Koestler's theory of the "emotional dynamics of the
comic" and his general philosophy of creativity, provide a
useful bridge between psychological and philosophical
approaches to the problems of humor. This is because
Koestler's own approach notably bridges the gap between sub
jective response and objective stimulus. The survey of
modern psychological theories attampted above should throw
into relief certain phases or trends which constitute
distinct groupings on a subjective-objective scale. At one
335
end of the spectrum, physiological and neural studies of
the comic response shade into the doctrinaire subjectivism
of Freudian psychology, which treats humor as a highly
individualized psychic process bound up with the emotions
and affective life. (The regressive and neurotic aspects
of humor are the theme of follow-up studies by Freudian
analysts.) At the other end of the spectrum, Gestalt
psychologists and logical positivists approach sense of
humor as a matter of intellectual perception, treating
it primarily as a cognitive response, and admitting the
existence of objective stimuli with comic potential (funny
situations, jokes, etc.).
The modern philosophical approach to humor has seen
metaphysical speculation give way to logical analysis.
Whereas the psychologists focus on internal feelings and
secret motivations associated with humor, the philosophers
tend to focus on a sequence of thought associated with ex
ternal objects or situations, if logical congruence of
ideas be considered the norm, incongruity will tend to seem
ludicrous and laughable; thus the concept of incongruity
frequently serves as a key in interpreting objective pat
terns of the comic.
The intellectualist approach to the comic appears quite
336
62
clearly in L^on Dumont's Des causes du rire. Dumont
identifies the laughable as a situation of logical incongru
ity, calling for simultaneous affirmation and denial of the
same proposition. The resultant shock of illogicality
provokes laughter which precedes intellectual comparison of
63
the propositions. Yet pleasure comes from the "intellec
tual activity" of noticing the contradiction.
Charles Leveque attacks Dumont's paradoxical intellec-
64
tualist view for resting on a psychological impossibility.
When two opposing ideas exist, says Leveque, only one is
affirmed, while the contrast with the second causes laugh
ter. According to Leveque's modification, there are two
movements in laughter; first, "cognitive appreciation of a
65
contradiction"; next "an affective reaction to this." A
certain kind of intellectual activity is followed by
62
See Piddington, p. 176.
63
Dumont quotes from poinsinet de Sivry: "'l 'Eruption
du rire est trop brusque pour que personne consente I t en
attribuer la cause aux procedes tardifs du jugement.'" in
Piddington, p. 176.
64
"Le rire, le comique et le risible dans l'esprit et
dans l'art," Revue des Deux Mondes. XLVII (1863), 117.
^As summarized in Piddington, p. 177.
337
pleasurable feeling and laughter. L^vSque distinguishes the
laughable, which is transitory, from the comic, which has
"elements of permanence" (an implied logical order) and is
directed to the intelligence. "The comic," says L^veque,
"is the disorderly, and in exposing it the comic poet in-
66
directly affirms the eternal order."
L^veque asserts that the generic cause of laughter in
volves irregularity, and that monistic theories of laughter
merely stress a particular species of this genre, such as
the unexpected, sudden contrast, interruption of harmony,
or illogicality (p. 110). He points out the common confu
sion of laughable and laugher, which should constitute ob
jective and subjective terms in any formula of laughter, in
his opinion, modern analyses of laughter have developed the
internal psychological elements of laughter, but also re
tained the notion of external irregularity or disorder,
which is the basis of classical theories. L^veque con
cludes by claiming that the study of laughter can provide
new perspectives both in psychology and in art criticism
66
See Greig, The Psychology of Laughter and Comedy.
p. 257. A similar philosophical concept of the comic is de
veloped by James Feibleman ("Comedy . . . consists in the
indirect affirmation of the ideal logical order . . .") and
by Marie C. Swabey: see below, pp. 366-401.
i
338
(an idea which Koestler has exploited) .
67
Albert Penjon, however (as noted above, p. 218), de
scribes laughter as a spontaneous and contagious expression
of pleasure and freedom, calling it "a natural echo of
liberty" or "liberty visible." His theory, which seems to
be derived from those of Kant and Schopenhauer, is opposed
to the intellec-tualism of Dumont and Leveque. He claims
that laughter is a release from mental exertion, and that,
conversely, "purposeful intellectual activity is not accom
panied by laughter. "
Referring to genetic origins, Penjon adapts Kant's
explanation of laughter to his own theory of liberty. He
regards the comic emotion as essentially disinterested (see
above, p. 218, n. 36), non-conative, playful, and insep
arable from liberty.
Le rire [he writes] parait etre la suite d'une sorte de
choc produit par la rupture soudaine d'une uniformity
d'abord constat^e et dont la persistance ytait attendue.
(p. 118)
This interruption of monotonous mental patterns reflects a
principle of spontaneity which touches a responsive chord in
the laugher. The comic, for Penjon, consists of an
67
"Le Rire et la Liberty," Revue Philosophique. XXXVI
(July-December 1893) , 113-140.
339
intervention of fantasy or freedom into the domain of rules.
The rational spirit allies itself with liberty in playfully
mocking or dodging these rules.
Like Leveque, Penjon singles out disagreement, dispro
portion, and incongruity ("le desaccord, la disproportion,
ou la disconvenance") as causes of the comic, deriving them
in turn from the play of spontaneity with order. Penjon
concedes that the ingenuity, taste, and judgment of verbal
wit and literary humor appear to be the work of reason, but
argues that they are really the fruit of "natural spontanei
ty, " developed by playful exercise and merely selected and
appreciated by the reason. Reason by itself, he insists,
follows logical paths and lacks gaiety. Fantasy (or
"thinking aside," to use Koestler's phrase) provides escape
from such restraints, and its inventions are welcomed with
laughter. For Penjon, naivete and tendency in humor serve
to affirm an ideal liberty by derogating actual rules and
68
conventions. As he says,
. . . naivety, malice ou ironie n'existent pour moi
qu'autant que je mesure la dose de liberty qu'elles
68 a
As in the case of Leveque, an ideal-actual antinomy
forms the core of penjon's theory. Liberty is to Penjon,
as logic is to Feibleman and Swabey.
340
supposent, la derogation k telle ou telle regie, k telle
ou telle convention ... (pp. 132-133)
Finally, Penjon makes a distinction between two kinds of
liberty: the first more or less synonymous with nature and
spontaneity; the second acquired through control of internal
and external natural forces, by science, art, and morality.
The first is laughable, the second is not. Man, according
to Penjon, balances between natural and achieved liberty.
Reason, he suggests, conspires with play to keep a place for
primary liberty in the activities of life; laughter, which
celebrates satisfaction of inclinations and suppression of
obstacles, is the signal of such liberty.
69
Renouvier and prat, also following Schopenhauer,
regard laughter as a form of play; their view is a mixture
of the play-theory and the theory of logical incongruity.
They trace comic pleasure to "liberty in the play of ideas
which is aroused by contradiction in the ludicrous
situation."
Camille Melinand disagrees with penjon and Bain, and
asserts that "all laughter implies a certain doubleness of
view. " Oddity does not make a thing comic unless it can be
69
La Nouvelle Monadologie. pp. 214-215; in Piddington,
pp. 188-189.
341
simultaneously seen as natural from a different point of
view. Melinand writes; "Partout on retrouvera le mdme
6lament; quelgue chose de surprenant et d'absurde qui, d'un
autre cot^ est naturel et banal.Doubleness of viewpoint
may involve unconscious self-exposure by a comic character
and imaginative projection into his thoughts by the spec
tator. The character thus has a single viewpoint— inevi
table to him— while the spectator grasps this logic of per
sonality, and at the same time regards the words or actions
which express it as absurd from his own point of view.
Melinand takes an intellectualist view of the comic. Any
unfamiliar objects, such as foreign words, he says, appear
ludicrous when they escape mental classification. Pidding
ton offers the following exposition of Melinand's ideas;
When we think of an object as belonging at the same time
to two mutually exclusive categories our thought is
shocked, as in the case of a triangle with four sides.
This constitutes the absurd. When an object which is
from one point of view absurd is suddenly perceived as
belonging to a familiar category, there arises pleasure
at the rediscovery of rationality in that which was pre
viously regarded as absurd. (p. 1.86)
The comic sense, then, seems to Melinand to operate in three
movements: first, a shock of illogicality, second,
70 /
"Pourquoi Rit-on? Etude sur la cause psychologique
du rire," Revue des Deux Mondes. CXXVII (January-February
1895), 621.
342
perception of a rational principle, third, pleasure in the
reaffirmation of logicality.
C. C. Everett, acknowledging Schopenhauer as his
philosophical master in ideas of the comic, argues that the
tragic has objective manifestation in the struggle for
existence, while the comic is a subjective mood; tragic
and comic alike, however, he considers to be simply differ
ent forms of the incongruous.
In real life [he says] form and reality are inseparable:
thus the tragic has a real objective existence. The
form can be separated from the reality only by a process
of thought; thus the comic is . . . purely subjective.71
Everett's separating of form from reality parallels
Schopenhauer's comic distinction of percept from concept,
or Carlyle's separation of outward garments from Real
presence in the clothes philosophy of Sartor Resartus.
According to Everett, "Wit entirely separates the form from
the reality" (same, p. 191) and may hurt in the process.
Humor involves a more tender separation of the superficial
from the real. The form is held up to ridicule but the
human individuality behind it is loved and respected. (This
71
"The Philosophy of the Comic," in Poetry. Comedy, and
Duty (Boston and New York, 1893), pp. 188-189. All ref
erences are based on this edition.
343
is true of Sterne's treatment of the Shandy brothers.) in
humor, Everett suggests, ridiculous forms are so superficial
that they can be good-humoredly slid aside, "leaving the
substance whole and uninjured" (p. 192). This humorous
exposure of incongruity is often accompanied by genial
sentiment, as in Dickens' treatment of his characters.
Whereas Schopenhauer felt the comic to be a relapse
from intellection into sense perception, Everett, in a
more philosophical version of Charles Lamb's impression, re
gards it as relief from substance and reality in recreative
enjoyment of mere appearance and artificiality.
In the comic we are taken into the world of surfaces.
The forms about us mean nothing. All is empty. We are
wholly free from the substance and are refreshed. . . .
The too intense mind becomes relaxed by this play of the
comic. . . . Mere negation of substance, mere vacuity,
mere aimlessness, would be tedious. But the comic brings
occupation that is not business. We have the form though
the substance is missing. We have emptiness that is not
vacuity; a definite aimlessness; a disorder that pre
serves the form of law. (pp. 196-197)
The comic, then, (according to Everett) is not idleness but
a lighter form of activity. The comic does not stop the
world to let people get off, it accelerates the pace, leav
ing no time for imaginative reconstruction of the moral or
emotional substance behind its fagade of rapidly moving
forms. Paradoxically, comedy affirms the moral order by
344
granting a moral holiday from which one is supposed to
return to duty, gratified and refreshed.
72
In an article "On the Philosophy of Laughing," Paul
Carus considers the view of Schutze that the comic is a
sign of human limitations. This is another version of the
comic incongruity of spirit and matter, of finite and in
finite, with the source of the comic this time located in
the material side of the contrast. Schutze credits the com
ic with objective existence in the world; carus reports his
views as follows:
Man believes himself to be free but finds by experience
that he is a plaything of nature. The comical reminds
man of his dependence upon physical conditions and
points out by a humorous derision his relation to a
higher state of freedom. The materiality of the world
is the objective cause of the ridiculous, for material
ity and spirituality form a contrast which manifests
itself as an incomplete realisation of the ideal.
(p. 257)
This theory might be characterized as a kind of disappointed
transcendentalism. Paul Carus adopts a simpler view of
laughter for his own, that of his namesake Dr. Carl Gustav
Carus, "who regards laughing as the expression of life in
tensified, and weeping . . . as a depression of the vitality
of the organism" (p. 259). The comic philosophy of both
72
Monist. VIII, Noa 2 (January 1898), 250-272.
345
Caruses is linked with a tradition of vitalism in comic
theory which reaches from Schopenhauer to Susanne Langer.
The currents of vitalism and intellectualism which stem
from Schopenhauer and often seem to flow at cross-purposes
in modern philosophy of humor, merge quite smoothly in
Henri Bergson's philosophy of the comic, vitality of intel
lect or flexibility of intelligence are signs of a progres
sive life-force; the comic sense serves creative evolution
by exposing to ridicule everything lifeless, rigid, mechani
cal, or merely habitual, especially when these are masque
rading as things or persons of real value. The comic con-
73
sists of "something mechanical encrusted on the living";
it represents an incongruous usurpation of vital spirit by
inert matter, of active intelligence by automatic responses.
In terms of Bain's theory, it denotes a degradation of life
toward the inhuman mechanical.
As Freud remarks in relating Bergson's theory of
creative evolution to his own theory of economy of expendi
ture in psychic activities, "it is in accord with our per
sonal development towards a higher stage of culture, to
Laughter; An Essay on the Meaning of the Comic, in
Comedy. ed. Sypher, p. 84.
346
limit our muscular work and increase our mental work" (see
above, p. 287). Anything which shows physical exaggeration
resulting from inferior mental development seems ridiculous
according to this principle] any emphasis on external ap
pearance at the expense of inner vitality seems comical.
Physical clumsiness, such as that of the clown who tumbles
over and gets tied up in performing the simplest actions,
74
is laughable, because it shows a human being (with an
implied capacity for spiritual intelligence) embarrassed by
his body. Absentmindedness is also ridiculous because it
implies "inelasticity of mind" and lack of mental adapta
tion to the flow of life. Bergson sums up the objective
comic of persons in the following definition:
The comic is that side of a person which reveals his
likeness to a thing, that aspect of human events which,
through its peculiar inelasticity, conveys the impres
sion of pure mechanism, of automatism, of movement
without life. (p. 117)
Mechanical patterns of thought and action are contrasted
74
Cf. Edwin Muir's comments on one of Sterne's humorous
techniques, "as old as the vocation of the jester," namely
"the pose of having so many difficulties to overcome that
you cannot do what you want to do." Muir illustrates this
device by allusion to Grock's'business" with the piano
stool. See Essays on Literature and Society, pp. 54-55.
with intellectual and spiritual potential; the waste of life
exposed is base, decadent, and ludicrous. in this respect,
the comic of mechanization belongs with theories of degrada
tion from Plato to Bain; it also constitutes a form of
"descending incongruity" (cf. Spencer) and of "disappoint
ment" (cf. Kant)— an expectation of spirit is reduced to
nothing by inert matter. An intellectual comic pleasure
comes from penetrating outward shows and disguises, from
peeling off the mask or husk of convention to reveal the
emptiness within. Indirectly, Bergson's theory is also one
of intellectual superiority; the percipient identifies with
the "elan vital" or forward-moving life-wave, and triumphs
over the hollow men who are not filled with this spirit.
Above all, Bergson's "mechanization of life" represents a
version of the incongruity theory (as Koestler pointed out
from the standpoint of his own theory of "bisociation").
It is rooted in the dualism of human nature which has
attracted the attention of comic theorists from Schlegel to
Schutze. Bergson's theory is profoundly human' indeed, "the
comic does not exist outside the pale of what is strictly
human" (p. 62) . That is because, beyond these bounds, the
combination of mind and matter from which this kind of in
congruity naturally springs, cannot be found, what is
348
simply material or mechanical or even animal (instinctual)
cannot be comical unless it is somehow infused with human
connotations. Thus felt (the material) is not ludicrous,
but an old felt hat is laughable if its battered shape sug
gests human agency or character expressed in the material
form. A rabbit running across a field is not ludicrous,
but if it sits up and washes its face in the morning dew like
a girl mincing before a mirror, then it is laughable. The
comic (says Bergson) does not exist in objects but only
in persons or human associations.
In another sense of the term, Bergson insists that the
comic is. objective; that is to say, it is a matter of criti
cal insight, not of emotion. So critical does the comic
sense appear that it is considered incompatible with emo
tional sympathy. The normal affective flow must be shut
off, while silence is imposed on sentiment, and "a momentary
anesthesia" on the heart; in this cold and quiet climate the
comic makes "its appeal . . . to intelligence, pure and
simple" (p. 64). Social and intellectual functions combine
in the comic application of corrective intelligence to the
inferior part of mankind. Here Bergson's view of the comic,
possibly based on Moliere's comedies, seems both too
flattering to the percipient, and too unsympathetic to his
349
object. Theorists too numerous to mention— Freud is one of
them— have criticized this exclusively intellectual view and
stressed the importance of emotional elements in the comic.
A psychologist would never have made this error (although
he might have reversed it). The point which Bergson wished
to make— and which he distorted by generalization— was prob
ably a psychological one. First, the appreciation of comedy
cannot function if there is sympathetic identification with
the characters (see Maier, above pp. 319-322); second, the
comic sense requires a sublimation or distancing of painful
affects in the object— anxiety, sympathetic pain, or any
violent emotion such as anger, disgust, pity, terror pre
clude its activation (see p. 150).
Bergson emphasizes that the comic is human and social,
objective and intellectual; these are the broad outlines of
his theory. He details many varieties of rigidity and
machine-like action which are contrasted with "living
pliableness" and exposed as ridiculously inadequate in unex
pected circumstances. Bergson shows how physical automatism
and absentmindedness go hand in hand, denoting "a certain
inborn lack of elasticity of both senses and intelligence,"
which unfits a person for the society committed to creative
evolution. Any deviation from the progressive social ideal,
350
such as the "over-romantic, utopian" star-gazing of Don
Quixote (p. 69) is exposed to corrective ridicule. The
comic sense is also seen as moral; vice is ridiculous,
Bergson implies, because it is antisocial, it incapacitates
a person from taking a creative role in society. Indeed,
"vice" has almost a double meaning: that of immorality and
that of the petrifying, warping grip of harmful habits which
cause "curvature of soul,” preventing further development.
The unconsciousness of self in which "humors” flourish and
which leads to constant self-exposure, is considered a sign
of deficiency in that "wideawake adaptability" which man's
social environment demands of him. Laughter functions as a
social gesture which "restrains eccentricity" and "softens
down . . . mechanical inelasticity" (p. 73).
Just as the clown's great physical expenditure for
trivial ends seems ridiculous, so does vain expenditure of
attention on physical appearance or external forms. Bergson
detects a comic principle in "the body taking precedence
of the soul," "the manner seeking to outdo the matter, the
letter aiming at ousting the spirit" (p. 94) . The theme
of much comedy is to be found in "a nature that is mechani
cally tampered with" (p. 88), as this will inevitably lead
to some kind of failure. If society is really carried
351
forward and sustained by the life-force, then the idea of
"automatic regulation of society" must seem ridiculous. The
same holds true of ceremonial forms whose immobility can
never capture and symbolize adequately the vital flow of
life. "Appearance seeking to triumph over reality" repre
sents a perennial comic principle which has become a
favorite theme of comic novelists.
One form of "degradation" or "descending incongruity"
has already been noticed in Bergson's theory, namely the
"mechanization of life." Bergson, like Schlegel and Freud,
also finds a source of the comic in any swift descent from
the moral or intellectual plane to the physical. This may
take the form of a sudden diversion of attention from a
person's noble words or ideas to some grotesque element in
his physical appearance, thus causing a "dissociation" of
feeling, to use Koestler's term (which incidentally implies
affective states which Bergson ignores). in Bergson's
view, the objects of the comic sense— which acts as a close
ally of the life-force— are uniformly inferior, warped,
decadent, lifeless, and classifiable as subhuman or inhuman.
The weight of evolutionary philosophy seems to have crushed
some of the life out of his view of laughter and limited its
range. If Bergson allowed it any affective quality, the
352
laughing emotion would not be a happy one. Laughter may
be "a wave of felt life" (as Langer calls it), but, accord
ing to Bergson, it leaves"a froth with a saline base. . . .
The philosopher who gathers a handful .to taste may find
that the substance is scanty, and the aftertaste bitter"
(p. 190).
Thus Bergson ends on a note of dissatisfaction. Yet
this is a fascinating and original essay in a field not
noted for freshness of ideas. Despite its errors of empha
sis— notably Bergson's false generalization of the cognitive
aspect of the comic and his oversimplification of incongru
ity— it contains many valuable suggestions on comic tech
nique. Its sparkling style has a special appeal for liter
ary critics.
Louise Mathewson's "Bergson's Theory of the Comic in
75
the Light of English Comedy” (1920) is a representative
application of his ideas to literature. The attempt ex
poses the limitations one might have been led to expect.
As noted above, Bergson's views on comedy seem to have spe
cial reference to the masterpieces of Moli&re. They are
75
University of Nebraska Studies in Language. Litera
ture. and criticism. No. 5 (Lincoln, 1920).
353
found wanting in reference to the mixed modes of English
comedy, which is not so obliging as to follow rigid aesthet-
76
ic principles, but has plenty of ”£lan vital" as well as
emotion. As Mathewson mildly states, "when we turn to
English comedy, ... we shall see that it is difficult to
eliminate feeling from all forms of laughter" (p. 6). The
Englishman is not accustomed to stand aside and judge incon
gruities impartially; he will either sympathize or deride.
In English comic literature, laughter is compatible with
fairly extreme forms of emotion: "It is either combined
with fierce denunciation as in satire, or tempered by the
infusion of positive kindness as in humor" (p. 10). There
is an abundance of genial and sentimental emotion in
Sterne's comedy of hobby-horse humors. At the same time,
many of Bergson1s ideas on automatism, mechanization of
life, absentmindedness, habitual patterns of thought, and
body taking precedence over mind apply most aptly to
Sterne's comic strategy.
Bergson's comic theory affirms three norms: vital
76
"Taine virtually tells us that the English have no
true sense of the comic." (p. 9) "... both Taine and
Scherer tell us that humor as we understand it, is a prod
uct of the 'triste nord.'" (p. 10)
354
life, intellectual flexibility, and social adaptation, in
affirming the social mean, he points out that "degradation
is only one form of transposition," which may occur upward
77
as well as downward. Mathewson points out that extremes
of behavior, whether ascetic or sensual, are always incon
gruous with the social norm and therefore ridiculous.
Comedy is socially normative and tries to correct the socio
moral balance in deviators and eccentrics. Mathewson
concludes:
Comedy is a protest against the unusual; and seeks to
prevent us from too completely leaving the basis of
commonsense. If we leave the path of custom we run
the risk of being ridiculous. (pp. 24-25)
Yet if comedy were really a repressive social agent, it
would, if successful, eventually put itself out of business,
as Hazlitt thought it had done in the nineteenth century.
Moreover, English comedy does not seem so idealistic as some
philosophers think comedy should be. It does not attack
folly as satire attacks vice, in fact it thrives on and
77
Bergson gives the following illustration of "upward
transposition": "To express in reputable language some dis
reputable idea, to take some scandalous situation, some low-
class calling or disgraceful behaviour, and describe them in
terms of the utmost 'respectability.1 is generally comic.
The English word is here purposely employed, as the practice
itself is characteristically English." (p. 142)
355
cherishes eccentricity, humors, and Whimsy for their richly
human variety and oddity. Theatrical substance would be
scanty indeed without them.
Another philosopher who believes the comic stands for
an ideal rationality is George Santayana, in The Sense of
Beauty (1896), he starts by associating comedy with fancy
and dream. The ludicrous in fiction, however, is mainly
a matter of incongruity and degradation. Like McDougall
(see above, pp. 302-304), he finds objects of the comic
sense unpleasant in themselves, for "we are in the presence
of an absurdity; and man, being a rational animal, can like
78
absurdity no better than he can like hunger or cold."
Not all men feel at home in an element of pure rationality;
on the surface, inability to appreciate the absurd would
seem tantamount to having no sense of humor. But Santayana
explains the comic stimulus as a pleasurable jolt to intel
lect, causing a change of rhythm and viewpoint.
The pleasure comes from the inward rationality and move
ment of the fiction, not from its inconsistency with
anything else. . . . We enjoy the stimulus and the shaking
up of our wits. It is like getting into a new picture,
or hearing a new song. (p. 249)
78
1904 ed., p. 248. Compare this view of man as
rational animal with Camus's view of man as absurd animal.
356
It is not the logical disorder, but the expansion of mental
horizons which is pleasurable; the confusion is tolerated
for the sake of the freedom and enlightenment to which it
stimulates us. To Schopenhauer or Everett, the comic is
a holiday from reason; to Santayana it is a challenge to
find out reason behind a mask of absurdity.
79
In two essays, "The Comic Mask" and "Carnival" (1921)
Santayana pursues the Comic Spirit in more liberal vein.
Vitality and impulse play a larger role in these later
essays, and share the comic spotlight with pure reason.
Like Everett, Santayana discovers a comic of forms which
caricatures real life. The clown's-eye view reveals "the
surface only, with the lucid innocence of a child" (p. 135) .
This lack of moral insight produces the flat dimensions of
the comic perspective. Persons reduced to the status of
hurrying automata become grotesques, the object of "boister
ous sallies." The primitive comedian, says Santayana, is
simply caught up and stimulated by the comic rhythm:
He is not at all amused intellectually; lie is not ren
dered wiser or tenderer by knowing the predicaments into
which people inevitably fall; he is merely excited,
flushed, and challenged by an absurd spectacle. (pp. 135-
136)
79
In Soliloquies in England, and Later Soliloquies
(New York, 1922), pp. 135-139, 139-144.
\
357
This revelling in absurdity is a far cry from the rational
ist view of absurdity as a painful privation of reason (like
hunger or cold). Reason is now seen to be a precarious
achievement superimposed on the vital flow of life. In the
comic, as in life, rationality is interdependent with irra
tional impulses; "animal experience" and "blind play" con
tribute to the comic sense. Even philosophers "cut capers"
sometimes, while wiseacres are unintentionally amusing.
Whenever reason oversteps the bounds of nature it becomes
ridiculous. Santayana, who had been wavering between in
tellect and sense, now takes the plunge with Schopenhauer,
as it were, and comes out strongly on the vitalist side:
. . . importance springs from the stress of nature, from
the cry of life, not from reason and its pale restric
tions. Reason cannot stand alone; brute habit and
blind play are at the bottom of art and morals, and un
less irrational impulses and fancies are kept alive, the
life of reason collapses for sheer emptiness. (p. 137)
This, then, is the dionysiac function of the comic, to
stimulate the will to live, on closer scrutiny, the comic
mask does not wear an expression of rationality; its cruder
grimace expresses lust for life. The energy which is con
centrated and distilled in comic ritual and literature, is
the same energy which supports the life of reason. The
place of comedy seems assured in the economy of culture and
358
society; the comic keeps the balance between man's ideals
and his nature, as Santayana shows in Mandevillian terms.
As Shaftesbury and Stendhal knew, a dash of comic reckless
ness is needed to save society from monotonous lethargy.
Santayana dwells on the link between the comic sense and
80 81
social communication. Like Shaftesbury, he considers
playful freedom of expression a mark of culture in social
intercourse; stuffy conventions can only distort but not
suppress this lively impulse.
What, on the contrary [he asks], could be more splendid
ly sincere than the impulse to play in real life, to
rise on the rising wave of every feeling and let it burst,
if it will, into the foam of exaggeration? (p. 138)
The comic Spirit, which involves a spilling over of felt
life into words, seems neither negative nor passionless in
its effects. Where Freud seems pessimistic about the
80
"Where the spirit of comedy has departed, company
becomes constraint, reserve eats up the spirit, and people
fall into a penurious melancholy in their scruple to be al
ways exact, sane and reasonable, never to mourn, never to
glow, never to betray a passion or a weakness, nor venture
to utter a thought they might not wish to harbour for ever."
(p. 138)
81
"'Tis the persecuting spirit has rais'd the bantering
one: And want of Liberty may account for want of a true
Politeness, and for the Corruption or wrong Use of pleasant
ry and Humour." (Characteristicks. Pt. I, p. 72; see above,
pp. 88, 215)
359
implications of the comic, Santayana seems boldly optimis
tic. He considers it a glorious squandering of vitality in
the expansive gestures of a free spirit, rather than a
penurious economy of psychic expenditure in the satisfaction
of a repressed "tendency." (Santayana's optimistic attitude
invites comparison with play-theories generally; see espe
cially Boris Sidis, pp. 228-229 above.)
Many philosophers and most psychologists regard tragic
and comic as subjective states of mind or feeling. Everett
regarded nature as a "great tragedy," which can only be made
to seem comic by ignoring the substance and enjoying the
forms. Santayana, on the other hand, asserts that "exis
tence involves changes and happenings and is comic inherent-^
ly" (p. 141). Things in their "intrinsic aspect” seem
"merry" to him; it is only sentimental projection which
casts a tragic shadow over nature, vitality, change, and
spontaneity constitute the essence of the comic sense:
A buoyant and full-blooded soul [says Santayana] has
quick senses and miscellaneous sympathies: it changes
with the changing world; and when not too much starved
or thwarted by circumstances, it finds all things vivid
and comic. Life is free play fundamentally and would
like to be free play altogether. in youth anything is
pleasant to see or to do, so long as it is spontaneous
.. . (p. 141)
Santayana regards change as the comic of becoming, and
360
"incongruity [he says] is a consequence of change." Change
occurs at varying rates in the individual and his environ
ment, resulting in manifold surprising incongruities. The
confusions and failures of comedy upset the expected order
of things, but people are the happier for such rapid changes
of position, which "belong to the very texture of our tempo
ral being." Santayana follows Bergson in regarding the
comic as a test of adaptation and flexibility:
. . . if people repine at these mishaps, or rebel against
these solutions, it is only because their souls are less
plastic and volatile than the general flux of nature.
(p. 141)
In this optimistic essay, "Carnival," Santayana relates
comic sense directly to appreciation of the variety of life,
and ventures the following cosmic generalization:
Thus the universe changes its hues like the chameleon,
not at random but in a fashion which moral optics can
determine, as it appears in one perspective or another;
for everything in nature is lyrical in its ideal essence,
tragic in its fate, and comic in its existence. (pp. 141-
142)
Viewed in the long perspective of sentiment, life is tragic;
enjoyed in the passing moment it is comical. This transi
tory world is itself a carnival, which Santayana calls the
comedy of existence.
Santayana's aesthetic philosophy is far removed from
the logical intellectualism of such French psychologist-
361
philosophers as Dumont, L^vdque, and M^linand. To return
to the "sense of incongruity" which unites the work of most
of these philosophers, one might consider the work of J. B.
82
Baillie. Baillie adopts the objective intellectualist
approach— "Healthy laughter rests on a judgment of an actual
objective situation, and is always detached from personal
bias" (p. 269)— but he modifies its cognitive assumptions
by including recognition of conation as a necessary element
of the comic. Apprehension of incongruity, and insight into
its structure, are not intrinsically comic— indeed, too much
mental exertion will preclude laughter; such insights only
become comic, as Baillie points out, when appreciation of
some purpose is added to them. The ludicrous situation is
then found to be completely irrelevant to this supposed pur-
83
pose.
Disparity between aim and performance constitutes a
82
Studies in Human Nature (London, 1922).
83
"Laughter arises when the character or process of an
object, which is considered to refer to an end, real or sup
posed, is judged to be partially or wholly incongruent or
incoherent with the end in view, it is important to note
that the end must not be given up but must still hold good
in spite of the incongruity; and also that the object
laughed at must not give way and must be none the worse for
its incoherence with the end." (Baillie, p. 259)
362
popular source of humor tinged with ridicule; on the analogy
of Plato's "vain conceit" (disparity between assumed manners
and actual character), this might be called the comic of
"vain attempt." The efforts of a beginner, a foreigner, a
child, or an animal to perform some skill beyond their pow
ers, usually have ludicrous effects which are apt to provoke
laughter. It should be noted that such awkward attempts are
mimetic in intention, but patently inferior to the object of
imitation; and, moreover, that the laughter thus caused im
plies familiar knowledge of superior performance. The "su
periority" of laughter, according to Baillie, is an affirma
tion of intellectual power, celebrating the fact that
we have in laughter triumphed over the incoherent, we
have kept up our belief in the end which holds its own,
and we have preserved ourselves in the face of the incon
gruous .84
perception of incongruity implies objective disorder ("the
absurd") reflected in mental confusion. Whereas Schopen
hauer regards perception of absurdity as a refreshing escape
from rational concepts, Baillie and Santayana (in Sense of
Beauty), adopting the standpoint of logic and moral philos
ophy, regard it as a painful deprivation of reason. Baillie
84
P. 291. Cf. W. R. Carpenter's "Laughter, a Glory in
Sanity," p. 323 above.
363
interprets laughter as a reassertion of mental stability in
the face of an illogical situation; according to him, the
"inarticulate outburst of sound" expresses a sense of irra
tionality, thus singling out that which is intellectually
unacceptable for contrast with a rational norm. Most intel-
lectualist theories are roughly Hegelian in form: an illog
ical thesis is challenged by a logical antithesis (or vice
versa) and the intellect resolves the incongruity into a
new synthesis.
The tendency to focus exclusively on intellectual pro
cesses, or abstract situations representing mental configu
rations, may cause a theorist to lose sight of the comic
objects which act as external stimuli of these thought pro
cesses. Piddington calls this tendency the "psychologist's
85
fallacy." Conversely, there is a philosopher's fallacy
of seeing the ludicrous everywhere in the universe, nature,
human nature, one's fellow men, but ignoring those psychic
processes which constitute the comic sense. There are as
85
"Very many writers on the subject of laughter, espe
cially the exponents of 'intellectualist' theories, have
failed to recognize the distinction between [the ludicrous
and laughter], and have as a result fallen into the
'psychologist's fallacy' of confusing the thought's object
with the thought itself." (Psychology of Laughter, p. 87)
364
many fallacies as there are approaches, "fallacy" in this
sense meaning narrowness and exclusiveness of view.
Philosophers of the comic need some of the flexibility
which Bergson preached— without practicing to any marked
extent— if their theories are to be adaptable to the myriad
varieties of laughter and literary humor. (Most theories
seem adaptable to certain forms of the comic, but not to
others, as Bergson's Essay is adaptable to Moliere but not
to Shakespeare.) Although most philosophers of humor tend
to claim universal validity for their own unique solution,
some writers have shown more awareness than others of the
relativity and limited perspective of all humor theories.
One such moderate thinker is J. Y. T. Greig, who introduces
his own theory of love-behavior, with some misgivings about
the search for a comic-philosopher's stone:
Nearly all comic theorists are comic monists. They do
not agree among themselves what the formula for laughter
should be, but with one accord they turn away from
pluralism in this branch of aesthetics at least, being
altogether persuaded that laughter must have one cause
and one cause only, unfortunately, no single formula for
laughter has yet stood the test of prolonged criticism,
and it seems hardly likely that a hypothesis so fantastic
in appearance as the one I have offered, will fare any
better. (psychology, pp. 70-71)
Another writer who reacts against the endless multipli-r
cation and divergence of humor theories is Merrel D. Clubb,
365
who confronts the problem with "A Plea for an Eclectic
86
Theory of Humor." Rigidity of thought is certainly inap
propriate in a comic theorist; as Clubb says, "nothing is
more ridiculous than a narrow, exclusive, Procrustean
theory of humor" (p. 342). Clubb rejects the psychological
fallacy of explaining the comic exclusively in terms of in
dividual psychic responses. A broader and profounder
approach is required, in his opinion:
The important contribution which an eclectic theory of
humor could make to aesthetic theory in general would
come from a demonstration of the fact that by any full
view humorous laughter is so closely bound up with the
most elemental types of physiological response that the
whole activity must be a structural part of human nature,
and hence that far more is involved in it than environ
mentally conditioned reflexes, important as these are.
(p. 346)
Clubb believes that no absolute theory of humor— which is
a profoundly human quality— is possible, "since all values
in the aesthetic life, from a truly eclectic point of view,
are about half objective and half subjective ..."
(p. 351). using a term from Einsteinian physics, he dis
cusses the possibility of an eclectic Feldtheorie, or
grouping of ideas, which will include all relevant data. He
86
University of California Chronicle. XXXIV (1932),
340-356.
366
also calls for "a more systematic study of humorous genres."
and follows Croce in suggesting a philosophical inquiry into
the basic position of humor in the aesthetic spectrum:
. . . the more inclusive problem of the relation between
humorous art and serious art, between the beautiful and
the funny, as the two major divisions of the field of
aesthetic perception, is one of the most fundamental
questions in the theory of humor. (p. 355)
The plea for eclecticism in humor-theory is naturally linked
to aesthetics, concerned as that is with the study of con
crete, individual expression, and subtle variations of
artistic effect which cannot readily be subsumed under gen
eral concepts, clubb's paper, however, turns out to be a
plea for a new philosophy of the arts, comprising humor.
Eclecticism by itself cannot provide a valid theory of
humor, as it lacks conciseness and definition. One may be
eclectic in one's application of theories to literature,
however, as the forms of literary humor are too diverse to
"be comprehended by monistic theories.
James Feibleman has attempted an intellectually compre
hensive aesthetic of comedy, in his book in praise of
Comedy; A Study in Its Theory and practice (New York,
87
1962), Feibleman asserts that there is only one kind of
87
All page references are based on this edition.
367
comedy, variations being in degree not kind. He offers the
following general definition: "Comedy . . . consists in the
indirect affirmation of the ideal logical order by means of
the derogation of the limited orders of actuality" (p. 178).
In other words, the comic spirit is essentially rational,
normative, and evolutionary. Like Bergson or Santayana,
Feibleman finds comedy in basic human incongruity; comic
technique involves transposition of values from the finite
human norm, either upwards to the "ideal logical order," or
downwards to "animal nature." The central incongruity is
that between the chance order of actuality (Santayana, on
the other hand, saw chance as a quickening principle of
comedy and of life itself) and a higher logical order, which
is never attainable, but always an object of evolutionary
effort. "The failure of things as they are to approximate
to things as they ought to be is here involved in the object
of comedy" (p. 23).
Feibleman summarizes trends in comic practice and
theory from ritual, lost epic (Homer's Margites). Plato, and
Aristotle to modern "psychologism," consistently supporting
the objective view against subjectivism. This review serves
as a prelude to his own intellectualist theory, and in the
process of adapting or discarding the principal theories,
he offers some valuable critical assessments. He is en
lightening on the relation of comedy to tragedy; the latter
is an outgrowth of traditional mythic themes, illustrating
"the inevitability of value" in human life; the former,
which deals with contemporary life, "is concerned to show
the inevitability of logic" (p. 28). (Translated into sub
jective terms, this means that tragedy appeals more to feel
ing, comedy to thinking.) An initial contrast in comedy,
then, lies between the actuality of contemporary life and
an ideal logic which looks to an improved future. Histori
cally (according to Feibleman), comedy was a revolutionary
art-form, upsetting old values and gods. But Feibleman in
sists that the comic impulse is not anarchic, as it destroys
a limited and decadent order in the interests of a new, more
liberal order. "Comedy," he argues, "points to what
actually happens, as Aristotle said, in the interests of
what may happen" (p. 29). Comedy is associated with social
realism and skepticism, but its logical implications save it
from being intrinsically low. According to Feibleman,
"Comedy breathes best in a free air and at great intellec
tual levels" (p. 36). Feibleman's praise of comedy (like
Meredith's in this respect) involves an aesthetic philosophy
with social (not to say political) overtones.
369
The revolutionary function of comedy, then, is to
challenge repressive authority with weapons of ridicule.
In accordance with this view, the comedian tends to be an
outsider, who has no vested interest in the establishment,
as this position of detachment gives him more liberty to
criticize. "Events appear more amusing to the 'outs' than
they do to the 'ins,' and comedy is ever on the side of the
minority party" (p. 68). Yet the comic is not merely de
structive and aggressive; it opposes the old order with
values which are invisible to many, but represent a higher
ideal of logic and morality: . . men cannot be great
humorists unless there is something worthy which their
humour is defending" (p. 70).
Even Plato, who branded poetry as "lies" and banned it
from his ideal republic, recognized a positive force for
good in comedy, showing that it serves a higher moral order
by implying contrasts between ridiculous deformity (e.g.,
hypocrisy), and ideal conduct or truth. Plato pointed out
that comic ridicule seizes on the "vain conceit," stripping
off pretentious masks of virtue. "Impotence masquerading as
fate" (in Feibleman's phrase, p. 75) is a favorite target
of satiric comedy from The Frogs of Aristophanes to its
milder and more sympathetic form in Tristram Shandy.
370
feibleman regards Plato's theory of comedy as "objective and
independent" and intellectual in its concern with "logical
contradictions" in character. But, as he points out, Plato
is less interested in the objective nature of comedy than in
its psychological effects. The emotions it arouses tend to
be those of "terrific fear, then of release, and finally of
laughter at the needlessness of the fear" (p. 77). Alter
natively, "envy and admiration" may give way to realization
of "vain conceit," followed by laughter at one's own
impr e s s ionabi1ity.
Feibleman's own view of comedy, however, is Aristote
lian rather than Platonist, simply because Aristotle keeps
the balance better between subjective and objective
approaches to the comic.
Aristotle's understanding of the psychological effects
of comedy is not the modern one. While modern critics
tend to identify the effect of comedy (as laughter) with
comedy itself, Aristotle shows in various passages that
he must have implicitly understood the realistic distinc
tion between the logical nature of comedy and its psycho
logical effects. (p. 79)
This distinction between logical causes and psychological
effects is crucial to Feibleman's theory, which is an
attempt to correct what he considers the imbalance in
modern theoretical trends which are heavily weighted toward
subjectivism. Aristotle's objective comments in the poetics
371
can be set alongside his subjective theory of catharsis ,
"found almost intact" in the Tractatus. Feibleman notes
that "purgation of the emotions through pleasure and
laughter"— which he calls a "hedonistic" response— "may be
only one of the psychological effects of comedy" (see pp.
83-84). The cathartic theory is certainly limited to af
fective responses and says nothing of mental involvement.
Once more Feibleman protests against exclusive preoccupation
with subjective responses, which reduces comedy to the level
88
of a laughter-mechanism and neglects its objective status.
However, he considers the Tractatus (4th to 2d cent. B.C.)
not guilty of this chronic imbalance, and places it "among
the last of the realistic theories of comedy" (p. 85).
Ever since then, more and more theorists have been delving
into psychological processes and losing sight of the broad
aesthetic daylight in which the Greeks viewed comedy.
Feibleman, moreover, does not believe that the answer to
88
"For the Greeks, laughter was the psychological
effect of comedy. For the subjectively oriented modern,
laughter is not the effect of comedy but is constitutive of
comedy itself. Laughter for the modern investigator _i£ com
edy; and so he seeks for an analysis of comedy in the phys-
iologico-psychological mechanism. Of this approach, the
anonymous author of the Tractatus was not guilty." (pp. 84-
85)
372
laughter contains the answer to comedy. Laughter springs
from "ebullient emotions which . . . lie waiting at the
surface of human reactions," while comedy, in addition to
laughter, arouses "more subtle, protracted, and far more
profound" responses, which have been consistently neglect
ed by theorists.
Feibleman proceeds to apply the criterion of objectiv
ity to theories of the comic and humor from Quintilian to
89
Robert Graves. Some of the results may be rapidly noted.
Quintilian stressed that "the laughable is found in things
and words.1 1 Feibleman regards this as a statement of
the absolute objectivity of the comic— "an objective
affair which is stubborn and irreducible and which the human
apprehension plays no part in creating" (p. 90). Hobbes's
i •
view, on the other hand, is regarded as absolute subjecti
vism, equating laughter shortsightedly with the whole mean
ing of comedy (see p. 96).
Feibleman then deals with objective and subjective,
normative and idealistic forms of rationalism in comic
theory and with a notable case of anti-rationalism.
89
See Graves, Mrs. Fisher, or the Future of Humour
(London, 1928).
373
According to the normative rationalism of Gottsched, comedy
was a "'faculty for clear analysis, which could perceive
and condemn anything irrational and exaggerated in the be-
90
haviour of man'" (pp. 99-100). Laughter is caused by
"that which seems absurd to our understanding"; the comic
is "the mental comparison of some eccentricity with a norm"
(same). Gottsched thought that comedy was designed to sup
port the "status quo ante," "to preserve the rigidity of the
existing order" (p. 101). Although comedy could operate
from such norms, Feibleman considers this a narrow view.
Comedy cannot be limited to merely local and temporary
issues; moreover, its principle is change. Ideally, "comedy
. . . criticizes all reigning orders in the light of the
possibility of greater order" (p. 101). J. E. Schlegel's
aesthetic intellectualism seems closer to Feibleman's own
views:
Schlegel thought that "comedy must necessarily present
an idealized version of reality and could never approxi
mate too closely to life." Comedy should pursue the
ideal of things and events as they ought to be, for "the
perception of order, the recognition of the relation of
one thing to another, is an invariable source of enjoy
ment. " (pp. 103-104)
90
Quoting Betsy Aikin-Sneath, Comedy in Germany in
the First Half of the Eighteenth Century (Oxford, 1936),
p. 31.
374
J. E. Schlegel's emphasis on the aesthetic quality and
civilizing effect of comedy may apply in Everett's sense of
comic focus on form rather than substance, creating light
ness and airiness not found in real life, in any case,
Schlegel's concept of modified mimesis mingled with inven-
i
ition contrasts with the traditional Aristotelian idea of
comedy as a mimetic picture of everyday low life, and with
the second half of Feibleman's own definition, concerning
"the derogation of the limited orders of actuality."
Kant's theory receives scant credit from Feibleman.
"It is not only subjective but self-conscious." He cannot
accept Kant's inverse logic of humorous character;
The subjective and random elements of humour appear
to be at odds with the rational elements, a conflict
which Kant attempts to resolve by making the principles
"rational in the case of such a mental temperament" as
is able to put itself at will into the frame of mind
which produces humour. (p. 106)
Feibleman concludes that Kant's subjectivism is a failure,
because there is still the upside-down view of things. "im
plying a correct view of things ..."(p. 106). Schopen
hauer, for his part, is severely censured for "defending a
variety of primitivism” (p. Ill). Feibleman argues that the
"triumph of percept over concept" need not produce this
regressive reaction in which one gleefully abandons faith
375
in man's conceptual powers; it might be more logical to
set about establishing "broader and more adequate concep
tions in the future" (p. 111). Schopenhauer's view is
stigmatized as anti-rationalism which crows with laughter
"at every temporary defeat of reason" (p. Ill). However,
Feibleman regards Schopenhauer's self-indulgent subjecti
vism as partly atoned for by his "Platonic and largely
realistic doctrine of the will" (p. 112); comedy, despite
its backslidings into sensual relaxation, affirms the "will
to live," which Feibleman interprets (dubiously) as the
desire for a better future in which errors have been cor
rected by laughter. Schopenhauer's view of comedy as in
citement to optimism is also enlisted in the cause of "the
ideal logical order" of the future.
Turning to the English romantics, Feibleman regards
Hazlitt as a literary impressionist rather than as a
consistent philosopher. Hazlitt's opening statement of
human incongruity, however, is taken to be "objective and
valid" (p. 113). Feibleman seems to have read this state
ment in his own intellectualist terms as a contrast between
"actuality" and "the ideal logical order." But then, a
few pages later, he is disappointed to find that Hazlitt
"falls back upon the old subjectivist incongruity theory"
376
(p. 113). While Hazlitt is an erratic philosopher, Meredith
is an inadequate one. He certainly regards the comic as
objective and intellectual, but his understanding is "too
narrow and limited," reducing comedy to a plaything of
"good" society. "It is all urbane and settled," but not
very profound or revolutionary (p. 117). The objectivity
and intellectuality of Meredithian comedy are delicate and
superficial; they do not challenge "the self-assurance of
the established order of society” (p. 117).
Feibleman's radically logical-objectivist standpoint
appears very plainly in his attitude to a nominally objec
tive theorist, C. C. Everett, who (as noted above, pp. 342-
343) relates comedy to reason and logic, tragedy to feeling
and value. Everett's view of comedy as an objective world
of surfaces is approved by Feibleman, but does not go far
enough for the latter. Feibleman rather patronizingly
remarks that comedy is so obviously rational that most
critics can't help catching a glimpse of its true nature:
The inability to stray from the truth about comedy is
due entirely to the rigorous logical nature of comedy
itself, which is the most intellectual training that
the common uneducated person ever receives. For comedy
is the only intellectual pursuit appealing to all alike,
irrespective of the wide variety of intellectual failings
and attainments. (pp. 120-121)
Feibleman boldly, but somewhat enigmatically, speculates
377
that the comic may have absolute objective existence in
nature independent of human perception. ("it is always
conceivable that comedy exists in nature and is apprehended
and appreciated by humans and other forms of living orga
nism"— p. 124.) If "showing teeth" represents a prehistoric
prototype of the smile (as Ludovici suggests) then dogs
may have a sense of humor consisting of an instinctive re
sponse to the comic in nature— Bergson1s categorical nega
tive notwithstanding. The connection of this kind of comic
sense with the ideal logical order, however, remains
problematic.
Feibleman praises Bergson's "instinctive feeling for
the logical rather than the psychological," and agrees
with his rationalist view that "any upsetting of the logical
order is an event which constitutes an object of comedy"
(p. 128). Bergson's observation that any degradation from
the moral to physical side of a person is comical, is con
sidered correct but too narrow, as "any reference downward
91
in the hierarchy of value is funny" (p. 128). Feibleman
91
It should be noted, however, that Bergson's idea of
comic transposition would include other forms of "reference
downward. "
378
92
dismisses Benedetto Croce's definition of the comic (which
Croce claims to be inclusive of all others) as another
example of subjective "relief-theory" (p. 130).
According to the relief theory, comedy is psychological
. . . Psychic forces (whatever these may be) which were
pent up are now released and the result is laughter.
(p. 130)
Feibleman reserves his strongest objections, however,
for Freud's psychologism. Freud had called Don Quixote
"purely a comic figure," but "a figure who possesses no
93
humour," meaning by this, I think, that the knight of La
Mancha is objectively comic in his appearance, actions, and
ideals, but has no subjective sense of humor, taking his
own ridiculous escapades in all seriousness as glorious
deeds of knight errantry. Feibleman regards Don Quixote's
personal humorlessness as completely irrelevant (although
it might be said to add an important comic dimension to his
character, when considered objectively).
92
"The comic has been defined as the displeasure aris
ing from the perception of a deformity immediately followed
by a greater pleasure arising from the relaxation of our
psychical forces, which were strained in anticipation of a
perception whose importance was foreseen." (See Aesthetic,
trans. Ainslie, pp. 148-151)
93
Wit and its Relation to the Unconscious, p. 377,
n. 1.
379
The fact that Don Quixote is unable to enjoy his own
predicament as comic [Feibleman protests] has nothing to
do with the case. For we are interested not in what
Don Quixote may or may not think but with an objective
situation . . . (pp. 155-156)
Feibleman's notion of "an objective situation" here seems
too superficial. In comedy one is interested in what the
characters think; or, if not, comedy ceases to be an intel
lectual entertainment and becomes a puppet-show, a world of
surfaces without deeper meaning. If one is to enjoy the
Cervantic humor of Tristram shandy, for example, one must
be interested in the curious "trains of thought" that set
the hobby-horse riders going at their game of cross
purposes. What the characters think in comedy is a matter
of dramatic motivation expressed in words, gestures, and
actions, which must combine to give the character an objec
tive moral outline. Comic theorists from Maggi to Bergson
have seen "deformed ratiocination" or "curvature of soul"
as objectively transparent forms of faulty thinking which
94
constitute the ridiculous in a character. if comedy is to
94
As Bergson says, rigidity of movement is an outward
expression of automatism of mind, and "there is a natural
relationship . - . between . . . the mind crystallising in
certain grooves, and the body losing its elasticity through
the influence of certain defects." (Laughter, p. 97)
380
be an intellectual training, as Feibleman suggests it is,
surely it requires objective insight into the thoughts and
motivations of the characters. Perhaps Feibleman's example
is ill-chosen. His main objection seems to be to the kind
of irrelevant "psychoanalyzing" which isolates characters
from the aesthetic structure to which they belong. He
continues:
We are concerned solely with the objective situation
and not with the psychological responses of the charac
ters involved. Modern psychologism has laid its dead
hand over all modern thinking, so that it appears to
be almost impossible to regard with a detached view
anything that happens in the world. (p. 156)
A degree of detachment is generally considered, by psychol
ogists and philosophers alike, to be necessary to apprecia
tion of the comic, but this detachment means suspension of
one's own sympathetic emotional responses, not a total lack
of interest in the thoughts and feelings of the characters.
The spectator's interest in these feelings is critical and
intellectual, not emotional, but, outside of pantomime, it
is an important factor. How else could comedy affirm "the
ideal logical order" but through moral perception?
Feibleman's intellectual partisanship seems to have been
responsible for this curious blind-spot in his argument.
Feibleman finds a religious reading of comedy that
381
parallels his own logical reading, in Dudley Zuver's
Salvation by Laughter (New York, 1933). Zuver finds
disparity in the contrast between an ideal spiritual order
and "the limited orders of actuality."
My thesis . . . is that there exists a space, and it
does not much matter whether you call it a gulf or a
gap, between the two worlds, both of which man inhabits
[i.e., matter and spirit]. . . . The ideal fails of
embodiment, yet the real cannot be permitted a final or
decisive word. In our intercourse with our environment
we listen to two voices which are discordant and seldom
speak in unison. . . . Mercy is the flexible connective
between the ideal and the real; it is a proper manifesta
tion of the comic spirit. God, too, has a sense of
humour . . . (Zuver, pp. 33, 35)
This theory, although theological in inspiration, has af
finities with the romantic metaphysics of Richter and Hegel.
It also has marked affinities with Feibleman's theory, but
Feibleman cannot accept it in this form, as it takes its
stand on faith, not logic.
judging Zuver's religious theory of humor insufficient
ly rationalistic, Feibleman next examines another kind of
transcendentalist approach, this time secular, pagan, and
based on classical mythology. This theory is proposed by
Robert Graves, and Feibleman approves its general "realis
tic" and logical orientation:
"... humour [writes Graves] is the faculty of seeing
apparently incongruous elements as part of a scheme for
382
supra-logical necessity. Humour is not of the gods
who have . . . only the most rudimentary sense of the
ridiculous, but of the Fates and of this Necessity,
who is, according to the Greek theologian at least, above
all the Gods."95
Feibleman criticizes Graves's use of the term "faculty,"
which suggests subjectivism, but would accept his definition
if the phrase "faculty of seeing" were changed to "sight
itself of," thus stressing the objective existence of humor.
Certainly Graves seems to mean that humor is an objective
essence which partakes of the universal cosmic order of
things. Feibleman approves Graves's view of humor "as a
form of the endorsement of logic" (p. 166).
Feibleman rounds off this series of critical examina
tions by noting that "the psychological aspect of humour is
. . . [simply] a matter of laughter," and concluding:
But certainly there is something which occasions the
laughter, something in the nature of a generalized
comical situation; and this must be logical in its
nature. (p. 167)
The objectivist emphasis of this statement, obvious as it
seems, was necessitated by his exasperation with the
"psychologist's fallacy" (as piddington called it). An
aesthetic of comedy must regard the comic as having
95
Mrs. Fisher, or the Future of Humour, p. 55, quoted
in Feibleman, p. 166.
383
objective content which can be shaped by art into logical
structures. Feibleman resists the trend to psychologism,
because that movement makes logico-aesthetic evaluation of
the comic impossible. Freud's work is as irrelevant to
Feibleman, as Feibleman's would be to Freud.
Feibleman's thesis and credo are summed up in the
statement: "Comedy, then, consists in the indirect affirma
tion of the ideal logical order by means of the derogation
of the limited orders of actuality." This may be achieved
by two methods:
(1) by means of direct ridicule of the categories of
actuality (such as are found in current customs and in
stitutions) , or it may be achieved (2) by confusing the
categories of actuality as an indication of their ulti
mate unimportance and as a warning against taking them
too seriously. (pp. 178-179)
The second method is that employed by Sterne. By confusing
"the categories of actuality" in the "systems" of Walter
Shandy, and those systems in turn with the "ruling passions'*
of uncle Toby and Dr. Slop and with the obtuseness of Mrs.
Shandy, Sterne derogates limited opinions while.elevating
96
the life of sentiments or logic of the heart. "The first
96
"Sterne more than the writers of the 'comic epics1
was the one who in the eighteenth century attacked in can
did fashion the customs and institutions of the day. There
is nothing about Sterne's books, and especially Tristram
384
method [Feibleman continues] is that of ridicule. . . . it
overestimates that which it intends to lower in estimation"
(p. 179). (This would be the method of high burlesque or
mock-heroic used in Fielding's Jonathan Wild or pope's
"Rape of the Lock.") The other mode of derogation,
Feibleman notes,
is exactly the reverse: to underestimate that which it
intends to raise in estimation. . . . The second method
is not that of ridicule but of confusion. (pp. 179-180)
(This would be the method of satiric irony used in Swift's
Argument Against Abolishing Christianity.) Feibleman notes
that both kinds of comedy operate from a mimetic basis of
realistic life, and that comedy in general illustrates
"the principle . . . that chance begets order" (p. 180).
Comedy, dealing ostensibly in actuality, must represent
the passing moment; its content is contemporary life.
Shandy, which appears to be exactly what it ought to be,
nothing that a serious adherent of custom, a conventional
ist, could approve. . . . Sterne's disorder is not acciden
tal . . . He was a fully conscious, albeit not the greatest,
votary of Whirl, the vortex of humour which clears the air
for new customs and institutions and the building up of new
traditions by the simple method of making a ludicrous hash
of the old." (Feibleman, p. 66) it certainly seems incon
gruous to associate Sterne with "an ideal logical order,"
although his daily reading of Locke and the Bible attest to
his interest in ideas of order.
385
According to Feibleman, what comedy represents is that which
it wishes to dergoate by exposure, its real criterion is
the invisible, ideal opposite of this ridiculous or confused
actuality:
Comedy epitomizes the height of the times, the Zeitgeist.
Hanging upon the vivid immediacy of actuality, it touches
the unique particularity embodied in the passing forms
of the moment. A criticism of the contradictions involved
in actuality, it must inevitably be concerned with the
ephemeral of actuals. Since its standpoint is always the
logical order, it deals critically with the fashions of
specific places— because they are not ubiquitous, and
with those of specific times— because they are not
eternal. (p. 182)
This paradoxical definition of comedy reminds one of Freud's
theory of dream-opposites. The "ideal logical order" may
be regarded as the dream-opposite of the limited order of
comic failures, "vain conceits," and distortions.
The humorous or ironic methods of underestimation and
overestimation, which Feibleman has considered characteris
tic of comic derogation, result in "the unexpected some
thing" and"the unexpected nothing," respectively (pp. 180-
181). The techniques of understatement and exaggeration,
explained in terms of Feibleman's theory, unite to make
comedy an "antidote to error" and "restorer of proportions"
(p. 181). Comedy criticizes customs and institutions, and
is revolutionary with varying degrees of commitment to the
386
present.
Feibleman proceeds to draw a distinction between
"romantic" and "classical" kinds of comedy, which derogate
historical and universal actuality respectively:
Romantic comedy [he says] deals with that which was actual
but is now remote; classical comedy deals with that which
is always true and therefore perennially actual. (p. 183)
Adopting this comparative perspective, one may view comedy
either as an indirect satire on the old order of things—
like Cervantes' ridicule of medieval chivalry in Don Quixote
or Sterne's mockery of scholastic philosophy in Tristram
Shandy— or as a more direct satire on the human condition.
Feibleman admits that the two kinds are usually mixed, it
is not easy to think of examples of strict classical comedy
in English. Whereas Dryden singled out Ben jonson's The
Silent Woman as an example of neoclassic unity of action,
Bartholomew Fair has a stronger flavor of universal comedy
97
in the varied low mimetic mode. As defined here, the
97
Ray L. Heffner, jr. disagrees with Dryden's compari
son of The Silent woman with classically "correct" French
drama. According to Heffner's thesis, Jonson does not ob
serve the classical unities of time, place, and action in
any of his comedies, but achieves thematic unity by organiz
ing highly diversified actions and images around a central
comic character or conceit. Thus the central "humor" of
The Silent Woman is Morose's hatred of noise, while that of
387
classical form "tends toward an absolutistic logical
view," and is uncompromising and unsympathetic toward
failure:
In Classical comedy |Feibleman asserts], the ideal of the
rigorous logical order of values is unqualifiedly demand
ed by the criticism of actuality. . . . This uncompromis
ing demand is the criterion of what is classical. It
manifests a severity of outlook which marks particularly
great comedy, and tends to be of permanent worth.
(p. 183)
This is a far cry indeed from the spirit of free play— the
dreamland "Utopia of gallantry, where pleasure is duty,
and the manners perfect freedom"— to be found in "artificial
comedy." But do people, in fact, go to the theatre or read
comic literature for lessons in morality and logic? This
seems to be asking too much of the public, and asking the
wrong thing of comecy. At least it would require an audi
ence of philosophers.
Feibleman reiterates his case against psychologism and
Bartholomew Fair is Troubleall's obsession with warrants.
Like T. S. Eliot, who speaks of Jonson's "unity of inspira
tion, " Heffner regards "interplay of realistic satire and
fantastic caricature" as the basis of Jonsonian comedy.
See Ray L. Heffner, jr., "Unifying Symbols in the
Comedy of Ben jonson," in English Stage Comedy, ed. w. K.
Wimsatt, jr., English Institute Essays. 1954 (New York,
1955), pp. 74-97.
against the reduction of the meaning of comedy to mere
laughter. "We laugh," he argues, "because we have appre
hended something external which is funny: the comic elements
in a situation" (p. 188). Even the mood of comic laughter
(normally considered emotive) he explains in terms of logi
cal analysis, intellectual fitness and emotional detachment:
as Feibleman points out, this light, alert mood, or comic
disposition, may easily be inhibited by depression or
fatigue, which attach one more or less helplessly to "the
historical order,1 1 making it difficult to rise above imme
diate actuality and achieve the ideal logical viewpoint.
But health and humorous detachment go together. As psychol
ogists like Ernst Kris have shown, freedom from anxiety and
the pressure of everyday cares and necessities is a precon
dition of the humorous state of mind. Feibleman makes the
jsame point from a different angle, stressing the need for
undistracted logical contemplation. For Feibleman, too,
comedy is a kind of escape, certainly not escape (with
Schopenhauer) from "that strict, untiring, troublesome
governess, the reason," nor an escape (with Lamb) into an
intellectually irresponsible dreamland, but an escape from
the disorder of contemporary life into an ideal supramundane
389
98
order. comedy is intellectual, logical, negative,
critical of limitations. Where tragedy endorses, comedy
ridicules life (see p. 199) . It is also revolutionary,
dealing with "the termini of things and events: their
formal limitations, as opposed to tragedy which is occupied
with their positive stuff or content" (p. 200). According
to Feibleman, comedy stresses limitations in order to sweep
away all the deadwood of imperfection which encumbers human
society:
Comedy [he says] leads to dissatisfaction and the over
throw of all reigning theories and practices in favour
of those less limited. It thus works against current
customs and institutions; hence its inherently revolu
tionary nature. Actuality may contain value, so comedy
seems to argue, but it is capable of containing more of
value; and it is necessary to dissolve those things and
events which have some value in order to produce others
which have a greater amount. (p. 200)
Feibleman points out, as Hegel did, that comedy thrives in
periods of social change or upheaval (p. 201). Traditional
ly, comedy is a mimetic art which ridicules the actual order
98
"Laughter is the result of the sudden recognition of
the wide difference between what is and what ought to be.
. . . The defects of actuality are unbearable to the feeling
subject, and so an escape into the logical order is demand
ed. This escape consists in the recognition of the limita
tions of actuality, of the ridiculous and ludicrous aspect
of existence." (p. 191)
390
of things and persons through mime, comedy is naturally
revolutionary although it can also be conservative.
. . . comedy . . . is essential to change; it can on
occasion render service to the forces of reaction by
ridiculing the novel aspects of anything new and valuable,
yet is indispensable to progress. Comedy . . . was pres
ent when men first learned to think and feel and do. it
is present also today, and has been inherited in a
straight line through history; inherited not through
learning as knowledge but through being as organization,
(pp. 269-270)
Comedy always tends to be realistic, handling "the tradi
tional and ever-present irritations of the finite order of
being," while indirectly affirming "the ideal logical
order."
To conclude the present discussion of "objective"
theories, I turn now from the rational idealism of
Feibleman's Praise of Comedy to a book which purports to be
a "strictly philosophical" analysis of the subject. This is
Marie Collins Swabey's Comic Laughter: A Philosophical
99
Essay (New Haven and London, 1961), which offers a con
cisely reasoned application of the logical-objective
approach, in her Preface, Miss swabey takes care to con
trast the basic logical assumptions, which provide the
framework of her study, with divergent assumptions based on
99
All page references are based on this edition.
391
biology, sociology, and psychology, asserting that rational
principles underlie (and are implied by) comic incongruity.
She explains:
Our treatment, being philosophical, differs strikingly
from the biological view of laughter as a release of
suppressed energy, a reversion to infantilism, or as an
expression of basic organic drives. Similarly, it stands
in contrast to the sociological view of laughter as a
means of social control to punish non-conformists. Nor
does it resemble the psychological accounts which find
in merriment an outlet for frustration, aggression,
liberation of the libido or the unconscious mind. What
is really important, in our opinion, is that in the
laughter of comic insight we achieve a logical moment
of truth; while metaphysically, through some darting
thought, we detect an incongruence as cancelled by an
underlying congruence. (p. v)
Thus, in the universe of logic, rationality ("truth") acts
as a norm, which throws irrationality into comic relief,
while any departure from this norm evokes an almost Platonic
idea of "a higher logical order" (the metaphysical side of
Miss Swabey's definition suggests this partial, but close,
parallel with Feibleman's theory). The comic sense affords,
Miss Swabey thinks, an insight into permanent values that
facilitates comfortable adjustment to one's environment.
She insists on the existence of an objective comic stimulus
to which the human organism responds. This view allows, and
even demands, objective value-judgments of the
392
comic.Her normative philosophical approach is deliber
ately opposed to the exclusively psycho-physiological
approach.
Basically, Miss Swabey's view of the comic amounts to
an incongruity theory, in which a shock to reason is
followed by intellection and recognition of the rational
principle involved, pleasure arising from the reaffirmation
of reason, which in turn restores a sense of harmony in
things. Two sources of comic incongruity are distinguished:
(1) deviation from, or collision of, accepted codes or
conventions; (2) awareness of "an infringement in the con
tent of our thought of the basic inclusive logic ..."
(p. 18). Deviation may take the form (for example) of an
accidental "gaucherie" or slip of the tongue; or of a de
liberate insertion of irrelevant or nonsensical terms into
language, rhyme, or discourse. Miss Swabey illustrates from
the nonsense rhymes of Ogden Nash and Edward Lear, but the
technique of verbal deviation may be found in more extended
l°°"If we are right, the perception of the comic, be
sides involving emotional and psychological responses, re
quires logical and metaphysical comprehension, a normative
intellectual insight which grasps what is worthy of laugh
ter, what in a state of affairs is laughable and not merely
what makes us as organic creatures laugh." (p. 13)
393
form in Sterne's digressions (at least at the surface-level
of Tristram's narration), transposition of chapters, blank
and marbled pages, etc., all calculated to upset normal
narrative expectations.
Returning to an examination of the comic in "the wider
sense" of the term (prior to a comparative analysis of its
subspecies), Miss Swabey offers the following generic def
inition: "... the presence of an incongruity, contradic
tion, or absurdity that is humanly relevant without being
oppressively grave or momentous" (p. 28). In her view,
"comic perception is rooted in intellectual insight"; it
requires a mental straightening-out of apparent contradic
tions. It is primarily a cognitive response to objective
facts or statements:
. . . relish of the ludicrous is more than an imaginative,
affective attitude of a subject in response to a repre
sentation. Its determining ground is logical and objec
tive, only secondarily involving taste and feeling.
(p. 29)
While the comic and humor may either be found in objective
existence or created in language, wit and satire are essen
tially matters of expression and communication, requiring
three persons for interpretation. The comic is intellec
tually more limited than wit, which requires simultaneous
mental acuity, condensation, and skillful expression.
394
Appreciation o£ the comic requires less emotional expendi
ture than humor. The genial emotion of humor and the
aggressive emotion of satire are both stronger than the
moderate rational pleasure of the comic. Miss Swabey sug
gests that the comic range extends beyond man "to impersonal
situation, mere movements, or to an independent phrase"
(p. 32).
After these general observations, Miss Swabey proceeds
to a consideration of the comic in its specific sense, find
ing it to be characterized by worldly wisdom, "rough
realism," and unillusioned "savoir faire." Social confor
mity and the effects of convention upon individual eccen
tricity are common themes for comic treatment, stock char
acters, usually vexatious, make frequent appearances. Two
prevalent views of comic intentions exist side by side. The
first sees it as impartial free intelligence concerned with
truth and common sense; the second, which identifies it
with group drives for solidarity and survival, sees it as
stricter and more partial in its judgments (see pp. 33-37).
The comic involves an easier, less emotional form of cor
rective than satire, but it is dryer and less sympathetic
than humor, it tends to rob its objects of dignity, where
as humor wraps their failings in sympathy. Humor tends to
395
enrich one's understanding of the lowly and deprived members
of society, while comedy, which exposes the defects of all
classes, represents a democratic, levelling spirit (see
pp. 42-43).
Miss Swabey notes that Kant denies cognitive effects
to music and jesting, which he classes together as humbler
aesthetic play-forms, lacking the cultural fertilizing power
of great art. it seems odd that an aesthetic philosopher
should assign such low value to music, often considered (as
by Pater and Joyce) the highest type of all the arts; like
the comic, however, music elicits bodily responses. Miss
Swabey considers that Kant makes a double error in denying
“that comic laughter expresses intellectual satisfaction,"
and in confusing a sense of physical relaxation or health
with "disappointed expectation" (see pp. 106-107). The
comic, she maintains, is not an intellectual anti-climax,
but a perception of logical error, which pleases by its
implicit reference to a rational norm. Comic effects may
also be produced by simultaneous “assertion of opposites,"
a logical absurdity which is compared to Hegel's "unity
of opposites" (see p. 113). of course, this situation
calls for selection of one of the contradictory ideas,
396
and exclusion of the other, thus involving a reaffirmation
of logic. The comic deploys a pretended irrationalism which
focuses attention on standards of reason through the chal
lenge of incongruity. Miss Swabey argues that comic appre
ciation of incongruity is "mere feigning,” and concludes:
Thus indirectly comic insight authenticates itself, as
it were, by appealing to rational principles as the
criteria to render judgment upon its effort to infringe
them. (p. 115)
Even comic irrationality and topsy-turvydom require an
internally consistent structure; the comic pleasure in
fantasies (such as those of Lewis Carroll) is keenest when
the inverse logic of character and situation is most strict
ly observed. As Miss Swabey says, the nursery-rhyme world,
"while incongruous with the world of fact, retains internal
congruity with itself" (p. 122). She declares, however,
that inversion of values, unredeemed by a suggestion of
rational norms, is destructive of the comic spirit, "which
depends on glimpses of objective truth, genuine worth,
integrity of soul, and concord in social relations" (p.154).
For this reason, she cannot accept Schopenhauer's
identification of the comic with the overthrow of concepts
397
"by an inscrutable reality"^^ (p. 166) . Contradiction is
comical, not because it dissolves the claims of reason, but
because it reveals deeper layers of rationality. Both com
edy and tragedy are based on contradictions, which the
former resolves (often by good luck, thus affirming the
principle, as Feibleman suggested, that "chance begets
order"), while the latter does not. But the difference goes
deeper; "whereas the comic primarily confronts simply logi
cal contradictions, the tragic confronts a moral predica
ment" (p. 182).
Miss Swabey wishes to emancipate theory of the comic
from its primitive and aggressive origins, so that it may
be regarded in the timeless, disinterested light of logic.
In rejecting or setting aside the Hobbesian theory of
aggressive superiority as a barbaric or uncivilized form of
the comic, she makes an important general point, which has
considerable bearing on rationalist and aesthetic approaches
to the subject:
. . . the origin is not the essence . . . since the soil
or matrix from which something emerged— astronomy from
101"Where the rationalist finds in comic incongruity
awareness of the deceptiveness of conflicting appearances
and the triumph of non-contradiction, Schopenhauer finds in
it the defeat of reason and the victory of nature's uncon
scious Will." (p. 166)
398
astrology, chemistry from alchemy, or appreciation of
the ludicrous perhaps from teasing— must not be mistaken
for its distinctive nature, just as the temporal order
of its emergence must not be confused with its order of
logical dependence. (p. 212)
This statement represents a sane criticism of the extremer
forms of anthropological, physiological, genetic, or
psychological approach to the comic. These sciences have
made important contributions in showing the lines along
which the comic and its associated genres have developed.
An understanding of these complex forms of experience and
expression demands depth-study and knowledge of origins.
But the raucous laugh of savage man, echoing down the cor
ridors of history, cannot explain the subtle gradations of
102
the comic sense brought into play by modern literature.
If origin were indeed essence, as some anthropologists and
myth-critics suppose, the term "evolution" itself would be
a cipher and cultural progress a hollow sham. This is not
to deny that traces of these origins linger in modern forms
of the comic, sometimes coalescing as undercurrents or
An anonymous critic, writing on "Laughter" in The
Edinburgh Review. CCXV (April 1912), 383-404, traces the
evolutionary and genetic gradations of pleasure and laugh
ter from physical actions to intellectual ideas, stressing
progressive detachment from original causes, which are still
unconsciously shadowed forth in the bodily reactions of
laughter.
399
"tendencies" concealed from superficial view. But to found
a theory of the comic on origins or history alone, or on a
science of neural responses, would preclude all logical and
aesthetic judgment, which must maintain a privileged illu
sion of freedom from the historical order and a contact,
however tenuous, with absolute values.
Miss Swabey wishes to cast the comic loose from all
projected ties with primitivism or irrationalism, she re
jects as meaningless all suggestions that the comic is a
passive mechanism, insisting on its objectivity and the in
tellectual activity needed to apprehend it. She is not in
terested in what she regards as the anarchic flux of psychic
responses; her concern is not with the unconscious, but with
103
the comic principle of rational will. The comic, to her,
is essentially a daylight activity of the mind, a rallying
call to reason.
103
"It hardly needs to be added, as against the irra
tionalism of Freud, that in our view the comic in all its
forms offers a rewarding challenge to our mental acumen,
awakening our intellect from somnolence, and correcting our
faults of logic. Far from expressing the wish to escape the
strictures of critical reflection, to return to infancy and
the lawless limbo of the unconscious, appreciation of the
ludicrous betrays a tendency to check the topsy-turviness of
uncritical perception against the norms of pure reason."
(p. 217)
400
The comic, then, as Miss swabey argues, is a free
activity, shaped by its own rules and not by necessity:
"For [she says] much as a game creates a mock domain based
upon a set of conventions demanding conformity, so does
comedy" (p. 222). The "multiple codes" of life itself are
reminiscent of play-conventions, and when these codes
clash the result is comedy. This play-atmosphere is con
centrated in the comic illusion which requires a certain
distance from the pressures of actual life, in comedy, life
is a game; the comic constitutes an aesthetic illusion rath
er than a mimetic presentation of life. It creates a sense
of pleasure in forms rather than content, the deep personal
perspectives of life being overlaid by a smooth, flat socio-
aesthetic surface. Comic distance gives an illusory sense
of immunity from, or superiority to, the trials of life,
which favors the flexible operation of critical intelli-
104
gence. Yet a profound sense of human values underlies
104
"Aesthetic judgments deal with forms of sensibility,
and as such are transcendental and disinterested. Thus ap
preciation of the comic or the beautiful requires one to be
detached. above the battle so to speak, rather than wholly
of it, or engaged in the struggle . . . Besides this detach
ment from the immediate fulfillment of organic desires, per
ceptions of the comic and the beautiful are characterized by
a kind of illusionism. an indifference as to whether
their objects exist in the actual, historical world, a
the comic spirit, which is "torn between delight in the in
congruities confronting it everywhere and a sense of chal
lenge to resolve them" (pp. 240-241).
preoccupation instead with their 'aesthetic surface,' mold
or essence." (p. 229)
CHAPTER V
MODERN AESTHETIC AND MYTHIC APPROACHES TO
THE PROBLEM OF HUMOR
Aesthetic Approach
In the philosophical essays of James Feibleman and
Marie Swabey, logical analysis of the comic merges with the
aesthetic approach. While physiological, anthropological,
genetic, sociological, psychological, and philosophical
approaches add various dimensions to one's understanding of
the comic, the aesthetic line of inquiry would seem to be
that most closely relevant to the study of specifically
literary techniques of humor. By aesthetic inquiry, in this
context, I mean formal concern with literary structures,
placing special emphasis on the intrinsic qualities and
interrelationships, within that objective framework, of ele
ments and techniques in the cluster of sub-genres loosely
associated with the word "humor.1 1
Ralph Piddington argues that perception of the ludi
crous is not simply a matter of objective observation, as
403
Aristotle suggests, but also implies degrees of selection
and organization, which link it intrinsically with artistic
creation:
Comedy [he says] possesses a definite aesthetic value,
which depends upon the discovery of ludicrous situations
the proper synthesis of which constitutes the art of the
comic dramatist, the humorous artist, and the wit.
(Psychology of Laughter, p. 145)
The aesthetic valuation of comedy was a subject for unlimit
ed speculation among German philosophers of romanticism.
Sometimes the results were very exaggerated, as Eastman
shows in The Sense of Humor. The work of Hegel, for ex
ample, encouraged theoretical complexity by linking the
comic resolution of incongruities with his own system of
logical triads. The followers of Hegel and Jean Paul seem
to have let their metaphysical imaginations run riot with
the heady idea of humor, in their soaring speculations they
tend to lose sight of the coarser everyday aspects of humor,
but they do drop some useful hints on its relation to art
and beauty. Thus the Hegelian Weisse, applying a quasi-
mystical notion of opposites, defines the comic as "ugliness
elevated or the reconstitution of beauty out of her absolute
negation" (in Sense of Humor, pp. 172-173).
With the formulation of the confusing transcendental
concept of "romantic irony," German aesthetics approaches
404
a pinnacle of metaphysical remoteness. According to Alfred
E. Lussky's analysis of Schlegel's and Tieck's dicta on
the subject,1 romantic irony appears to be a matter of
the writer's relation to his work and to the reader, irony
constitutes a strategy for gaining aesthetic objectivity
in a work of art; by alternating seriousness and humor, the
artist hopes to destroy the limited poetic mood along with
the local and material aspects of his work, thus exchanging
romantic involvement for "freedom of spirit1 ' and mocking
2
detachment. According to Friedrich Schlegel's modification
of this concept, romantic irony signifies that objectivity
in a work of art, which is yet transfused by the artist's
immanence (as in Shakespeare) (p. 81). But the artist's
self-revelation must be indirect and set against a back
ground of perfect objectivity (see p. 108).
The popular conception of romantic irony, however,
shifts completely, with Goethe and Tieck, to that of subjec
tive literary devices whereby the writer intrudes ironical
^Tieck's Romantic irony: With Special Emphasis upon
the influence of Cervantes. Sterne, and Goethe (Chapel Hill,
N.C., 1932). All page references are based on this edition.
2
Views of Kummer; see Lussky, pp. 33-34.
comments into his work, or carries on a dialogue with the
reader, thus shattering the illusion of reality and plainly
asserting his personal control of the aesthetic fabrication.
Sterne's self-conscious narrator (who points out aspects of
structure and manipulates time and characters to comic
effect), and his ironical attitude toward the reader (whom
he alternately flatters and admonishes, and whom he treats
as dull or licentious) are examples of destruction of nar
rative objectivity in favor of aesthetic freedom. The
irony of Cervantes, Sterne, Goethe, and Tieck, however,
is not "romantic irony" in Schlegel's sense of "objective
immanence"; the writer demonstrates his spiritual detachment
from the work of art by allowing himself to be seen tamper
ing with its construction and now and then peering through
gaps directly at the reader. Thus the literary work becomes
merely a vehicle for the aesthetic communication of writer
and reader; through this self-conscious "tour de force" the
writer projects an image of his own mind which appeals to
other minds.
As Eastman notes, nineteenth-century aesthetic philos
ophers were much troubled by the problem of how a union of
negative and positive elements in humor can produce a high
er positive value (Sense of Humor, p. 217). According to
406
Lipps, humor abstracts sublimity from baseness; in the con
flict of reality and idea, Solger finds "restfulness" in the
pervasive presence of idea; Bohtz believes that the negative
component gives body to the affirmative ideal; carriere
finds it cheering that negation is transitory, while the
positive ideal is "enduring and real"; Lotze regards the
combination of failure and success in wit as a sign of uni
versal harmony; while Bahnsen, viewing "tragic self-
contradiction" as the condition of life, sees humor as an
escape into impartial intellectual and aesthetic contempla-
3
tion of the impasse.
From the standpoint of idealistic metaphysics, humor
seems to rebound from the ridiculous to the sublime with
monotonous regularity. But not all nineteenth-century aes-
theticians held such views; some stressed the darker side
4
of laughter, in De l'Art et du Beau (1841) Lamennais
considers laughter "an image of evil," self-love and vindic
tive superiority (although smiles, on the contrary, some
times express tender consideration for others).
3
These philosophical notions are taken from Eastman,
pp. 217-218.
4
Reported in Greig, Psychology of Laughter and Comedy,
p. 253.
407
Lamennais' treatise might serve as an introduction
5
to Charles Baudelaire's still darker aesthetic view. For
Baudelaire, laughter is a spasm of pain or grimace of agony,
an expression of man's fallen state and league with the
g
devil. Laughter for him becomes an expression of romantic
agony and satanic pride. Baudelaire claims support for
this view in physiological versions of the superiority
theory (there seem to be affinities between Baudelaire's
thoughts and the Machiavellian self-interest of Hobbes's
"sudden glory"). His aesthetic notions lean on science.
It is well known that the kinds of laughter can be studied
in stark relief as abnormal conditions. Erasmus Darwin,
for example, describes a kind of laughter close to hysteria,
and Freud later shows the relation of the comic to mania,
5
See "On the Essence of Laughter," in The Mirror of
Art: Critical Studies, trans. Jonathan Mayne (New York,
1956). All references are based on this edition.
g
"Laughter and tears cannot make their appearance in
the paradise of delights. They are both equally the chil
dren of woe, and they came because the body of enfeebled man
lacked the strength to restrain them. From the point of
view of my Christian philosopher, the laugh on his lips is
a sign of just as great a misery as the tear in his eyes."
(Mirror, p. 135)
Mark Twain, in satanic mood, echoes Baudelaire: "Every
thing human is pathetic. The secret source of humor itself
is not joy but sorrow. There is no humor in heaven."
(Quoted in Eastman, Enjoyment of Laughter, p. 331)
408
humor to masochism, and wit to sadism. Baudelaire, for his
part, suggests a kinship between superiority-laughter and
7
manic delusions of grandeur. Having related laughter to
pride and madness, Baudelaire hastens to add loss of inno
cence, worldliness, and depravity to the list of its causes.
Diabolical laughter he sees as a product of advanced civili
zation, and he suggests it is derived from the intellectual
and metaphysical strain of proud man's probing the secrets
g
of the universe. Baudelaire's assertion that primitive man
7
"If you wished to demonstrate that the comic is one of
the clearest tokens of the Satanic in man, one of the numer
ous pips contained in the symbolic apple, it would be enough
to draw attention to the unanimous agreement of physiolo
gists of laughter on the primary ground of this monstrous
phenomenon. . . . Laughter, they say, comes from superiori
ty. . . . A Satanic idea, if ever there was one! And what
pride and delusion! For it is a notorious fact that all the
madmen in the asylums have an excessively overdeveloped idea
of their own superiority: I hardly know of any who suffer
from the madness of humility. Note, too, that laughter is
one of the most frequent and numerous expressions of mad
ness." (Mirror, pp. 137-138)
g
"Comparing mankind with man . . . we see that primi
tive nations . . . have no conception of caricature and
have no comedy . . . [this contradicts the anthropological
assumption that comedy is directly related to ritual and
precedes tragedy in the evolution of the arts] but as they
advance little by little in the direction of the cloudy
peaks of the intellect, or as they pore over the gloomy
braziers of metaphysics, the nations of the world begin to
laugh diabolically with the laughter of Melmoth ..."
(Mirror, p. 140)
409
is innocent of comedy seems to be based on Edenic
mythology— he had earlier called the comic "one of the
numerous pips contained in the symbolic apple" (see above,
n. 7)— and it may carry a buried allusion to Rousseau's
supposed doctrine of the "noble savage." in any case, it
contradicts the anthropological assumption that comedy
originates in ritual and precedes tragedy in the evolution
of dramatic art. Baudelaire's impression of comedy as a
decadent art, tallies with Rousseau's negative view, ex
pressed in his "Lettre k D'Alembert" (see above, p. 73),
where he maintains (against Moli&re) that comedy displays
the favorite vices of a society with no moral intention to
reform them.
Baudelaire's picture of laughter is consistently black.
Whereas Aristotle illustrates the nature of the ridiculous
by remarking that "the comic mask is ugly and distorted
but does not imply pain, " Baudelaire believes the reverse
and quotes the following passage from Charles r. Maturin's
Melmoth the Wanderer (a favorite Gothic romance which he
once intended to translate), to illustrate his opinion:
A mirth which is not riot gaiety is often the mask which
hides the convulsed and distorted features of agony—
and laughter, which never yet was the expression of
410
rapture, has often been the only intelligible language
of madness and misery. Ecstasy only smiles— despair
laughs . . .9
in Baudelaire's mind, the romantic agony of laughter is
apparently related to the romantic philosophy of humor. Man
in his fallen state is infinitely lower than the angels, yet
infinitely higher than the beasts. Contemplation of human
superiority to the animal carries with it self-knowledge of
man's fixed place in the "great chain of being,and of
his measureless inferiority to the divine. Standing at the
pinnacle of animal creation, man's foot is on the lowest
rung of the spiritual ladder, in this dizzying position
(looking up and looking down), a sudden glory and a sudden
despair flood man's consciousness at the same moment, and
he laughs. As Baudelaire says, "it is from the perpetual
collision of these two infinities that laughter is struck"
(p. 140). Laughter is "profoundly human," expressing
superiority and a limited, but rebellious, freedom.
Baudelaire sees the irreconcilable modes of bestial and
Q
Quoted from Melmoth, 2d ed. (1824), III, 302, in
Mirror. p. 139.
*°This hierarchical idea of existence is expounded by
Arthur O. Lovejoy in The Great Chain of Being: A Study of
the History of an Idea (Harvard, 1936 j New York, 1960).
411
divine touching and coming to a high point of tension in
human existence. The opposition of sense and intellect
stressed by Schlegel and Schopenhauer is here intensified
to the level of religious allegory. But instead of a con
trast of finite and infinite, as in Jean Paul Richter's
philosophy of humor, Baudelaire makes the source of laughter
the friction of two infinite emotions— the satanic ones of
pride and despair ("infinite grandeur and infinite misery").
Comic sense, Baudelaire insists, is rooted in an emo
tional consciousness of one's own being and is therefore
profoundly subjective. He states flatly: "The comic and
the capacity for laughter are situated in the laugher and by
no means in the object of his laughter" (p. 140), thus
laying the basis for a subjective aesthetic of the comic.
He ridicules the Hegelian notion of philosophic humor as
objectivity to self and distancing of emotion. In real
life, he argues, there are few who laugh at their own mis
fortunes; one would have to have "acquired by habit a power
of rapid self-division and thus of assisting as a disinter
ested spectator at the phenomena of his own ego" (p. 140)—
and this Baudelaire regards as a psychological absurdity.
He establishes the subjectivity of the comic on a basis of
emotional dualism— the tug of war between a sense of
412
superiority and of inferiority. In his view:
While it is a sign of superiority in relation to brute
creation (and under this heading I include the numerous
pariahs of the mind), laughter is a sign of inferiority
in relation to the wise, who, through the contemplative
innocence of their minds, approach a childlike state.H
(p. 140)
If laughter expresses lost innocence, despair, and the
burden of consciousness, as Baudelaire suggests, it may
still retain a potentially aesthetic quality, in this con
nection, one recalls his own wry comment on poetic symbol
ism: "J'ai cultive mon hyst&re." Satanic laughter, too,
is a proud cultivation of despair. Byron's Don Juan, for
instance, said "if I laugh at any mortal thing/ 'Tis that I
may not weep." The pride of self-domination (Hobbesian su
periority to one's self formerly or "superior adaptation”)
seems to be the source of such dark laughter.
For Baudelaire,pride even enters into the basic mimetic
If the "pariahs" mentioned in Baudelaire's parenthet
ical clause are to be considered as ideas in the mind of the
laugher, then he may be referring to hallucinations and
nightmares, thus paradoxically suggesting that, if the
laugher does not attain objectivity toward his ego, his con-;
scious self still rises superior to the unconscious, and
gains aesthetic control over the strange images that surface
from a lower level of existence. A simpler explanation of
the ambiguous phrase "pariahs of the mind," would be ration
al creatures (men) degraded to the level of brutes. The
contrast involved would then stress the characteristically
human quality of laughter.
413
process of art; thus he gives Aristotle 1 s theory of the
comic a satanic twist. Imitation implies conscious control
— in the comic, of man's own ideas and experiences; in the
grotesque, of the presentation of natural elements (see
p. 144). in the latter case, "laughter is still expression
of an idea of superiority— no longer now of man over man,
but of man over nature" (p. 144). Baudelaire regards the
natural grotesque as belonging to a freer aesthetic realm
than the human comic. He says:
. . . the laughter caused by the grotesque has about it
something profound, primitive and axiomatic, which is
much closer to the innocent life and to absolute joy than
is the laughter caused by the comic in man's behaviour.
(p. 144)
This statement leads to an antithetical distinction between
the grotesque as the "absolute comic" and the ordinary human
kind as the "significative comic." In the one the effect
is immediate, in the other analytic (see p. 144). Baude
laire illustrates the two kinds of comic by contrasting
Rabelais with Voltaire. In Rabelais' work, action and
thought are inseparably fused in symbolic fantasy and this
is absolute comic; in Voltaire's, on the other hand, a
satiric fable demands analysis and this is significative
comic. As Baudelaire explains:
414
Rabelais, who is the great French master of the grotesque,
preserves an element of utility and reason in the very
midst of his most prodigious fantasies. He is directly
symbolic. His comedy nearly always possesses the trans
parence of an allegory. . . . It must be admitted that
the enormous poetic good humour which is required for the
true grotesque is found but rarely among us in level and
continuous doses. . . . As for the essentially French
comedy in the Contes of Voltaire, its "raison d'etre"
is always based upon the idea of superiority; it is
entirely significative. (p. 146)
Pure "creation"— fantasy— predominates over "imitation" in
the grotesque, where laughter comes from a sense of natural
superiority; imitation (of men and manners) predominates
over creation (satiric slanting of the material) in the
significative comic, where laughter comes from a sense of
intellectual superiority.
Baudelaire prefers the more primitive natural superi
ority of the grotesque, which is most clearly expressed in
pantomime. Whereas the French excel in a biting wit-comedy
of intellectual superiority, the art of creating good-
humored laughter with simpleminded imitative gestures is a
specialty of the English. For Baudelaire, there is a unique
"frisson"— which finds its echo in laughter— in the con-
12
vergence of fantasy and reality. As Susanne Langer has
12
"... how can the pen rival the pantomime?" he
asks. "The pantomime is the refinement, the quintessence
of comedy; it is the pure comic element, purged and
415
shown, the artificial heightening of reality and accelera
tion of the pulse of action in pantomime crystallize in a
sense of "virtual life” and a concentration of comic
13
effects. This insight helps to explain Baudelaire's
aesthetic excitement. Langer bases her idea of "comic
rhythm" on a combination of anthropological radicalism and
the philosophy of symbolic forms. She brilliantly shows
how the form of comedy ("vital rhythm") is an aesthetic
counterpart of its feeling, tracing the development of both
from ritual origins. Her thesis is that comedy offers a
presentation of "virtual life" (i.e., life abstracted and
14
set to aesthetic tempo).
concentrated. Therefore, with the English actors' special
talent for hyperbole, all these monstrous buffooneries took
on a strangely thrilling reality." (p. 149)
13
See Susanne Langer's whole passage on the buffoon in
relation to comic rhythm, in Feeling and Form, pp. 342-344.
14
At one point her thesis is threatened by the view
that the clown of comedy is descended not from ritual cele
brations of life, but from the morally repressive Miracle
Plays of the Middle Ages, in which the buffoon is devil.
"Such a conception," she notes, "brings the spirit of life
and the father of all evil, which are usually poles apart,
very close together.1 1 But here she appeals to anthropology,
and takes her stand that the buffoon— in various folkloric
disguises— has been passed down from the older religions of
nature. The two lineages are not really separate, however.
The clown, as "Life-force, Will, or Brain," claims a natural
right to thrust his way into religious drama: "From the
416
Langer's depth approach to comedy— through the "philos
ophy of symbolic forms"— seems more fruitful than the uneasy
blend of romantic impressionism and formal classification
found in Baudelaire's essay. As Albert Cook says: "Comedy
is so rich and various that it is trivial to classify it
descriptively . . . The point is to probe its depths, not to
15
chop it into portions." under Aristotelian and neo
classical influence, aesthetic analysis of the comic has
traditionally involved descriptive classification; Benedetto
Croce, however, is an aesthetician who has grown shy of
normative generalizations, in an article entitled
16
"L'Umorismo" (1903), Croce denies that the "science of
Aesthetics" can any more supply definitions of "sublime,"
"tragic," "comic," "humorous," etc., than it can of "love,"
primitive exuberant religions that celebrate fertility and
growth he tends ever to come into the ascetic cults, and
tumble and juggle in all innocence before the Virgin."
(Feeling and Form, p. 343) Cf. Theodore Reik's essay,
"Saint irony," in The Secret Self: Psychoanalytic Experi
ences in Life and Literature (New York, 1952), for a Freud
ian interpretation of Anatole France's story of the clown
who juggled before the Altar.
15
The Dark Voyage and the Golden Mean (New York, 1966),
p. 31. Cf. reference, p. 292 above.
16
journal of Comparative Literature. I, No. 3 (July-
September 1903), 220-228.
"hate," "joy," "happiness," "despair," "enthusiasm," or any
of the other feelings and passions which man experiences and
which form the basis of art (p. 220). He cites Giordano
Bruno's definition of humor— "in tristitia hilaris, in
hilaritate tristis"— as an example of the kind of vague
definition in terms of diffused emotion which simply will
not suffice for a scientific aesthetic of genres. Defini
tions of "the humorous" inevitably remain vague and fluc
tuating, as the term indicates a loose grouping of psycho
logical phenomena. Their aim is not to penetrate to the
reality of things, but to reduce the variety of forms to
general prospects, and to serve as memory-aids in marshal
ling a multitude of details (pp. 226-227). Humor, he
argues, can never be defined exactly and philosophically,
although the widely-varying definitions put forward by
philosophers all help one to gain perspective on the sub
ject (p. 227). Croce regards pedagogical definitions as
too abstract for literary criticism, which must individ
ualize in its analysis of humor. Conclusions on the nature
of humor, Croce insists, must be related to particular
works if they are to have any concise meaning.
L'ufficio del critico letterario consiste nell'andar
oltre gueste osservazioni generiche. il critico
418
letterario deve individualizzare♦ per me non c'fe
l'umorismo, ma c'fe Sterne, Richter, Heine. (p. 227)
This emphasis on precise literary analysis and avoidance of
grandiose generalizations is salutary for problems of liter
ary humor, and suggests the subsequent practice of New
Critics. As a reaction to metaphysical speculation (such
as that of nineteenth-century German theorists) it is a step
in the direction of healthy pragmatism.
However, one is dissatisfied finally that a book with
the intriguing title, Aesthetic as Science of Expression and
17
General Linguistic (1909) should reject or evade the prob
lem of definition. Croce champions the uniqueness of in
dividual works of art which cannot be subsumed under general
discursive concepts. To illustrate the relativity and
ambivalence of "humor,1 1 Croce offers a sample of high-
sounding definitions; it may denote any of these, he says,
and what you will beside, according as it is wished to
get a view of the physiognomy of this or that poet,
of this or that poem, which, in its uniqueness, is its
own definition, and though momentary and circumscribed,
is alone adequate. (pp. 90-91)
The idea of poem as organic structure ("heterocosm"), ex
pressing itself alone and irreducible to logical discourse,
17
Trans. Douglas Ainslie, rev. ed. (New York, 1953).
All page references are based on this edition.
419
is familiar today after the lessons of symbolism, imagism,
and new criticism. Croce applies the same idea to humor.
Yet, as long as one talks of "humor," one must have some
normative frame of reference in mind, however diversified
its scope. After all, one can attempt a definition of the
general term "poem" used in Croce's comparison.
In order to test the validity of previous theories,
Croce offers a synthetic definition of the comic, which,
he says, includes all the main theoretical points from
Plato and Aristotle to Hobbes, Kant, and Richter (inciden
tally importing the physiology of Spencer and Lipps).
The comic [he says] has been defined as the displeasure
arising from the perception of a deformity immediately
followed by a greater pleasure arising from the relaxation
of our psychical forces, strained in expectation of a
perception looked upon as important. (p. 91; see above,
p. 378, n. 92)
Croce rejects this omnibus definition, however, as
"applicable not only to the comic, but to every spiritual
process" (p. 92). it is vitiated by the use of quantitative
terms of unascertainable limitation; it could be made mean
ingful only by application to a particular comic context.
Croce shares Jean Paul's joke that the fate of such defini
tions is "to be themselves comic and to produce in reality
the fact which they vainly try to fix logically" (p. 92).
420
"And/1 asks Croce, despairing of logical definitions in the
humorous branch of aesthetics,
who will ever logically determine the dividing line
between the comic and the non-comic, between laughter
and smiles, between smiling and gravity, or cut the
ever-varying continuum into which life melts into
clearly divided parts? (p. 92)
One shudders at a challenge so generally worded; the con
certed efforts of philosophy and psychology in all their
branches could scarcely attempt such an anatomy. Fortunate
ly, the present investigation of humor is directed toward
an understanding of literary techniques— which Croce admits
are analyzable— rather than toward a pure "science of
aesthetic."
Whereas Croce declines to offer any aesthetic principle
of humor in abstract terms, Horace M. Kallen offers a def
inition of the comic in aesthetic terms which closely
parallels the logical analyses of M^linand, Swabey, or
Feibleman. Where they see the comic process as a logical
sequence beginning with an illogical shock or incongruity,
which causes intellection followed by insight and a re
affirmation of "the ideal logical order" signalized by comic
pleasure, Kallen sees it, in a similarly tripartite move
ment, as an aesthetic sequence proceeding from disharmony
or malproportion ("inversion of the ordinary") through
421
disintegration, to a renewed sense of harmony and value.
Kallen*8 terms might be compared with those of the
Hegelians (especially of Weisse) discussed at the beginning
of this chapter, "in art [says Kallen], the comic might,
18
indeed, be called the beauty of disintegration.1 1 To give
this dictum some specific meaning in terms of literary
techniques, Kallen points out how jonsonian humor characters
are disorganized by an "internal disharmony of traits" or
moral malproportion. "The inner disharmony [he says] is
expressed outwardly in a thousand ways, and this outer ex
pression is comedy of character" (p. 148). According to
Kallen's analysis, the comic of character consists of
"infectious disharmony," in which the will to live, instead
of achieving harmonious expression, flows into egoistic or
perverted channels. "Disharmony" appears as an aesthetic
correlate of the logical term "incongruity"; to Kallen
(who also traces the effects of disharmony in verbal wit and
comic plot), disharmony is a negative actuality which
implies a positive ideal of harmony. Like Feibleman and
Miss Swabey, Kallen affirms that laughter indirectly
18
"The Aesthetic principle in comedy," American Journal
of Psychology. XXII, No. 2 (April 1911), 144.
422
"enhances or preserves the laugher's implicit values ..."
(p. 153). The disintegration involved is reconstitutive
of a higher level of aesthetic experience.
The outcome of the comic situation [Kallen concludes]
is an alterative outcome, not a destructive outcome.
The disintegration which is the object of laughter
leads to re-distribution, re-adjustment, harmony, not
to real human loss. (p. 153)
Edward Bullough's paper, "'Psychical Distance' as a
19
Factor in Art and an Aesthetic principle" (1912) has
proved particularly influential in the field of comic
theory. This is the definitive article on what has come
to be known as "comic distance,” the aesthetic detachment
and freedom from emotion required by comedy (cf. Bergson's
notion of emotional "anesthesia," above p. 348). Builough
notes that the problem of classifying kinds of comedy is a
difficulty common to "all distinctions of literary or artis
tic species, as opposed to artistic genera" (p. Ill).
Moreover, he adds that "the laughable" is an embarrassingly
broad category which extends far beyond the limits of the
comic, although all its varieties enter into comedy. These
different species of comedy and the laughable, however
19
British Journal of Psychology. V, No. 2 (June 1912),
87-118.
423
classifiable, "presuppose different degrees of Distance"
(p. Ill) . Yet they often seem to show no such distance
at all, as both laughing and weeping are direct expressions
of emotion.
Certainly the tendency to underdistance is more felt
in comedy even than in tragedy; most types of the former
presenting a non-distanced. practical and personal appeal,
which precisely implies that their enjoyment is generally
hedonic, not aesthetic. In its lower forms comedy conse
quently is a mere amusement and falls as little under the
heading of Art as pamphleteering would be considered as
"belles-lettres." . . . (p. Ill)
However much refined or sharpened, these types of comedy
retain some trace of simple amusement, often crude or
cruel; the degree of distance varies inversely with the
degree of subjective feeling. According to Bullough, the
primitive origins of the comic, along with the predilection
for generalized character-types, indicate the survival of an
affective attitude eliminated from the higher forms of art.
The tendency to affective involvement decreases with prog
ress toward high comedy, while "spiritualisation of the
comic elements" increases with distance. The playful con
trol of hatred in humorous ridicule is a triumph of aesthet
ic distance; a subtle balancing of contradictory emotions
(e.g., contempt and sympathy) frees the mind for aesthetic
424
contemplation.^
Katherine M. Wilson also regards sense of humor as
sublimating unpleasant experiences which are thus raised
from an emotional to an aesthetic level of response:
A sense of humor purges away bitterness by lifting our
hurtful experiences to a plane where they delight our
minds instead of harassing them; by it we can enjoy our
discomforts, especially in retrospect. In fact, this
makes the whole significance of humor, its origin and
"raison d'etre."2!
E. F. Carritt, for his part, compares humor to beauty as
antithetical aesthetic species (on the analogy of comedy and
tragedy); alternatively, if beauty corresponds to the
whole range of aesthetics, then humor is a subspecies.
The sense of beauty is found to be objective and expressed
in abstract terms, the sense of humor to be personal and
expressed in subjective terms. Carritt's first point is on
the side of psychological rather than philosophical
approaches; an aesthetic of humor is inevitably based on
"The supreme achievement of comedy is unquestionably
that 'distanced ridicule1 which we call humour. This self-
contradiction of smiling at what we love, displays, in the
light vein, that same perfect and subtle balance of the
'antinomy of Distance' which the truly tragic shows in the
serious mood.” (p. 112)
21
"The Sense of Humor, " Contemporary Review. CXXXI
(January-June 1927), 629.
425
subjective human standards: "The comedy of things is in our
22
attitude to them." In spite of its subjectivity, comic
experience is fundamentally aesthetic rather than moral or
emotional; as Carritt says, "what amuses us need not neces
sarily be either true or false, right or wrong, useful or
hurtful; all these categories are irrelevant" (p. 556).
While tragedy, Carritt argues, gives artistic form to
the pressures, distresses, and emotions of life, comedy is
not the expression of urgent feelings, but "only the elabo
ration of an experience already comic, already, that is to
say, reflective or aesthetic ..." (p. 556) . Carritt
notes that Hegel views comedy as the disintegration of
beauty, which reveals the inadequacy of sensuous forms to
express spiritual ideas. Comedy is seen as a breakdown of
romantic art which reveals the inconsistency of spiritual
with human values. In comedy reality triumphs over human
contradictions and cross-purposes. Beauty, for Hegel, ex
presses spiritual states, while disharmony is ugly; but
somehow "disharmony of form and content" can be transmuted
into art by comic genius, incidentally, Carritt points to
22
"A Theory of the Ludicrous. A Footnote to Croce's
Aesthetic," Hibbert Journal. XXI (October 1922-July 1923),
553.
426
the incongruity or disharmony of sex and soul as a favorite
comic theme "from Aristophanes to Sterne" (p. 562).
A rapid transition from the monumental theories of
Hegel to the riotous practice of the Keystone cops and
Charlie Chaplin is an intrinsic illustration of comic in
congruity not without salutary meaning for a theory of
humorous art. in The Seven Lively Arts (New York and
23
London, 1924), Gilbert Seldes contrasts the vigor of
genuine popular art with the effeteness of genteel substi
tutes. The art of slapstick, he says, is at once classical
and contemporary, preserving the old virtues of Aristophanic
and Rabelaisian comedy, without being derived or artificial
ly cultured. In praise of Keystone slapstick, Seldes
writes:
It is one of the few places where the genteel tradition
does not operate, where fantasy is liberated, where
imagination is still riotous and healthy, in its econ
omy and precision are two qualities of artistic presenta
tion; it uses still everything commonest and simplest and
nearest to hand; in terror of gentility, it has refrained
from using the broad farces of literature— Aristophanes
and Rabelais and Molifere— as material; it could become
happily sophisticated, without being cultured. (p. 24)
In other words, slapstick involves a truly aesthetic expe
rience— with the qualification that mind is no more involved
23
All page references are based on this edition.
427
than emotions. The form of response is certainly very dif
ferent from that of high comedy, being closer to pantomime:
instead of quiet, distanced contemplation of the absurdities
of life, there is direct confrontation of a series of exag
gerated and accelerated absurdities which provokes gales of
cathartic laughter. Nowhere is the Bergsonian comic prin
ciple of "mechanization of life" more dramatically at work
than in the art of slapstick. Seldes regards this as a
faultless art-form, and calls for a revolution in taste
24
toward appreciation of its popular aesthetic value.
The finely balanced incongruities of Charlie Chaplin's
art— wisdom in simplicity, strength in weakness, for
example— make a unique appeal to the comic sense. Seldes
also praises Chaplin's consummate union of social criti-
25
cism with aesthetic fantasy (which is almost a definition
24
Judging from some recent reviews of Keaton and
Keystone movies— such as those by Penelope Gilliatt in the
London Observer— this revolution may now have been achieved.
25
"It is another way for him to live apart from the
world by assuming that the world actually means what it
says, by taking every one of its conventional formulas, its
polite phrases and idioms, with dreadful seriousness. He
has created in Chariot a radical with an extraordinarily
logical mind." (Seven Lively Arts, p. 48)
428
{of comedy) :
He corresponds to our secret desires because he alone
has passed beyond our categories, at one bound placing
himself outside space and time. His escape from the
world is complete and extraordinarily rapid, and what
makes him more than a figure of romance is his immedaite
creation of another world. He has the vital energy, the
composing and functioning brain. This is what makes him
aesthetically interesting, what will make him for ever
a school not only of acting, but of the whole creative
process. (pp. 51-52)
Thus popular comic art, in the hands of a creative genius
like Chaplin, can generate aesthetic freedom as effectively
|as philosophic humor or high comedy. The difference which
most people sense immediately may be due to the problematic
relation between aesthetics and human values, in "high"
humor and comedy, the artist must comprehend a greater
range of experience, subsume a layer of deeper experience
beneath his surface effects, and overcome real disharmonies
through the harmonizing power of art. But doubtless the
iappreciation of comedy is tainted with social and cultural
i
hypocrisy, as Seldes suggests, which leads one to overlook
i
I 25
the aesthetic elements in "low" comedy.
L. C. Knights, like Croce, is critical of "profitless
26
Seldes* discussion of Chaplin may be compared with
Feibleman's analysis of the Marx Brothers' techniques in
in praise of comedy.
429
generalizations," which, he says, haunt the comic more than
27
any other form of literature. Knights takes "the break
ing-down of undesirable attitudes" to be a general effect of
comedy. But such a vague formula acquires value only
through application to specific details. For the literary
critic, "all the work remains to be done in each particular
case" (p. 115). Knights issues a scornful double warning
against Meredithian effusions on the one hand, and "a
28
priori" logical or psychological judgments on the other.
Apparently Knights resents and resists the application of
any supra-literary ideas to comedy. This new-critical
reverence for "the text itself" may help to preserve the
notion of literary criticism as a distinctive discipline,
which is important, but mere exposition of texts can be
narrow, superficial, and sterile. The fact of aesthetic
27
"Notes on Comedy," in Determinations: Critical
Essays, ed. F. R. Leavis (London, 1934), p. 114.
28
"No theory of comedy can explain the play Henry IV;
no theory of comedy will help us to read it more adequately.
Only a morbid pedantry would be blind to the function of
laughter in comedy, but concentration upon laughter leads
to a double error; the dilettante critic falls before the
hallucination of the comic Spirit, the more scientifically
minded persuade themselves that the jokes collected by
Bergson and Freud have something to do with the practice of
literary criticism." (p. 131)
430
distance does not make literature a thing apart from life
(as the Shakespearean Knights must know) and any genuine
contact with other areas of knowledge and ideas can be
fertilizing, if one's central commitment remains the work
29
of art in its detail and totality.
The pragmatic Knights stands in forlorn reaction on
the shores of English literature, rebuking a rising tide of
theories, in an article published the year after Knights's
notes, for example, Julius vexler advances a neo-
Aristotelian theory of comedy: catharsis of emotion through
laughter clears the air for aesthetic contemplation of
character and action.3^ This cathartic impulse may be
directed toward "riddance of excess and hardened whim1 1 such
as are found in "humour''-characters. The spectacle of
ridiculous behavior in rational beings is intolerable;
"disgust and sympathy are roused; they unite to make laugh
ter and purgation" (p. 293). in the enjoyment of "humours"
29
Jean Starobinski states the matter clearly: "C'est
la preuve ... que si loin qu'elle puisse s'^carter dans la
speculation, la reflexion critique surgit avec la litera
ture elle-meme et respire du meme souffle." "Les Directions
Nouvelles de la Recherche Critique," preuves. XV, No. 172
(June 1965), 32.
30"The Essence of comedy," Sewanee Review. XLIII,
No. 3 (July-September 1935), 292-310.
431
pleasure is balanced against pain. The action of comedy
leads toward the goal of pleasure, but is complicated
en route by the laughable mishaps which befall the charac
ters, each striving for the common goal after the promptings
of his own peculiar "humour."
A free action, fit for art and laughter, works with
pleasant aspects of native irresponsible eccentricities,
towards responsibility and freedom,— which are but higher
follies. (p. 298)
To Vexler, the rationale of comedy is less moral than aes
thetic. He regards humor as aesthetic style imposed on
chaotic impressions of actuality. The test of its success,
he says, is the pleasure it communicates.
By practice and definition, humour is a way of flowing,
a way of action, and not the flux itself. If humour
secures pleasure it differentiates itself from chaos;
if not it subsides therein and misleads to fatalistic
theories. (p. 299)
There is a kind of benign and tolerant resignation which
comes from treating conscious will as an illusion. This
attitude, which Vexler calls "fatalistic," is often thought
of as "philosophic humor," and, indeed, Schopenhauer and
31
Einstein (among others) have given it philosophic
31
"I do not believe we can have any freedom at all in
the philosophical sense, for we act not only under external
compulsion but also by inner necessity. Schopenhauer's
saying— "A man can surely do what he wills to do, but he
432
statement. But aesthetic of comedy implies that humor
itself is an expression of the artist's conscious will (in
the Kantian sense), which reshapes the materials of con
sciousness to produce pleasure out of pain.
Since aesthetic will conditions the nature of comedy,
Vexler cannot accept the "play-theory" of comic art, which
would make comedy, he says, "more foolish than the event
it is mocking at" (p. 301). The purpose of comedy is to
expose to sympathetic ridicule the mistaken ways in which
men pursue pleasure, and to produce pleasure in itself, not
by emotional indulgence, but by artistic control of emotions
or catharsis. Paradoxically, but logically, aesthetic
theories of "comic distance" are often linked to cathartic
theories of comic emotion.
Whereas Vexler sees the pleasure of comedy as a sense
of aesthetic mastery of disorder, Harold H. Watts sees it as
a mundane reinforcement of the sense of security and
cannot determine what he wills,"— impressed itself upon me
in youth and has always consoled me when I have witnessed
or suffered life's hardships. This conviction is a per
petual breeder of tolerance for it does not allow us to take
ourselves or others too seriously; it makes rather for a
sense of humor." Einstein, in Living Philosophies (New
York, 1931), pp. 3-4, quoted by Vexler, p. 299.
433
adjustment rather than as a transcendental aesthetic
32
experience. He combines two well-known features of
comedy— its contemporaneity and its commonsense rationality
— to formulate a distinctive theory. According to Watts,
comedy supplies "two immediate pleasures: 1) that of
recognition; and 2) that of applying a limited scale of
truth." These blend to form a single effect, which he
calls "sense of regain." This concept represents a version
of the 1 1 re lief-theory. " Familiar contemporary surroundings
and faces strengthen the sense of social adjustment and
normality; the belief that politics, love, and money are
important is confirmed by the everyday scale of comic values
which silences profounder, more disturbing thoughts. Comedy
is a retreat "from the precipices where one stands to talk
with the gods" (as in tragedy) to "a mediocre kind of
33
sanity" and safety. Thus comedy weights the balance in
favor of man's finite limitations as against his immortal
longings, of the familiar as against the unknown. When
32
"The Sense of Regain; A Theory of Comedy," Univer
sity of Kansas City Review (1940), extract in Lauter,
pp. 448-449.
33
1 1 [The comic writer] provides a mediocre kind of sani
ty in place of the destructive truth which tragedy and the
secret parts of our own nature contain." (p. 449)
434
contemplation returns from an unfocused infinite to the
limited sphere of human control, it brings with it reassur
ance, cheerful confidence, and reassertion of the will to
live in the here-and-now, for better or worse. Comedy is a
game one knows how to play with ease and mastery.
In The Dark Voyage and the Golden Mean: A Philosophy
of Comedy (Cambridge, Mass., 1949), Albert Cook adopts a
symbolic approach to comic complexity, rejecting the analyt
ic methods of Aristotle, Bergson, and Freud as superficial:
"The point [he says] is to probe its depths, not to chop it
into portions" (p. 31). His concern for deeper meanings
takes the form of approaching tragedy and comedy as con
trasting "symbolic attitudes"— the "dark voyage" of wonder
ful tragedy, and the "golden mean" of probable comedy.
Tragedy he sees as a fatal venturing into the unknown by
which man strengthens his soul; comedy (which brings a
"sense of regain" in place of the tragic sense of loss) as
exploitation of the familiar and readjustment of social
balance, controlled by standards of expediency instead of
ideals. "Tragedy's subjects are the wonderful, sin, and
death; comedy's the probable, politics, and sex" (p. 35).
Cook's categories of "wonderful" and "probable"
correspond roughly to comedy and tragedy, but in some
435
areas— such as "the wonderful as probable"— they overlap.
Within the domain of the wonderful, two parallel symbolic
systems are described in the Nietzschean terms of an
Apollonian-Dionysian dichotomy running through Greek culture
and dividing the nascent drama into rival modes of present-
34
ing experience. "Apollo is the wonderful-as-probable— god
of the glowing, probable day, of success, medicine, and
music ..." (p. 33). He is protector from evil, social
prophet, and harbinger of harmony and light. "Dionysus is
the god of wonderful failure, the dark instincts of cruel
spring ..." (p. 33). As leader of orgies, revels, and
rituals he is, at the same time, a god of comedy and a
leader of the self-destructive search or romantic quest for
the wonderful. "Dreaming Apollo and drunken Dionysus are
polar in the world of the wonderful" (p. 33). The world
of ordinary men, social relations, and contemporary life is
the world of the probable, in which rational and social
norms are sustained by comedy, and events tend to fall into
natural cyclic patterns. The usual symbol of the wonderful
is death (which finally isolates the individual), while that
of the probable is marriage (which brings whole social
34
See The Birth of Tragedy.
436
groups together on the stage). However, it is not the
outcome of the drama, but the concentration in it of
probable and wonderful events which determines whether it
be tragedy or comedy (see p. 32). cook appends a useful
table of comic and tragic antinomies, which illustrates
in detail recurring aspects of this symbolic contrast
'(see pp. 50-51).
Comparing the symbolic norms of the two modes of
drama, Cook finds that in comedy, events are presented not
in the absolute and eternal perspective of soul and fate
as in tragedy, but in terms of socio-genetic norms. The
unit in comedy is the family, part of the larger unit of
society.
Comedy [says Cook] represents ideas not as eternal
truths but as the probable clothing of a specific time !
of life. . . . What is normal for one generation is
I abnormal for another. (p. 36)
Comedy occurs, as A. W. von schlegel noted, when a character
| I
flouts the norms of his own generation by adopting the be- i
[ I
havior of another; an old man who acts like an amorous j
youth, or a young man who arrogates authority in excess of j
i
his years would be examples. There is also a "probable"
conflict between generations, as the natural cycles of j
regeneration bring a predictable victory of spring over j
437
35
winter, son over father, young over old. in this ritual
istic sense, life wins out over death in comedy, as youth
does over age. Schopenhauer sensed this when he discerned
the death-wish in tragedy, the will-to-live in comedy. Just
as tragedy usually ends with the death of the hero, comedy
usually ends with the defeat of repressive paternalistic
forces in society by young love, and the successful integra
tion of the life-force into society in the marriage of the
lovers. Where tragedy displays destructive assertion of
individual will, comedy shows an integrative assertion of
social will.
While Cook contrasts the symbolic attitudes of tragedy
and comedy, he also examines patterns of contrast inherent
in the structure of the separate modes. Whereas the extreme
ethics of tragedy produces tension between good and evil,
the adaptive ethics of comedy produces tension between con
formity and expulsion (pp. 38-41). The tragic hero's dark
quest for the wonderful contrasts with the golden mean of
contentment, while the clown's buffoonery contrasts with
"the norms he implies by violating them" (p. 39). The one
35
See also discussions of "the comic Oedipus situation"
in Jekels, Frye, and Grotjahn (see below, pp. 455-458).
tends to rise too high and the other to fall too low, but
both deviate from norms. The tragic hero seems excessive
in his aspiration ("vaulting ambition that o'erleaps it
self"), the comic figure in appetite and self-indulgence.
Tragic excess may lead to destruction, comic excess to
ridicule and expulsion from society, it must be remembered
that comedy and tragedy, for Cook, represent antithetical
attitudes. If the traditional attitude of tragedy consists
in admiration, pity, and terror, that of comedy lies in
ridicule and contempt. Thus an "abnormal individualist"—
e.g., "a drunkard, a satyr, an aristocrat, a saint, or an
artist"— could play the leading role in either mode, depend
ing on whether the treatment were sympathetic or contemptu
ous. (Even if a scene is serious, one can always adopt a
cynical attitude and "play it for laughs.")
Cook assumes that the laughter of comedy is conserva
tive (as befits the "probable" mode); laughter asserts the
superiority of the "golden mean" over abnormal behavior, and
of the social group over the individual. Far from "affirm
ing an ideal logical order" (as Feibleman suggests), Cook
notes that comedy mocks excessive reasoning as abnormal,
and affirms normal common sense. Reason in comedy often
appears as "the rationalization of egotistic selfishness";
439
moreover, "all intellectuals are abnormal in society, and
as such they are laughed out of the group in comedy ..."
(p. 40). Cook cites Thwackum and Square in Tom Jones.
Socrates in the Clouds, as examples; the same theme occurs
in Tristram Shandy, where Sterne sympathetically ridicules
ithe asocial intellectualism of Walter Shandy, and, more
contemptuously, that of Phutatorius, Kunastrokius, and the
Schoolmen. Comedy, Cook argues, is based on acceptance of
the probable social norms; "in comedy, everybody is happy in
his social station" (p. 40). As the abnormal individual
jtends to be expelled by laughter, so the social success
gains acceptance by releasing tension and provoking laughter
by deft use of witticisms.
! While tragedy follows rigid patterns of fate or myth, i
icomedy has always been known for license. This comic
license may be extended to the aesthetic framework of the !
I
comic drama or novel itself; there is a recurrent tendency
I
to self-parody in comedy, "which jauntily laughs at all artj
1 I
including itself" (p. 44). This tendency nowhere finds
more integral expression than in Tristram's self-conscious
narration, which had such a noticeable influence on the
440
36
romantic irony of Tieck and others. in stage comedy.
Cook notes, the basic convention is third-personal, with
actors intervening between spectators and characters; but
occasionally, "the actor reaches out of the frame of objec
tivity and addresses the audience second-personally ..."
(p. 44). This always causes laughter which affirms the
implicit norm of objectivity; in addition, the irregularity
itself soon becomes a predictable convention, just as the
intimate admonitions and intrusions in Tristram's narration
i
boon come to be expected.
Working from symbolist assumptions, Cook finds comedy
affirmative of the social norm; just as, working from intel-
lectualist assumptions, Feibleman finds it affirmative of
;"the ideal logical order." Naturally, Cook takes comedy to
I j
be conservative while Feibleman sees it as revolutionary.
Cook argues that the violation of aesthetic (stage) conven- j
I |
jtions reminds the audience that the action is artificial and
t :
the characters abnormal; that they are there to be exposed
in contrast to the norm. Alternatively, he adds, comedy may!
be used ritually for the vicarious experiencing and subse
quent purgation by laughter of antisocial tendencies; or,
i
36
See Lussky, above p. 404. i
again, simply as release from the pressures of social
conscience. Cook does not propose a social-corrective
theory of comedy; he points out that comedy is not entirely
programmatic and serious (as Shavians might suppose) but
involves entertainment and fantasy. Comedy represents a
safe outlet for antisocial tendencies, supporting the
social norm indirectly in its psychological effects. The
audience may laugh at and officially condemn their own vices
objectively presented, while secretly condoning and con
tinuing to practice them (p. 45). in other words, Cook
does not believe that comedy is reformative; it is simply
affirmative of the social sense. He agrees that there is
a satiric element in comedy, but regards its fundamental in
tention as "approval, not disapproval, of present society;
it is conservative, not liberal, however much the socialist
Feibleman would like it to be" (p. 49). In fact, Cook
regards comedy as radically anti-utopian, realistic rather
than idealistic, "it expels the intellectual and his
futuristic programs." He even insists that liberal
comedians like Shaw are not comical when they are being
"liberal" (p. 49). These two excellent critics, Feibleman
and Cook, obviously want to enlist the comic as a social
force under the opposing banners of their own assumptions.
442
For Cook, comedy and logic are twin forms of the probable,
united in the works of Lewis Carroll (p. 125); whereas,
for Feibleman the comic lies in the contrast of probable
logic (the finite order) and wonderful logic (the ideal
order).
37
For Susanne Langer the nature of comedy lies in a
unique balance (rather than contrast) of art and life.
While she makes use of the ritual and mythic approach to
expound the content and development of comedy, she is pri
marily concerned with aesthetic quality— the way the comic
form abstracts, patterns, and concentrates the feeling of
life. Comedy is a distillation of life in aesthetic
38
form. in this respect it retains marked affinities with
comic ritual and aesthetics, although the degree of direct
ness or distance varies enormously. The higher aesthetic
form of symbolic comedy vitalizes economically— the energy
and enthusiasm stimulated are conserved and go to deepen
one's awareness and enrich one's experience of life;
37
Feeling and Form (see above, p. 16 et passim).
38
Cf. Henry Miller: "Art teaches nothing, except the
significance of life. . . . Art is only a means to life, to
the life more abundant." From "Reflections on Writing," in
The Wisdom of the Heart (New York, 1960), p. 24.
443
whereas in primitive ritual the energy of concentrated life
was spilled in sensual orgies. Economy, as distinct from
inhibition or atrophy, is a principle of civilized life
which serves to channel the flow of "elan vital."
As Langer rightly insists, the value of literature,
and especially of comedy, lies not in moral lessons (as
the "social corrective" theory seems to hold) but in artis
tic form. This means the organization of moral and histori
cal elements, along with other raw materials from life,
into "a rhythmic single structure." The sense of life
which comedy refines from these raw materials consists,
first, in its pure form, of "sensation, awareness, and ex
pectation, " and, second, of their reflection in the familiar
outward situations and forms of social life, (incidentally,
the traditional narrative novel deals with the second form,
the "nouveau roman" with the first. Tristram is ineptly
concerned with the second, while his master, Sterne, is
skilfully engaged with the first.) Langer claims that "the
pure sense of life is the underlying feeling of comedy,"
conditioning its various forms and "developed in countless
different ways" (p. 327). Comic art presents life in
concrete situations, whereas discourse is always separated
from livingness by generality, in relation to life, one
444
might coin the term "comic proximity," to balance the aes
thetic term "comic distance." This immediate sense of felt
, life in comedy, says Langer, "dictates its rhythmically
structured unity, that is to say its organic form" (p. 331).
The different forms of tragedy and comedy reflect the felt
rhythms of "tragic action" (the image of Fate) and vitality
(the image of Fortune) respectively. In Langer's words:
Their basic structures are different; comedy is essen
tially contingent, episodic, and ethnic; it expresses
the continuous balance of sheer vitality that belongs
to society and is exemplified briefly in each individual;
tragedy is a fulfillment, and its form therefore is
close, final, and passional. (pp. 333-334)
According to Langer's aesthetic philosophy, each of the
various arts creates its own characteristic illusion which
concentrates some aspect of experience by translating it
into symbolic form. Thus the illusion of painting is
"virtual space" (space which constitutes non-representation-
al abstraction of a certain feeling of space); the illusion
of music is "virtual time" (a sense of freedom from histori
cal time); and the illusion of comedy is "virtual life"
(which is the synthesized and abstracted "sense of felt
life"). Thus the laughter of comedy expresses aesthetic
pleasure, not simple emotion. As Langer sees it:
in a good play the "laughs" are poetic elements, its
humor as well as its pathos belongs to the virtual life,
445
and the delight we take in it is delight in something
created for our perception, not a direct stimulus to our
own feelings. (pp. 341-342)
"Virtual life," says Langer, is not diffused, but "always
moving visibly into the future . . . intensified, speeded
up, exaggerated" (p. 344). in comedy the vital flow,
or "dlan vital" as Bergson calls it, is more clearly ex
pressed than in actual life, where it tends to become bogged
down under slow routine developments and repeated actions.
Comedy advances vital feeling by abstracting it from the
monotonous rhythm of everyday life, in doing so it creates
a mood of laughter in the audience, so that trifling events
seem funnier within the aesthetic framework of the play (see
Langer, pp. 344-345). Humor (in the narrower sense) Langer
regards as a problematical by-product of comedy, mingling
what appears to be emotion with the aesthetic response. The
distinction lies in the fact that emotion in literature
or the theatre is "symbolically presented." Humor in comedy
is a structural element and its effects are intensified by
its place in the total comic illusion. Langer shows that
rhythm has a lot to do with sustaining and intensifying
"aesthetic" humor— there must be no let-down between laughs;
laughter is provoked by the total humorous structure of the
play, not by isolated jokes (see p. 347). The humor of
446
comedy is appreciated in relation to the art-form and not to
actual life. Langer even explains the comic pleasure in
contemporaneity (which Harold Watts described as the sense
of "recognition") in terms of the art-work itself. As she
points out:
Political or topical allusions in a play amuse us
because they are used, not because they refer to something
intrinsically very comical. This device of playing with
things from actual life is so sure to bring laughs that
the average comic writer and improvising comedian overdoes
it to the point of artistic ruin . . . (p. 347)
The comic sense, in this case, is stirred by contrasts
between the incongruous realms of aesthetic and practical
values, between "virtual life" and "actual life," to the
detriment of the work itself.
True comedy does not present such indigestible frag
ments of actual life, but an abstracted and composed "image
of 'livingnesa"' The "illusion of life," says Langer,
should be complete in itself— a Gestalt— which represents
the triumph of art over its environment (p. 348). From the
aesthetic standpoint (which is the essential one for art)
it is not the subjective appeal of humor which matters, but
what it does objectively in the unified organism of the
play or novel. A variety of unrealistic devices are used
to sustain the aesthetic response and prevent relapse to
447
the self-interested standards of "actuality." coincidence,
stereotyped gesture, and accelerated rhythm are among the
techniques employed (see p. 348).
According to Langer, aesthetic contemplation of comedy
requires and invites a "light rhythm of thought.” In this
I
t
{atmosphere life is felt as an exhilarating game of chance
with the world, a game which heightens vitality, wit, and
will (see pp. 348-349). Emphasis rests on the light and
manageable side of life and "there is a general trivializa-
tion of the human battle" (p. 349). Life and the comic
principle go merrily on in spite of obstacles. While the
I
concentration of living rhythm gives comedy a strong
ritual element, this does not mean to say that modern
comedy should be treated as fable or parable of magic
|
origin. Symbolic meanings may adhere to some of the stock
characters and situations, but these are less important
[
jthan the way they are caught up and transfused with the
rhythm of life or comic feeling and adapted to the organic
form of the art work as a "single symbol" (p. 350).
Mvthic-Ritual Approaches
In the twentieth century, findings of cultural anthro
pology have been brought increasingly to bear on the theory
448
and problems of art. All cultural expression can be traced
back to a common matrix in the mythological consciousness,
which arises with the magical power of words to symbolize
and abstract ideas from nature. Ernst Cassirer has
remarked:
Myth, language and art begin as a concrete, undivided
unity, which is only gradually resolved into a triad
of independent modes of spiritual creativity. Conse
quently, the same mythic animation and hypostatization
which is bestowed upon the words of human speech is
originally accorded to images. to every kind of artistic
representation.39
As a leading disciple of Cassirer, Susanne Langer has shown
how closely the approach to comedy through ritual may be
linked with aesthetic analysis. Her method, focused as it
is on aesthetic problems, relates to the wider context of
40
"myth-criticism," which sets priority value on discovery
39
Language and Mvth. trans. Susanne K. Langer (New
York, 1946), p. 98.
40
Ren^ Wellek and Austin Warren discuss the meanings of
"Myth":
" 'Myth,1 a favorite term of modern criticism, points to,
hovers over, an important area of meaning, shared by reli
gion, folklore, anthropology, sociology, psychoanalysis, and
the fine arts, in some of its habitual oppositions, it is
contraposed to 'history,' or to 'science,' or to 'philos
ophy,' or to 'allegory' or to 'truth.' . . .
"Historically, myth follows and is correlative to
ritual; it is 'the spoken part of ritual; the story which
the ritual enacts.'"
From Theory of Literature (New York, 1956), p. 180.
i 449
and interpretation of literary symbols and patterns derived
from the archetypal unconscious, primitive religion, and
myth. Such varied works as sir j. g . Frazer's The Golden
Bough: A Study in Magic and Religion (London, 1911-15),
C. G. Jung's Psychology of the Unconscious: A Study of the
Transformations and Symbolisms of the Libido, trans B. M.
Hinkle (New York, 1916), Jessie L. Weston's From Ritual to
Romance (London, 1920), Sigmund Freud's The interpretation
of Dreams (1900), trans. A. A. Brill (New York, 1950) and
‘ i
i ;
Totem and Taboo: Resemblances between the Psychic Lives of
Savages and Neurotics (1913), trans. A. A. Brill (New York,
|
1927), and Ernst Cassirer's The Philosophy of Symbolic
Forms (Berlin, 1923-29), have all given impetus to mythic
: i
interpretations, which have been increasingly applied to !
! 41 !
characters and situations of comedy. There has been an
The authors' remarks are based on references to Lord
kaglan's The Hero: A Study in Tradition. Myth, and Drama
|(London, 1937) and Samuel H. Hooke's Myth and Ritual
I (Oxford, 1933).
41
W. K. Wimsatt, referring to Northrop Frye and others,
describes this interpretive use of myth as "a hugely ex
panded analogical mode which embraces with equal confidence
both tragic and comic and their origins in ritual death or
ritual resurrection, heroic quest and divine sacrifice, or
carnival misrule and the 'green world' of Robin Hood."
"The Criticism of Comedy," English Institute Essays (1954),
p. 12.
450
ambivalent exchange of influence between psychoanalysis and
literature in relation to mythic material, which has itself
been supplemented by the findings of cultural anthropology.
42
As jean starobinski points out, Freud relied heavily on
literature in his conceptualization of psychic states, a
fact which is reflected in the metaphorical terms of psycho
analysis: "narcissism," "masochism," "sadism," "Oedipus
complex," etc. if Freud plundered literature in the inter
ests of science, many literary critics have returned the
compliment by applying psycho-mythic approaches to litera
ture.
Freud himself admitted that his whole Oedipus theory
was prefigured in Diderot's Neveu de Rameau (see Staro
binski, p. 24); while Diderot, for his part, was an ardent
admirer of Sterne's sentimental humor. In this connection,
it is notable that Tristram Shandy opens with a mock-
Oedipal situation, in which the "hero" imagines his own
conception, and goes on to imply that the "dispersal of
animal spirits," due to his father's semi-impotence and his
mother's maladroitness, is the cause of his own unsettled,
"Psychanalyse et Critique Litt^raire," preuves. XVI,
NO. 181 (March 1966), 25.
impotent character ("character is Pate"), as reflected in
the skittish narration which follows. According to Ludwig
Jekels, Northrop Frye, and Martin Grotjahn (all following
Freud) the thematic roots of both tragedy and comedy lie in
conflict between father and son. In tragedy the son's
jealousy of the father, who possesses the woman they both
love, ends in his own self-destruction (Ernest Jones has
applied this key in The problem of Hamlet and the Oedipus
Complex, 1911); in comedy, the father rivals the son for
the love of a girl young enough to be his daughter, but
vigorous youth defeats impotent age and the conclusion is
fertile marriage, in tragedy the conflict is destructive
and shatters family relationships, but in comedy the cyclic
patterns of decline and regeneration— worked out within
the family unit— ensure that there will be no ultimate
defeat. Winter will give way to Spring, Age to Youth, and
Father to Son. Albert Cook gives the following account:
in the primitive fertility rituals, the old man tries
to slay the young, and fails; this rudimentary pattern
is reflected in the antiphonal debate for sexual posses
sion of the young man between the young woman and the
old near the end of Aristophanes' Ecclesiazusae. in the
eternal springing back to life in the Punch and Judy
show, in the debate of Alcuin's poem between young
Spring and old Winter as to whether the cuckoo shall
come and bring the flowers and the sun. The ideas of
the father versus the ideas of the son, the older
452
generation versus the younger generation, are at the
core of the family in comedy from Aristophanes to
Finnegan's Wake . . .^3
Mythico-magical fusion of human and natural character
izes primitive ritual and vegetation myth. In her chapter
44
on "Nature Ritual," Miss Weston shows how anthropomorphic
symbolism and tribal consciousness link the sexual virility
of the king (or father-figure) with the fertility of the
land. (This may be the source of the well-known psycho-
mythic equation whereby water=sex.) When the king becomes
impotent, he must be ritually slain and replaced by a
younger man, lest the earth dry up and fail to bear crops.
The celebrations of new-found potency and fertility, which
usher in a young king or spring rains, are marked by tribal
joy and relief, which readily develop comic overtones; at
the same time, such festivals coincide with the death and
subsequent deification of the old king, or with the passing
43
The Dark Voyage and the Golden Mean, p. 36. A good
example of a son who completely dominates his father might
be added: namely Anticleon, in Aristophanes' Wasps. who
keeps his father, philocleon, locked in his room to prevent
his going to court with his rowdy juror-friends, beats him,
lectures him, cajoles him, and takes on the task of re
educating him by letting him sit in judgment over the dog
and paying him in soup, and finally reduces him from waspish
activity to stingless docility.
44
See From Ritual to Romance. pp. 52-64.
453
of the old year. When killing was omitted from the ritual,
comic elements seem to have received compensatory stress,
until solemn nature-rituals degenerated into comic buffoon-
45
ery. (The development from ritual to comedy— as distinct
from romance— seems to involve a de-mythologizing and
46
secularizing trend toward the probable and realistic.)
It might not be too fanciful to draw a parallel between the
mock-slaying from which the young man revives, and the
bungled or parodic version of this which Tristram undergoes
(his brother dies in childhood), when his nose is broken at
the ritual moment of birth and when he suffers accidental
circumcision (nearly castration) from a falling window-sash
on the threshold of puberty. Tristram Shandy is, in the
true tradition of family comedy, a comedy of passing genera
tions (Sterne compounds this effect by a rapid shuttling of
the time-element). The ideas of the father are held up to
45
A similar trend toward the secular and comic takes
place in the Middle Ages with the development of holy
Miracle Plays into more or less ribald Moralities.
46
Northrop Frye argues that "the resolution of New Com
edy seems to be a realistic foreshortening of a death-and-
resurrection pattern, in which the struggle and rebirth of a
divine hero has shrunk into a marriage, the freeing of a
slave, and the triumph of a young man over an older one."
"The Argument of Comedy," English institute Essays (1948),
pp. 65-66.
454
htore or less sympathetic ridicule by the son, and relations
between members of the older generation are reflected in
47
Tristram's memory as a maze of ineffectual cross-purposes.
Family relationships furnish many of the central themes
in Greek drama, and in comedy the family or social units,
rather than individual fate, usually constitute the frame
work. Adopting a Freudian approach to family relationships,
Ludwig jekels analyzed several classical comedies and found
in them "a mechanism of inversion": "the feeling of guilt
which, in tragedy, rests upon the son, appears in comedy
48
displaced on the father; it is the father who is guilty.1 1
jekels' attitude to literature does not seem acceptable,
however, as he regards both comedy and tragedy as direct and
almost automatic products of psychoneurosis, not of art;
he naively presumes to take art as literal self-expression
in which the artist practices a personal and almost ego-
maniacal catharsis, impelled by "the imperative urge to
47
At the same time, the opinions of the older genera
tion comically revindicate their authority, by pushing
Tristram's "life” out of his own "autobiography," so that
he only manages to get himself born and breeched with the
greatest difficulty and maximum number of interruptions and
digressions.
48
"On the Psychology of the Comic," in Selected Papers,
trans. I. Jarosy (New York, 1952), p. 97.
455
effect the discharge of his repressed complexes . . . [by]
distributing his feeling of guilt among the many" (p. 102).
The "repressed complexes" which form the tragic or comic
theme are, in both cases, subsumed under the psycho-mythic
heading of "Oedipus situation," and according to Jekels, "it
is only a delayed swift turning-point which finally decides
us as to [the] genre1 1 (p. 103) . in comedy ("from classical
comedy to the contemporary bedroom farce") the roles of
father and son are reversed, and the father takes a
beating. Jekels detects "a wide range of aggression"—
scorn, derision, threat of castration, etc.— directed
"against the father" in comic plots (p. 103). As indicated
above, Jekels seems to regard literary art as an egomaniacal
act of self-exploitation. This opinion is confirmed by his
conclusion. Apparently regarding the comic plot as pure
psychodrama, he sees the victory of son over father as a
dissolution of the super-ego in the ego with resulting
release of fantasy and laughter, it seems of doubtful
relevance to the literary critic to be informed that "comedy
represents an aesthetic correlate of mania,” as the gap
between aesthetics and mania must (surely) be a wide one.
Ernst Kris, commenting on Jekels' "displacement of
guilt" theory of comedy, notes the relation between father
| 456
and fool, the latter still bearing symbols of lost authority
about him.
When we laugh at the fool, we never forget that in his
comic fancy dress, with bladder and cap, he still carries
crown and sceptre, symbols of k i n g s h i p .49
i
At the same time, Kris suggests that the freedom and license
of the fool are inherited from a "demonic predecessor."
Comedy could thus be seen in terms of evolutionary ego-
development, as the conquest of fear. Kris illustrates
this point etymologieslly (as Freud does in his essay on
l
j 50
"The 'Uncanny'" ). The French word "drole," the German
I
word "komisch," and even the English word "funny" can all
carry the connotation of "strange" or "uncanny." Kris
therefore regards the comic as an intermediate phenomenon
between the emotions of anger, surprise, or anxiety, and
\ j
I J
aesthetic distance, which implies complete control of
j
emotions. j
j !
j in "The Argument of Comedy," Northrop Frye adapts
jjekels' theory of "a comic Oedipus situation" to explication
i
49
"Ego Development and the Comic," international
Journal of Psychoanalysis. XIX, No. 1 (January 1938), 87.
(See also above, pp. 309-313.) j
5°ln On Creativity and the unconscious: papers on the
Psychology of Art. Literature. Love. Religion, ed. Benjamin j
Nelson (New York, 1958), pp. 122-161.___________ j
457
of literary themes. He traces the reversed Oedipus motif
in comic plots from the New Comedy of Menander, Plautus, and
51
Terence, through its disguised appearance in jonson,
Moliere, the English Restoration, and "French rococo," to
Ibsen's Ghosts and Little Evolf (same, pp. 58-60). All
comes out well for the youthful protagonists in the ritual
conclusion of marriage, dance, or feast, which brings with
it "a renewed sense of social integration" (see pp. 60-61),
the true theme of comedy, in Frye's opinion.
Martin Grotjahn picks up the theme of the "reversed
52
Oedipus situation" in Beyond Laughter. relating it to the
cyclic sequence of generations, a perennial theme in comedy.
He regards the figure of the clown as a vital link between
51
Frye argues: "New Comedy unfolds from what may be
described as a comic Oedipus situation. Its main theme is
the successful effort of a young man to outwit an opponent
and win the girl of his choice. The opponent is usually
the father (senex), and the psychological descent of the
heroine from the mother is also sometimes hinted at. . . .
Often the central Oedipus situation is thinly concealed by
surrogates or doubles of the main characters, as when the
heroine is discovered to be the hero's sister, and has
to be married off to his best friend." (pp. 58-59)
52
(New York, Toronto, and London, 1957). All page
references are based on this edition.
458
I :
| 53
comedy and tragedy, and connects it with the "senex." The
father in comedy, he explains, is not a tyrannical, authori
tarian figure against whom the son rebels, but a pathetic,
impotent old man, who retains only the symbols of a vanished
power,and envies the vigorous actuality in the son, who pro
gressively occupies the limelight, while his progenitor is
shuffled off into the shadows, "in the role of frustrated on
looker" (see pp. 260-261). Grotjahn interprets the drooping
scepter and deflated bauble, forlorn vestiges of authority,
I :
as symbols of impotent sexuality: "The clown," he argues,
"is the comic figure representing the impotent and ridiculed
father" (p. 261). As the son achieves manhood, the father
reverts to childhood— "the son's typical attitudes of child-i
hood longing are projected upon the father" (p. 260)— and
i !
roles are reversed as the son wins sexual freedom and the
54
father's powers decline. The combination of youthful
desires and old age, which A. W. von Schlegel singled out as|
i
i
I
53 J
Sterne seized on this fact when he chose Yorick— '
jester with life and death— for his "alter ego." This role j
allowed him to alternate laughter and tears, and to inter- j
twine comic and tragic elements in the curious compound he |
called shandean humor.
54
in Tristram shandy, paradoxically, the father's im
potence seems to descend as a curse upon the son.
459
ludicrous, Grotjahn regards as pathetic;
The clown is the comic figure representing the impotent
and ridiculed father. He also represents the sadness of
things and finally comes to stand for death in the person
of the tragic truly great clown. This is the point
where tragedy and comedy finally meet and symbolize human
life. (p. 261)
"'Alas, poor Yorick!'" sighs Hamlet; to his contemplative
mind, the great clown seems an almost sacrificial figure.
Lear, too, is one of those archetypal figures who tread the
edge of a precipice between tragedy and comedy. Impotent,
stripped of power by his daughters, and cast out into the
storm "a poor bare forked creature," the fit companion of
his madness is a fool. If pity and terror did not predomi
nate over the sense of folly, King Lear would be a comedy.
The trivialization of life, which Lear condenses in the
dizzy image of the samphire-gatherer clinging to the cliff
midway between earth and heaven, or which Hamlet expresses
with nausea—
How weary, stale, flat, and unprofitable
Seem to me all the uses of this world.
Fie on't! 0 fie! 'tis an unweeded garden,
That grows to seed; things rank and gross in nature
Possess it merely. . . . (I.ii.133-137)—
is an attitude which may be either tragic or comic. Tragic
trivialization seems to represent the despairing viewpoint
of age or impotence, while comic trivialization reflects
460
55
the infantile and regressive. These two aspects occasion
ally fuse, as in the pathetic comedy of Cervantes or
56
Sterne.
The great clown, who practices the art of tragi-comic
trivialization, also fills the role of ritual scapegoat
for the older generation, who are forced by ridicule to re
linquish authority along with declining sexual powers. This
rise and fall of generations is reflected in the relentless
calculus of comic ritual. The wheel of fate keeps turning
with the cycle of seasons; individual fate is transcended by
the life-force apotheosized in so many natural religions.
55
Cf. Alfred Winterstein: "A sense for what is small
and limited, despised and foolish is characteristic of
humor: the 'little world* which it so kindly describes
represents as it were the childish ego ...11 "Contribu
tions to the Problem of Humor," psychoanalytic Quarterly.
Ill (1934), 309-310. See above, pp. 298-299.
56
Sterne's sublimation of his own conflicts and
anxieties may be shadowed forth in the convention of dual
surrogates in Shandy. Yorick, as lean and haggard as his
horse (both mount and rider are visibly skeletal), is death
the jester, a trait of Tristram-Sterne1s fictional character
which is killed off with a black page. The young Tristram,
who bears the scars of injuries inflicted by neglect at the
crucial stages of conception, birth, and puberty, takes over
as controlling ego and, in his fictional fantasizing, gains
complete control over the older generation, who have sunk
out of sight and can only be revived as ideas— each trailing
a stream of associations— in the narrator's consciousness.
461
If the clown (or "butt") acts as a sacrificial figure, how
ever, he also acts as a figure of fun. In him, repressive
powers are disarmed by playful ridicule; his very existence
implies the rise of younger, hopeful generations, and his
winter ushers in their spring.
Northrop Frye (whose study of comic Oedipus themes has
been noted above, pp. 456-457) finds much playful treatment
of the painful in comedy (as Max Eastman does in jokes; see
above, pp. 235-236).
The element of play [he writes] is the barrier that
separates art from savagery, and playing at human sacri
fice seems to be an important theme of ironic comedy.
Even in laughter itself some kind of deliverance from
the unpleasant, even the horrible, seems to be very
important.57
Frye divides mythical elements in literary genres into a
four-part seasonal cycle. The "Mythos of Spring” fore
shadows Comedy; the "Mythos of Summer," Romance; the "Mythos
of Autumn," Tragedy; and the "Mythos of Winter," irony and
Satire. Frye then analyzes comedy into a spectrum of
six phases, passing from ironic or satiric comedy at the
dark end of the scale, to romance at the sunny end. Mainly
57
Anatomy of Criticism; Four Essays (Princeton, N.J.,
1957), p. 46. Other references in the text are based on
this edition.
462
concerned with dramatic structures, he attempts to reveal
mythic outlines behind details of plot, suggesting how
myths have become secularized, particularized, and translat
ed into the concrete social situations and characters of
comedy.
Dealing with large concepts, Frye argues that comedy
involves a movement from obstruction, usurpation, and re
pression at the beginning of the play, towards liberation
and fulfilment at the end (see p. 163). The action of New
Comedy, according to Frye, turns on parental obstacles to
youthful desire, and comic resolution involves the triumph
of youth (see p. 164). A tussle of wills between son and
father, finally issues in the "crystallization" of a "new
society" around hero and heroine, who are united in marriage
and in possession of the future. Frye stresses the social
reorientation that takes place in comedy, reflecting natural
and ritual cycles of life, and suggests that resentment of
the older generation against the younger (the sense of
usurpation cuts both ways) may lie behind the charges of
subversion sometimes levelled at comedy. (He finds a
parallel to this "writing for young lovers" in the
463
58
"youth-cult" of modern movies.) This view of comedy as
regenerative in a socially subversive way (cf. Aristophanes'
Wasps) seems to tell against the conservative view (as ex
pressed by Gottsched, cook; above, pp. 373, 441), and in
favor of the revolutionary view (as expressed by Feibleman,
I
above pp. 389-390). Yet the argument can be turned around:
cyclic patterns are predictable or "probable," as mythic
generalization indicates, and therefore conservative in the
long run; at the same time, they reflect a struggle for
personal fulfilment and liberty, rather than a concern with
logic or politics, and therefore cannot be considered revo-
j
j
lutionary in Feibleman's radical social sense of the term.
The mythic approach relates comedy to a background of
^Larger, archetypal symbols.
Basically, then, Frye argues that comedy displays a
recurring conflict of generations from the viewpoint of the I
! i
young, who are favored by the forward surge of the life-
force and by the principle of cyclic change. The form that
r |
I
58
As for the writing of comedy, on the other hand, Jean1
Paul considers tragedy (more idealistic, less disillusioned)
as more suitable to the talents of the young than comedy
(mimetic, realistic), which requires the knowledge and ripe
ness of mature experience. See introduction to Aesthetics.
Wo. 39, "The Comical of the Drama," in Lauter, pp. 321-322.
comedy takes, he says, will depend on whether emphasis
rests on "blocking characters" (who are repressive and
ridiculous), or on "scenes of discovery and reconciliation"
(which are liberating and lyrical): in the first case, the
result will be comic irony, satire, realism, or comedy of
manners; in the second, Shakespearean or romantic comedy
(see pp. 166-167). According to Frye's anatomy, the
"humor"-type often constitutes a "blocking character,1 ' who
has the power to impose his obsession on a segment of
society; the comic action then concerns a struggle by the
other characters to break this power, which may have been
objectified in the form of an "absurd or irrational law"
(see p. 169). Frye finds mythic symbols of relentless
struggle in the sea, and of serenity and escape from "the
society of the 1 senex'1 1 and his authority in the green
world or dream world of Shakespeare's Arden.
If one traces the derivation of comic patterns back
through myth and ritual to their source in the spontaneous
flow of life in natural cycles, it becomes clear that comedy
moves away from fixed or mechanical forms towards untram-
59
meled fluidity and freedom. As Frye's analysis suggests,
59
Bergson emphasizes this tendency to flexibility, in
applying his philosophy of creative evolution to the comic.
465
the comic contains elements of primitivism, spontaneity, and
experimentalism, which are in open rebellion against social
conventions. He writes:
Thus the movement from pistis to gnosis. from a society
controlled by habit, ritual bondage, arbitrary law and
the older characters to a society controlled by growth
and pragmatic freedom is fundamentally, as the Greek
words suggest, a movement from illusion to reality.
Illusion is whatever is fixed or definable, and reality
is best understood as its negation; whatever reality is,
it is not that. Hence the importance of the theme of
creating and dispelling illusion in comedy: the illu
sions caused by disguise, obsession, hypocrisy, or
unknown parentage. (pp. 169-170)
Comedy, then, tends to subvert actual social orders in
the interests of an ideal, indefinable order of love and
liberty. From the point of view of society, the comic im
pulse might be regarded as regressive, or revolutionary in
its desire to stop the machine and turn the clock back to
an age of irresponsible Arcadianism. Whereas Freud con
siders comic regression in psychological terms of infantile
libido and desire for the lost freedom of childhood, Frye
discusses such regression in mythic terms of "a Saturnalia,
a reversal of social standards which recalls a golden age
in the past ..." (see p. 171). For instance, Frye con
siders Falstaff a composite, almost archetypal, figure of
comedy: "'senex et parasitus,'" he plays clown-father to
Prince Henry, and as "a mock king, a lord of misrule . . .
466
60
his tavern is a saturnalia.1 1
The term "Saturnalia" suggests ritual merriment and
sexual license, both innate aspects o£ comedy. Expressions
of the life-force in comedy must, however, be modified to
suit social and artistic norms; myths based on primitive
sexuality within the family can only be dimly reflected in
comic patterns. As Frye says:
The presiding genius of comedy is Eros, and Eros has
to adapt himself to the moral facts of society: Oedipus
and incest themes indicate that erotic attachments have
in their undisplaced or mythical origin a much greater
versatility. (p. 181)
Transplanting a myth means transforming it; a question of
discrimination then arises: how much does comedy owe
directly to literary myth, and how much does it simply share
the same natural sources? presumably this question should
60
"Argument of Comedy,” English Institute Essays (1948),
pp. 70-71 (see reference above, p. 20).
Frye links the baiting of Falstaff with specific
ritual actions in the following passage from Anatomy of
Criticism: "The green world charges the comedies with the
symbolism of the victory of summer over winter ... in The
Merry Wives there is an elaborate ritual of the defeat of
winter known to folklorists as 'carrying out Death,' of
which Falstaff is the victim; and Falstaff must have felt
that, after being thrown into the water, dressed up as a
witch and beaten out of a house with curses, and finally
supplied with a beast's head and singed with candles, he had
done about all that could reasonably be asked of any fertil
ity spirit." (Anatomy, p. 183)
467
be decided according to the author's intentions rather than
the critic's assumptions.
In this connection, Susanne Langer traces the evolution
o£ Eros in comic forms from mystic ritual to drawing-room
comedy and bedroom farce. For her, sex and survival supply
the forward-moving thrust of an abstract "comic rhythm,"
which transcends the individual impulses that it momentarily
sustains. According to Langer, the mood of comedy is one
of buoyant confidence, self-congratulation, and social affa
bility; individual feeling is swept along on a wave of com-
61
munal vitality, which culminates in laughter.
Comedy [she says] is an art form that arises naturally
wherever people are gathered to celebrate life, in spring
festivals, triumphs, birthdays, weddings, or initiations.
For it expresses the elementary strains and resolutions
of animate nature, the delight man takes in his special
mental gifts that make him the lord of creation; it is
an image of human vitality holding its own in the world
amid the surprises of unplanned coincidence. . . . What
justifies the term "Comedy" is not that the ancient
ritual procession, the Comus, honoring the god of that
name, was the source of this great art form . . . but
that the Comus was a fertility rite, and the god it
celebrated a fertility god, a symbol of perpetual rebirth,
eternal life. (Feeling and Form, p. 331)
61
Whereas Hegel, judging metaphysically, regards
this glad anthropomorphic sense of achievement and mastery
as the characteristic illusion of comedy (see above,
pp. 109-110), Langer regards it as a biological reality.
468
In relation to more sophisticated forms of comedy, Langer
quotes Meredith's rationalization of comic amorality: '"The
heroines of comedy are like women of the world, not neces-
62
sarily heartless from being clear-sighted . . .'" (p. 346).
Meredith continues: "Comedy is an exhibition of their
battle with men, and that of men with them ..." Langer,
herself, regards the primitive sex-battle or mating urge,
disguised and elaborated as it may be by all the trappings
of civilization (which contrast with its primitive vitality
and sincerity), as still the heart of comedy. It is, she
says,
the most universal contest, humanized, in fact civilized,
yet still the primitive joyful challenge, the self-
preservation and self-assertion whose progress is the
comic rhythm. (p. 346)
As well as the rhythms of sexual attraction and antag
onism, comedy, she suggests, reflects the rhythms of sur
vival. Behind myth stands ritual, and behind ritual man's
struggle to wrest a living from the earth. The necessities,
62
Meredith's remarks bring to mind a famous scene in
Tristram Shandy: the scene in the sentry-box, where the
''lambent delicious fire" of worldly, but kindhearted, Widow
Wadman's lucid eye dazzles poor Uncle Toby, who has scarcely
recovered from a wound in the groin before being struck to
the heart by such amorous shafts. (See T.S..VIII.xxiv-xxv.
376-378)
469
frustrations, anxieties, and glories of this struggle for
survival have shaped the pattern of comedy which celebrates
the narrow victory of life. Langer traces affinities be
tween the primitive sense of life expressed in ritual and
the more sophisticated forms of modern comedy. She writes:
The same impulse that drove people, even in prehistoric
times, to enact fertility rites and celebrate all phases
of their biological existence, sustains their eternal
interest in comedy. It is in the nature of comedy to
be erotic, risqui, and sensuous if not sensual, impious,
and even wicked. . . . The sense of precariousness that
is the typical tension of light comedy was undoubtedly
developed in the eternal struggle with chance that every
farmer knows only too well— with weather, blights, beasts,
birds, and beetles. The embarrassments, perplexities and
mounting panic which characterize that favorite genre,
comedy of manners, may still reflect the toils of ritual
and taboo that complicated the caveman's existence. Even
the element of aggressiveness in comic action serves to
develop a fundamental trait of the comic rhythm— the deep
cruelty of it, as all life feeds on life. There is no
biological truth that feeling does not reflect, and that
good comedy, therefore, will not be prone to reveal.
(p. 349)
As both Frye and Langer insist, comedy accentuates the posi
tive and vital; it seems to express a will to make the best
of a bad job, dissolving minor difficulties in laughter.
A comparison of the contributions of Frye and Langer
to comic theory suggests certain ideas about the relative
validity of ritual and mythic approaches to the comic. For
Langer, the feeling of comedy crystallizes "the pure sense
of life," while its form abstracts patterns of living. Her
analysis goes deep and probes the dynamics of comedy. She
is not concerned with the narrative-mythic content of comedy
as "psycho-biographical document," but with the kind of
energy or "sense of felt life" which flows into it from
ritual sources and molds its forms, in my opinion, her
marriage of ritual and aesthetics, feeling and form, bears
fruit in a more quintessential understanding of the "vis
comica"(as it might be called), than Frye1s psycho-dramatic
use of myth, which involves tracking down shadowy analogues
of comic plot and character. Langer resists the tendency
63
to reduce comedy to a pattern of overt ritual symbols;
whereas Frye does not hesitate to draw mythic parallels and
to "explain" comedy in terms of mythic symbols. Of the
ritual and mythic modes of theory, as represented by Langer
and Frye, it might be said that the former is concentrative,
while the latter is diffusive.
Frye admits that "the total mvthos of comedy" seldom
63
She writes: "... the fact that the rhythm of com
edy is the basic rhythm of life does not mean that biologi
cal existence is the 'deeper meaning' of all its themes, and
that to understand the play is to interpret all the charac
ters as symbols and the story as a parable, a disguised rite
of spring or fertility magic, performed four hundred and
fifty times on Broadway." (p. 349)
471
appears clearly or consistently in a single literary work.
A source of possible objection to the mythic approach,
then, lies in its somewhat scientistic use of folklore and
anthropology, and its tendency to construct earth-girdling
generalizations based on commonplace particulars. Mythic
land psychological approaches often overlap, as evidenced by
the prominence that both Freud and Frye (for different
reasons) give the Oedipus situation; and both approaches,
when applied to literary texts, may share the common fault
64
of subverting or distorting the immediate values of art.
There is always the danger that, in the criticism of comedy,
the generalizing tendency of science may be at odds with the
concrete realizations of art, and the laughter of the audi
ence may evaporate in the atmosphere of the study. The
i
characteristic profundity of psychological and mythical
approaches seems unsuited to the lighter aspects of comedy,
jand sometimes strikes an unintentionally comic note. Yet
64In some examples of myth-criticism, neo-scientism may
be at odds with the "philosophy of symbolic forms." As
Ernst Cassirer has said: "Science means abstraction, and
abstraction is always an impoverishment of reality. The
forms of things as they are described in scientific concepts
tend more and more to become mere formulae. These formulae
are of a surprising simplicity. ..." An Essay on Man: An
Introduction to a Philosophy of Human Culture (New Haven and
London, 1965), p. 144.
472
the psycho-mythic approach— which tends to be Jungian more
often than Freudian, dealing with symbols of the archetypal
unconscious and primitive religion— can (if handled
judiciously) deepen one's appreciation of a literary text,
by setting it in dynamic relation with the continuity of
human life and culture, in which laughter plays such an
integral part.
I
CONCLUSION
It is time now to review the scope and findings of the
present study. I have aimed at the widest possible perspec
tive, inasmuch as theories of humor tend to grow out of, and
modify, each other, progressing from the classical theories
of Plato and Aristotle with their rigorous simplicity, up to
the subtle elaboration of modern theories, which have drawn
intellectual sustenance from a number of "new sciences."
It will be clear from the eclectic method pursued here,
that the author considers the search for a single clue or
formula to all humor illusory and misguided. The fact that
no theoretical umbrella will shelter all modes and manifes
tations of humor, does not, however, demand literal adher
ence to Croce's advice to abandon all general aesthetic
discussion of the concepts involved. On the contrary, a
pragmatic approach to the humorous techniques of individual
works will always seem shallow and to some extent invalidat
ed, unless it rests upon a deeper knowledge of the natural
resources of laughter and humor, knowledge, that is, of the
473
474
substrata which underlie a literary surface. In effect,
then, much can be learned from the "monistic" theories of
Bergson and Freud (which are incisive, if narrow), and
from the more abstractive philosophies of Feibleman and
Koestler; nothing constructive, it might be added, can be
learned from the anti-monistic, anti-generalizing essays of
Croce, Knights, and Clubb. —
Monistic theories of humor may contain valuable in
sights, but they tend to be individual and partial, although
their authors do not generally hesitate to claim universal
validity. Why should all humor answer to a single rigid
formula? Spontaneity and elusive variety are principal
features of humor; the contrastive approaches examined here
attest to the multiplicity of humorous modes. The critic
of literary humor must of necessity make an apt selection
for each textual occasion from the well-stocked supermarket
of modern humor theories. One might apply Wellek and
Warren's concept of "perspectivism" to the critical use of
humor-theory. According to them:
The unsound thesis of absolutism and the equally unsound
antithesis of relativism must be superseded and harmonized
in a new synthesis which makes the scale of values itself
dynamic, but does not surrender it as such. "Perspecti
vism, 1 1 as we have termed such a conception, does not mean
an anarchy of values, a glorification of individual
475
caprice, but a process of getting to know the object
from different points of view which may be defined
and criticized in their turn. (Theory of Literature,
p. 145)
The present study has been concerned with getting to know
the object— and subject— of humor, from many different
points of view.
The critic who has a mature grasp of the idea of humor
— including its various permutations, progressions, and
i
divisions— will be more likely to shed light on the manner
in which a particular literary text communicates a broad or
subtle essence of humor, than one who lacks such perspec
tive. Humor is a universally welcome compound, which the
esemplastic energy of a great author's will to laughter can
forge out of the most heterogeneous and unprepossessing
Materials. The conflicting theories of humor herein re-
I
viewed offer alternative tools for analyzing such humorous
Compounds. The critic should have enough experience with
jthe possible approaches to select those tools most suitable
for the task in hand.
Discussions of literary humor almost inevitably assume
a theory of interrelated kinds of humor. As noted above,
pp. 90-92, the terms "humor" and "the comic" may be used
either in a generic or sub-generic (specific) sense; in the
476
former case they are more or less synonymous, in the latter
each term covers a distinct area of meaning. Of the writers
quoted in these pages, some use the term "humor" and some
the term "comic," when speaking of the laughable. Given the
phrasing of such quotations, absolute consistency of termi
nology, at least on the inclusive level of humor-theory,
could only be achieved by violating the original sourcesj
moreover, precise definitions of sub-genres, based on
stipulative definitions and supported by literary illustra
tions, should be located within the wider context of a
philosophical background. The experienced reader or liter
ary critic will naturally wish to distinguish "humor" in the
general sense from "humor" in a more specific sense, and to
distinguish these in turn from "the comic," "wit," "irony,"
"satire," "burlesque," "parody," "farce," and so on. Such
distinctions, however, are likely to be matters of purely
superficial and nominalistic semantics, unless they are
grounded in a more fertile philosophy of humor.
This troubled relation of terminology to ideas suggests
the analogous findings of A. 0. Lovejoy on "Romanticism"
and its spectrum of possible meanings, denotative and
All
connotative.1 Rejecting the quest for a monistic interpre
tation of this term, Lovejoy decides to pluralize it, and
to insist on stipulative definitions of its use in any
given context. Unfortunately, one cannot speak of "humors"
in parallel terms, for to do so would be to suggest that
variation of personality-types associated with medieval
psychopathology and Jonsonian comedy. One can, however, use
the term "humor" with a clear consciousness of the diversity
of its connotations. The ambivalence of laughter and humor
might be suggested by a series of more or less antonymous
associations:
love
-
hate regression
-
se1f-conquest
sympathy
-
contempt discharge - economy
kindness - cruelty realistic
- idealistic
play - aggression pessimistic
- optimistic
relief
-
triumph illusion
-
insight
empathy
-
detachment affective - cognitive
superiority
-
incongruity subjective
-
objective
ugliness
-
beauty absurdity
-
truth
pleasure
-
pain illogical
-
logical
low - high spontaneous
-
perceptive
primitive
-
refined social
-
antisocial
animal
-
sentimental conservative - revolutionary
human
-
divine corrective - amoral
infantile
-
mature universal - eccentric
English - Irish
German - American
French - Fijian
etc.
^See his essay "On the Discrimination of Romanticisms,"
in Essays in the History of ideas (New York, 1960),
pp. 228-253.
478 j
Such a fluctuating plethora of associations and atti
tudes leads to the question "Why anatomize humor?" Given the
great divergence of theories and individual responses, given
the evanescence and freedom of laughter, what can be the
justification for such an excruciating operation? First,
!
let me boldly answer "Curiosity, " for humor constitutes a
striking and encouraging aspect of man's shared experience,
signifying special powers of enjoyment, intelligence, and
fortitude, expressed within, but extending beyond, the
i :
(limits of literary genres, in his essay on "The Historiog
raphy of Ideas," for example, Lovejoy points out,
not only how little they know of English literature who
only English literature know— that has long been obvious— i
but also how little they know of English literature who
only literature know. (Essays, p. 3)
The time has come for a cross-fertilization of interrelated
i
(subjects and sciences. Nowhere is this more apparent than
jin the field of humor study. HUmor touches life at many
Ipoints, and many ways of thinking intersect in trying to
probe its meanings. Arthur Koestler has argued convincingly
!
that Humor, Art, and Discovery are sparked by the sudden
intersection or fitting together of independent matrices of j
|
thought (see above, p. 333). if his thesis is valid, it J
i
I
may well be that new insights into the phenomena of humor
479
will be generated at the "burning points" where divergent
intellectual forces meet and conflict in approaching the
central elements of humor. Out of these disputed or contro
versial points new ideas may emerge. The multi-dimensional
approach adopted in the present survey is directed toward
a flexible synthesis of humor theories.
The original stimulus of this study was a desire to
accept the latent challenge of Shandeism, by unravelling
some of the problems of humor in which Tristram so neatly
enmeshes the curious reader, it soon became apparent that
I would have to extend and stratify my understanding of
humor, putting it on a broader scholarly basis. At first
sight, the field seems cluttered and chaotic. On the one
hand, theories of humor tend to overlap, with much repeti
tion or mere modification; on the other, they tend to
diverge because of seemingly irreconcilable aims and assump
tions. in face of such proliferation, especially in the
modern period, the problem of organizing these unwieldy
masses of theory became crucial. The methodology adopted
2
here involved my dividing ideas of humor into nine groups,
^Namely, in Chapter III: Physiology; Anthropology and
Aggression; Genetics and Love; Spontaneity, Energy, and
Play-Theory; Sociology and Communication; in Chapter IV:
Psychological and Subjectivist; Philosophical and Objecti-
vist; in Chapter V: Aesthetic and Myt'hic.
j 480
i
|according to dominant scientific or philosophical assump
tions. Generally speaking, these separable approaches seem
to balance and complement, rather them cancel or contradict,
each other. Their nominal divergence could be construed as
convergence on a central problem from widely separated
jangles in the sciences and humanities. Thus the problem of <
dealing with modern theories of humor appears most likely to
be solved by rotating and revealing in alternation various
aspects of the wheel of "universal humor."
i The comparative perspectives thus attained reveal cer
tain more fundamental dichotomies. Laughter, for example,
is seen to oscillate between theoretical poles of love and
hate, the former finding its major support in genetics and
!
jits diffusion in play-theories, and the latter finding its
i
I
major support in anthropology and its diffusion in aggres-
jsion-theories. A more fundamental split in theory appears j
in the Subjective-Objective dichotomy, a clear grasp of j
Which seems essential to the understanding of humor. Tradi-!
tional confusion between subject and object of humor |
I
(between percipient and perceived) achieves pedagogical ;
I
Status with the rise of psychologism and logical positivism j
in the present century. Psychologists, on the one hand,
i
tend to give all their attention to subjective responses: j
481
Freudians to unconscious emotive processes, Gestaltists to
cognitive ones. Philosophers, on the other hand, tend to
give prior attention to objective situations containing log
ical incongruities; thus Bergson concentrates on contrasts
pf vital and mechanical, Feibleman on those of ideal and ac
tual, Swabey on logical and illogical, while Koestler ex-
i
i
plains humor in broader terms as the intersection (or "biso-
|
ciation") of independent matrices of thought.
Both subjective and objective approaches are legiti-
j
jaatef they cannot profitably be thought of as mutually ex
clusive. The one turns inward to the emotive and perceptive
mechanisms by which sense of humor operates; the other turns
outward to the objective causes of humor and their logical
constructions. While the first approach might deal with
i
psychological factors which condition an author's sense of !
; :
humor and the quality of humorous consciousness which per-
| i
Jvades his art, the second quite properly may deal with the
! 3 j
finished literary product, its techniques and articulation. !
A full discussion of any complex and masterful work of
humorous art, such as Tristram Shandy, will call forth both
approaches. Sterne, for instance, is much concerned with |
subjective mechanisms of humor in his readers, as well as iii
his "alter ego," the narrator, and consequently devises 1
objectively controlled techniques (involving "self- i
conscious" narration, illogical associationism, play-upon- i
words, etc.) to exploit them.
482
The aesthetic approach to humor and comedy, which
ostensibly bears closest relevance to literature, tends to
deal chiefly with such specialized objective aspects as
integrative harmony or comic distance, or with the subjec
tive emotional attitudes implied in sublimation, catharsis,
br sense of regain. A somewhat different approach through
symbolic attitudes (furnishing a series of parallel antin
omies) , or through symbolic forms (abstracted as "comic
rhythm") is perhaps more fundamental and fruitful. The
I ;
symbolic approach provides a bridge between technical aes
thetics and the psycho-mythic speculations which have become
a popular, and occasionally illuminating, method of inter
preting comedy. Finally, my survey comes full circle, ending
as it begem in the ritual origins of comedy.
I have felt obliged to present this study in the form
pf an anatomy, treating the descriptive philosophy of humor
!
jas a broad continuum of ideas, and discriminating within
this continuum main lines of theoretical approach. By
j
{arranging insights in the pattern of a synthesis, I have
intended to dispel some of the vagueness and confusion that ,
traditionally haunt discussions of humor in literary crit- |
icism, which more often praise humor to the skies than
i
attempt to understand or define it. This survey, then, is i
483
bffered as an eclectic basis for making selective critical
judgments on humor. Aware of the variety of alternative ap
proaches to, and implications of, humor, the literary critic
may choose to apply psychological, logical, mythological,
aesthetic, or other concepts, depending on his own interests
and on the technical qualities of a given work. The compar
ative relevance of these and other approaches to explication
of literary humor is relative and depends on textual occa
sions and critical decisions. Whatever the case, a working
l
knowledge of humor-theory seems essential to practical anal
ysis of humorous tone, image, and structure.
The anatomy of such a lively organism as humor can
never be conclusive, however much, in Blake's words, critics
"murder to dissect." Its value lies rather in a wealth of
i
i (
i
suggestion. Arthur Koestler bases The Act of Creation on
l
the idea that there are no hard and fast boundaries between
|
Humor, Discovery, and Art in the fluid continuum of creative
i
consciousness (see above, p. 334). Arthur Lovejoy, for his ;
part, has pointed out that the current division of fields in
universities constitutes a purely arbitrary, and perhaps
4
unnecessarily restrictive, convenience. The word
4 '
See "The Historiography of Ideas," Essays, pp. 6-7. I
484
"anatomy," then implies a classification of parts, but it
also implies a measure of organic unity. To pursue the
metaphor, humor-theory may be thought of as a single tree
growing steadily upward from classical times, and putting
out few branches until the tremendous exfoliation, or fan-
wise spreading-out, of theories which began in the nine
teenth century and continues to flourish.
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485
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! 1
1
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, NOTE. Useful theoretical summaries by author and/or
j bibliographical information may be found in Greig, j
I Grotjahn, Piddington, and Rapp.
III. The following section contains works cited from
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i
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i
I
! 505 !
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I l
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I . '
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i ' i
; I
Dugas, L. Psychologie du rire. Cited in Eastman, Sense of j
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506
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507
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I
j 509
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III. The following section contains works consulted but
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i
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510
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511
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512
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Creator Stewart, John Francis (author)

Core Title An Anatomy Of Humor

Degree Doctor of Philosophy

Degree Program English

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