Logic, laughter and laughter-provocation

Abstract

The background of the present enquiry on laughter is the debated question: Is it an involuntary and non-rational phenomenon like an automatic knee-jerk? Or is it the action-conclusion of a process of practical reasoning? Logically speaking the two accounts may be applicable to different kinds of laughter. The main aim of this thesis is to examine the extent, if any, to which the reality of laughter corresponds to this logical possibility. An account of the different kinds of laughter, accompanied by the tracing of any unifying threads between them justifying the use of the one term, constitutes the first part of the enquiry. An examination of empirical studies of laughter conducted by neurologists/acousticians and by anthropologists leads to the establishment of five main types of laughter. Each of these types of laughter is examined in a literary text in which its occurrence is described. It turns out that these five types of laughter correspond to five main types of incongruity. It happens, moreover, that although all the types of laughter-provocation are found in varying degrees at all times, yet each type has been predominant in different epochs of different cultures and was garbed in different literary genres, utilizing different 'language-games'. Laughter can only make the sense which it actually does in relation to contingent history. There would be no room for it in a Parmenidean world in which all being was eternal and there was no becoming. The first type of laughter is the loud and uproarious 'guffaw'. It turns out to be provoked by the formal invalidities of thought, the starkest incongruities of matter and mind, most blatantly manifested in matters where Eros and Thanatos are involved. The special kind of pleasure associated with the intuition of this universally felt and intimate invalidity is the paradoxical 'jouissance' described most graphically by Lacan. It is typical of so-called primitive societies in which deep emotions seem to be less controlled in their expression than in more sophisticated cultures. The literary garb in which the laughter-provocation is prevalently expressed is that of episodes in epics which bring out the stalemates to which all inter-heroic rivalry built on the aspiration to divine immortality necessarily leads. The typical primary mechanism of this earliest and most permanent form of laughter-provocation is farce, which operates mainly through physical action and features eating and excreting as well as all sorts of verbal and other exaggeration. The mask most frequently worn by the laughter-provoker is here that of the clown. The second type of laughter is almost more angelic than human: 'smiling'. This type of laughter, which is the opposite pole of the first type, starts off from the realization of an error not in logical consistency but in communicative force. The deepest cases have an eschatological dimension; they are related to the paradox of the accidental necessity of death, resoluble only in mythical terms. The species of pleasure derived from the quasi mystical intuition that love is more powerful than death is akin to joy; or, if the feeling is more superficial, gaiety. This second form of laughter-provocation prevails expectedly in ages of supernatural faith, such as the European Middle Ages or certain golden epochs of Buddhist civilization. Its most frequent literary garb is some form of allegory and the primary mechanism employed is evocation of the other worldly through magician-like techniques of enchantment. The mask the laughter-provoker wears is that of the child like humourist ready to see and say that the emperor has no clothes. The third type of laughter is 'chuckling', although it can also be vented in its negative form called by Lewis Carroll the 'chortle'. This third type is rationally controlled and sets out from dichotomies between language and reality. The flavour of pleasure expressed is mostly delight or glee. Its main literary garb is theatrical, whether on stage or at other preferred sites of verbal duelling. Since a change of language implies a change of way of life, this primarily linguistic form of stirring up laughter sparkles out most brilliantly in images of Renaissance splendour with the emergence of new lifestyles and social formations (such as the early capitalist) amid the pangs of revolution. Its mechanism is axled on the main properties of wit. The favoured kind of masks worn by the dandy-oriented Wits are names or surnames or nicknames or pseudonyms in the manner of Kierkegaard or those borne by so many theatrical characters from Shakespeare's verbal baroque firework displays down to perhaps the wittiest play of all times, Oscar Wilde's The Importance of being Earnest. The fourth type of laugh occurs when the laugh is blended into the properly verbal components of the 'language-game'. It is here called the 'cackle', with the term used, like its predecessors and successors, in a technically defined sense. This kind of laugh is provoked primarily by the errors arising out of diachronic structure and confusions of the potential and the actual, causes and reasons, the subjects of change and sameness over time. The feelings of pleasure associated with the anticipation of resolution can variously range from gladness, hilarity and jollity to mirth. The most classic forms of such laughter-provocation seems to have originally come from the Orient and to have evolved from the folk-tale to the joke told by professionals and amateurs alike, with the diffusion of even uncostumed jesterhood into practically all walks of life. The literary garb has varied from the fable-forms such as Aesop's, to short stories and novel-length texts, to the oral deliveries at parties, dinners or other social gatherings, public as well as private. The primary mechanism used in these essentially brief or episodic literary forms embody both a fragmentary mode of knowing and a knowledge of isolated fragments. The fragmentation emerges as such when related to eternity rather than to history, so that the spirit of jocularity moves from embodiment in theological/moral guidance to the radically secularized and trivialized contemporary jokes. The mask worn by the jokester has evolved from the cap with asinine, erotic and political connotations to man-in-the-street dress. The fifth kind of laughter is constituted by such parodies or caricatures of the smile as are snigger, titter, giggle and smirk. Such relics of laughter start getting scattered about when the contrast between an old texture of thought and the thought itself enlarged by the addition of some fresh knowledge becomes too conspicuous for total seriousness to be maintained. The pleasure derivable from the prospect of the restoration of harmonious co-existence between the old and the new may be called 'amusement', particularly if some knowledge of the etymology of the word colours its interpretation. Irony, despite its conception, birth and delivery in ancient times and its flourishing in different forms in individual hands at such times as when human beings most felt the dazzle of reason and enlightenment, is the form of laughter-provocation which has been swallowing up all the rest in these latter days. It did not assume its all-consuming stance until practically our own day, controversially called 'postmodern' by Lyotard and others, and 'late capitalist' by still surviving Marxists such as Fredric Jameson. Forms of apparently utilitarian prose, from essay to aphorisms or other vehicles directed away from the original purpose, lent themselves to laughter-provocation that has become so widely sought that hardly any deliberation is necessary to fall in with its pursuit. The techniques used to project it forward can all be found in the armoury of twenty-first century humankind, from Socratic to Romantic to Postmodern. Irony has become so universal as to be often practically unnoticed. The mask worn by the ironist is inevitably multifacial. The rules of the game of laughter-provocation are articulated sequentially since they are drawn up to govern a process. The core of the process is two-phased. First, there is the always somewhat painful realization of the occurrence of an incongruity; then, there is the advent of an inner conviction that its resolution is possible. While the first phase is accompanied by the feeling of a subjective split or crack in one's very human nature correlative to the objective incongruity, the anticipation of resolution is accompanied by some sort of pleasurable feeling at the prospect of the integration of a multiplicity. This core of the laughter-provocative process is normally preceded by foreplay and succeeded by after-effects.