This is a newsletter about the Philosophy of Humor.
Laughter is Madness - King Solomon
Why do we laugh? Why do we find things funny? Why do we take so much pleasure in the absurd? These questions have long fascinated me. At first glance, you might assume these are straightforward questions about a perfectly normal, everyday activity. But as you plunge a little deeper down the rabbit hole, you begin to realize that humor might be the most peculiar thing there ever was.
Imagine you were raised in a humorless but otherwise identical society on some other planet and you were given one evening to study the people of Earth. Imagine you’re taking your tour and seeing all the things there are to see, and a little boy waddles up to you and asks, “Why did the absurdist fall into the well?” Naturally, you would take this for a serious question. You kneel down to the boy and put your hand on his shoulder. You begin to gather your thoughts on the subject and think of a couple of follow-up questions that you think will help clarify the problem he is trying to solve. But before you have a chance to open your mouth, the boy smiles and shouts, “Refrigerator!” and waddles off into the night. Very curious that the boy seems to find so much satisfaction in such a strange answer, you think. Perhaps his mind is unsound.
Let’s say you continue your tour of this strange planet and encounter a mime standing on a crate in the middle of a square. Why he pretends to be trapped in a box is beyond you. The fact that he’s pretending to pull a rope doesn’t seem particularly productive either. But the real mystery here is why such a buffoon has managed to gather a crowd of people around him who seem to genuinely enjoy this behavior. On your planet, such an absurd man would be locked away and sterilized.
What is more curious is the way these humans express their enjoyment. Rather than simply smile and nod, like a person on your planet would do to express her content with something, these humans make odd, high-pitched howls and grunts that come from the depths of their bellies.
Then let’s say that after this you go to dinner with some friendly humans you’ve met. The company is charming enough, and the meal is quite tasty, but when the waiter comes to collect your dish, he smiles and says, “Oh, you must have hated the meal, didn’t you?” even though it is very obvious you finished every morsel on your plate. This is where you begin to wonder if the curious behavior you’ve noticed is not limited to a few oddball characters, but is perhaps something that has infected the whole of the human race.
Soon enough you would see that Earth is an endless circus of absurdities. You would see people gluing nickels to the ground and hear people talking in accents that are very obviously not their own. You would see children wearing adult shoes. You would hear riddles that don’t make any sense. Toward the end of your journey, when you try to photograph the group of friends you’ve met, these humans, instead of staring vacantly at the camera like a sane person would, grin and make facial expressions that couldn’t possibly correspond to any emotion. Some of them bulge their eyes out, pull their mouths open wide with their pointer fingers and make horrible flailing movements with their tongues. Others make odd gestures with their fingers on top of each other’s heads.
At the end of your visit, you would ultimately have to conclude that human beings seem to achieve great pleasure in intentionally abandoning whatever intellect they possess—and that they are entirely incompatible with a rational society such as yours.
What we could never sufficiently convey to such a visitor is what it’s like to actually experience humor on a physical level—to know what funny feels like. Few feelings are stranger, and fewer still can make us feel so at home. Laughter can seize the body very powerfully, and yet it feels as light as a tickle. Paradoxically, it makes you feel as if you’re being attacked by relaxation.
Most striking about humor is the fact that not only is it usually purposeless, but it’s often intentionally counterproductive and completely opposite to the behaviors that a pragmatic people would value. We expect nothing but honesty from our friends, so why would we feel such pleasure hearing them sarcastically say the opposite of what they think? We value nothing more than health and safety, so why does it feel so good to see a perfectly nice man fall off his roof and land crotch first onto a fence?
Some of the things we laugh at are downright horrifying. A typical episode of America’s Funniest Home Videos might show a bridesmaid dancing on a table until one of the legs snaps and sends her across the room, or maybe a quick clip of a young gymnast twirling and flipping and then landing on her neck in such a way that causes an uproar of snorting laughter from the studio audience. Is this the most appropriate response?
I like to imagine hosting a show like that. I’d let the audience have a laugh at the young gymnast’s tumble. Then I’d let the tape keep playing so they see what horrible people they are for laughing. Perhaps it would show the young gymnast lying silently on the floor for several minutes, surrounded by a team of paramedics making concerned gestures to each other. Maybe it would show the stadium respectfully applauding as the coaches and medical staff try and load the girl’s mangled body onto a child-sized stretcher and carry her out of the arena.
Which brings us to yet another interesting curiosity of humor: how fickle it can be. The response to humor is the most boisterous of all emotions. You would be hard-pressed to find any art that induces an involuntary reaction as loud and contagious as laughter. Laughter is so powerful that it can infect an entire room, or completely possess a man even when he desperately wishes to contain himself. And yet the humor behind these laughs is so fragile that only the slightest misstep in timing, or a misplaced facial expression will send the humor crumbling down, even for a veteran comic in front of an audience thoroughly willing to laugh.
Another strange feature of jokes is that although they seem to thrive on attention, they cannot handle an ounce too much of it. If a joke goes on for only a few moments too long, it will start to spoil. Tell someone ‘I love you’ twice and it's only that much more endearing. But tell someone a joke twice and the response to the second is opposite to that of the first. Even when you hear an ingenious joke it has a way of slipping out of your memory so that when you're asked if you know any good jokes you draw a blank.
One night after having thought a great deal about humor, I dreamed I lived in a world where the laws of humor were simple and predictable. In this universe, it was the sight or sound of shattered glass that made one laugh. I saw a comedian on a late-night talk show pull out a wine glass from his jacket pocket and casually toss it onto the floor in front of him to get a polite laugh from the audience. Then he reached his toe out and knocked over a vase on the table next to him to garner a hearty chuckle. Finally, he had a series of glass aquariums rolled out onto the stage, and he shattered them with a baseball bat until the audience had lost its collective mind.
It occurred to me that if you were ever able to have such a thorough understanding of every detail about what makes people laugh so that you could induce the reaction at will, just like the man in the dream, you would have immense power. You could heal the sad and the sick. You could spellbind people and lead them through humorous trains of thought in order to make your opinions seem more palatable. You could ridicule the things you don’t like. You could respond to any criticism or uncomfortable situation by making people fall to their knees and gasp with laughter. It would not be long before people began to see you as a god.
On the other hand, if you were able to reduce a very precious part of human nature to a simple, mechanical process, you might risk drying up some of the magic. If you can kill one joke by explaining it, then perhaps by understanding every aspect of humor you risk spoiling the phenomenon altogether. I suspect that the only way this has happened yet is if everyone who knows exactly how humor works has taken a vow of secrecy in order to spare the rest of us from permanent seriousness.
The truth is that the mere thought of a world where humor is a predictable process is so alien that it only demonstrates how unknowable the phenomenon is. Trying to make sense of nonsense has been a perennial bother in just about every area of philosophy, but at least in the more serious spheres you don’t make a fool of yourself along the way. Humor is a creature so elusive in nature that it can be difficult even to know where to begin an investigation.
The pressures of natural selection, which have so thoroughly explained the other emotions, offer few easy clues to explain the things we do for the sake of a laugh. Nature has always favored the fit, intelligent, and strong, while humor glorifies the plump, dimwitted, and clumsy. It is hard to believe a man wearing a tutu and a horse head mask is displaying some trait that helped his forefathers persevere through difficult circumstances.
Nor is there any obvious evolutionary justification for our response to humor. When people laugh, they go into a fit. They snort, snicker, shriek, holler, and stomp. They tear up, turn red in the face, fall to their knees, and pass gas. I can’t see how any of that would do anyone any good in the wild. I’d like to see someone justify how peeing your pants could be an evolutionarily favored response to seeing someone make a funny face.
Maybe humor is a glitch that was harmless enough to slip through the cracks. Or maybe it is our prize for reaching the top of the food chain and escaping much of the callous, brutal pragmatism so necessary to biological life. Maybe the heavens have blessed us with an ethereal reward for transcending the limitations of the rational world. This, of course, is not likely.
A further challenge to the investigation of humor is the difficulty in providing a comprehensive definition of humor which includes all of its varieties. It isn’t easy to find a common thread that links poop jokes, a clown, a toddler who talks funny, or any of the other gags that fall along the spectrum of humor. And even if you do, the responses to humor are so subjective that it can be hard to pin down which antics are actually funny enough to be worthy of study. If you tell a lewd joke to a couple of friends, one of them might laugh while the other gasps. And you could tell that same joke in a different setting and their reactions might reverse.
Even if you do get your test subjects to laugh at your jokes, you still don’t know if your joke is funny. Laughter happens not to be a very good barometer for how funny something is. People laugh at things for all sorts of reasons. Mostly when I laugh it is to pretend I heard what a stranger just said to me so that it seems like we’re getting along. If a joke is ridiculing someone you might laugh as a way of publicly dismissing them. Some jokes you laugh at to let everyone know you got the joke or sometimes merely to show you appreciate the craft behind the joke as if to say “ah, I see what you did there.”
You can even be fooled by your own laughter. I have found myself in a social gathering laughing so hard at a speaker that I have tears in my eyes, and afterwards I’ll think about it and realize that it wasn’t the slightest bit funny. I’ve even been in a group of friends where we’re all laughing and we can’t explain why. On the other hand some of the most hilarious jokes will often get not much more than a smirk or an internal chuckle.
But even if you could find a single joke that is undeniably hilarious to every listener in every context, you would still have to confront the fact that it is impossible to study a joke while it is still alive. There is an observer effect. When you analyze a joke, you kill it. The characteristic lightness of a joke is spoiled by the seriousness of inquisition. This means you’re trying to figure out what’s so funny about something that you can no longer find funny.
With other emotions, when you dwell on the reasons the emotion has come about, there is a magnifying effect. Ask a friend how his divorce has affected his state of mind, and he will probably only grow more bitter or more somber with every point he makes. Or if you tried to come up with a list of reasons why his recent lottery win is making him so happy, he will only get more excited. But if you hypothesize that the reason he laughs at the elephant joke might be because elephants don’t usually take their hats off when they go to dinner, not only will your friend’s happiness diminish, but his mood may actually reverse into annoyance.
These considerations have led me to believe that humor is a specimen that desperately wishes not to be studied or understood. It is a mischievous little devil flailing and dancing about, trying to catch you off guard, but who pretends to be asleep when you give it a second look. Because of these peculiarities, I imagine that if there is any understanding to be achieved, it will require an unorthodox approach.
We know that some things are best known by looking to their opposite, and in the same way that studying heat helps us to better understand the cold, so too might we better understand humor by looking instead to what it is not.
One can say without too much controversy that there is something about humor that stands opposite to seriousness. Things said in jest are not taken to be literal pieces of information meant to be factored into any decision making process. They are not expected to carry any impact. Serious information, on the other hand, carries with it a sense of urgency. It is considered worthy of one’s full attention and is expected to impose significant consequences. Maybe if we look at these serious, consequential matters of life, we might be able to trace ourselves back to a better understanding of the frivolous. Bertrand Russell once said that “the point of philosophy is to start with something so simple as not to seem worth stating, and to end with something so paradoxical that no one will believe it,” so by his reasoning we have a solid beginning to our adventure.
As a thought experiment, let’s begin by imagining a stimulus we would treat with absolute seriousness. A little gunfire might do it. Or maybe some muffled cries for help coming from the basement, or any other situation that provokes that heart-pounding, palm-soaking, so-this-is-how-I-die sensation pumping into the bloodstream in the form of adrenaline and other stress hormones.
In such a situation, the body initiates a series of actions that prepare it to handle danger. Breathing shifts from slow, deep breaths in the belly to quicker, shallow breaths higher up in the chest. Thoughts race and the body’s machinery is put into high gear by our fight-or-flight response.
But then, let’s say that after all these bodily actions have been taken, you make the discovery that the signal which originally gave you a fright were really nothing to worry about. You see something that tells you this is really not your problem and makes you feel you can go along with the rest of your boring day. Maybe you discover that the “gunfire” you thought you heard was actually just a show of fireworks, or that the “child you heard crying for help in the basement” was not in any way related to you.
This might be a situation where a laughter mechanism is well suited. A number of thinkers have said in one way or another that the quintessential comic epiphany occurs when you realize you’ve taken something more seriously than you should have.
Max Eastman, paraphrasing Plato, suggested that laughter arises from something that is expected to cause pain but which somehow causes pleasure.
English philosopher Herbert Spencer believed that laughter occurs when we realize we’ve been deceived into triggering more nervous arousal than necessary. He believed that throughout our life, our body summons nervous energy to accomplish whatever it needs to do, and that every now and again when we discover that we’ve summoned more energy than necessary, we release that excess energy through laughter. Spencer’s portrait of laughter is often likened to a sort of relief valve that makes sure there isn’t too much energy built up to solve a problem that isn’t really there. All nervous energy needs to go somewhere, Spencer reckoned, and most of the time it is channeled toward some sort of action. Laughter, he noted, was the only emotion not tied to any action.
Sigmund Freud later developed this theory into a more sophisticated one which accommodated his theories of the unconscious. He believed that a joke tricks us into summoning unconscious intellectual and emotional resources, and that when we realize the premise of the joke was a farce, we release those unconscious energies in order to return to equilibrium.
These theories are mired in antiquated ideas about the brain and nervous system, but we can salvage from them a simple and straightforward model of humor. First, there are some indications that signal the expectation of an emotionally compelling situation. Second, the body summons the resources necessary to handle such a situation. Third, an epiphany arises, illustrating those expectations were unfounded. And finally, the tension is released through laughter.
It is often said that humor requires an element of surprise. But in one way, this epiphany is the inverse of what we normally think of as a surprise. With a typical surprise, you are going about your day, minding your own business, and then something suddenly jumps to your attention. But in a humorous situation as Spencer and Freud would describe it, the order of emotions is reversed: you begin in a state of anticipation, with your attention fixed intensely on a situation, and then something happens to make that sense of anticipation vanish. A surprise happens when a state lacking any expectation explodes into something, whereas a laugh happens when, as Immanuel Kant once said, a strained expectation about something fizzles into nothing. If a surprise is necessary for a laugh, Spencer might have said it’s only necessary in order to wind up a person so that they can later laugh when they discover they were startled under false pretenses.
From a neurological perspective, modern observations about laughter’s effect on the nervous system are more or less in line with the suggestions made by Spencer and Freud. During a laugh, there is a sudden and transient burst of sympathetic (fight-or-flight) nervous arousal, followed by a sharp vagal rebound, a quick return to equilibrium marked by an uptick in activity of the parasympathetic nervous system, our neurological machinery most closely related to relaxation.
Contrary to the sympathetic nervous system, the parasympathetic nervous system inhibits many of our defensive responses and is responsible for our “feed-and-breed” or “rest-and-digest” activities. It is interesting to note that parasympathetic activity can at times stimulate tear secretion and empty the bladder and bowels, which might help explain some of the more bizarre accompaniments to hearty laughter.
From a physiological perspective, you might say the traits of a laugh are opposite those of a gasp—perhaps making it a half-sibling of the sigh. With a gasp we experience a sudden inhalation at the onset of some astonishment, whereas during a sigh or a laugh we experience a strong exhalation at some relief.
While gasping has been observed to elevate a person’s blood pressure and activate one’s fight-or-flight response, a sigh is believed to reset a person’s breathing and heart rate patterns back to a normal rhythm and to mitigate whatever emotional arousal came out of the initial stress.
These behaviors adjust the nervous system’s metronome, either at the onset of or at a break from some stress, so by comparison, the Spencerian view might be that laughter helps us reset the nervous system’s metronome after we realize an arousing trigger turned out to be nothing to get worked up over.
The notion that laughter serves to relieve a person's excess nervous tension is one that has received support from many prominent thinkers throughout history. But where an explanation like this falls short is in its failure to account for why a relaxation response would need to be so noisy. The sound of laughter is completely ridiculous for being just a relaxation mechanism. You would think that a physiological response that has something to do with aggression and a perceived threat of danger would err on the side of caution and be as quiet as possible.
Evidently the benefits of laughter drawing attention to itself must have outweighed the costs.
Occasionally in nature if there is an advantage to be gained by making others in the area aware of a particular behavior or trait, it will be embellished to be made more noticeable. Sometimes it will be exaggerated to the extent that its value as a means of expression can become more important than the purpose of the original behavior.
For example, a wild dog facing an adversary might pull the corners of his mouth back from his teeth in order to make it easier for him to bite, inadvertently displaying his sharp fangs. Because this behavior anticipates something very serious, it has the potential to carry great weight as a social signal. Any animal that recognizes the predictive power of this behavior stands to gain an advantage. Those animals that recognize this snarl as a display of aggression—and thus exhibit suitable caution—will reduce their risk of unnecessary harm. In turn, a dog with an expressive snarl will be rewarded for being more intimidating. Eventually, as the sender and receiver adapt to recognize the message encoded in this signal, dogs will develop the instinct to articulate their snarl as ostentatiously as possible when they want to express their aggression. By this point, the communicative value outweighs whatever preparatory value the behavior originally had.
Similarly, cranes open their wings and flap them around before they fly in order to shake out dirt and straighten out their feathers. At some point, it became recognized that wing-flapping was a reliable predictor of flight, and over the course of many generations, cranes developed the instinct to flap their wings in an exaggerated and prolonged fashion in order to send a message to the group that it’s time to fly. This ability to announce one’s private state to the group furthers the group’s ability to work together.
A similar sort of evolution likely occurred with regard to laughter. The muscles responsible for the vocalization of laughter are intimately involved with the maintenance and regulation of our emotional state, making it feasible for the byproducts of a relaxation response to be developed into a communication signal.
The characteristic bursts of exhalation that occur during a laugh are produced in large part by contractions of the diaphragm. The diaphragm’s primary function is to push air out of the lungs during respiration, but it has also been observed since antiquity to have a strong effect on our emotional state. Much of this emotional modulation is carried out by information exchanges between the diaphragm and brain by way of mechanoreceptors and chemoreceptors. The observed effect that diaphragmatic activity has on our nervous system is the basis for many types of meditation and deep breathing exercises.
The reason these bursts of exhalation have a distinct vocal quality is due to the fact that they are accompanied by innervations of the larynx. Originally a muscle that helped us keep water and food out of the lungs, somewhere along the way our ancestors developed the ability to maneuver the larynx in such a way so that air passing up the windpipe would make distinct sounds, thus setting the course for basic respiratory activities to be articulated into meaningful vocal signals.
Those best able to accentuate these rumblings of the diaphragm and larynx likely gained an advantage by being able to broadcast information about their internal state in a way that might disarm their peers. Likewise, those best able to read these expressions as an indication of nonaggression likely gained an advantage by identifying and form relationships with those least likely to cause them harm.
It’s worth noting that a laugh also produces a variety of other indications that a person is not prepared to engage in hostile activities. In many ways it’s the opposite of a flex. Instead of tensing the muscles so they’re ready for exertion or so that you can intimidate your opponent, when you laugh, your muscles fall slack and conspicuously unprepared for any kind of defensive response. Instead of gritting your teeth so that your jaw is prepared to handle impact, during laughter, your mouth is relaxed into an open position, leaving one of the body’s most vulnerable points of contact unprotected from attack.
The indication that you’ve let your guard down could have several implications. It could act as an insult, to taunt someone as if to say “I’m not alarmed because I don’t consider you a legitimate threat." It could also serve as a gesture of cordiality. A way of saying “I’m lowering my defenses around you because I understand you mean no harm.”
You could argue that there are benefits to being able to convey to someone that you’re not preparing to attack them. It stands to reason that a man who can disarm the aggressions of other people would be able to survive longer than a man who cannot. On a grander scale, it follows that a group that can collectively manage its aggressions and reduce risks of internal conflict would be much more productive than one that cannot. Henri Bergson once remarked that laughter hardly ever occurs without the company of other people, which strongly suggests that one of its primary purposes is to serve as a vehicle for social communication.
The idea that laughter functions as some sort of safety signal is one that has been repeated many times throughout the course of history. Darwin and his contemporaries suggested that a signal to indicate the harmlessness of certain threats would be useful in facilitating play in children. In the early 20th century, Donald Hayworth proposed that laughter could have been a way for our ancestors to announce that some danger had passed, or that it was not as harmful as we’d expected it to be. Using a similar line of reasoning, Neuroscientist V.S. Ramachandran would later call laughter a “false alarm” signal.
These interpretations suggest that laughter’s function is more or less opposite that of a scream. It’s not a terribly outlandish notion, considering how opposite the feelings associated with laughs and screams are. Darwin observed that the vocal patterns of laughter and screaming contrasted as well. During a scream, our exhalations are long and continuous, and our inhalations are short and interrupted, while the exact opposite is true for laughter.
The acoustic traits of laughs and screams are quite different too. A scream is sustained, whereas a laugh is broken up. A scream maintains a constant pitch, whereas the pitch of a laugh will fluctuate. A scream has indistinct onsets and offsets. It slips out of the air and then fades off. Laughter is much more textured. It comes as a collection of colorful rhythmic bursts, punctuated by jagged, staccato edges.
The straightforward, streamlined structure of a scream likely helps it convey a sense of urgency more efficiently without risking giving up too much information, while the ornate, fanciful nature of a laugh allows it to carry a wealth of information about who and where it’s coming from. This makes laughter especially valuable as a social signal, as it takes a great deal of nuanced information exchange in order for social cooperation to be effective.
You could probably invent dozens of new ways of laughing by switching up the pacing, or the number and length of intervals, or how quickly the tones flutter. Each of these different ways of laughing would paint a different portrait of a person. But if you wanted to improvise new screams, your options would be much more limited.
If you closed your eyes and heard a laugh in the other room, you’d immediately be able to tell all sorts of things about the person laughing. You’d be able to pick out little subtleties about their status or their mood or their health. But if you’d heard a scream in the other room, you’d know very little about the person except that they’re in distress.
In 1955, Peter Marler suggested that the structure of an animal call could play a role in helping it achieve its function. He suggested that because many alarm calls tend to be long in duration, maintain a consistent pitch, and have indistinct onsets and offsets, they have the effect of making it very difficult for listeners to determine where they’re coming from.
The reason for this is because one of the ways our brain figures out where a sound is coming from is by comparing how it sounds in each ear. If a sound is a little louder in one ear, or if a sound is heard slightly earlier in one ear than another, our brains will measure this small difference and be able to roughly calculate the distance and direction to the sound source. It is harder to pick up on these differences if each ear is bombarded by an identical tone for a sustained period of time. Marler hypothesized that if an alarm sound were hard to localize, it would allow an animal to alert his peers of danger without giving up his specific location to enemies. If he is successful at convincing his peers that there is danger in the vicinity, they might scatter, creating a distraction for the predator that might allow for an escape.
Contrary to this, Marler noticed, calls which are segmented into fragments and which have more pitch complexity are much easier to localize. It is much easier for the brain to pick out specific differences between how a sound is received in each ear when the sound is more textured.
While simple, inconspicuous signals are fit to convince others in the area to scatter, ostentatious, easy to locate signals are naturally suited to convince others to gather, which might contribute to the fact that laughter so often accompanies behaviors that occur when people collect together, like courtship, fraternization, and parent-offspring interactions.
Furthermore, because laughter carries all the risks that come with making one’s location publicly available, when a person laughs, he isn’t just suggesting that a scene is free from risk, he’s providing reliable, falsifiable evidence. By drawing attention to himself, he makes himself the easiest target of the group, which demonstrates that he has something to lose if he is incorrect about his assertion of safety.
What we have yet to achieve in these theories is a satisfying account of humor's relation to the absurd; the humor of strange riddles and inversions of logic. It makes sense that a response which is calming could have something to do with our nervous responses, but I don't see any sense in why I should feel a surge of relaxation after hearing whatever strange reason the chicken has for crossing the road. Similarly, I don’t see how nervous energies could have anything to do with a joke about a penguin and a rabbi having drinks together in a bar, even if I still find it funny. Humor’s relation to fear and humor’s relation to absurdity are equally integral to the phenomenon, yet there is little obvious connection between the two aspects.
I believe that the beginnings of an explanation can be found by looking further into how the brain treats a serious situation. More specifically, if we consider the influence that fear and aggression have on our mechanisms of learning and memory.
Before we elaborate, let us first review a simple model of learning and memory originally introduced to us by Ivan Pavlov. In his famous experiment, Pavlov demonstrated that if you present a dog with a bowl of meat, his mouth will water. If you ring a bell every time you present this meat, he will begin to associate the two, and after a certain number of repetitions, you can eventually condition the dog to salivate in response to the ringing of the bell alone, even if there is no meat. The basic idea is that if one action is consistently presented in association with another action, an individual can be conditioned to see the first as a meaningful signal of the second.
This discovery of basic patterns out of a noisy environment is the cornerstone of all learning, and it is critical to any organism that hopes to develop some sense of order about the world.
Typically these sorts of associations are made only after it has been sufficiently established that the same pattern will occur with consistency. If a situation is especially frightening, however, the pathways of learning and memory are built much more quickly, and the resulting associations are stronger. The insights of a fear episode can be established in as little as one lesson. The rationale for this is quite simple: if it took ten injuries to finally discover that getting mauled by a dog causes pain, our ancestors would not have survived for very long.
When we are exposed to an aversive stimulus like this, our receptors are shuffled around and our neurotransmitters are logistically reorganized in order to make for a heightened sensitivity to the stimulus. The result is that less of the signal produces more of a response. If it used to take a dog barking in your face for your heart to start beating a little faster, after a traumatic incident, the mere sight of a dog down the road will get your heart racing.
This response can sometimes be more powerful than we’d like it to be. For example, as Neuroscientist Joseph LeDoux explains in The Emotional Brain, if you heard a car horn just before getting into a car accident, your brain might wire the sound of a horn to signal the expectation of a car accident. Months later you could be sipping tea in a café, and the sound of a car horn from the street might send you spiraling down a tunnel of post-traumatic terror, even though intellectually you know full well that there is no danger.
Although the power of a response like this can come at a tremendous cost, there is still a rationale to it. The pressures of natural selection have incentivized Mother Nature to be more invested in our survival than our happiness. In the case of the car horn, she must have calculated that it is better for us to have a painfully sensitive fear of car horns than to risk us wandering around in traffic.
Still, there is no reason for the instinct to overreach. It would serve no evolutionary purpose—and in fact would be counterproductive—for us to have an irrational, paralyzing fear about something not even associated with anything threatening—for example, if we went into a flurry of post-traumatic stress over a family member making noise in another room or a balloon popping, simply because one had once caught us off-guard. If we were conditioned to fear every harmless surprise we had ever encountered, we would have all of the pain and risk that come with excess fear without the benefit of increased safety. An alarm system doesn’t do much good if it sirens all day long over nothing.
Because there are hazards to miscalculating an alarm signal, our fear-conditioning circuitry has a feedback system that accounts for the subsequent events that occur after a signal and adjusts the strength of a signal according to how accurate its predictions were. If a stimulus which is believed to predict harm is followed by a harmful stimulus, then its signaling power is strengthened; but if that same stimulus is followed by something pleasurable, its signaling power is weakened. The longevity an experience has in our memory is largely determined by the chemicals that are released while it’s happening. Stress hormones play a role in strengthening fear memories, and if the receptors of these hormones are blocked after a traumatic event, certain kinds of fear associations won’t develop. Endogenous opioids, which are released during laughter, play a role in disrupting the development of fear associations. Furthermore, we mentioned earlier that the vocal aspect of a laugh is produced in large part by the larynx. The larynx is innervated by the vagus nerve. Vagus nerve stimulation is an emerging treatment that has been shown to help fade away traumatic memories.
If Freud had known what we know today about how fear shapes our learning process, he might have listed this as one of the reasons why we need to let go of unnecessary nervous tension. If we let fear linger longer than necessary, it could encourage the strength of misleading memories. But if we could replace that fear with a more pleasurable response, it would perhaps block the building of incorrect and counterproductive fear associations and prevent harmless episodes from being uploaded to the brain as traumatic memories.
All of this is to say that we have put our finger on one more possible dimension of an incentive not to take certain things too seriously. If we did not have discretion about which pieces of information we treat with seriousness, the soundness of our decision-making apparatus would be compromised. A signal that cannot deliver on the anticipation it has created is no signal at all. It is noise. It is absurd, and its significance as a signal should be reduced if the integrity of one’s information is to be maintained.
The course of thought which accompanies a harmless surprise like we’ve just described is very similar to the traditional structure of a joke. In a typical joke, we are given a premise which anticipates a certain set of expectations, and when the premise cannot deliver on these promises, it’s credibility is laughed away. Any pattern that might have been implied by the premise is no longer considered meaningful.
Often a joke will mimic a traditional problem solving task. You’re given some riddle somebody wants you to solve or asked to explain how some pieces of a story fit together. Ordinarily, a person working through a problem solving task will undergo a physiological response similar to what they would feel if they were experiencing a stressful situation. Their heart rate might pick up and they might sweat a little more. But at some point during the joke it is revealed that the problem was not a legitimate one. The listener discovers that he no longer has to burden himself with the stress of solving the problem and can discard whatever information was presented in the original premise.
The idea that humor serves to identify information that can’t be taken seriously is a perspective that has been iterated in many forms throughout history. The Roman rhetorician Quintilian remarked that humor had the power to single out logical flaws in another person’s thought process. More recently, Marvin Minsky likened a sense of humor to a debugging mechanism that weeds out inaccuracies from the mind. Matthew Hurley proposed a similar model, remarking that the pleasure of a laugh could serve as an emotional reward for discovering such errors. Across the various fields of the humanities and social sciences, there are a great number of theories that have their own way of saying that behind every laugh there is some diminishment of our investment in an idea; that in every joke there is some signal being dialed down, or some pattern that is unlearned and unaccepted.
These theories are built upon an assumption that is encoded in our language. When you are introduced to an idea that is not worthy of your consideration, you say it is laughable, silly, ridiculous, absurd, or a joke. When you say something is funny, you not only mean that it makes you laugh, but also that it is odd and does not easily find a home in the mind. Max Eastman noticed the connection between the different connotations of the word funny and remarked that “the development of language has thus been wiser in our time than any philosopher.”
Perhaps the most pavlovian theory was proposed by Arthur Koestler. He contrasted comic epiphanies to scientific discoveries. He believed that scientific discoveries were the result of finding a connection between two different concepts, whereas comic epiphanies occur when we realize these associations are not possible. In simpler terms, we say “a-ha” when a connection is made, and “ha-ha” when a connection is broken.
A classic example of a scientific epiphany like Koestler described occurred when Descartes unified geometry and algebra after discovering that the insights of one could be useful to the other, or when Archimedes took his famous bath and realized that his observations of water displacement could be enhanced by his understanding of density and volume in order to explain the nature of buoyancy.
On the other end of the spectrum, one of the most classic approaches to getting a laugh is to juxtapose two things that don’t quite fit together, e.g., a dog in a policeman’s uniform, a dimwit who thinks he’s a genius, a child’s face superimposed on a picture of a world leader, or a body builder who appears to struggle immensely trying to arm wrestle a small child. According to Koestler, in the face of mismatches like these, any tension implied by the premise of the situation loses its justification. The union between these things appears so absurd that the scene altogether cannot be believed at face value to be a serious and credible situation.
If we did not have the capacity to prevent these odd mismatches from entering the mind, we would have a very unreliable understanding of the world. You would be in real trouble if you genuinely believed that a dog in a policeman’s outfit held any real authority.
It is important to note that according to this model, it is not absurdity on its own that produces a laugh, but an absurd combination of elements that is incompatible in such a way that it makes an idea untenable. There needs to be some element of what Herbert Spencer called “descending incongruity,” that is, if the absurdity is to have any comic effect, it must play some role in defusing the severity of the original premise. In other words, absurdity is only going to produce a laugh if it has some tension to defuse. You need to feel that there is at least a pinch of something which could be taken seriously in order to justify the firing of the “don’t take this seriously” response.
With this in mind, I like to think of humor as a more pleasant, more cognitive analogue of disgust. In each of these phenomena you are labeling something as unfit for consumption. With disgust you see something that is unfit to put in the belly, and with humor you see something that is unfit to put in the mind. In each there is usually some small part of you which is tricked into accepting the thing before you feel the urge to reject it.
I used to have a chihuahua, which means I spent a good deal of my life picking up chihuahua feces. I never minded it. I’d see other dog-walkers picking up after their dogs and they didn’t seem to have any problem with it either.
But if my chihuahua ever vomited, and I could make out the little bits of chicken or fish or macaroni or anything else that looks like food in the vomit, I couldn’t stand to look at it. In fact it gives me trouble even writing about it.
If I didn’t feel such a visceral disgust, and instead I felt my stomach growl and my mouth salivate the same way they do when I see chicken at the grocery store, I’d have probably been found dead by now, face down in a dog park with little bits of chicken in my mouth.
You can walk by all kinds of toxic and unsavory things like buckets of paint and bags of concrete mix and not feel the “don’t eat this” response because there was never any hint of an urge to put those things in your body. But then you see a little morsel of old spaghetti in the garbage disposal and it makes you gag.
In the same way, you can walk around the world and see all kinds of meaningless noise and random absurdity and not find any of it funny because there was never any presumption of seriousness. There has to be just a little part of you that believes the friend jumping out at you from behind a corner is actually a threat, or that there is something in the satire you’re reading that is valid before you catch on that these are not worthy of your full attention.
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