Laugh? I nearly did.

There are plenty of theories about what makes things funny, lots of them stressing the cruel nature of laughter. They suggest it’s an expression of superiority over the person we’re laughing at, but that’s too crude. Laughter’s a shared reaction – and it doesn’t have to be at someone else’s expense.

BMK / CC BY-SA (https://creativecommons.org/licenses/by-sa/3.0)

The theory I like best is the one which says that laughter’s actually about thinking. If you like, it’s intellectual, critical. It’s your mind seeing something happening, assuming it’ll pan out in a particular way then having those assumptions undermined when something unexpected happens. At its crudest, it’s the banana skin scenario.

e.g.

A person (preferably one of rank and substance – a queen, a president, a supermodel, say) is walking along and suddenly becomes a disarticulated mechanism. If the result is a serious injury, the laughter dies at once, which kind of discredits the ‘laughter is cruel’ theory. If it had been a bent, lame old person heading for the banana skin, there’d be no laughter (or maybe just less, if the observer were a sociopath). Sympathy would interfere with the laughter.

No, what’s happened is that you suddenly have two mutually exclusive sets of rules to handle at the same time. A medal-laden head of state processing along a red carpet is (technically, at least) a dignified, elevated thing, an example of the pomp, ceremony and grandeur of an 'eminent' human being and a representative of the rest of us. Then suddenly, he ends up in an embarrassing, tangled heap. He’s just a lump of stuff that the laws of gravity have dumped on the carpet. (Don’t ask me why no-one noticed the yellow banana skin on the red background.)

It’s the juxtaposition of things which don’t belong together that’s funny. Punchlines in gags work that way. The joke leads you along one path and suddenly, the destination is totally different. We appreciate the gap between the two and we laugh. The laugh shows that our brain has seen the distinction between the two states and it’s capable of judging and assessing situations. So laughing is a result of thinking – maybe unconsciously, but it’s a judgemental, not an emotional thing.

e.g.

The veteran Scottish comedian, Rikki Fulton, in his role as the Reverend I M Jolly, once told of how, after a trying day, he stopped at a massage parlour and was helped to relax by a young lady masseuse who, after a while, leaned close to him and asked ‘Do you want super sex?’ He thought about it, then replied: ‘If it’s all the same to you, I’ll have the soup.’

If you’ve read this far, thanks for being so tolerant and humouring me. Because that sort of theorising doesn’t really achieve much and definitely isn’t funny. So how do we write funny stuff?

Well, when I used to write sketches (skits in the USA) for performance, the characters used to do the work for me. For example, when Mary (the virgin one) discovers she’s pregnant, she breaks the news to her fiancé, Joseph, who, according to the Bible, is then ‘minded to put her away privily’. I love that. It skates over the whole crucial scene there must have been between the two of them. Imagine you’re an honest, hard-working young carpenter. You’re sawing and hammering away and your fiancée, whose wish to remain intact you’ve respected, comes in and  says ‘By the way, I’m heavy with child’ – or whatever the appropriate expression was in Nazareth at the time. Now how on earth do you get from that to the seeming acceptance of, ‘OK, babe. I’ll just put you away privily’?

Or what sort of conversation would Jude the Obscure share with Tess at the Casterbridge disco? And how did Adam and Eve relax when he came home from a long hard day in the garden? (This was before they were aware of their nakedness and original sin, remember.)

 

In all these cases, and in others, such as Hannibal Lecter’s quip that he was ‘having a friend for dinner’, it’s the co-existence of two separate levels of  interpretation that generates the humour.

All of which sets me up perfectly for comments such as ‘What do you know about laughter? None of your stuff’s funny.’