The Act of Creation (9 page)
Read The Act of Creation Online
Authors: Arthur Koestler
However, an additional factor enters into the comic effect of some
disorders of behaviour such as stuttering, mispronunciation, misspelling:
one might call it the bisociation of structure and function, or of part
and whole. The stammering barbarian was a comic figure to the Greeks for
reasons just mentioned; but the comedian's stage-stutter is funny in a
different way. When he struggles with a consonant, trying to take the
same hurdle again and again, eyes bulging and face convulsed, we become
suddenly aware of the complicated motions of lips and tongue required
to produce the sound
M
; our attention becomes focussed on these
physiological details torn from their functional context and placed under
a magnifying glass, as it were. Much the same happens when the gramophone
needle gets stuck in a groove, and the soprano's voice keeps repeating
the same word on the same quaver. The part has become detachcd from the
whole and monopolizes attention as if it existed in its own right, as an
independent structural entity, regardless of its function in the larger
context from which alone its meaning is derived. In one of Silone's novels
an innocent peasant boy from the Abruzzi drifts into a crowd in front of
Mussolini's new forum, and cannot understand why everybody keeps chanting
in a chorus: 'Ce-du, ce-du, ce-du, ce-du . . .' The isolated quaver or
consonant which has made a declaration of independence, the syllables
'du' and 'ce' torn from their context, are examples of the conflict
which can arise between part and whole, structure and function, when --
to put it in a different way -- the dependent part pretends to be an
independent whole and forces our attention to regard it as such.
When we exercise a well-practised skill the parts must function smoothly
and automatically -- they must never occupy the focus of attention. This
is true whether the skill in question is riding a bicycle, playing the
violin, enunciating the letter
M
, or forming sentences according to
the rules of grammar and syntax. The code which controls the performance
functions, as we repeatedly saw, on a lower level of consciousness than
the performance itself -- on the fringes of awareness or, in completely
automatized skills, even beyond the fringe. The moment attention is
focussed on a normally automatized part-function such as enunciating
consonants, the matrix breaks down, the needle gets stuck, and the
performance is paralysed -- like the centipede who was asked in which
order he moved his hundred legs, and could walk no more.
The paradox of the centipede is a consequence of the hierarchic
organization of the nervous system which demands that the highest
centres should be occupied with the task in hand conceived as a whole,
and leave the execution of the component sub-tasks and sub-sub-tasks to
the sub-centres, etc., on lower levels of the nervous system. A brigadier
does not give orders to, and concentrate his attention on, individual
soldiers during action; if he does the action goes haywire. The paradox
of the centipede will be seen to play an important part in discovery and
the theory of thinking in general; in humour, apart from the examples
mentioned, it accounts for the comic effect of the 'self-conscious'
(in fact, detail-conscious) behaviour of the person who does not know
what to do with his hands; and also explains why the comedian's clothes,
and some foreign or bygone fashions, are funny. Conventional articles
of apparel are perceived as parts of a person's appearance as a whole,
whereas the comedian's checked trousers and the Victorian lady's bustle
disrupt the unity and force attention on textiles and starched draperies
leading an independent life. Except when we are in a romantic mood:
then a historical costume on the stage is no longer seen detached from
its wearer but attaches him to the period.
Since I mentioned mispronunciation, I must add the obvious remark that if
the maltreated word assumes a different meaning, we get the involuntary
pun; and even if it does not, mispronunciation can be funny if it follows
its own logic which exposes the absurdities of conventional spelling. Try
on an innocent foreigner the sequence: a coughing plough and a soughing
trough; then see what happens.
Displacement
A car dealer is boosting a new sports model to a prospective client:
discussion, which is the speed of the car. The link-concept is 'Grimsby at
4 a.m.' -- which in one context plays the accidental part of an improvised
example, in the second an essential part. This sudden shift of emphasis
-- or displacement of attention -- to a seemingly irrelevant aspect of
a bisociated concept is frequently found not only in humour, but
also in art and discovery (
Chapters VIII
,
XXIII
). It is related to the paradox of the
centipede, but instead of displacing attention from the
whole
to the
part
it is displaced from a dominant to a previously
neglected aspect of the whole, showing it in a new light.
In the "Ballad of Reading Gaol" there are two unforgettable lines:
implications -- splitting apart and creating a gap -- are never thought
of. Wilde shifts our attention to that forgotten physical image; he lets
salvation enter through the aching gap, like a thief in the night. When
the Red Queen complains: 'It's a poor son of memory which only works
backwards,' she is putting her finger on an aspect of reality -- the
irreversibility of time -- which we normally take for granted; her
apparently silly remark carries metaphysical intimations, and appeals
to our secret yearning for the gift of prophecy -- matters which would
never occur to Alice, that little paragon of stubborn common sense.
Coincidence
It was once usual to classify comedies into those relying on situations,
manners, or characters. In his discussion of the first, Bergson came
closest to the essence of humour: 'A situation is always comic', he
wrote, 'if it participates simultaneously in two series of events which
are absolutely independent of each other, and if it can be interpreted
in two quite different meanings.' One feels like crying 'Fire', but a
couple of pages further on Bergson has dropped the clue and gone back
to his hobby: the interference of two independent series in a given
situation is merely a further example of the 'mechanization of life'.
In fact the crossing of two independent causal chains through coincidence,
mistaken identity, confusion of time and occasion, is the most clean-cut
example of bisociated contexts. The chance-coincidence on which they
are hinged is the
deus ex machina
, the intervention of providence
in both tragedy and comedy; and, needless to say, lucky hazards play an
equally conspicuous part in the history of scientific discovery.
Nonsense
One type of comic verse lives on the bisociation of exalted form with
trivial content. Certain metric forms, such as hexameter and Alexandrine,
arouse expectations of pathos, of the heroic and exalted; the pouring
of homely, trivial contents into these epic moulds -- 'beautiful
soup, so rich and green' -- creates a comic effect of the same type
as the parody. The rolling dactyls of the first line of the limerick,
carrying, instead of Hector and Achilles, a young lady from Stockton as
their passenger, make her already appear ridiculous, regardless of the
calamities which are sure to befall her. In this atmosphere of malicious
expectation whatever witticism the text has to offer will have a much
enhanced effect.
Instead of an epic mould, a soft, lyrical one will equally do:
jam tomorrow and jam yesterday -- but never jam today.' Two logically
incompatible statements have been telescoped into a line whose rhythm and
syntax gives the impression of being a popular adage or golden rule of
life. Sometimes the trick is done by the substitution of a single word
in a familiar text: 'One should never work between meals.' The homely,
admonitory structure lulls the mind into bored acquiescence until the
preposterous subterfuge is discovered. Oscar Wilde was a master of this
form: 'In married life three is company and two none'; 'the only way to
get rid of a temptation is to yield to it', etc., etc. My own favourite
coinage is: 'One should not carry moderation to extremes.'
Nonsense humour -- as Max Eastman has pointed out -- is only effective
if it pretends to make sense:
It's a fact the whole world knows /
That Pobbles are happier without their toes.
Even with rhymed gibberish
the illusion of meaning is essential. 'The slithy toves' that 'gyre and
gimble in the wabe' evoke sound associations which suggest some kind of
action even though we are unable to say what exactly the action is --
perhaps some small creatures gyrating and gambolling on a brilliant day
in the web of some flowery bush. The meaning varies with the person as
the interpretation of the ink blots in a Rohrschach test; but without
this illusory meaning projected into the phonetic pattern, without
the simultaneous knowledge of being fooled, and of fooling oneself,
there would be no enjoyment of
the jabberwock with eyes aflame' who
'came whiffling through the tulgey wood / And burbled as it came
.
Tickling
The harmless game of tickling has resisted all attempts to find a unitary
formula for the causes of laughter; it has been the stumbling block which
made the theorists of the comic give up, or their theories break down.
It was at one time believed that the laughter caused by tickling is a
purely mechanical reflex in response to a purely physical stimulation. But
-- as Darwin has pointed out -- the response to tickling is squirming,
wriggling, and straining to withdraw the tickled part -- activities which
may or may not be accompanied by laughter. The squirming response was
interpreted by Darwin and Crile as an innate defence mechanism to escape
a hostile grip on vulnerable areas which are not normally exposed to
attack: the soles of the feet, the neck, arm-pits, belly, and flank. If
a fly settles on the belly of a horse, a kind of contractile wave may
pass over the skin -- the equivalent of the squirming of the tickled
child. But the horse does not laugh when tickled, and the child not
always. As Gregory has put it:
response. But the child will laugh only -- and this is the crux of the
matter -- if an additional condition is fulfilled: it must perceive
the tickling as a
mock
attack, a caress in a mildly aggressive
disguise. This explains why people laugh only when tickled by others
but not when they tickle themselves. (The question why this should be
so was once put to a BBC Brains Trust which, after some humming, hawing,
and giggling, decided that it was one of the insoluble mysteries of human
nature.) Not only must there be a second person to do the tickling, but
her expression and attitude must be mock-aggressive -- as mothers and
nurses instinctively know. Battle cries like 'peekaboo' and 'bow-wow'
pay guaranteed dividends, like the comedian's imitation of the lion's
roar. As in every attack, the element of surprise plays an important part:
the expert tickler's tactics never let the victim guess when and where
the next pressure or pincer movement will occur. Experiments in tickling
on babies under one year old showed that babies laughed fifteen times
more often when tickled by their mothers than when they were tickled
by strangers. For naturally the mock-attack will make the baby laugh
only if it knows that it is a mock-attack; and with strangers one never
knows. Even with its own mother there is an ever-so-slight feeling of
uncertainty and apprehension, the expression of which alternates with
laughter in the baby's behaviour; and it is precisely this element
of apprehension between two tickles which is relieved in the laughter
accompanying the squirm. The rule of the game is 'let me be just a little
frightened so that I can enjoy the relief'.
Thus the mechanism is essentially the same as in comic impersonation: the
tickler impersonates an aggressor, but is simultaneously known not to be
one. It is probably the first situation encountered in life which makes
the infant live on two planes at once, the first delectable experience in
bisociation -- a foretaste of pleasures to come at the pantomime show,
of becoming a willing victim to the illusions of the stage, of being
tickled by the horror-thriller.
In adolescence, erotic elements enter into the game, and tickling assumes
the role of a sexual mock-attack -- acknowledged with giggles which betray
their origin in infantile apprehensions. Some homosexuals claim to be
extremely ticklish and display a tendency to squirming and wriggling as
an expression of mock-fright. But these are secondary developments which
partly illuminate, partly confuse the original pattern -- the tickled
child's laughter is a discharge of apprehensions recognized as unfounded
by the intellect.
The Clown
Most of the comic techniques I have discussed can be found in the
repertory of the circus clown -- the classic incarnation of the coarser
type of humour. His face is a richly exaggerated caricature of stupidity,
sometimes with an infectious grimace of laughter painted on it; in each
piece of his apparel, form battles against function; each of his movements
is a parody of grace. He is the victim and perpetrator of preposterous
practical jokes; he is both human and inert matter, for to survive all
the slaps, whacks, and cracks, his skull must be made of ebony. He is
the image in the distorting mirror, the clumsy impersonator of acrobats,
ballet dancers, and fairies: Caliban imitating Ariel. He is a collection
of deformities, bodily and functional; he stumbles over obstacles and
words; he is timid, gauche, eccentric, and absent-minded. Above all,
he is the man of gigantic efforts and diminutive accomplishments: the
midwife who aids the mountain to deliver the mouse.
The clown's domain is the coarse, rich, overt type of humour: he leaves
nothing to be guessed, he piles it on. A good deal of the enjoyment he
causes is a mild gloating, the discharge of sadistic, sexual, scatalogical
impulses by way of the purifying channels of laughter. One means of
producing and prolonging this effect is
repetition
. The clown
and the clowning kind of music-hall comedian will tell, or act out, a
long-drawn narrative in which the same type of flash, the same pattern,
the same situation, the same key-words, recur again and again. Although
repetition diminishes the effect of surprise, it has a cumulative effect
on the emotive charge. The logical pattern is the same in each repeat,
but new tension is easily drawn into the familiar channel. It is as if
more and more liquid were big pumped into the same punctured pipeline.
Originality, Emphasis, Economy
I have discussed the logic of humour and its emotive dynamics, and
have tried to indicate how to analyse a joke. But nothing has been
said so far about the criteria which decide whether it is a good, bad,
or indifferent joke. These are, of course, partly a matter of personal
taste, partly dependent on the technique of the humorist; only the second
is our concern.
There are, I shall suggest, three main criteria of comic technique:
originality, emphasis, and economy. In the light of the previous chapters
we shall expect them to play also a significant part in the techniques
of scientific theorizing and artistic creation.
as the Marquis' in the Chamfort story -- is truly unexpected; with
its perverse logic, it cuts through the narrative like the blade of
the guillotine.
But creative originality is not so often met with either in art or in
humour. One substitute for it is suggestiveness through
emphasis
. The cheap comedian piles it on; the competent craftsman plays in
a subtle way on our memories and habits of thought. Whenever in the
Contes Drolatiques
Balzac introduces an abbé or a monk, our
associations race ahead of the narrative in the delectable expectation
of some venal sin to be committed; yet when the point of the story is
reached we still smile, sharing the narrator's mock-indignation and
pretended surprise. In other words, anticipation of the type of joke or
point to come do not entirely destroy the comic effect, provided that
we do not know when and how exactly it will strike home. It is rather
like a game: cover my eyes and I shall pretend to be surprised. Besides,
the laughter provoked by spicy jokes is, as already said, only partly
genuine, partly a cloak to cover publicly less demonstrable emotions --
regardless whether the story in itself is comic or not.
Suggestive techniques are essential; they create suspense and
facilitate the listener's flow of associations along habit-formed
channels. A comic idea of a given logical pattern can be transposed
into any number of different settings; local colour and dialect help
to establish the atmosphere. The most effective stories are regional:
Scottish, Marseillais, Cockney; the mere mention of 'a man from Aberdeen'
establishes the matrix, the desired frame of mind. Thus suggestiveness
depends firstly on
the choice of relevant stimuli
-- as the
biologist would say. Next, all non-essential elements should be omitted,
even at the price of a certain sketchiness, otherwise attention will
be sidetracked, the tension frittered away: this is the technique of
simplification. In the third place the effect is increased by certain
emphatic gestures, inflections, a stress on dialect and slang: in a word,
by exaggeration. We have met these three related factors: selection,
exaggeration, simplification, in the technique of the caricature (and
of the portrait and blue-print); taken together they provide the means
of highlighting aspects of reality considered to be significant. It
is not surprising that the same techniques enter into the artist's and
humorist's efforts to communicate with his audience.
However, except in the coarsest type of humour and the trashiest forms
of art, suggestion through emphasis is not enough; and it can defeat
its own purpose. It must be compensated by the opposite kind of virtue:
the exercise of
economy
, or, more precisely: the technique of
implication
.
Picasso's 'I often paint fakes' is at the same time original, emphatic,
and implicit. He does not say: 'Sometimes, like other painters, I do
something second-rate, repeitive, an uninspired variation on a theme,
which after a while looks to me as if somebody had imitated my technique.
It is true that this somebody happened to be myself, but that makes no
difference to the quality of the picture, which is no better than if
it were a fake; in fact you could call it that -- an uninspired Picasso
apeing the style of the true Picasso.'
disorders of behaviour such as stuttering, mispronunciation, misspelling:
one might call it the bisociation of structure and function, or of part
and whole. The stammering barbarian was a comic figure to the Greeks for
reasons just mentioned; but the comedian's stage-stutter is funny in a
different way. When he struggles with a consonant, trying to take the
same hurdle again and again, eyes bulging and face convulsed, we become
suddenly aware of the complicated motions of lips and tongue required
to produce the sound
M
; our attention becomes focussed on these
physiological details torn from their functional context and placed under
a magnifying glass, as it were. Much the same happens when the gramophone
needle gets stuck in a groove, and the soprano's voice keeps repeating
the same word on the same quaver. The part has become detachcd from the
whole and monopolizes attention as if it existed in its own right, as an
independent structural entity, regardless of its function in the larger
context from which alone its meaning is derived. In one of Silone's novels
an innocent peasant boy from the Abruzzi drifts into a crowd in front of
Mussolini's new forum, and cannot understand why everybody keeps chanting
in a chorus: 'Ce-du, ce-du, ce-du, ce-du . . .' The isolated quaver or
consonant which has made a declaration of independence, the syllables
'du' and 'ce' torn from their context, are examples of the conflict
which can arise between part and whole, structure and function, when --
to put it in a different way -- the dependent part pretends to be an
independent whole and forces our attention to regard it as such.
When we exercise a well-practised skill the parts must function smoothly
and automatically -- they must never occupy the focus of attention. This
is true whether the skill in question is riding a bicycle, playing the
violin, enunciating the letter
M
, or forming sentences according to
the rules of grammar and syntax. The code which controls the performance
functions, as we repeatedly saw, on a lower level of consciousness than
the performance itself -- on the fringes of awareness or, in completely
automatized skills, even beyond the fringe. The moment attention is
focussed on a normally automatized part-function such as enunciating
consonants, the matrix breaks down, the needle gets stuck, and the
performance is paralysed -- like the centipede who was asked in which
order he moved his hundred legs, and could walk no more.
The paradox of the centipede is a consequence of the hierarchic
organization of the nervous system which demands that the highest
centres should be occupied with the task in hand conceived as a whole,
and leave the execution of the component sub-tasks and sub-sub-tasks to
the sub-centres, etc., on lower levels of the nervous system. A brigadier
does not give orders to, and concentrate his attention on, individual
soldiers during action; if he does the action goes haywire. The paradox
of the centipede will be seen to play an important part in discovery and
the theory of thinking in general; in humour, apart from the examples
mentioned, it accounts for the comic effect of the 'self-conscious'
(in fact, detail-conscious) behaviour of the person who does not know
what to do with his hands; and also explains why the comedian's clothes,
and some foreign or bygone fashions, are funny. Conventional articles
of apparel are perceived as parts of a person's appearance as a whole,
whereas the comedian's checked trousers and the Victorian lady's bustle
disrupt the unity and force attention on textiles and starched draperies
leading an independent life. Except when we are in a romantic mood:
then a historical costume on the stage is no longer seen detached from
its wearer but attaches him to the period.
Since I mentioned mispronunciation, I must add the obvious remark that if
the maltreated word assumes a different meaning, we get the involuntary
pun; and even if it does not, mispronunciation can be funny if it follows
its own logic which exposes the absurdities of conventional spelling. Try
on an innocent foreigner the sequence: a coughing plough and a soughing
trough; then see what happens.
Displacement
A car dealer is boosting a new sports model to a prospective client:
'You get into this car at midnight and at 4 a.m. you are in Grimsby.'The question is perfectly logical, but irrelevant to the subject under
The customer is indignant: 'And what am I to do in the middle of the
night in Grimsby?'
discussion, which is the speed of the car. The link-concept is 'Grimsby at
4 a.m.' -- which in one context plays the accidental part of an improvised
example, in the second an essential part. This sudden shift of emphasis
-- or displacement of attention -- to a seemingly irrelevant aspect of
a bisociated concept is frequently found not only in humour, but
also in art and discovery (
Chapters VIII
,
XXIII
). It is related to the paradox of the
centipede, but instead of displacing attention from the
whole
to the
part
it is displaced from a dominant to a previously
neglected aspect of the whole, showing it in a new light.
In the "Ballad of Reading Gaol" there are two unforgettable lines:
How else but through a broken heartThe broken heart has become such a cliché that its physical
May Lord Christ enter in?
implications -- splitting apart and creating a gap -- are never thought
of. Wilde shifts our attention to that forgotten physical image; he lets
salvation enter through the aching gap, like a thief in the night. When
the Red Queen complains: 'It's a poor son of memory which only works
backwards,' she is putting her finger on an aspect of reality -- the
irreversibility of time -- which we normally take for granted; her
apparently silly remark carries metaphysical intimations, and appeals
to our secret yearning for the gift of prophecy -- matters which would
never occur to Alice, that little paragon of stubborn common sense.
Coincidence
It was once usual to classify comedies into those relying on situations,
manners, or characters. In his discussion of the first, Bergson came
closest to the essence of humour: 'A situation is always comic', he
wrote, 'if it participates simultaneously in two series of events which
are absolutely independent of each other, and if it can be interpreted
in two quite different meanings.' One feels like crying 'Fire', but a
couple of pages further on Bergson has dropped the clue and gone back
to his hobby: the interference of two independent series in a given
situation is merely a further example of the 'mechanization of life'.
In fact the crossing of two independent causal chains through coincidence,
mistaken identity, confusion of time and occasion, is the most clean-cut
example of bisociated contexts. The chance-coincidence on which they
are hinged is the
deus ex machina
, the intervention of providence
in both tragedy and comedy; and, needless to say, lucky hazards play an
equally conspicuous part in the history of scientific discovery.
Nonsense
One type of comic verse lives on the bisociation of exalted form with
trivial content. Certain metric forms, such as hexameter and Alexandrine,
arouse expectations of pathos, of the heroic and exalted; the pouring
of homely, trivial contents into these epic moulds -- 'beautiful
soup, so rich and green' -- creates a comic effect of the same type
as the parody. The rolling dactyls of the first line of the limerick,
carrying, instead of Hector and Achilles, a young lady from Stockton as
their passenger, make her already appear ridiculous, regardless of the
calamities which are sure to befall her. In this atmosphere of malicious
expectation whatever witticism the text has to offer will have a much
enhanced effect.
Instead of an epic mould, a soft, lyrical one will equally do:
... And what could be moisterAnother variant is what one might call the pseudo-proverb: 'The rule is:
Than tears from an oyster?
jam tomorrow and jam yesterday -- but never jam today.' Two logically
incompatible statements have been telescoped into a line whose rhythm and
syntax gives the impression of being a popular adage or golden rule of
life. Sometimes the trick is done by the substitution of a single word
in a familiar text: 'One should never work between meals.' The homely,
admonitory structure lulls the mind into bored acquiescence until the
preposterous subterfuge is discovered. Oscar Wilde was a master of this
form: 'In married life three is company and two none'; 'the only way to
get rid of a temptation is to yield to it', etc., etc. My own favourite
coinage is: 'One should not carry moderation to extremes.'
Nonsense humour -- as Max Eastman has pointed out -- is only effective
if it pretends to make sense:
It's a fact the whole world knows /
That Pobbles are happier without their toes.
Even with rhymed gibberish
the illusion of meaning is essential. 'The slithy toves' that 'gyre and
gimble in the wabe' evoke sound associations which suggest some kind of
action even though we are unable to say what exactly the action is --
perhaps some small creatures gyrating and gambolling on a brilliant day
in the web of some flowery bush. The meaning varies with the person as
the interpretation of the ink blots in a Rohrschach test; but without
this illusory meaning projected into the phonetic pattern, without
the simultaneous knowledge of being fooled, and of fooling oneself,
there would be no enjoyment of
the jabberwock with eyes aflame' who
'came whiffling through the tulgey wood / And burbled as it came
.
Tickling
The harmless game of tickling has resisted all attempts to find a unitary
formula for the causes of laughter; it has been the stumbling block which
made the theorists of the comic give up, or their theories break down.
It was at one time believed that the laughter caused by tickling is a
purely mechanical reflex in response to a purely physical stimulation. But
-- as Darwin has pointed out -- the response to tickling is squirming,
wriggling, and straining to withdraw the tickled part -- activities which
may or may not be accompanied by laughter. The squirming response was
interpreted by Darwin and Crile as an innate defence mechanism to escape
a hostile grip on vulnerable areas which are not normally exposed to
attack: the soles of the feet, the neck, arm-pits, belly, and flank. If
a fly settles on the belly of a horse, a kind of contractile wave may
pass over the skin -- the equivalent of the squirming of the tickled
child. But the horse does not laugh when tickled, and the child not
always. As Gregory has put it:
A child fingers the pepper-pot, waves pepper into its nose, and sneezesThus tickling a child will call out a wriggling and squirming
violently. Touch it under the arm-pits, or finger its waist, and it
wriggles vigorously. It sneezes to dislodge the pepper from its nose,
and its wriggle suggests a sneeze to relieve its whole body. The violent
squirm of the tickled child so obviously tries to avoid the tickling
hand that, when the truth is perceived, it is difficult to understand
how tickling and laughter could ever be identified or confused.[3]
response. But the child will laugh only -- and this is the crux of the
matter -- if an additional condition is fulfilled: it must perceive
the tickling as a
mock
attack, a caress in a mildly aggressive
disguise. This explains why people laugh only when tickled by others
but not when they tickle themselves. (The question why this should be
so was once put to a BBC Brains Trust which, after some humming, hawing,
and giggling, decided that it was one of the insoluble mysteries of human
nature.) Not only must there be a second person to do the tickling, but
her expression and attitude must be mock-aggressive -- as mothers and
nurses instinctively know. Battle cries like 'peekaboo' and 'bow-wow'
pay guaranteed dividends, like the comedian's imitation of the lion's
roar. As in every attack, the element of surprise plays an important part:
the expert tickler's tactics never let the victim guess when and where
the next pressure or pincer movement will occur. Experiments in tickling
on babies under one year old showed that babies laughed fifteen times
more often when tickled by their mothers than when they were tickled
by strangers. For naturally the mock-attack will make the baby laugh
only if it knows that it is a mock-attack; and with strangers one never
knows. Even with its own mother there is an ever-so-slight feeling of
uncertainty and apprehension, the expression of which alternates with
laughter in the baby's behaviour; and it is precisely this element
of apprehension between two tickles which is relieved in the laughter
accompanying the squirm. The rule of the game is 'let me be just a little
frightened so that I can enjoy the relief'.
Thus the mechanism is essentially the same as in comic impersonation: the
tickler impersonates an aggressor, but is simultaneously known not to be
one. It is probably the first situation encountered in life which makes
the infant live on two planes at once, the first delectable experience in
bisociation -- a foretaste of pleasures to come at the pantomime show,
of becoming a willing victim to the illusions of the stage, of being
tickled by the horror-thriller.
In adolescence, erotic elements enter into the game, and tickling assumes
the role of a sexual mock-attack -- acknowledged with giggles which betray
their origin in infantile apprehensions. Some homosexuals claim to be
extremely ticklish and display a tendency to squirming and wriggling as
an expression of mock-fright. But these are secondary developments which
partly illuminate, partly confuse the original pattern -- the tickled
child's laughter is a discharge of apprehensions recognized as unfounded
by the intellect.
The Clown
Most of the comic techniques I have discussed can be found in the
repertory of the circus clown -- the classic incarnation of the coarser
type of humour. His face is a richly exaggerated caricature of stupidity,
sometimes with an infectious grimace of laughter painted on it; in each
piece of his apparel, form battles against function; each of his movements
is a parody of grace. He is the victim and perpetrator of preposterous
practical jokes; he is both human and inert matter, for to survive all
the slaps, whacks, and cracks, his skull must be made of ebony. He is
the image in the distorting mirror, the clumsy impersonator of acrobats,
ballet dancers, and fairies: Caliban imitating Ariel. He is a collection
of deformities, bodily and functional; he stumbles over obstacles and
words; he is timid, gauche, eccentric, and absent-minded. Above all,
he is the man of gigantic efforts and diminutive accomplishments: the
midwife who aids the mountain to deliver the mouse.
The clown's domain is the coarse, rich, overt type of humour: he leaves
nothing to be guessed, he piles it on. A good deal of the enjoyment he
causes is a mild gloating, the discharge of sadistic, sexual, scatalogical
impulses by way of the purifying channels of laughter. One means of
producing and prolonging this effect is
repetition
. The clown
and the clowning kind of music-hall comedian will tell, or act out, a
long-drawn narrative in which the same type of flash, the same pattern,
the same situation, the same key-words, recur again and again. Although
repetition diminishes the effect of surprise, it has a cumulative effect
on the emotive charge. The logical pattern is the same in each repeat,
but new tension is easily drawn into the familiar channel. It is as if
more and more liquid were big pumped into the same punctured pipeline.
Originality, Emphasis, Economy
I have discussed the logic of humour and its emotive dynamics, and
have tried to indicate how to analyse a joke. But nothing has been
said so far about the criteria which decide whether it is a good, bad,
or indifferent joke. These are, of course, partly a matter of personal
taste, partly dependent on the technique of the humorist; only the second
is our concern.
There are, I shall suggest, three main criteria of comic technique:
originality, emphasis, and economy. In the light of the previous chapters
we shall expect them to play also a significant part in the techniques
of scientific theorizing and artistic creation.
An art dealer (this story is authentic) bought a canvas signedOne measure of originality is its surprise effect. Picasso's reply --
'Picasso' and travelled all the way to Cannes to discover whether it
was genuine. Picasso was working in his studio. He cast a single look
at the canvas and said: 'It's a fake'.
A few months later the dealer bought another canvas signed
Picasso. Again he travelled to Cannes and again Picasso, after a single
glance, grunted: 'It's a fake.'
'But cher maître,' expostulated the dealer, 'it so happens that I saw
you with my own eyes working on this very picture several years ago.'
Picasso shrugged: 'I often paint fakes.'
as the Marquis' in the Chamfort story -- is truly unexpected; with
its perverse logic, it cuts through the narrative like the blade of
the guillotine.
But creative originality is not so often met with either in art or in
humour. One substitute for it is suggestiveness through
emphasis
. The cheap comedian piles it on; the competent craftsman plays in
a subtle way on our memories and habits of thought. Whenever in the
Contes Drolatiques
Balzac introduces an abbé or a monk, our
associations race ahead of the narrative in the delectable expectation
of some venal sin to be committed; yet when the point of the story is
reached we still smile, sharing the narrator's mock-indignation and
pretended surprise. In other words, anticipation of the type of joke or
point to come do not entirely destroy the comic effect, provided that
we do not know when and how exactly it will strike home. It is rather
like a game: cover my eyes and I shall pretend to be surprised. Besides,
the laughter provoked by spicy jokes is, as already said, only partly
genuine, partly a cloak to cover publicly less demonstrable emotions --
regardless whether the story in itself is comic or not.
Suggestive techniques are essential; they create suspense and
facilitate the listener's flow of associations along habit-formed
channels. A comic idea of a given logical pattern can be transposed
into any number of different settings; local colour and dialect help
to establish the atmosphere. The most effective stories are regional:
Scottish, Marseillais, Cockney; the mere mention of 'a man from Aberdeen'
establishes the matrix, the desired frame of mind. Thus suggestiveness
depends firstly on
the choice of relevant stimuli
-- as the
biologist would say. Next, all non-essential elements should be omitted,
even at the price of a certain sketchiness, otherwise attention will
be sidetracked, the tension frittered away: this is the technique of
simplification. In the third place the effect is increased by certain
emphatic gestures, inflections, a stress on dialect and slang: in a word,
by exaggeration. We have met these three related factors: selection,
exaggeration, simplification, in the technique of the caricature (and
of the portrait and blue-print); taken together they provide the means
of highlighting aspects of reality considered to be significant. It
is not surprising that the same techniques enter into the artist's and
humorist's efforts to communicate with his audience.
However, except in the coarsest type of humour and the trashiest forms
of art, suggestion through emphasis is not enough; and it can defeat
its own purpose. It must be compensated by the opposite kind of virtue:
the exercise of
economy
, or, more precisely: the technique of
implication
.
Picasso's 'I often paint fakes' is at the same time original, emphatic,
and implicit. He does not say: 'Sometimes, like other painters, I do
something second-rate, repeitive, an uninspired variation on a theme,
which after a while looks to me as if somebody had imitated my technique.
It is true that this somebody happened to be myself, but that makes no
difference to the quality of the picture, which is no better than if
it were a fake; in fact you could call it that -- an uninspired Picasso
apeing the style of the true Picasso.'
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