The Morality of Laughter

3. The One Necessary Thing: Incongruity and Wordplay Relief and Exuberant Laughter • Innocent Laughter The Absurd and Postmodernism • Self-Deprecatory Humor

The One Necessary Thing Chi vuol esser lieto, sia, Di doman, non c’é certezza. Lorenzo di Medici, Trionfo di Bacco Superiority is not a suf‹cient condition for laughter, as we saw in chapter 2. For example, we might fail to laugh at someone in pain because the element of playfulness is missing. But I do think that superiority is a necessary condition. When I examine the different things that provoke our laughter, superiority seems a key that unlocks every door. I must therefore address ‹ve possible counterexamples, where we laugh but the element of superiority might not seem readily apparent. These are incongruities and wordplay, relief and exuberant laughter, innocent laughter, the absurd, and the joke told on oneself (self-deprecatory laughter). Incongruity and Wordplay In chapter 2 we noted Kant’s explanation of the risible: we laugh whenever two incongruous ideas are juxtaposed. We would have to reject the Positive thesis if a mere incongruity, without a signal about relative status , could raise a laugh. But while incongruities are sometimes risible, not every contradiction will serve. Kant himself acknowledged that incongruities in nature are not amusing. Snowfall in July is incongruous, but not risible. Indeed, why should an incongruity make us laugh? One might puzzle over an oddly paired set of experiences, but puzzlement is not comic, even when it leads to a Kantian incongruity. The only kind of incongruity that is risible is one that expresses a sense of superiority. If we laughed whenever our senses were surprised, we would giggle at 29 3 musical “jokes,” the bane of the music appreciation class, where different effects are incongruously linked. Haydn’s Surprise Symphony is an example: a sleepy melody is followed by a thundering punctuation, like the sudden blossoming of azaleas that lie dormant the rest of the year. Incongruity yes, but laughter no, neither for the music nor the azaleas— at most a musicologist’s wintry grin. Before music may amuse, something more than incongruity is needed. For example, an imbroglio conveys the idea of utter confusion by giving singers parts that sound harmonic but are in different rhythms and meters. What is amusing is not the incongruity but the apparent confusion of the singers. Similarly, a musical parody might be amusing, but only because a composer is mocked. Recall Erno von Dóhnanyi’s parody (in Variations for Piano and Orchestra) of Richard Strauss. Thundering crescendos, a climax, a pause. And then the piano softly enters—playing “Baa, Baa, Black Sheep.” Or think of Peter Schickele’s spoofs as P. D. Q. Bach (a hitherto undiscovered work reveals the in›uence of Western swing on Baroque music in the Gun‹ght at the O.K. Chorale). As these examples show, incongruity is risible only when it identi‹es a butt’s inferiority. By itself, incongruity adds nothing, except the element of surprise that we identi‹ed as a necessary condition of laughter (chap. 2). Nor does the incongruity theory account for the other elements of laughter, notably sociability, as the superiority theory does. Kant does not explain why the incongruity is always about people—only the superiority thesis does that. Similarly, only the superiority thesis can explain the instinct to retell the joke. One might seek to rescue the incongruity theory by broadening it to encompass the superiority theory. This was what Beattie did, in labeling all excessive behavior as incongruous.1 However, every comic vice represents a deviation from a golden mean, and all laughter asserts a superiority over excessive behavior (see chap. 5). Beattie’s move was simply to rede‹ne incongruity as superiority. Nevertheless, the incongruity thesis might at ‹rst glance seem better able to account for the play on words. There is a clear incongruity, but the element of superiority seems veiled. Instead, there is the delight that comes from recognizing that, like paradox, wordplay operates at more than one level. Wordplay comes in many varieties, beginning with the simple pun, where the same sound has more than one meaning and where the sentence in which it appears means more than one thing. The simplest the morality of laughter 30 example involves the homonym (or polyseme), where a word has the same sound and spelling as another but a different meaning. Pascal’s “Le coeur a des raisons que la raison ne connaît point” (The heart has its reasons that reason does not know) employs words with the...