Engaging Humor - Hardcover

Oring, Elliott

Hardcover

ISBN 10: 0252027868 ISBN 13: 9780252027864

Publisher: University of Illinois Press, 2003

Synopsis

Elliott Oring asks essential questions concerning humorous expression in contemporary society, examining how humor works, why it is employed, and what its messages might be. This provocative book is filled with examples of jokes and riddles that reveal humor to be a meaningful--even significant--form of expression. Oring provides alternate ways of thinking about humorous expressions by examining their contexts--not just their contents. Engaging Humor demonstrates that when analyzed contextually and comparatively, humorous expressions emerge as communications that are startling, intriguing, and profound.

About this title

About the Author

Elliott Oring is a professor emeritus of anthropology at California State University, Los Angeles, and is the author of Israeli Humor, The Jokes of Sigmund Freud, and Jokes and Their Relations. He serves on the editorial board of Humor: International Journal of Humor Research.

Excerpt. © Reprinted by permission. All rights reserved.

Engaging Humor

By ELLIOTT ORING

University of Illinois Press

Copyright © 2003 Board of Trustees of the University of Illinois
All right reserved.
ISBN: 978-0-252-02786-4

Contents

Preface.............................................................ix1. Appropriate Incongruity Redux....................................12. The Senses of Absurd Humor.......................................133. Joke Thoughts....................................................274. The Humor of Hate................................................415. Blond Ambitions and Other Signs of the Times.....................586. Humor and the Suppression of Sentiment...........................717. The Joke as Gloss................................................858. Colonizing Humor.................................................979. Sigmund Freud's Jewish Joke Book.................................11610. The Context of Internet Humor...................................129Afterword...........................................................141Appendix............................................................147Notes...............................................................163Index...............................................................203

Chapter One

Appropriate Incongruity Redux

Humor, I have argued, depends upon the perception of an appropriate incongruity; that is, the perception of an appropriate relationship between categories that would ordinarily be regarded as incongruous. A brief example should suffice to illustrate the notion: "A man goes to see a psychiatrist. The doctor asks him, `What seems to be the problem?' The patient says, `Doc, no one believes anything I say.' The doctor replies, `You're kidding!'" To understand this joke, one must apprehend both the appropriateness and the incongruity of the doctor's response. The phrase "you're kidding" is an expression of surprise and appropriately registers the doctor's skepticism that the situation could be as severe as the patient describes. In some sense, it may even be regarded as a reflexive expression of reassurance. At the same time, "you're kidding" registers the physician's disbelief in the patient's report and seems to affirm the very proposition that the physician seems to be denying—that no one believes anything the patient says. In other words, the doctor's denial is incongruous in that it confirms the very problem about which the patient complains. Even the physician to whom the patient turns for help seems to doubt his veracity from the first moment of their encounter.

It is worthwhile to note that while the linguistic formulation of the doctor's response in this joke is critical, the joke is a conceptual and not a linguistic one. It does not depend upon a precise and unalterable linguistic formula. Had the doctor responded, "That's impossible," or "Aren't you exaggerating?" or "No way!" a joke would still be discernible that traded on the very same idea. Granted, the phrase "you're kidding" is particularly felicitous in that it is familiar, colloquial, and has a certain semantic density that requires some work to unpack. It is not, however, essential to the creation of the joke. Had the psychiatrist responded, "Well, we'd best get to the root of this problem," there would have been no joke, and if he had responded, "Well, in that case you'd best pay me in advance," the joke would have been different in that the reported untrustworthiness of the man would have been extended to the implied promise to pay for his treatment.

While the phrase appropriate incongruity is recent and my own, the concept is not. In the late eighteenth century James Beattie proposed that "Laughter arises from the view of two or more inconsistent, unsuitable, or incongruous parts or circumstances, considered as united in one complex object or assemblage." This notion, that humor depends upon the perception of an incongruity that is resolved or made sense of, has come to be known as the incongruity-resolution theory of humor. While the notion of appropriate incongruity certainly resembles incongruity-resolution theory, there are two points on which they may be distinguished. The first is that the term appropriate incongruity does not suggest that an incongruity is resolved. The incongruity remains, even though points of connection between the incongruous categories are discovered. A measure of appropriateness is recognized between the juxtaposed domains, but incongruity and appropriateness characterize a psychologically valid rather than a logically valid relation. In the joke about the psychiatrist and his patient, nothing is resolved; the doctor's expression of reassurance at the same time exacerbates the patient's problem. Both effects of the phrase remain in force. While one sense of the phrase may be secondary to the other in a temporal sense, it is not secondary in a psychological sense. The incongruity and the appropriateness are parallel constructions.

The second distinction between appropriate incongruity and incongruity-resolution theory is that incongruity-resolution theory implies a temporal order such that an incongruity is first recognized and its resolution (or the appropriateness of that incongruity) follows. Appropriate incongruity does not presume the order of recognition. An incongruity may first be registered and then followed by the sense of its appropriateness, or a seemingly appropriate relationship may be supplanted by a sense of its incongruity. I would argue that in the joke about the psychiatrist and his patient that the appropriate sense of "you're kidding" is registered before the incongruous sense. That is, the audience of the joke first perceives the phrase as an appropriate expression of the doctor's surprise and concern before recognizing that the phrase identifies the psychiatrist as yet another disbeliever.

A German joke illustrates a similar order in the perception of appropriateness and incongruity: "If one enquires from a youthful patient whether he has ever had anything to do with masturbation, the answer is sure to be, `O na, nie!'" This joke ends in an expression that means "Oh no, never." But the words in the expression when linked together make "Onanie," which is the German word for onanism (masturbation). In this case as well, the meanings of the individual words are likely to be apprehended before the meaning of the expression constructed from their concatenation. So the incongruous sense of the expression is only apprehended after a common and appropriate one.

It is necessary to point out that neither appropriate incongruity nor incongruity-resolution theory should be confused with straightforward incongruity theory. There are theorists who hold that incongruities can in themselves be humorous. This seems a difficult position to maintain in that there are numerous instances of incongruities that generate no humor. Were incongruities in themselves funny, incongruous pairings like "snake/ veil" or "tomato/carburetor" might be expected to excite laughter, and formulations like "Why did the chicken cross the road?—Because the geese were eating corn" or "What is black and white and red all over?—A palm tree" might prove hysterical.

There are occasions when such riddles may prove humorous, for they may excite laughter in children. First- and second-graders tend to make up riddles that have either realistic or nonsensical answers. That is to say, the riddles of children either describe some object (e.g., "Q: What is brown and has bumps in it? A: A fence"—because a nearby fence is painted brown and its vertical planks are rounded so that the top of the fence could be said to be bumpy), or they appear as puzzling questions that have seemingly nonsensical answers (like the two examples in the previous paragraph). Of course, most traditional riddles are not nonsensical, since there is an aspect of appropriateness to the riddle answer. But this appropriateness may not be grasped by the younger child or may not be highly valued. Thus the riddle "Q: Why should you always wear a watch in the desert? A: Because camels live in the desert" may prove as acceptable and funny to a six-year-old as "Q: Why should you always wear a watch in the desert? A: Because a watch has springs [water sources] in it." As they get older, children abandon interest in riddles with nonsensical, arbitrary answers and come to demand answers that trade upon some relation of appropriateness such as the utility of a watch in a desert environment because of its "springs." By the age of ten or eleven, children are bored with riddles altogether and prefer jokes that escape the question-and-answer format and that depend upon appropriate incongruities.

The fact that children laugh at riddles whose questions and answers seem arbitrarily related does not necessarily undermine the characterization of humor as being rooted in the perception of an appropriate incongruity. When the relations between the questions and answers are characterized as arbitrary and nonsensical, they are arbitrary and nonsensical according to adult standards. When children laugh at the riddle "Q: Why should you always wear a watch in the desert? A: Because there are camels in the desert" are they laughing merely at the incongruity? Is it possible that they are perceiving some appropriate relation that is unperceived by adults or which is otherwise insufficient to generate humor in adults? Or have they simply learned to laugh at seemingly nonsensical question-answer sequences because that is what older people do—or so it seems to them? In children's humor it is often difficult to ascertain precisely what it is that children are laughing at. Consequently, children's humor is a very uncertain critique of humor as the perception of an appropriate incongruity.

Even if it is granted that children do laugh at sheer incongruity—without discerning appropriateness—children's humor appears to be a preliminary stage in the development of the adult sense of humor. It is difficult to characterize something from a stage of its development. Crawling is a stage in human locomotion, but it is not clear that crawling contributes significantly to the characterization of human bipedalism. Bipedalism is a different affair entirely and must be characterized on its own terms. This is not to suggest that developmental stages do not inform the nature of the final result. Crawling undoubtedly bears some relation to bipedal locomotion—if only by indicating the kinds of motor and proprioceptive abilities that are prerequisite for upright motion, the absence of which make crawling necessary. Undoubtedly, children's humor has much to contribute to the understanding of humor more generally, but it is unlikely to be able to serve as the basis for its characterization.

There are constructions that do raise questions about the characterization of humor as appropriate incongruity. These are definition and metaphor. Definitions and metaphors are rooted in appropriate incongruities, yet neither definitions nor metaphors are in themselves funny. If the perception of appropriate incongruity is at the root of humor, the perception of appropriate incongruity in definition and metaphor should prove humorous as well. Yet it does not.

Aristotle holds that a definition is a formula that binds a genus to a differentia. Thus, in the definition of man as the "rational animal," "animal" is the genus and "rational" the differentia. In this way the genus is divided between those members that possess the differentia and those that do not. Humans, for example, are animals that are differentiated from all other animals by their ability to reason. The characteristic of reason is so prized that the category of human comes to be viewed as opposed to that of animal, despite the fact that the definition of "human" remains rooted in the genus "animal." In a real sense, the definition of human (or the distinction of any segregates included within the same taxonomic category) creates an appropriate incongruity. "Man" and "animal" are incongruously yet appropriately related. Man and animal are incongruous categories because humans are rational while animals are not. Yet human and animal are appropriately related because a human being is an animal in all remaining characteristics.

If the Aristotelian definition of man is rooted in an appropriate incongruity, why is it not funny? Why does the definition of humans as "rational animals" engender nary a smile? Certainly there is much humor that plays upon the opposition between human and animal. For example, "Man is the only animal that chews its ice cubes." In one Gary Larson cartoon, while a pack of wolves devours its prey, one wolf stands up holding a camera to photograph the event. The caption reads: "For crying out loud Doris ... You gotta drag that thing out every time we all get together?" From classic jokes and Gary Larson cartoons to Shakespeare's Midsummer Night's Dream, a large corpus of humor trades upon humans behaving like animals and animals behaving like humans. Nevertheless, it is one thing to say that jokes, cartoons, and comedy often trade on this category relation. It is quite another to claim that a definition that differentiates humans from and links humans to the other animals is funny in itself. Why isn't the appropriate incongruity resident in the Aristotelian definition of man funny?

A similar question may be asked of metaphor. A metaphor is also rooted in appropriate incongruity. A metaphor involves a comparison between two categories; indeed, between two clashing conceptual categories. Metaphors proclaim that one thing is like another; indeed that something is something other than itself—a logically absurd proposition. To overcome the seeming absurdity of the metaphor, one must discover appropriate connections between the categories. Thus, in the line "Oh blackbird, what a boy you are" or "Thou art the grave where buried love doth lie," one is provoked to discover the ways that blackbirds are like boys or a person could be imagined as being a grave. Metaphors are appropriate incongruities—juxtaposed incongruous categories whose appropriate connections need be discovered if a sense of the metaphor is to be apprehended. It is no wonder that metaphors have often been compared to jokes. The curious thing about metaphors is that despite the fact that they, like jokes, depend upon the perception of an appropriate incongruity, they are only rarely laughed at. Why are metaphors not—or only rarely—funny?

It seems to me that the reason riddles and jokes are humorous while definitions and metaphors are not is that in jokes the engagement of the incongruity and the search for its appropriateness is spurious rather than genuine. That is to say that jokes emerge when some aspect of either the incongruity or its appropriateness (more often the latter) is recognized as illegitimate. It violates logic, the sense of what we know to be true, or the sense of what traditional behaviors or expressions are supposed to do and mean. Thus, in the riddle "Q: Why should you always wear a watch in the desert? A: Because a watch has springs in it," the appropriate relation established between deserts and watches by the word "springs" is not recognized as a legitimate relation. The appropriateness is linguistic only and this linguistic relation does not affect relations between the objects named in the real world. Watch springs do not provide water. If they did, there would be no joke. Consequently, the connection of watches to the desert environment is appropriate but not legitimate.

"Man is the only animal that chews its ice cubes" in some sense parodies the Aristotelian definition of man. The appropriate incongruity upon which it is based also would be regarded as spurious. The definition is incongruous because it chooses a small, very particular, and insignificant characteristic (of only some people)—and one that is often regarded as an annoying habit as well—and proposes it as the fundamental distinction between humans and other animals. The incongruity is appropriate because man would seem to be the only animal species to chew ice cubes. But the distinction is spurious because it is trite, is not species-wide, and to chew ice cubes one has to be able to make them, which requires refrigeration and advanced technology more generally. One also has to have drinking vessels to hold them and a cultural preference for chilled drinks. There is so much that is presupposed by "chewing ice cubes" that is more fundamental to the distinction between animal and human that the proposition, though perhaps accurate, is spurious. But were one to formulate the distinction in terms of these presupposed capacities—e.g., "man is the technological animal" or "man is the cultural animal"—one would be left with definitions that have been seriously proposed and entertained and which lack any humorous dimension whatsoever.

The Gary Larson cartoon about the wolf with the camera depends upon the incongruous comparison of wolves communally feeding to a human dinner party. The incongruity is in some measure appropriate because both species are social and feed in groups. Undoubtedly, there are many serious analogies to be observed between wolf and human behaviors. But the cartoon does not focus upon any genuinely appropriate relationship between them. If wolves are of the same genus (Aristotelian, not Linnaean) as humans, it is hardly because they both compulsively photograph their friends and relations at social gatherings. The cartoon highlights one highly peculiar and sometimes irritating human behavior (in that sense it is similar to chewing ice cubes) and spuriously transposes it to the wolf pack.

In the joke about the psychiatrist and the patient, the psychiatrist's comment "you're kidding" was not meant to register the psychiatrist's disbelief in all that the patient says. In denying the patient's report with "you're kidding," the psychiatrist was suggesting that "surely someone believes something you say," since the logical negation of no one believes anything you say is someone believes something you say. Since the patient's report of his problem also belongs to the class of things that the patient says, and since the psychiatrist denies the truth of this report, the doctor's seeming reassurance that the patient must sometimes be believed results in yet another instance in which the patient is disbelieved. In other words, the logical and legitimate sense of the psychiatrist's response is to deny the magnitude of the patient's complaint. The practical result is to evidence the complaint once again.

(Continues...)

Excerpted from Engaging Humorby ELLIOTT ORING Copyright © 2003 by Board of Trustees of the University of Illinois. Excerpted by permission of University of Illinois Press. All rights reserved. No part of this excerpt may be reproduced or reprinted without permission in writing from the publisher.
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Edition details

• Publisher: University of Illinois Press
• Publication date: 2003
• Language: English
• ISBN 10: 0252027868
• ISBN 13: 9780252027864
• Binding: Hardcover
• Number of pages: 224