A Muse Unmasked

A Muse Unmasked

by Michael L. Johnson

        The most captivating image of Thalia, the Greek muse of comedy, doubtless is the one painted by Jean-Marc Nattier in 1739: Muse de la Comédie. Although for the most part she is brightly aglow in that oil, an air of darkness surrounds her. Her left hand holds the comic mask away from her face. Her right hand lifts a curtain to reveal a staged comedy in the background. She smiles slyly, mischievously. Her right breast is exposed—an intentional wardrobe malfunction, it is reasonable to presume. Does she not, even if only sketchily invoked by this abbreviated description, put us in mind of the charm and mystery of humor? Does she not persuade us that humor—and not gin, as Jean-Baptiste Clamence argues in Albert Camus’s novel The Fall—is “the sole glimmer in this gloom”?^{1All translations, … Continue reading}

        The paradigmatic vehicle of humor is the joke, a gesture spoken, written, or by some other means enacted with the goal of provoking laughter. The word derives from the Latin jocus (“jest”), a word probably related to Sanskrit (yācati) and Old High German (gehan), both denoting some sort of speaking, a connection that suggests that the spoken joke is the archetypal form.

        Some years ago British researcher Paul McDonald and his team at the University of Wolverhampton completed their quest for the world’s oldest recorded joke. Among their discoveries was a riddle in the tenth-century Anglo-Saxon Exeter Book that appears to be the UK’s oldest recorded joke. It goes, in modern English, this way: What hangs at a man’s thigh and wants to poke the hole that it has often poked before? A key. The first such joke, however, is Sumerian. Inscribed on a stone tablet around four thousand years ago, it reads: Something that has never happened since time immemorial: a young woman did not fart in her husband’s lap. Not a knee-slapper but clearly an example of humor immemorially combining the sexual and the scatological—a linkage in many jokes aptly glossed by W. B. Yeats’s poetic maxim, in “Crazy Jane Talks with the Bishop,” that “Love has pitched his mansion in / The place of excrement. . . .” No wonder ancient Greek comedy, to which we are distant heirs, had its origins in religious ribaldry, fertility festivals, phallic celebrations, and the like. The ancestral line of “dirty” jokes is quite long.

        The first joke I can remember being told to me, by a neighborhood kid of whom my mother direly disapproved, was one of the versions of the Johnny Fuckerfaster narrative—the vulgarity of which I will spare the reader. Since I was seven or eight at the time, I didn’t really understand the joke, nor did the slightly older teller; but I got from it a fairly lucid sense of incongruity, discordance, double meaning, whatever you want to call the semantic switcheroo of its punch line after the set-up. And I laughed—from a mix of politeness, vague fear, embarrassment, and self-consciousness. About the same time I heard a lot of jokes at Bell’s Barber Shop, but they weren’t told to me; and most of them I didn’t understand either, let alone appreciate. I don’t recall when I gained the confidence to be the teller of a joke.

        My first laugh is lost in the abysm of my mind. My parents may have taken pleasure in witnessing it, but it surely was not commemorated as babies’ first laughs are among the Navajo (the Diné), for whom the first-laugh ceremony is of signal importance. With them the commemoration of that laugh entails, among other things, gifts and food; and the celebration indicates, as Luci Tapahonso notes in her book A Radiant Curve: Poems and Stories, that the child has “consciously performed the act of thinking,” an act that recollects mythical history and marks a change of existential status. More specifically, Tapahonso writes, “Centuries ago, the Holy People decreed that Diné children be honored in this fashion, because before this first genuine expression of emotion, the infant still ‘belonged to’ and lived in the world of the Holy People. The first laugh marks the first step of his or her moving away from this sphere and the beginning of the child’s participation in the human family’s network.” Laughter, by this account, requires some discriminating rumination on what is perceived and is, moreover, a social event that supposedly adumbrates a certain generosity of spirit.

        Two Wampanoags at Plymouth Rock watch a huge ship full of white people pulling into the harbor. One of them says to the other, “Do you think they’ll stay overnight?”

        Can a person laugh too much or too oddly? Yes, I gather. Fits of uncontrollable laughter may be borderline epileptic, and some psychoses exhibit excessive elation. Indeed, concerning the latter, there are well-evidenced relations between laughter or joking and psychotic behavior. Consider a joke from Heinrich Heine discussed by Silvano Arieti in his book, Creativity: The Magic Synthesis. It goes as follows: This woman resembles the “Venus de Milo” in many ways: like her, she is extremely old, has no teeth, and has white spots on the yellow surface of her body. According to Arieti’s analysis, indebted to Sigmund Freud, the technique entailed in this joke “consists of ‘representation through the opposite.’” The basic element in such a joke is “the possibility of an impossible identification,” a twist found in schizophrenic thinking as well as in non-pathological wit.

        It may be true, as Robert W. Corrigan asserts in his essay “Comedy and the Comic Spirit,” that death is not ever taken seriously in comedy. Still, what often is taken seriously in comedy’s treatment of it, I would contend, is what he calls “[t]he essential quality of the ‘is-ness’ of life . . . its absurdity, its futility.”

        The universe is so vast, vast beyond any but the most abstract and abstruse reckoning, and I am so small—what can I do except laugh at my own dreams and dreads within the scale of such disjunction? Or, better, have an epiphany like Theo Decker’s in Donna Tartt’s novel The Goldfinch when, high on LSD at night in the middle of a playground in Las Vegas, Nevada, he realizes “that laughter was light, and light was laughter, and that this was the secret of the universe.”

        The world’s funniest joke was determined by Richard Wiseman of the University of Hertfordshire around 2002 by means of a website where people could submit and rate jokes (some forty thousand of them, pretty much global in provenance) for the competition. Lots of now-classic chucklers found their way to the site, such as, What did the Buddhist say to the hotdog vendor? Make me one with everything. And there were clunkers, naturally. This one, with a strong appeal across numerous cultures, was the winner:
        Two hunters are out in the woods when one of them collapses. He
        doesn’t seem to be breathing, and his eyes are glazed. The other guy
        whips out his phone and calls the emergency services. He gasps, “My
        friend is dead! What should I do?” The operator says, “Calm down. I
        can help. First, let’s make sure he’s dead.” There is a silence; then
        a gunshot is heard. Back on the phone, the guy says, “OK, now what?”

        Divorced from my second wife at the ripe age of seventy, I grew by turns depressed, panicky, bewildered, and above all insistently angry as the subsequent long, lonely days passed. Then one morning while eating raisins for breakfast, I realized that they weren’t just dried grapes but the mummies of grapes. And I laughed heartily, remembering the penultimate words of Lucile Asher’s memoir It Beats Bawling: Some Recollections from a Fading Era: “When the going gets rougher and life whacks you down, and you are almost despairing, try laughing.” With my laughter—and its catharsis—that morning began a fuller tolerance of my state of affairs, a resignation to it, even a freshet of forgiveness for the woman who had left. I, too, would be a mummy ere long, and I had what were really all-too-short days ahead that wanted less anger and almost-despair, more laughter.

 

I used to think the brain was the most important organ. Then I realized what was telling me that.

 

        The word laugh comes from the Old English verb hliehhan, an onomatopoetic eponym, with its origin in prelinguistic vocalization. It’s interesting here to consider the word grin, which comes from the Middle English verb grinnen, “to snarl,” to show the teeth. Perhaps a laugh tends to follow a grin and is a more open expression attendant upon a defensive posture yielding to the relaxation of jocular accord; that is, a silent grrrr and then a repeating h-sound.

 

My therapist says I have a preoccupation with vengeance. We’ll see about that.

 

        Pitti-Sing, one of the “three little maids from school” in William Gilbert and Arthur Sullivan’s operetta The Mikado, sings a line that zips by and yet has bothered me ever since I first heard it sixty years ago: “Life is a joke that’s just begun!” On any given day, not long after reading the morning paper, that does seem to be the case. In his polemical essay “Why Women Aren’t Funny,” Christopher Hitchens temporally deepens the application of Pitti-Sing’s verb in declaring that male humor “understands that life is quite possibly a joke to begin with”—the core judgment therein arguably implicit in the sweeping averment of Rudge, the gauche athlete in Nicholas Hytner’s film The History Boys, that history “is just one fucking thing after another.”

        In his essay “On the Essence of Laughter,” Charles Baudelaire interprets laughter as the consequence of man’s idea of his peculiar superiority. A contradictory phenomenon, it is, he explains, “at once a token of an infinite grandeur and of an infinite misery, infinite misery relative to the absolute Being of whom he has a conception, infinite grandeur relative to the beasts.” Laughter arises from the collision of those infinities and thereby expresses “a double, or contradictory, feeling; and that is why there is convulsion.” Laughter, for him, amounts to a dialectical paroxysm.

 

What does an agnostic, dyslexic insomniac do? He stays up all night wondering if there is a Dog.

 

        Do other animals—specifically, nonhuman primates—laugh? Maybe, in some way, but I would argue that laughter as humans know it first happened when, on the evolutionary tree, they did—though the cackling of chimpanzees and such may hint at some blur in that occurrence. In any case, to paraphrase one of Ludwig Wittgenstein’s elliptical statements in his Philosophical Investigations, even if a dog could laugh, we could not get the joke.

 

I went to the military-surplus store to buy some camouflage pants, but I couldn’t find any.

 

        Søren Kierkegaard, in his Journals and Papers, argues that the comic is founded on contradiction. He notes that if a man tries to set himself up as a tavern keeper and fails, that is not comic; but if a woman tries to set herself up as a prostitute and fails, that is comic. A comparable contradiction obtains, I suppose, in the case of the figure of the absentminded professor, the smart person who is somehow not so smart. At any rate, Kierkegaard’s comparison raises all sorts of questions about why either failure might come about. Is the man an alcoholic? Is he too poor to operate a tavern? Is the woman too ugly to be sexually attractive? Too innocent? And so on. The success of the humor here may call for misogyny. Or some leap of comedic faith.

        Facts about laughter: If it’s genuine—not an operatic laugh, a laugh-track laugh in a sitcom, a courtesy laugh, or any other feigned risibility—it is involuntary. There are different kinds of it: giggle, chortle, chuckle, and so forth. It tends to occur in a social milieu, but, of course, a person can laugh alone. Typically, it springs forth in a triplet of sounds—ha ha ha—with either a dactylic or an anapestic rhythm. As a general rule, an individual’s experience of it, both in its frequency and in its intensity, diminishes with age.

 

Women like silent men. They think they are listening.

 

        Taped to the door of my refrigerator is a sheet of paper with these words from the last line of Rainer Maria Rilke’s poem “Archaic Torso of Apollo” in 32-point type: “You must change your life.” In the months since a downward turn of personal events prompted my placing that stark imperative there, I’ve wondered more and more if the change mandated isn’t in my life but in my understanding of it, which subtler change I’ve gradually tried to implement. With that effort has come the clearer and clearer awareness that my life is a joke. As a result, the yelping of coyotes under a full moon sounds like laughter, as do the gentle tinkling of my wind chimes and the asphaltic sigh of distant midnight traffic. Or is the truth that, all projection aside, I, like the vaporous speaker in Percy Bysshe Shelley’s “The Cloud,” “silently laugh at my own cenotaph”?

        The human skull, that most theatrical memento mori, forever grins on the brink of laughter. Death’s laughter, when it finally starts, lasts. Life’s laughter, like its weeping, as Ernest Dowson reminds us in his poem (its title borrowed from Horace) “Vitae summa brevis spem nos vetat incohare longam, ” is “not long.” In time the universe, as astrophysicists assure us, will be cold, dark, dead absolutely and forever. Not a laughing matter–or nothing except precisely that. Still, the universe is long and life short. Should I, then, as Françoise Sagan urges in a discussion of automotive speed in her memoir With Fondest Regards, jump in my Mustang 5.0 and take it to the red line for what she promises will be “a rush of happiness,” laughing all the way?

 

There are two fish in a tank. One asks the other, “How do you drive this thing?”

 

        At one point in Robert Heinlein’s novel Stranger in a Strange Land, the story of Valentine Michael Smith, a young man reared on Mars by Martians but returned to Earth, Nurse Gillian Boardman takes him to Golden Gate Park. There he witnesses bullying among a family of capuchins, at which he laughs loudly, irrepressibly. Jill is appalled. She gets him calmed down and has an air cab transport them out of the park and back to their flat. The ensuing conversation leads to Mike’s elucidating his reaction to the capuchins’ bullying: “Of course it wasn’t funny; it was tragic. That’s why I had to laugh. I looked at a cage full of monkeys and suddenly I saw all the mean and cruel and utterly unexplainable things I’ve seen and heard and read about in the time I’ve been with my own people–and suddenly it hurt so much I found myself laughing.” When both Jill and Mike continue their talk about laughing at hurtful things, death inevitably enters their conversation. Jill argues that death isn’t funny, but Mike responds, “Then why are there so many jokes about death? Jill, with us—us humans—death is so sad that we must laugh at it.” Sir John Betjeman may have understood the heart of the matter when he wrote “The Last Laugh,” a small jewel of a poem:
        I made hay while the sun shone.
                 My work sold.
        Now, if the harvest is over
                 And the world cold,
        Give me the bonus of laughter
                 As I lose hold.

        Numerous indeed are the subjects—politics, religion, sex, on and on–and styles–knock-knock, shaggy-dog, on and on—of jokes with their ultimate source almost invariably uncertain. Some of them turn up in cycles, for example Helen Keller jokes or Polish jokes, and often intimate an underlying cultural anxiety. At any rate, lucky is the person who has a lot of jokes. Think of Sherman Alexie, George Carlin, Stephen Colbert, Ellen DeGeneres, Lewis Black, Bill Maher, that whole contemporary tribe—a cornucopia of satire, blue comedy, and more emerges from those sensibilities.

 

Four fonts walk into a bar. The barkeep growls, “Get out! We don’t want your type in here.”

 

        In his article “Twelve Guys Walk into a Bar . . . ,” Wayne Curtis reports on the “research” undertaken by Joel Warner and Peter McGraw to answer the question of whether or not alcohol makes people—in this case a dozen members of an advertising team invited to come up with gags while drinking at the Hurricane Club in New York—funnier and also to test McGraw’s “‘benign violation’ theory of humor,” summarized as follows: “Humor arises when something ‘wrong, unsettling, or threatening’ overlaps with a safe, nonthreatening context. . . . So somebody falling down the stairs (violation) is funny, but only if the person lands unhurt (benign). . . A faux-clueless Sarah Silverman saying racist things is funny; a drunk and hostile Mel Gibson is not.” That theory, as far as it goes, is surely tenable, and the data gathered warranted a predictable conclusion: the gagster’s sweet spot is located about “two or three drinks in”; after that, the inventive spirit tends to become less benign and more violational, with the fun apt to go a quip too far.

        Jews have been the world’s most continuously and violently persecuted people and also the best at laughing at themselves—something I should bear in mind as I perform in the vaudeville of my own small world of entirely minor depredations committed against my self-esteem.

 

How does a Jewish princess change a light bulb? She says, “Daddy, I need a new apartment.”

 

        Contemplate the following progression (tripartite, as are many jokes). From Lord Byron’s Don Juan: “And if I laugh at any mortal thing, / ‘Tis that I may not weep. . . .” From Henri Bergson’s Laughter: Essay on the Meaning of the Comic: “The comic requires . . . , in order to produce its full effect, something like a momentary anesthesia of the heart.” Finally, from Friedrich Nietzsche’s The Gay Science: “Laughter signifies: to feel schadenfreude, but with a good conscience.”

 

A woman gets on a bus with her baby. The bus driver says, “That is the ugliest baby I have ever seen.” The woman goes to the rear of the bus and sits down, burning with anger. She says to the man next to her, “The driver just insulted me!” The man says, “You go right back up front and tell him off. Go ahead. I’ll hold your monkey for you.”

 

        Sometimes laughter is tricky to plumb. Think of Mr. Apollinax in one of T. S. Eliot’s poems. His laughter “tinkled among the teacups” but was also “submarine and profound,” and as well he “laughed like an irresponsible foetus.” Given that range of laughter—from genteel to primitive—no wonder the poem asks, “‘But after all what did he mean?’” Such uncertainty may be connected to the more deep-rooted kind that creates coulrophobia, the fear of clowns—caused at least partly by ignorance of who exactly is behind the mask and thus of what he or she means. Recall the lip-sync performance of Roy Orbison’s “In Dreams,” a song that opens with that “candy-colored clown” in David Lynch’s film Blue Velvet. And yet, of course, such a clown figure might be like Canio in Ruggiero Leoncavallo’s opera I Pagliacci, whose heart rages with tragic pain even as he tells himself to laugh about his broken love. It seems plausible that a condition like his afflicts many a comedian. The “show” must go on.

        In Shakespeare’s Much Ado about Nothing Leonato remarks to Don Pedro that his daughter, Hero, “hath often dreamt of unhappiness and waked herself with laughing.” Hero’s repetitive retaking could, with a little tweaking, be refigured illuminatingly in the terminology of Karl Marx’s observation in The Eighteenth Brumaire of Louis Bonaparte that all great events in world history happen twice, “the first time as grand tragedy, the next time as shabby farce.”

 

Why did the skeleton not cross the road? He didn’t have the guts.

 

        Prefacing his Critique of Pure Reason, Immanuel Kant observes that human reason has “the special fate” of being vexed by questions it can’t dismiss but lacks the power to answer. That philosophical joke is reverberant in its implications. Thus it may well be true that nobody can reach the level of intellect necessary to prove the Riemann hypothesis or achieve actual divinity, but maybe we should not react to those restrictions too grievously. Tragedy obsesses about such states. Comedy ridicules them or at a minimum avoids obsessing about them. So, here comes an apropos anecdote. One evening during happy hour my youngest brother, a tad in his cups, phoned me to ask how human consciousness manages to be so remarkably comprehensive in its scope and even to elaborate the self as a spiritual entity. Also liberally lubricated, I was at first flustered by his query, then broke into prolonged—and not very fraternal—laughter. Dismissive—at least for that moment.

        These days the marketers of films and the tribunals that confer awards on them are having great difficulty in defining a given film as a comedy since so many black elements are mixed with the humor. The reason for that imbroglio, I’d venture, has to do with the reality that we have been living in a tragicomic age for some time. In addition, the “tragedy” in lots of films verges on pathos–or, not infrequently, bathos. Nonetheless, there lingers always the question, to borrow the title of one of Michel de Montaigne’s essays, of “How We Cry and Laugh at the Same Thing.” A thought-provoking question, particularly since laughter unadulterated with any telltale of sorrow nonetheless stirs the lachrymal glands–as is obvious from the stock comment about a powerful response to humor that “I laughed until I cried.” And it is not unusual in a tragicomic age for a person caught between feeling and thinking to have to laugh at everything from fear of having to cry about it.

        In his essay “Laughter” Max Beerbohm offers a range of opinions germane to his topic: that he prefers laughter that takes him “unawares”; that no one has died of laughter though it seems to him such an expiration would be “a great euthanasia”; that he would bet “that nine tenths of the world’s best laughter is laughter at, not with.” This insight is particularly epiphanic: “Falstaff is a triumph of comedic creation because we are kept laughing equally at and with him.”

 

I’m on a whiskey diet. I’ve lost three days already.

 

         “The closer to the bone, the less you are alone”–that seems to be the motto of many a stand-up comedian with regard to retaining the audience. But you can’t get too close, even at a roast. To borrow from Ella Wheeler Wilcox’s poem “Solitude,” if you tell the right jokes, “the world laughs with you . . .”; if you tell the wrong ones, “you weep alone . . . .” As the failing comedian would put it, in a predicament that may trigger masochistic humor, “I’m dying up here.”

 

What food group is guaranteed to reduce a woman’s sex drive? Wedding cake.

 

        Humor is marvelously variegated in its categories: billingsgate, satire, drollery, mycterismus, on and on. Likewise variegated are the theories maintaining that it is based on feelings of superiority, a perception of incongruity of some kind, the activation of defense mechanisms, or some other device. Fine. Such exploration would do well, however, to recur to the origin of the word. Humor derives from the Latin noun ūmor (“moisture” or “fluid”) and refers either to something that is comical or to the faculty for perspicaciously discerning and/or artfully expressing it. As the etymology suggests, in this vale of tears people who are “dry” don’t have a good sense of humor, but people who are “wet” laugh readily. If that smacks of pre-modern science, so be it.

 

A rabbi, a priest, and a Baptist minister walk into a bar. The barkeep asks, “Is this a joke?”

 

        An international laughter-yoga movement has been around for a while and is swelling in membership. For a skeptic like me, that is, of course, a laughable development, and yet I must acknowledge that laughter has been scientifically shown to be salubrious by dint of boosting endorphin levels and sponsoring other positive physiological alterations. Mayhap, as Mark Twain, Charlie Chaplin, Lucille Ball, Kurt Vonnegut, and many other humorists, comedians, and comediennes have assured us, laughter really is the best medicine for all manner of sufferings. “Perhaps I know best why man alone laughs,” Nietzsche writes in The Will to Power: “He alone suffers so deeply that he had to discover laughter.”

 

One foggy November morning a family practitioner, a gynecologist, a pathologist, and a surgeon are duck hunting. A bird flies above them. The family practitioner won’t shoot it because he’s not sure it’s a duck. The gynecologist is pretty sure it’s a duck, but he won’t shoot it for fear it might be a hen. The surgeon shoots the bird and, once it has fallen to the ground, says to the pathologist, “Go see if that’s a duck.”

 

        The most intractable problem with the theory of laughter as an expression of superiority, which was championed by such luminaries as René Descartes and Thomas Hobbes and dominant until the eighteenth century, is that it cannot account for the laughter occasioned by most of the humor we experience. That’s easy to prove: just think of any joke you’ve heard recently. With the exception, to be sure, of something like a George W. Bushism on the order of “They misunderestimated me.”

        “He who laughs last laughs best.” Variations of this proverb turn up in many languages and connote laughter as compensation—or, more sharply, revenge. Or, with a twist, maybe as educative retrospection on previous foolishness, a possibility Hobbes adumbrates in The Elements of Law, Natural and Politic when he concludes that “the passion of laughter is nothing else but a sudden glory arising from sudden conception of some eminency in ourselves, by comparison with the infirmities of others, or with our own formerly. . . .” Well, the theory of laughter as an expression of superiority certainly holds sometimes, especially when we have the rearward view of selves surpassing their antecedents.

 

Sherlock Holmes and Dr. Watson are camping out. They have pitched their tent and gone to sleep. Sometime in the middle of the night, Holmes wakes up Watson and says, “Watson, look up at the sky, and tell me what you see.” Watson replies, “I see millions and millions of stars.” Holmes asks, “And what do you deduce from that?” Watson responds, “Well, if there are millions and millions of stars, and if even a few of those have planets, it’s quite likely there are some planets like Earth orbiting around them. And if there are a few planets like Earth, there might also be life on them.” And Holmes says, “Watson, you idiot, it means that somebody has stolen our tent.”

 

        In “The Absurd and Suicide” Camus declares that “there is only one truly serious philosophical problem: it is suicide.” There is only one truly serious solution to that problem: it is laughter. That message is at the core of Harold Ramis’s film Groundhog Day. Phil Connors, the protagonist who attempts suicide, can slip the time loop in which he is trapped (his Sisyphean repetition, his samsara) only by abandoning his egomania, by turning outward to care about other people, and, as commentators on the metaphysical nuances of the film seem not to have noticed, by learning to laugh.

        The foremost proponent of the theory of laughter as relief—promoted in variations by Herbert Spencer, John Dewey, and others and at times mired in hydraulic neurological metaphors—was Freud. His detailed expounding of that theory in Wit and Its Relation to the Unconscious is less conclusive than many of his fans would admit. Be that as it may, the most salient correction concerning his theorizing about jokes, largely ones about either hostility or sex or both, that should be issued is that they don’t, according to him, involve, as is widely misbelieved, the release of repressed emotions but the release of the constipated psychic energy employed to keep them repressed.

 

How many Freudians does it take to screw in a light bulb? Two: one to hold the bulb and one to turn the penis—oops, I mean ladder.

 

        Whenever I used to share with my father any of my too-Tamburlaine-like ambitions, he would address to me his most humbling byword: “If you want to make God laugh, tell him your plans.” Now, that is perspective by incongruity!

 

What’s the difference between God and a doctor. God doesn’t think he’s a doctor.

 

        People with big laughs have big orgasms. That’s a datum that affords some confirmation of the relief theory of laughter.

 

Two behaviorists finish making love. One says to the other, “It was good for you. How was it for me?”

 

        When, after living too long in the realm of lust and luxury and greed, Siddhartha awakens by the river that is virtually a character in Hermann Hesse’s novel Siddhartha, he has a stretch of profound self-reflection, part of which proceeds as follows: “Things were going downhill with him, and now he stood again empty and naked and stupid in the world”; but he could not feel sad about that and “even felt a great urge to laugh, to laugh at himself, to laugh at this strange, foolish world.” And he did laugh. And, later, so did the river.

        In his book Creativity Arieti elaborates a richly skeined consideration of the logic of jokes. He recalls for us Freud’s attempt “to demonstrate that the search for and discovery of an outlet for hindered motivation was the main aim of the joke, just as it was for the dream.” To the extent that his demonstration succeeded—and you can make a solid argument that in some measure it did—what Freud calls wit-work and dream-work may be analyzed as activities that involve parallel cognitive processes both with and against the grain of straightforward logic. As Arieti emphasizes, laughter is triggered by the interaction of the two:
        The listener is temporarily deceived because he first apprehends the
        intellectual process of the joke as logical. A fraction of a second later,
        however, he realizes that the cognitive process is not logical at all, and
        he laughs. He discovers that he is not reacting to logic but either to
        paleologic or to faulty logic. Logic, faulty logic, and paleologic may be
        very similar and, when they are put together as they are in a joke, they
        may deceive us as identical twins do. It is just a fleeting deception,
        however. As soon as we become aware of it, we laugh.
There’s a small addendum to this line of thought that at first seems like a kicker but quickly registers as a transparent truth: “If we know that we are going to listen to a joke, we prepare ourselves to be temporarily deceived.” We get ready to find “discordance in what for a brief interval seemed a concordance,” and the joke we experience is born in the gap. Jokes in which there is little or no discordance “may be compared to those rare dreams whose manifest content coincides with their latent content.” Arieti’s chief example of a “joke” of this stripe is Benjamin Franklin’s remark to John Hancock at the signing of the Declaration of Independence: “We must indeed all hang together, or, most assuredly, we shall all hang separately”—a clever and incisive sentence in its ominous play on the word hang but not actually comical since “it follows both logic and paleologic.”

 

A three-legged dog comes into a saloon in the Old West, limps to the bar, and announces, “I’m looking for the man who shot my paw.”

 

        Let me cite a trenchant apostrophe from one of Pindar’s odes: “Do not, dear soul, strive after immortal life, but exhaust what is possible”—not too far from the English version of Pindar’s Greek that serves as an epigraph for Camus’s “The Myth of Sisyphus” and Other Essays, translated by Justin O’Brien. What is possible for Sisyphus is quite bounded: only his endless, cyclical wrestling with a stone. But, as Camus argues, he does exhaust it because of his attitude toward the hopeless absurdity of his labor. That is to say, as Camus avows in “The Myth of Sisyphus,” “The struggle toward the heights itself suffices to fill a man’s heart.” Consequently, in the oft-quoted words of the close of the piece, “One must imagine Sisyphus happy.” Does he, the absurd hero who is stronger than his eternal rock, laugh from time to time? One must imagine he does.

        The theory that laughter arises from the perception of incongruity that disturbs expectation is now the most cogent one. It is widely accepted by gelotologists (scientists who study laughter) and has a pedigree that, in sundry incarnations, includes predecessors among the speculations of advocates such as Kant and Arthur Schopenhauer. So herewith a germane versicle: If you desire to solve the mystery of laughter, then incongruities enjoyed are what you’re after.

 

I took a picture of an elephant in my pajamas. I don’t know how he got into them.

 

        Bergson is preoccupied with causation in his book Laughter. Laughter, as he dissects it, is very much a collective phenomenon, a purgative for vices that enables sane social life, and it arises in response to situations in which the inborn suppleness, elasticity, and flexibility of life are stiffened by mechanicalness, automatism, and the like (hence, the funniness of pratfalls, absentmindedness, and so on)–situations in which the body displays the rigid behavior of a machine. Broadly interpreted, such theorization can account for a good deal of laughter but hardly for all of it.

        In his book The Life of the Drama Eric Bentley conjures a baseline distinction regarding the role of comedy in human endurance: “In tragedy, but by no means in comedy, the self-preservation instinct is overruled. . . . The comic sense tries to cope with the daily, hourly, inescapable difficulty of being.” That distinction is amplified and, with a different punctuation on the issue of mortality, made more existentially poignant by Christopher Fry in his essay “Comedy”: “The difference between tragedy and comedy is the difference between experience and intuition. In the experience [of tragedy] we strive against every condition of our animal life: against death, against the frustration of ambition, against the instability of human love. In the intuition [of comedy] we trust the arduous eccentricities we’re born to, and see the oddness of a creature who has never got acclimatized to being created.” If, however, everything goes wrong and the oddness stops being funny and skews into crazy stress or even hallucinations, we may hesitate at the sill but then, like Septimus Warren Smith in Virginia Woolf’s novel Mrs. Dalloway, go ahead and jump.

 

How many surrealists does it take to change a light bulb? Two: one to hold the giraffe and one to fill the bathtub with brightly-colored machine tools.

 

        As Horace Walpole and others have affirmed, the world is a tragedy for those who feel and a comedy for those who think. Moreover, either can be embedded in the other. Ponder the well-known scene in Shakespeare’s Macbeth in which the porter does his comedic shtick–a welcome intermission of alarm-alleviating (and, askance, thematically relevant) wit just before the emotionally chaotic revelation of regicide. To stay in that vein, many years ago, while cleaning up the mess from my father’s gunshot suicide, I was choked with grief and nearly gagging; but at one point, I vividly recollect, I laughed—I couldn’t stop myself—as I thought about the utterly macabre weirdness of what I was doing. Was that laughter an act of acquiescence or of revolt, of assent or of refusal? Such a distressing fluctuation, as Camus has testified, defines the artist and the artistic calling.

 

A doctor, leaving the bedside of a woman whose husband accompanies him, exclaims worrisomely, “I do not like her looks.” “I haven’t liked her looks for a long time,” the husband rejoins.

 

        The year is 1327. In the labyrinthine library in the Italian abbey to which Brother William of Baskerville has been sent to investigate rumored heresy—as is recounted in Umberto Eco’s novel The Name of the Rose—one manuscript has been carefully hidden at all costs. Near the end of a likewise labyrinthine plot that progresses through a series of murders, William discovers that the manuscript is the second book of Aristotle’s Poetics, long believed irrecoverably lost or never written, which treats comedy with much the same erudition that informs the Stagirite’s treatment of tragedy in the Poetics as we have it today. Why was it hidden? Aristotle, as William reads him, values comedy “as a force for good, which can also have an instructive value: through witty riddles and unexpected metaphors, though it tells us things differently from the way they are, as if it were lying, it actually obliges us to examine them more closely, and it makes us say: Ah, this is just how things are, and I didn’t know it.” Thus, as the blind librarian Jorge de Burgos explains more apprehensively, the manuscript poses a terrible danger because through Aristotle’s sophisticated and convincing argument “the function of laughter . . . is elevated to art . . . ,” which opens up the possibility that it “would be transformed into an operation of the brain” and not merely of the belly—which could lead to all manner of mockery and critique of the truths of Scripture. Oddly enough, this negative position, not far from that of Plato in his Republic, was not at all that of the more Aristotelian Thomas Aquinas, who—unlike most of the Church Fathers and, later, the Puritans—in his Summa Theologica advocates the pleasure of humor in moderation as a form of spiritual rest, solace for the soul. A plethora of comedy, even with no direct assistance from Aristotle, has dealt and still deals incredulously with all sorts of “truths” to help us know “just how things are.”

 

How do you get holy water? Boil the hell out of it.

 

        In Shakespeare’s King Lear, Edgar, disguised as poor Tom, nicely nutshells the difference between tragedy and comedy: “The lamentable change is from the best; / The worst returns to laughter.” Every silver lining has a cloud versus its chiasmic opposite. More Senecan counsel might simply encourage us to transcend any such teetering and simply laugh at life rather than lament it.

 

Someone stole my mood ring. I don’t know how I feel about that.

 

        In his essay “Beyond Laughter: A Summing Up,” Martin Grotjohn sums up a happy evolutionary beginning: when our remote ancestors stood upright, that posture “freed the hand for reaching and holding, and the human mouth was free to talk, to smile, and to laugh, no longer being needed to hold things, like the mouth of a dog”—though he later adds that the third of those three gestures, when inappropriate, “is a significant sign of deterioration.” In which case a happy ending may not be in the offing–rather something more like what is anticipated in Proverbs 14:13: “Even in laughter the heart is sad, and the end of joy is grief.”

 

        Assuredly, there were first jokes, but there are no last jokes—not yet anyway—though there are last words (purportedly) that can serve the purpose, among them these from famous persons:
        Humphrey Bogart: I should never have switched from Scotch to
                                            martinis.
        Oscar Wilde: Either that wallpaper goes, or I do.
        Sir Donald Wolfit: Dying is easy. Comedy is hard.
The last two cris de coeur are especially pertinent here, Wilde’s because the punning is perfect in its economy, Wolfit’s because it bears so aptly on my topic.

 

The final paragraph of Benjamin Lehmann’s essay “Comedy and Laughter” offers what may be the best peroration on that dyad we could wish for:
             Comedy did not invent incongruity, it discovered it. Long before
        psychiatry formulated analogous concepts, comedy discovered the
        masque, the disguise, mistaken identity. Comedy found them what we
        call laughable, but on the deeper level felt them as symbolic expression.
        It recognized in non-sequiturs the verbal symbol of those minor
        derangements in the sequence of events which are always present when
        we view reality with preconceptions. It found in wit—the surprising
        juxtaposition, implied or expressed and happily phrased—the verbal
        suggestion of the infinite possibilities of being and of connection. In
        those unillusioned judgments made with love, what we call humor, it
        found the manner of consent to all possible being and all possible
        connection. In puns, which begin with one meaning and end with
        another, it found the verbal means of rendering those random collisions
        of phenomena which both do, and do not, make sense. And each of
        these, perceived, may make us laugh; but their doing so is incidental to
        another effect which is a delight too deep for laughter, a joy too
        pervasive for laughter. That effect is a felt affirmation about life which
        chimes with our intuitive sense of how things are and with our deep
        human desire to be re-created by seeing true humanness prevail,
        against the frightening altitudes of aspiration, against the set
        mechanism of the habitual and conventional, against the threat of
        corruption and of time.
Any questions?

 

Why can’t you tell a joke while standing on ice? Because it might crack up.

 

        As announced in Nietzsche’s Thus Spake Zarathustra, “Laughing lions must come.” Well, perchance so. If not—or until then—let us at least regularly repeat James Joyce’s supplicant send-up in Finnegans Wake of a refrain in The Book of Common Prayer: “Loud, heap miseries upon us yet entwine our arts with laughters low!”