A First Second Thought: Bring on the Irony

Editors:

A reporter once asked Bob Dylan what his songs meant. His response: "I'm the first to put it to you and the last to explain it to you." Humor works kind of like that; you either get the punch line to "Where was Moses when the candle went out?" or you don't. You are in the dark if laughter doesn't emerge—unless, of course, you've been trained like the Navajo children that Jennifer Hughes mentions. Like Dylan (pretty funny fellow himself), writers of humor (or if you prefer "humorists," Mr. Wuster, or "satirists," Mr. Caron) often fail to supply a satisfactory explanation either. Still, it never stops us scholars from trying to shed light on what these writers of humor produce—that inexplicable thing called humor, all in the hopes of not producing the inevitable "dead frog" that E. B. White warned us of. (Note: to my mind, no one produced a lifeless amphibian in this issue.) Yet, as long as we have literature that produces laughter, we'll have those who want to explain how it works or what it does. And that's OK. The folks writing in the issue of StAH 4.2 titled "The Assault of Laughter" (all of whom I know and admire—well, maybe not Wuster and Caron) know their stuff. But their arguments hinge on terminology, free-floating signifiers, (a deconstructionist's dream), so I offer a "second thought" about the "terminological chaos" to which Judith Yaross Lee refers.

Just as Bruce Michelson makes a bid to recover and reconsider "wit" as a neglected, and possibly stable, term, I'd like to get in a word for irony as more than a rhetorical trope or a technical device such as parody, travesty, burlesque, lampoon, caricature, epigram, fable, and mock-epic used only in service to satire. If Caron can supplement Wuster's valorizing of Twain as "mere humorist" by elevating Twain as satirist, I'd like to invoke Twain as ironist. In his book Mark Twain: The Gift of Humor (2015), Harold H. Kolb Jr. divides Twain's humor into three periods: the comic (early career), the satiric (middle), and the ironic (late), with much bleeding over from one period to another.

These phases of humor (comic, satiric, and ironic) have clear corollaries with Aristotle's types of humans as they relate to the emotions and moral qualities that correspond to our various ages. The young have strong passions and gratify themselves indiscriminately, with hot tempers and hopeful dispositions. Fond of fun, they are therefore witty.

Corollary 1: Youth favor the comic. The elderly "have lived many years; they have often been taken in, and often made mistakes; and life on the whole is a bad business."¹ They have lost optimism, or, as Twain clarifies, "At 50 a man can be an ass without being an optimist, but not an optimist without being an ass."² (Remember, Aristotle claimed a man's mental/emotional prime was forty-nine.) "They feel pity out of weakness, not kindness as the young do; therefore, they are querulous, and not disposed to jesting or laughter" (30-31). For them, it's not dark yet, but it's getting there.

Corollary 2: The elderly favor the ironic. Those in the prime of life are free from the extremes of the young and the old. They neither trust everybody nor distrust everybody but judge people correctly. They value the best qualities of the young and the old, meaning they are still capable of fun but are not inordinately disposed to laughter.

Corollary 3: Satire seems to suit those in their prime. Thus, the comic and satiric are meant for the young to middle parts of life where one is still able to laugh with hope, but the ironic is reserved for those who have seen a great deal more. Such corollaries would seem to match up with Twain's own chronology.

So what do we do with that laughter that comes from places of discomfort and agitation, yet has no clear satiric end in sight, no ridicule...