Part Two: and then I had a strange dream...
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.