But what are we to make of the absurd? (part 4)
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.