Afterthought

By ALAN BRIEN

Reading any of the classic works on wit, hum- our and laughter by Spencer, Bergson, Freud or, most recently, Koestler, you can soon see'.where this illusion arose. Perhaps unconsciously, each seems reacting to some accusation that he lacked a sense of humour and was determined to disprove this most hurtful of all accusations by showing that he could not only tell jokes but he could also tell us why we laughed at the jokes he told. The trouble is, we rarely do laugh. Our theorists have an unfortunate habit of either picking bad jokes or muffing the good ones. The worse the joke, the easier it is to analyse, just as the deader the body, the easier the autopsy. The joke is usually bad just because its mechanism is so obvious, its theme so familiar, its operation so clumsy. Inferior art often makes an ideal model for superior criticism.

Academic joke-tasters so often misunderstand the nuances of the jokes they nail to the demon-

stration board that I find myself becoming doubt- ful about the universality of their theories. Arthur Koestler, for example, shook my faith in his ear for an anecdote in The Act of Creation when he gave the punch-line of the famous Jewish joke about the boy who had just been to the psychia- trist as : 'Oedipus or Shmoedipus, I wouldn't worry so long as he's a good boy and loves his mamma.' Not only is this longer and flatter than the interrogative pay-off in the version I used to tell (`Oedipus-Shmoedipus, what's it matter so long as he loves his old mother?') thus draining off two of Mr. K's three joke-requirements- `originality, power, economy.' But to anyone who has ever heard the idiom alive on the lip of, say, a New York taxi-driver (and lips don't come any livelier than that), to change 'Oedipus-Shmoedi- pus' to `Oedipus or Shmoedipus' is as destructive of the cultural authenticity of the joke as it would be in a Cockney anecdote to replace `bloody' with `by Our Lady.' Now The Act of Creation is a fat, 700-page work (and also one full of both enter- tainment and instruction) so such a slip is a minor blemish. But what happened to the sense of hum- our of the staff of the Observer Colour Supple- ment two weeks ago? They reprinted a rather second-rate New Yorker cartoon showing four simple-minded trappers playing poker with a Red Indian. Facing the Indian, and leaning against the wall with a good view of the other players, is another Indian-blowing smoke signals as he pulls on a pipe. Though the Indians are fairly heavily blacked in the face, wearing head-bands and fringed tunics, Mr. Koestler is allowed to explain the tableau thus : The smoke rings blown by the bored guy leaning against the wall are coded signals to his bug-eyed accomplice. The `bisociation' here is between the blowing of smoke rings, which habitually conveys peaceful day-dreaming, and the practical use to which two cardsharpers have put it. Like Hamlet's clouds, the puffs of smoke have abruptly changed their meaning.

Challenged later, Mr. Koestler admitted that the two cheats were undoubtedly Red Indians but claimed that his analysis remained substantially correct.

I am always suspicious of all-purpose, port- manteau theories, like Marxism, Freudianism and Roman Catholicism, which continue unaltered however the facts may change and even can justify opposite conclusions from the same evidence. Mr. K's `bisociation' is the core of his theory of laughter-all humour lies in the discovery of the unexpected confusion of two usually separate contexts. This formula fits his imaginary cartoon but not the real one. There is no bisociation be- tween the two uses of the smoke to Red Indians- it has always been their means of silent communi- cation over distances. Indeed, the sole point of the joke seems to be that they are using the smoke for its original purpose. Mr. K could still apply his theory by saying that there is no bisociation and therefore no laughter-and I would agree with him. He can hardly in logic stick to his original verdict.

I have no doubt that his approach to the machinery of jokes is the right one. But I ques- tion whether the idea of .a collision between two modes of thinking really needs those cumber- some drawings (like instructions on how to fold your own spaceship on a corn-flakes packet) to

make what is essentially a simple, if overlooked point. I also wonder how far this theory is really so different from that of Freud (who also col- lected same bad jokes and crippled some bad ones) in Wit and Its Relation to the Uncon- scious. Mr. Koestler sums up : We can now define humour in all its varia- tions as the effect of perceiving an idea or event, simultaneously or in quick succession, in two habitually incompatible frames of reference.

Freud conoludes :

It is a condition for the origin of the comic that-we can be induced to apply-either simul-

taneously or in rapid succession-to the same thought function two different modes of ideas between which the `comparison' then takes place and the comic difference results.

Mr. Koestler makes a very valuable point when he stresses that there is no 'sharp dividing line between the domain of humour and that of discovery . . . and the rhyme is a glorified pun.' I would go farther and claim that all art springs

from Mr. Koestler's `bisociation' or from Freud's 'comparison' or Mr. F. W. Bateson's leap across the 'semantic gap.' Ar4totle said it first-`an intuitive perception of the similarity

in dissimilars.' Hobbes, Dryden, Dr. Johnson (why do we always call him `Dr.'?- it was an

honorary degree) repeated it but Coleridge said it best. His definition of imagination is the key to the universe: the balance of reconcilement of opposite or discordant qualities: of sameness, with differ- ence; of the general with the concrete; the idea with the image; the individual with the repre- sentative; the sense of novelty and freshness with old and familiar objeots; a more than usual state of emotion with more than usual order; judgment ever awake and steady self- possession with enthusiasm and feeling pro- found or vehement . . .

This is the secret of living in barely half a sen- tence.