Read The Act of Creation Online
Authors: Arthur Koestler
The Act of Creation (6 page)
The details of Spencer's theory (parts of which Freud incorporated
into his own) [7] have become obsolete; but its basic thesis that
'emotion tends to beget bodily motion' has not only been confirmed,
but has become so much of a commonplace in contemporary neurophysiology
that the need to qualify it is often forgotten. For there exist, of
course, emotional states -- looking at the sea, or engaging in religious
contemplation -- which, on the contrary, tend to promote relaxation
and bodily passivity. The title of Walter B. Cannon's pioneer work,
which had a decisive influence on the modern approach to the problem of
emotions --
Bodily Changes in Pain, Hunger, Fear, and Rage
-- ought to
have acted as a warning that the emotions which mobilize the body into
action all belong to an important, but nevertheless limited, category --
that which enters the service of the self-assertive tendencies. Cannon
himself warned -- with little success -- against the lumping together of
all emotions into a kind of red rag drenched with adrenalin.* However,
for the moment we are concerned only with precisely this limited category
-- the aggressive-defensive type of emotion which enters into the comic.
When the Marquis in the Chamfort story rushes to the window, our
intellect turns a somersault and enters with gusto into the new game;
but the piquant expectations which the narrative carried, including
perhaps an unconscious admixture of sadism, cannot be transferred to
the other, the 'quid-pro-quo' matrix; they are disposed of through
channels of least resistance. When Othello, on the point of strangling
Desdemona, breaks into hiccoughs and is transformed into a poor, sodden
ham, our thoughts are again capable of performing the jump from one
associative context into another, but our tension, now deprived of its
logical justification, must somehow be worked off. In a word, laughter
is aggression (or apprehension) robbed of its logical
raison
d'être
; the puffing away of emotion discarded by thought.
To give another example: one of the popular devices of sustained humour
is impersonation. Children imitating adults, the comedian impersonating
a public figure, men disguised as women and women as men -- in all these
cases the impersonator is perceived as himself and somebody else at the
same time. While this situation lasts, the two matrices are bisociated
in the spectator's mind; and while his intellect is capable of swiftly
oscillating from one matrix to the other and back, his emotions are
incapable of following these acrobatic turns; they are spilled into the
gutters of laughter as soup is spilled on a rocking ship.
What these metaphors are meant to convey is that the
aggressive-defensive class of emotions has a greater inertia,
persistence, or mass momentum than reason
. This assumption is tacitly
shared by most psychological theories, but it needs to be explicitly
stated in order to appreciate its consequences. The most important among
these is that quite frequently our emotions are incapable of keeping step
with our reason and become divorced from reason. In psychopathology this
phenomenon is taken for granted, but its significance in less extreme
situations is generally overlooked -- although both common experience and
neurophysiology ought to make it obvious. Emotions of the self-asserting
type involve a wide range of bodily changes, such as increased secretion
of the adrenal glands, increase of blood sugar, acceleration of heart
rate, speedier clotting of the blood, altered breathing, inhibition
of digestive activity, changes in electric skin resistance, sweating,
'goose-pimples' which make the hair of the skin stand on end, dilation
of the pupils, muscle tension, and tremor. The joint effect of these
so-called emergency reactions is to put the whole organism into a state
of readiness for come what may; sweating, for instance, disposes of
the heat generated by fight or flight, and the abundance of blood sugar
in the circulation provides the muscles with excess energy. Hence the
remarkable feats of force of which people are capable in danger; but more
important from our point of view is the lowering of the threshhold of
motor responses -- the increased excitability of the muscles by nervous
impulses, and the resulting tendency to violent movement, to 'work off',
or at least 'shake off', the physiological effects of emotion. The chief
mediators of this general mobilization of the resources of the body are
the so-called sympathetic division of the autonomous nervous system, and
the hormones secreted by the medulla of the suprarenal glands: adrenalin
and nor-adrenalin, the 'humours' of fear and anger. Since these nervous
and glandular processes are interrelated, it is convenient to refer
to them jointly as activities of the sympathico-adrenal system. (To
avoid confusion, I must underline that the sympathetic nervous system
has nothing to do with the friendly emotion of sympathy; rather, as I
have just said, with its opposites: rage and fear. However, by a lucky
coincidence the initials of Sympathico-Adrenal system are the same as
those of the Self-Assertive emotions which are aroused by it.)
It follows from the above that these emotions involve incomparably
heavier machinery, acting on the whole body, than the process of
thinking which, physiologically speaking, is confined to the roof of
the brain. The chemical and visceral states induced by the action of the
sympathico-adrenal system tend to persist; once this massive apparatus
is set in motion it cannot be called off or 'change its direction' at a
moment's notice. Common observation provides daily, painful confirmation
of this. We are literally 'poisoned' by our adrenal humours; reason
has little power over irritability or anxiety; it takes time to talk a
person out of a mood, however valid the arguments; passion is blind to
better judgement; anger and fear show physical after-effects long after
their causes have been removed. If we could change our moods as quickly
as we jump from one thought to another we would be acrobats of emotion.
Thinking, in its physiological aspect, is based on electro-chemical
activities in the cerebral cortex and related regions of the brain,
involving energy transactions which are minute compared to the massive
glandular, visceral, and muscular changes that occur when emotions are
aroused. These changes are governed by phylogenetically much older parts
of the brain than the roof-structures which enable man to think in verbal
symbols. Behaviour at any moment is the outcome of complex processes which
operate simultaneously on several levels of the nervous system, from
the spinal cord to our latest acquisition, the prefrontal lobes. There
is probably no formal thinking without some affective colouring; but it
is nevertheless legitimate to distinguish between form and colour --
in our case between the logical pattern of a comic narrative and the
emotive charge which it carries.
The sympathico-adrenal system might be compared to the body of a piano
which gives resonance to the cortical strings of thought. When all is well
the huge wooden box lends depth and colour and warmth to the vibrations
of the strings. But if you play a humorous scherzo with full pedal on,
the resonating body is unable to follow the swift modulations of the
chords -- thought and emotion have become dissociated. It is
emotion
deserted by thought
which is discharged in laughter. For emotion,
owing to its greater mass momentum, is unable to follow the sudden switch
of ideas to a different type of logic or a new rule of the game; less
nimble than thought, it tends to persist in a straight line. Ariel leads
Caliban on by the nose: she jumps on a branch, he crashes into the tree.
It could be objected that the faint emotive charge of a joke, the slight
malice or salaciousness which it arouses, would not be sufficient to
bring the massive sympathico-adrenal machinery into action. The answer
lies in the anachronistic character of our autonomous responses to
stimuli which carry an echo, however faint, of situations that held a
threat or promise in the remote past of the species; which once were
biologically relevant, though they no longer are. These reactions lag
by many millennia behind the conditions in which we live: we jump at a
sudden sound; we develop gooseflesh in response to a screeching noise, to
make our long-lost body hair bristle at the attack of some extinct beast;
we sweat before an examination -- to dispose of the excessive heat our
bodies might develop in the impending struggle with the examiner. I like
to call these innate, anachronistic responses the
over-statements of
the body
. One of the remarkable things about them is that they can
be triggered off by certain stimuli in minute, quasi-homeopathic doses.
To sum up, the grain of salt which must be present in the narrative to
make us laugh turns out to be a drop of adrenalin.
The Mechanism of Laughter
In the first chapter I discussed the logic of humour; in the previous
section its emotional dynamics. Fitting the two together, we can now
expand the
formula on page 35
as follows: The sudden
bisociation of a mental event with two habitually incompatible matrices
results in an abrupt transfer of the train of thought from one associative
context to another. The emotive charge which the narrative carried
cannot be so transferred owing to its greater inertia and persistence;
discarded by reason, the tension finds its outlet in laughter.
But that still leaves the question open why the excess energy should be
worked off in the particular form of laughter and not, say, by flapping
one's arms or wiggling one's toes. The somewhat tentative answer is that
the muscular contractions and breathing actions in laughter seem to offer
natural channels of least resistance for the overflow. To quote Freud:
manifestations of relief from tension, would thereafter become channels
of least resistance.
The peculiar breathing in laughter, with its repeated, explosive
exhalations, seems designed to 'puff away' surplus tension in a kind of
respiratory gymnastics; and the vigorous gestures and slapping of thighs
obviously serve the same function. Often these massive reactions seem
to be quite out of proportion to the feeble stimuli which provoke them
-- particularly when we do not like the type of joke which causes such
hilarity in others:
is the familiar pattern of the practical joke which the laws of physics
play on the artist, suddenly revealing that his magic strings are made
of common cat-gut -- 'I know you from a plum-tree'. The 'consternation'
on Oistrakh's face is the consternation of the man slipping on the banana
skin; exaltation is debunked by the sudden impact of triviality. But all
this does not account for that unexpected, barbaric outburst of hilarity
which schoolmasters know only too well -- unless one realizes that what
I call, somewhat abstractly, 'the emotional charge of the narrative'
contains here a mass of resentment, mostly perhaps unconscious, at having
to sit still and listen 'with studious attention' to that Russian with
the unpronounceable name; a repressed emotion, tending to beget fidgety
motions, until the tension snaps with the string, releasing the outburst,
instantly transforming the hushed class into a horde of savages.
In other words, all discussions of the comic remain bloodless
abstractions unless we bear in mind that laughter is a phenomenon of
the trigger-release type, where a minute cause can open the tap of
surprisingly large stores of energy from various sources: repressed
sadism; repressed sex; repressed fear; even repressed boredom. Here is
a list of 'occasions for laughter' recorded by American undergraduates
in reply to a questionnaire:
mirthless and humourless;* it can be contrived as a means of social
communication or in lieu of a rude noise. It can also serve to cover
up sexual or sadistic gloating, as in the forced, tumescent laughter
of the spectators at a strip-tease -- or in the jolly manifestations of
English popular humour at public hangings in the last century.
Surprisingly, Bergson believed that one can only laugh in the presence
of others -- presumably because this fitted his theory of laughter as an
act of social correction ('one has no taste for the comic when one feels
isolated. It seems that laughter needs an echo. Our laughter is always
the laughter of a group.'). [11] No doubt, collective giggling fits do
occur in dormitories at girls' schools, and no doubt one laughs with
more gusto in company than alone. But the infectiousness of emotive
manifestations is a well-known phenomenon in group behaviour, which
equally applies to hysteria, panic, even to infectious coughing of
theatre audiences; it is not a specific characteristic of laughter,
and contributes nothing to its explanation.
Lastly, laughter or smiling frequently occur in response to stimuli
which in themselves are not comic, but merely signs or symbols for
comic stimuli, or even symbols of symbols -- Chaplin's boots, Groucho
Marx's cigar, caricatures of celebrities reduced to a few visual hints,
catch-phrases and allusions to familiar situations. The analysis of
these oblique cases often requires tracing back a long and involved
thread of associations to its source, which is not much fun; yet the
procedure is essentially the same as the literary critic's or the art
historian's when they try to analyse the evocative power of a poetic
image or a landscape. The task is made more complicated by the fact
that the effect of such comic symbols -- the sight of Colonel Blimp
on a cartoon, the appearance of Falstaff on the stage -- appears to be
instantaneous; there seems to be no time for first accumulating and then
discharging tension. But in these cases memory serves as an accumulator,
a storage battery whose electric charge can be sparked off any time: the
smile which greets Papageno strutting on to the scene is derived from a
mixture of memories and expectations. All of which goes to show that to
find the explanation why we laugh may be a task as delicate as analysing
the chemical composition of a perfume, with its multiple ingredients --
some of which are never perceived, while others, sniffed in isolation,
would make us wince.
The Importance of not being Earnest
Discussing the problem of man's innate aggressive tendencies, Aldous
Huxley once said:
people. There are, of course, other outlets for tame aggression:
sport, politics, book-reviewing, and so forth; but these are conscious,
voluntary activities, whereas laughter is a spontaneous, physiological
reflex, a gift of nature included in our native equipment as part of
the evolutionary package deal. Not only the functions of our glands,
but the whole autonomous nervous system and the emotion-controlling
centres in the mid-brain, are much older than the Paleolithic Age, and
reflect conditions at a stage of human evolution when the struggle for
existence was more deadly than at present and when any unusual sight or
sound had to be answered by jumping, bristling, fight, or flight. As
security and comfort increased in the species, the affect-generating
emergency mechanisms of the sympathico-adrenal system gradually became an
anachronism. But organs and their functions do not atrophy at the rate at
which they become redundant; and thus the biological evolution of homo
saplens (if it has not stopped altogether) lags dangerously behind his
mental evolution. One consequence of this is that our brains have become
'divided houses of faith and reason', of thinking at odds with emotions;
another, that our emotive responses have become 'over-statements of the
body' out of all proportion with the reactions biologically required or
socially permitted -- and cannot be worked off through their original
channels. Fortunately, at some point along the evolutionary line, the
luxury reflexes of laughter and weeping emerged as overflow mechanisms
for the disposal of at least part of our redundant emotions. They are
obviously twin reflexes: laughter serving the disposal of aggressive
emotions cast off by the intellect, while crying (to anticipate once
more) facilitates the overflow of participatory emotions accepted by
the intellect.
It follows that two conditions had to be fulfilled before
homo
ridens
, the laughing animal, could emerge: first a relative security
of existence, which called for new outlets for excess energies; second
and more important, a level of evolution had to be reached where reasoning
had gained a certain degree of autonomy from the 'blind' urges of emotion;
where thought had acquired that independence and nimbleness which enable
it to detach itself from feeling -- and to confront its glandular humours
with a sense of humour. Only at this stage of 'cortical emancipation'
could man perceive his own emotions as redundant, and make the smiling
admission 'I have been fooled'.
into his own) [7] have become obsolete; but its basic thesis that
'emotion tends to beget bodily motion' has not only been confirmed,
but has become so much of a commonplace in contemporary neurophysiology
that the need to qualify it is often forgotten. For there exist, of
course, emotional states -- looking at the sea, or engaging in religious
contemplation -- which, on the contrary, tend to promote relaxation
and bodily passivity. The title of Walter B. Cannon's pioneer work,
which had a decisive influence on the modern approach to the problem of
emotions --
Bodily Changes in Pain, Hunger, Fear, and Rage
-- ought to
have acted as a warning that the emotions which mobilize the body into
action all belong to an important, but nevertheless limited, category --
that which enters the service of the self-assertive tendencies. Cannon
himself warned -- with little success -- against the lumping together of
all emotions into a kind of red rag drenched with adrenalin.* However,
for the moment we are concerned only with precisely this limited category
-- the aggressive-defensive type of emotion which enters into the comic.
When the Marquis in the Chamfort story rushes to the window, our
intellect turns a somersault and enters with gusto into the new game;
but the piquant expectations which the narrative carried, including
perhaps an unconscious admixture of sadism, cannot be transferred to
the other, the 'quid-pro-quo' matrix; they are disposed of through
channels of least resistance. When Othello, on the point of strangling
Desdemona, breaks into hiccoughs and is transformed into a poor, sodden
ham, our thoughts are again capable of performing the jump from one
associative context into another, but our tension, now deprived of its
logical justification, must somehow be worked off. In a word, laughter
is aggression (or apprehension) robbed of its logical
raison
d'être
; the puffing away of emotion discarded by thought.
To give another example: one of the popular devices of sustained humour
is impersonation. Children imitating adults, the comedian impersonating
a public figure, men disguised as women and women as men -- in all these
cases the impersonator is perceived as himself and somebody else at the
same time. While this situation lasts, the two matrices are bisociated
in the spectator's mind; and while his intellect is capable of swiftly
oscillating from one matrix to the other and back, his emotions are
incapable of following these acrobatic turns; they are spilled into the
gutters of laughter as soup is spilled on a rocking ship.
What these metaphors are meant to convey is that the
aggressive-defensive class of emotions has a greater inertia,
persistence, or mass momentum than reason
. This assumption is tacitly
shared by most psychological theories, but it needs to be explicitly
stated in order to appreciate its consequences. The most important among
these is that quite frequently our emotions are incapable of keeping step
with our reason and become divorced from reason. In psychopathology this
phenomenon is taken for granted, but its significance in less extreme
situations is generally overlooked -- although both common experience and
neurophysiology ought to make it obvious. Emotions of the self-asserting
type involve a wide range of bodily changes, such as increased secretion
of the adrenal glands, increase of blood sugar, acceleration of heart
rate, speedier clotting of the blood, altered breathing, inhibition
of digestive activity, changes in electric skin resistance, sweating,
'goose-pimples' which make the hair of the skin stand on end, dilation
of the pupils, muscle tension, and tremor. The joint effect of these
so-called emergency reactions is to put the whole organism into a state
of readiness for come what may; sweating, for instance, disposes of
the heat generated by fight or flight, and the abundance of blood sugar
in the circulation provides the muscles with excess energy. Hence the
remarkable feats of force of which people are capable in danger; but more
important from our point of view is the lowering of the threshhold of
motor responses -- the increased excitability of the muscles by nervous
impulses, and the resulting tendency to violent movement, to 'work off',
or at least 'shake off', the physiological effects of emotion. The chief
mediators of this general mobilization of the resources of the body are
the so-called sympathetic division of the autonomous nervous system, and
the hormones secreted by the medulla of the suprarenal glands: adrenalin
and nor-adrenalin, the 'humours' of fear and anger. Since these nervous
and glandular processes are interrelated, it is convenient to refer
to them jointly as activities of the sympathico-adrenal system. (To
avoid confusion, I must underline that the sympathetic nervous system
has nothing to do with the friendly emotion of sympathy; rather, as I
have just said, with its opposites: rage and fear. However, by a lucky
coincidence the initials of Sympathico-Adrenal system are the same as
those of the Self-Assertive emotions which are aroused by it.)
It follows from the above that these emotions involve incomparably
heavier machinery, acting on the whole body, than the process of
thinking which, physiologically speaking, is confined to the roof of
the brain. The chemical and visceral states induced by the action of the
sympathico-adrenal system tend to persist; once this massive apparatus
is set in motion it cannot be called off or 'change its direction' at a
moment's notice. Common observation provides daily, painful confirmation
of this. We are literally 'poisoned' by our adrenal humours; reason
has little power over irritability or anxiety; it takes time to talk a
person out of a mood, however valid the arguments; passion is blind to
better judgement; anger and fear show physical after-effects long after
their causes have been removed. If we could change our moods as quickly
as we jump from one thought to another we would be acrobats of emotion.
Thinking, in its physiological aspect, is based on electro-chemical
activities in the cerebral cortex and related regions of the brain,
involving energy transactions which are minute compared to the massive
glandular, visceral, and muscular changes that occur when emotions are
aroused. These changes are governed by phylogenetically much older parts
of the brain than the roof-structures which enable man to think in verbal
symbols. Behaviour at any moment is the outcome of complex processes which
operate simultaneously on several levels of the nervous system, from
the spinal cord to our latest acquisition, the prefrontal lobes. There
is probably no formal thinking without some affective colouring; but it
is nevertheless legitimate to distinguish between form and colour --
in our case between the logical pattern of a comic narrative and the
emotive charge which it carries.
The sympathico-adrenal system might be compared to the body of a piano
which gives resonance to the cortical strings of thought. When all is well
the huge wooden box lends depth and colour and warmth to the vibrations
of the strings. But if you play a humorous scherzo with full pedal on,
the resonating body is unable to follow the swift modulations of the
chords -- thought and emotion have become dissociated. It is
emotion
deserted by thought
which is discharged in laughter. For emotion,
owing to its greater mass momentum, is unable to follow the sudden switch
of ideas to a different type of logic or a new rule of the game; less
nimble than thought, it tends to persist in a straight line. Ariel leads
Caliban on by the nose: she jumps on a branch, he crashes into the tree.
It could be objected that the faint emotive charge of a joke, the slight
malice or salaciousness which it arouses, would not be sufficient to
bring the massive sympathico-adrenal machinery into action. The answer
lies in the anachronistic character of our autonomous responses to
stimuli which carry an echo, however faint, of situations that held a
threat or promise in the remote past of the species; which once were
biologically relevant, though they no longer are. These reactions lag
by many millennia behind the conditions in which we live: we jump at a
sudden sound; we develop gooseflesh in response to a screeching noise, to
make our long-lost body hair bristle at the attack of some extinct beast;
we sweat before an examination -- to dispose of the excessive heat our
bodies might develop in the impending struggle with the examiner. I like
to call these innate, anachronistic responses the
over-statements of
the body
. One of the remarkable things about them is that they can
be triggered off by certain stimuli in minute, quasi-homeopathic doses.
To sum up, the grain of salt which must be present in the narrative to
make us laugh turns out to be a drop of adrenalin.
The Mechanism of Laughter
In the first chapter I discussed the logic of humour; in the previous
section its emotional dynamics. Fitting the two together, we can now
expand the
formula on page 35
as follows: The sudden
bisociation of a mental event with two habitually incompatible matrices
results in an abrupt transfer of the train of thought from one associative
context to another. The emotive charge which the narrative carried
cannot be so transferred owing to its greater inertia and persistence;
discarded by reason, the tension finds its outlet in laughter.
But that still leaves the question open why the excess energy should be
worked off in the particular form of laughter and not, say, by flapping
one's arms or wiggling one's toes. The somewhat tentative answer is that
the muscular contractions and breathing actions in laughter seem to offer
natural channels of least resistance for the overflow. To quote Freud:
According to the best of my knowledge, the grimaces and contortions ofIn other words, the muscle-contractions of the smile, as the earliest
the corners of the mouth that characterize laughter appear first in
the satisfied and over-satiated nursling when he drowsily quits the
breast. . . . They are physical expressions of the determination to
take no more nourishment, an 'enough' so to speak, or rather a 'more
than enough'. . . . This primal sense of pleasurable saturation may
have provided the link between the smile -- that basic phenomenon
underlying laughter -- and its subsequent connection with other
pleasurable processes of de-tension. [8]
manifestations of relief from tension, would thereafter become channels
of least resistance.
The peculiar breathing in laughter, with its repeated, explosive
exhalations, seems designed to 'puff away' surplus tension in a kind of
respiratory gymnastics; and the vigorous gestures and slapping of thighs
obviously serve the same function. Often these massive reactions seem
to be quite out of proportion to the feeble stimuli which provoke them
-- particularly when we do not like the type of joke which causes such
hilarity in others:
A thousand Edinburgh schoolchildren burst into laughter when DavidLet us try to understand what those brats found so funny. Firstly, there
Oistrakh, the Russian violinist, snapped a string while playing
Schubert's Fantasy in C Major during a recital of a city housing estate
yesterday. Their studious attention broke when Mr. Oistrakh -- guest
ofhonour at the Edinburgh Festival -- held up the violin and looked
with consternation at his accompanist. [9]
is the familiar pattern of the practical joke which the laws of physics
play on the artist, suddenly revealing that his magic strings are made
of common cat-gut -- 'I know you from a plum-tree'. The 'consternation'
on Oistrakh's face is the consternation of the man slipping on the banana
skin; exaltation is debunked by the sudden impact of triviality. But all
this does not account for that unexpected, barbaric outburst of hilarity
which schoolmasters know only too well -- unless one realizes that what
I call, somewhat abstractly, 'the emotional charge of the narrative'
contains here a mass of resentment, mostly perhaps unconscious, at having
to sit still and listen 'with studious attention' to that Russian with
the unpronounceable name; a repressed emotion, tending to beget fidgety
motions, until the tension snaps with the string, releasing the outburst,
instantly transforming the hushed class into a horde of savages.
In other words, all discussions of the comic remain bloodless
abstractions unless we bear in mind that laughter is a phenomenon of
the trigger-release type, where a minute cause can open the tap of
surprisingly large stores of energy from various sources: repressed
sadism; repressed sex; repressed fear; even repressed boredom. Here is
a list of 'occasions for laughter' recorded by American undergraduates
in reply to a questionnaire:
A pillow fight in the dormitoryThis ought to be enough to make one realize that laughter may be entirely
A girl friend tore her dress
I fell during skating
A dog came in during a lecture
A mispronounced word in rhetoric class
Being teased about my corpulence
Lizzie trying to do a fairy dance
My opponents in a bridge game bidding four spades when I held two aces
and the king, jack and five of spades
An article by a priest on the sex life of H. G. Wells. [10]
mirthless and humourless;* it can be contrived as a means of social
communication or in lieu of a rude noise. It can also serve to cover
up sexual or sadistic gloating, as in the forced, tumescent laughter
of the spectators at a strip-tease -- or in the jolly manifestations of
English popular humour at public hangings in the last century.
Surprisingly, Bergson believed that one can only laugh in the presence
of others -- presumably because this fitted his theory of laughter as an
act of social correction ('one has no taste for the comic when one feels
isolated. It seems that laughter needs an echo. Our laughter is always
the laughter of a group.'). [11] No doubt, collective giggling fits do
occur in dormitories at girls' schools, and no doubt one laughs with
more gusto in company than alone. But the infectiousness of emotive
manifestations is a well-known phenomenon in group behaviour, which
equally applies to hysteria, panic, even to infectious coughing of
theatre audiences; it is not a specific characteristic of laughter,
and contributes nothing to its explanation.
Lastly, laughter or smiling frequently occur in response to stimuli
which in themselves are not comic, but merely signs or symbols for
comic stimuli, or even symbols of symbols -- Chaplin's boots, Groucho
Marx's cigar, caricatures of celebrities reduced to a few visual hints,
catch-phrases and allusions to familiar situations. The analysis of
these oblique cases often requires tracing back a long and involved
thread of associations to its source, which is not much fun; yet the
procedure is essentially the same as the literary critic's or the art
historian's when they try to analyse the evocative power of a poetic
image or a landscape. The task is made more complicated by the fact
that the effect of such comic symbols -- the sight of Colonel Blimp
on a cartoon, the appearance of Falstaff on the stage -- appears to be
instantaneous; there seems to be no time for first accumulating and then
discharging tension. But in these cases memory serves as an accumulator,
a storage battery whose electric charge can be sparked off any time: the
smile which greets Papageno strutting on to the scene is derived from a
mixture of memories and expectations. All of which goes to show that to
find the explanation why we laugh may be a task as delicate as analysing
the chemical composition of a perfume, with its multiple ingredients --
some of which are never perceived, while others, sniffed in isolation,
would make us wince.
The Importance of not being Earnest
Discussing the problem of man's innate aggressive tendencies, Aldous
Huxley once said:
On the physiological level I suppose the problem is linked with the factA third alternative, which Huxley overlooked, is to laugh at
that we carry around with us a glandular system which was admirably well
adapted to life in the Paleolithic times but is not very well adapted to
life now. Thus we tend to produce more adrenalin than is good for us,
and we either suppress ourselves and turn destructive energies inwards
or else we do not suppress ourselves and we start hitting people. [12]
people. There are, of course, other outlets for tame aggression:
sport, politics, book-reviewing, and so forth; but these are conscious,
voluntary activities, whereas laughter is a spontaneous, physiological
reflex, a gift of nature included in our native equipment as part of
the evolutionary package deal. Not only the functions of our glands,
but the whole autonomous nervous system and the emotion-controlling
centres in the mid-brain, are much older than the Paleolithic Age, and
reflect conditions at a stage of human evolution when the struggle for
existence was more deadly than at present and when any unusual sight or
sound had to be answered by jumping, bristling, fight, or flight. As
security and comfort increased in the species, the affect-generating
emergency mechanisms of the sympathico-adrenal system gradually became an
anachronism. But organs and their functions do not atrophy at the rate at
which they become redundant; and thus the biological evolution of homo
saplens (if it has not stopped altogether) lags dangerously behind his
mental evolution. One consequence of this is that our brains have become
'divided houses of faith and reason', of thinking at odds with emotions;
another, that our emotive responses have become 'over-statements of the
body' out of all proportion with the reactions biologically required or
socially permitted -- and cannot be worked off through their original
channels. Fortunately, at some point along the evolutionary line, the
luxury reflexes of laughter and weeping emerged as overflow mechanisms
for the disposal of at least part of our redundant emotions. They are
obviously twin reflexes: laughter serving the disposal of aggressive
emotions cast off by the intellect, while crying (to anticipate once
more) facilitates the overflow of participatory emotions accepted by
the intellect.
It follows that two conditions had to be fulfilled before
homo
ridens
, the laughing animal, could emerge: first a relative security
of existence, which called for new outlets for excess energies; second
and more important, a level of evolution had to be reached where reasoning
had gained a certain degree of autonomy from the 'blind' urges of emotion;
where thought had acquired that independence and nimbleness which enable
it to detach itself from feeling -- and to confront its glandular humours
with a sense of humour. Only at this stage of 'cortical emancipation'
could man perceive his own emotions as redundant, and make the smiling
admission 'I have been fooled'.
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