FIFTH AND ULTIMATE COMEDIC PRINCIPLE -- CLASSICAL COMEDY

I said that I was going to make this particular entry simple and I'm going to keep my word. I can write no more than a few words on this.

Classical comedy is the finest and most sophisticated type of humour. The Greeks invented it, as far as I can tell, and this for obvious reasons. Classical comedy shares an intimate link with tragedy. Much like lyric and epic poetry are the mirror of each other, so comedy and tragedy share the same structure, inverting only the order of the signifiers. You can't discover one without stumbling onto the other.

What is Classical comedy? It is an elaborate form of representation based on complex situations involving quid pro quos of various circumstance. It is also necessarily based on dialogue. A typical, simple example of a comedic situation is the 'boyfriend hero' sketch: a guy takes a girl out and sets up a fake aggression in agreement with a friend, so he can pretend to beat up the make-believe aggressor and look like a hero to the girl. But on the night when they do go out, a prison convict escapes and stumbles upon them in the street. The boyfriend, thinking this is his friend, starts acting all tough and even looks like he will kick the shit out of the convict.



The sketch can go in both directions from here - either the boyfriend beats up the convict, or the other way round. Differently from regular jokes, though, there is no punch-line here. There is not a moment of 'oh, ah,' when you actually laugh, or when you suddenly get it. It's the entire situation which is funny.

Like irony, this is a type of humour easy to recognise, but hard to pin down. I'm not going to write a full article on it now, not because it's simple, but on the contrary, because it's way too big a topic. As a concept, it is not clear enough in my mind. And if I started on this, I'd have to write about tragedy, too, and I can't do that. Besides, I intend to work on this in the future, so there's no loss if I don't lay my thoughts down yet. It's just postponed. (Incidentally, when the moment does come that I decide to write about comedy and tragedy in the same way that I wrote about the lyric and the epic, all these notes I've thrown down on why we laugh are going to prove considerably useful. This thought, needless to add, was one of the main drives I had when I was writing them in the first place).

For now, though, I'm going to leave the question of Classical comedy here. Only for now.

AND NOW... SOME CLOSING THOUGHTS!



I've attempted to sketch out the core mechanisms of laughter as I understand them. No doubt my results are partial and rough, but I hope I haven't missed out on anything major, at least within the framework that I've projected. Suggestions on questions I've left open, or jokes which cannot be explained according to the principles I described, are all very welcome.

But one thing we must always remember, when thinking about comedy, is that humour is almost always compound humour. It is extremely rare to get a pure Absurd joke, for instance. And while you can get a pure Fail in the Fail compilations on Youtube, and some pure Taboo quips in the type of sex jokes which go around in primary school, even these things are rare. Fail and Taboo are themselves usually integrated into broader sketches which make use of other principles as well. Here's an example:

Your mama's so fat that when I was fucking her, I fell off the bed, rolled three times, and I was still on top of her.

This is a very simple joke. It belongs to the genre of 'You're so X' insults, which is itself elementary in its construction ('You're so ugly that when you throw a boomerang, it won't even come back to you,' 'You're so white that when you pass through a prism, more prisms come out', etc.). But notice how many levels this one joke works on. Let's list them.

a.) It's Fail humour, because it's an insult. An insult excludes an individual from our group, while reinforcing our own bonding (and of course, the joke isn't funny if it's being addressed to you or to someone you care for).

b.) It's Absurd, because how could someone be so fat as to cover bed and floor? Note that what distinguishes this from mere hyperbole is that the language *breaks our expectations*. Saying 'your mama's so fat that she's as big as the whole world' isn't funny, because it's a predictable use of language. Anyone can make an hyperbole of this type. The prior joke, instead, projects a grammar scenario which leads to an outcome we did not expect. It is broken expectations that define the Absurd, even in language.

c.) It's taboo. I mean, obviously. There's fucking involved.

Just about the only type of humour this 'simple' joke doesn't activate is irony. But this is only because irony is already a compound, since it needs a Fail and an Absurd to be activated. For the rest, we've got it all.

And on that anti-climactic note, I'm closing my thoughts on the funnies. Whew! I need a drink!

COMEDIC PRINCIPLE # 4 – IRONY

A recollection, to begin with. A couple of years ago I was working in Disneyland Paris and on one particular work-day - I forget the circumstance - I asked myself what exactly was irony. I usually reach a definition quickly when I pose myself these questions, but this time I found the word to be recalcitrant, and the more I thought about it, the less clearly could I see the concept taking shape. The funny thing was that for all my difficulties of definition, I felt like I 'knew' what irony was. I couldn't quite put my finger on it, but some part of my brain understood it perfectly, without assigning any words to it.

Taking it as an opportunity to start some conversations (something useful when you're practically surrounded by top-models), I asked around my British colleagues. It was amusing to witness that everyone seemed to be in my same situation: they seemed to 'know' what irony was quite well, in the sense that they could recognize an ironic event with ne'er the batting of an eyelid, but they had no idea how to give a concise definition of it. If you think it's easy, try for yourself. Close this article for the moment, think up a definition of irony, and post it in the comments section below. I'm genuinely very interested in reading what anyone comes up with.

As for the dictionary, its authors seem to think that irony is another word for sarcasm: the use of words to convey a meaning that is the opposite of its literal meaning: the irony of her reply, “How nice!” when I said I had to work all weekend. Yyyeeaahhh, except that there's nothing *ironic* about the someone telling you 'How nice', there's only something *sarcastic*. The same dictionary then goes on to add that irony differs from sarcasm in greater subtlety and wit. This is simply not true. Irony is not a milder version of sarcasm. It's when you're sweltering in your garden because you don't have a tree for shade, and you don't have shade because you cut down your tree in the winter to be warm. Sarcasm, in paragon, is simply a case when you're sweltering in your garden under the sun and you say 'How chilly.' (For those who want the full dictionary definition, you can find it here. It's worth reading the whole thing).



At all events, the fact that everyone seemed to know 'instinctively' what irony was, meant that examples came aplenty. Perhaps the most synthetic and useful case-study was this:

Irony: having one-hundred forks, and needing a spoon.

Given my inability to come up with a rapid explanation, I decided to work on the example instead, breaking it down and trying to find how it produced this mysterious effect we call irony, recognizably distinct from other forms of humour, yet so much more difficult to pin down.

Two years later, at the moment of retrieving and expounding my conclusions, I remain surprised at just how complicated and sophisticated a concept this is. So complicated, in fact, that there's no way of just cutting straight into the matter of things. It will require some back-tracking.



Let's start with a very common type of linguistic humour, the confusion of two different (even opposed) meanings for the same word under a given circumstance. You say something, and it means something else (like the time I read of my university's 'mandarin society' having a reunion and I went there thinking I'd find fruit... never mind). The most simple example is given by a certain type of puns. Puns are jokes based on employing two different words (or groups of words) which are pronounced in the same way, like deer/dear, whine/wine, or 'no pun in ten did' / 'no pun intended.' You can't really write down a pun, because the spelling gives away the intended meaning and therefore the joke - the humour, after all, lies in the confusion of the two meanings. Here's a quick case-study:

A man walks into a bar with a giraffe, and they both get drunk. The giraffe falls to the floor, unconscious, and the man heads for the exit. The barman says, 'What, are you just going to leave that lying there?' And the man replies, 'it's not a lion, it's a giraffe.'

When spoken out loud, the humour lies in the failure of communication inherent in the words lying/lion – it was supposed to mean one thing, but it ended up meaning another. Though this specific example contains an Absurd element in the idea of a man walking into a bar with a giraffe, the mechanism is essentially Fail humour. We laugh at the failure of communication, especially when the joke includes characters who embody that failure. The laughter is gregarious, because it depends on our shared understanding of the real meaning of the words. 'He,' the character in the joke, doesn't understand it, and 'we' do. Even if there is no 'he,' and there's only the linguistic confusion, the principle still holds: the effect of understanding the joke, of 'getting it,' of being 'in on it,' results in our approbation as part of a group - a fact which we signal with laughter. (An example of a character-less joke would be the immortal classic: 'What do you call a deer with no eyes? No idea / No-eye deer'. Still funny, and still for the same principle).

Now suppose that I were to label the meanings of the two words by means of letters. The meaning of 'lying' is A, and the meaning of 'lion' is B. The mechanism of the pun, then, is that of producing a sentence (or a whole situation) which builds towards meaning A, and then closing it with a word that carries the meaning B. This results in an incongruence, which we can express as A ≠ B.

This formula is Fail algebra reduced to the bone. A does NOT equal B, i.e., it *fails* to equal B. The guy *should* understand 'lying,' but he understands 'lion.'

Here it is... a giraffe.

Let's turn to irony now. It is a type of compound humour, which is why I've kept it for last, and it always includes both a Fail and an Absurd element. The Absurd aspect is rather subtle and we shall come to it later, while the Fail can be analysed readily. In our example of the 'hundred forks and a spoon,' the 'failure,' the problem, the 'bad' thing, is needing a spoon and not having it. This in itself is a Fail, and therefore potentially funny, as long as it's happening to someone else. Having the one-hundred forks only highlights the incapacity of the subject to fulfill his desire and thus makes it funnier. This is given by the identity that subsists between forks and spoons: both are metal tools for eating, but they differ in the specific types of food. Without this identity, there is no irony. It would not be ironic if I said, for instance, that a guy has a hundred cars and he needs a spoon, though we're still talking about the same exact Fail.

Now if we express this by letters, as we did with puns, we notice a similar but more complex process at work. An object carries implications A and B, and another carries B and C (the 'implications' that I am talking about are usually semantic in nature, but I don't think this has to be a rule, and I really don't want to haggle over such details). Both objects share implication B, but they differ in that one carries A and the other C. Graphically, I shall refer to this as FIGURE ONE:

FORKS:.....A --....-- B --...........
SPOONS:............-- B --....-- C --

If we assume the meaning of B as 'tool for eating,' we see the commonality between forks and spoons which allows for irony: they both share that meaning. If we express A as 'eating steak' and C as 'eating soup,' we find the points of divergence. The presence of A elucidates the meaning of C - it is easier to perceive what the Fail of 'needing a spoon' is, when you have the dialectical opposite of the spoon's function in the same sentence. Greater clarity and emphasis then falls on the Fail. It's as though the first letter is the power of the last.

Now, the fail in itself can be represented like this:

B ≠ C

We see that the 'needing a spoon' situation makes for a self-sufficient fail. As stated, the forks are connected to the spoon by sharing the meaning B, and by bringing A into the equation, they further show / enlarge the chasm between B and C. I say this because B, as we can see in Figure One, is perceived as a sort of halfway line, a 'bridge,' between A and C. It follows that the greater the distance between A and C, the greater the perceived distance between B and C, because B is simply the midway point between the two.

So the more A and C are disconnected, the more the distance between A, B and C appears great. And since the measure of the Fail depends on the degree of disconnection between B and C (having a 'tool for eating', and then failing to 'eat soup'), it follows that the more imaginative and unexpected the relation between A and C, the greater the Fail - and therefore, *the greater the irony.* This is, by the way, where the Absurd element comes into the irony compound. The distance between A and C is established by breaking our expectations, bringing together two things we did not expect to have an obvious connection, and anything that breaks our expectations to produce comedy necessarily belongs to the Absurd category we discussed in earlier posts.

Irony is able to take a very simple Fail and make it much more powerful. The Fail multiplies its effects by itself in proportion to how distant and creative the meaning A will be in relation to C. At the formulaic level, irony can then be expressed like this:

(B ≠ C)A

[And a big fuck you to blogspot for not retaining superscript text from Word... the A is meant to be small and high-up, like a power]. Not that any of this is actual mathematics, obviously - there isn't a quantitative relation between A and C! It's just my favourite way of representing it.

Irony 'activates' humour in the same way that puns do. Puns present a sentence where a word is supposed to mean one thing, but it signifies another. In the ironic case of forks and spoons, both carry implication B of 'eating,' but they differ in the specific function (A and C, 'eating steaks' and 'eating soup'). So starting to speak of forks is meant to signify 'eating' (B), but in reality this signification is made impossible when you mention that you need spoons. The failure of communication between forks and spoons, connected by the concept B just like 'lying' and 'lion' are connected by having identical sound, results in the powering of the inherent Fail and therefore the humour. Irony is a mode of comedy structurally similar to simple linguistic jokes, except that the signs it employs are not words, but real objects and events. Forks and spoons are not two different meanings of the same phoneme, they are two different objects orbiting around one same idea. As a result, it can do more than just producing a Fail of communication; it takes a real-world Fail and brings it to the nth power by couching it in the mechanisms of a communication Fail. It multiplies a real Fail by a communication Fail, if you see what I mean.

To test it, try switching the signifiers: a great warrior who asks one-hundred swords to be forged so he can defend himself from the enemy and then dies of starvation because there's no more iron for the forging of a spoon dies an ironic death (this is known as poetic irony, to be precise, because of the moral lessons inherent in its little parable).* And so it is similarly ironic, in this context, if one has one-hundred battle-swords and needs a spoon. 'Sword' and 'spoon' both share meaning B of 'iron tools,' but they are distinct in their purposes A and C, 'warmongering' and 'eating.' Admittedly the commonality in B is weaker, which means that the irony of the whole thing is not as immediate as that in the forks/spoons example. Notwithstanding that, the same formula / principle holds with different objects, as long as they retain a commonality of meaning at the level of B, and an incongruence at the levels A and C.

Fuck me. This was one difficult article to write. Next for the final entry - a brief consideration on the ultimate comedic principle, and some closing thoughts. Believe it or not, it's going to be something very simple.

* The irony is not lost on me that I am discussing the word 'irony' in the context of a story about iron. The irony, of course, lies not in the pun iron/irony, as much as in the fact that it occurred precisely while I was trying to discuss irony. This resulted simultaneously in an identity and an incongruence between the language employed and the object being discussed. The crossover, if it really needs spelling out, occurs as follows. The fact that I'm trying to 'master' irony (by explaining it) and instead end up unwittingly its victim makes for Fail 1. The linguistic Fail of 'irony' being supposed to mean 'a form of humour' and instead standing for 'belonging to iron' is Fail 2, and it is what takes Fail 1 and multiplies it by itself. This double combo of Fails is what makes me *perform* irony, rather than just talking about it. The two Fails contain each other, and they multiply each other's respective values.

COMEDIC PRINCIPLE # 3 - TABOO HUMOUR

The third comedic principle is fairly well-known, but a little awkward to explain.

Succinctly: we laugh when a taboo is broken. Freud defines a 'taboo' as something that is simultaneously desired and prohibited. Since 99% of what is desired and prohibited in our culture involves sex, it explains why so many of our jokes are based on sex in various forms, either explicitly or by allusion - or, should I say, they are about FUCKING.

The word 'fuck' is already a case of Taboo humour, like all swear words. But fuck is the most important of them all: it signifies the object of desire, and simultaneously stands as a prohibited signifier. We cannot say fuck, anymore than we can do fuck (although of course, we do both - and if we can't do one, we do more of the other). And so the use of foul language becomes an automatic joke, one which irreverent comedies will integrate with gusto (South Park, for example, which puts its endless cussing in the mouth of children).

Consider the fact that an infinity of our jokes are simply 'other ways' of performing the FUCK word, that is to say, stories of people having sex liberally and in violation of all possible laws: oral and anal, polygamy, adultery, incest, bestiality, occasionally rape, sex in churches, in public offices, in schools, in public, in elevators, in the street, on highways and planes, or inversely in scenarios where laws are abrogated, as in far-off islands, in jungles, in forests, in deserts. In all of these jokes, the laughter (or punch line) occurs at the moment when the law is violated. We laugh when hearing all these stories, because we like (to) FUCK.

The things you find on the internet...

Now the question of why we laugh at all of this is a little more subtle. Not everything that gives us pleasure elicits laughter: we also like to eat or feel the open air, but we don't laugh at this. For that matter, we don't laugh at genuine sexual excitation, like seeing a hot partner taking his/her clothes off. In fact, we've stated that we laugh to express an alliance. So where's the alliance here?

In Fail humour, we laugh at the person failing because we are excluding him/her from our alliance. In the Taboo, we laugh WITH the person who breaks the taboo because that person is giving us what we want. We grow up under a repressive social law, by necessity; when someone starts saying fuck or having sex, it shows to us that we can do it too. It liberates us. We consolidate our alliance in the novel social order which finds its fulcrum, or its leader, in the first violator of the taboo. This social order in turn will become repressive as the alpha figures emerge and establish their dominance over the available resources. In less abstract terms, this historically happens in human communities when males grow and establish their 'possession' over the females (first by marrying them, and then by becoming fathers). It is for this reason that old people are far more rarely amused (and more easily insulted) by Taboo humour than the young. It's adolescents especially who laugh at programs with swear words and who go see films with lots of soft nudity, incidental sex and all the stuff which defines pants movies like American Pie, Road Trip, Scary Movie and an infinity of others.

In passing, this is why in my previous entry I refused to define films such as those by the Wayans brothers (Scary Movie, I mean) as samples of the Absurd - because they contain all sorts of other stuff and they could just as easily be called samples of Taboo humour. Read back on the other entries or wait for the next ones, and you'll see there's no type of comedic principle which isn't reabsorbed in the Wayans / Mel Brookes / Leslie Nielsen comedies.

Now, I said that we laugh with the person breaking the taboo to express our alliance with him/her - we want to be included in his/her new social order, so we can break the taboo as well. This is how things must have been in primordial times, and why laughter evolved to respond to the presence/allusion of sex. But since the rules of these primordial times have long since failed to apply exclusively, as we saw in the evolutionary futility of Absurd humour, the 'person' in question doesn't have to exist. Specifically in representation, a taboo can be broken without anyone being there to break it, much like a sketch performed by actors can activate the Fail principle without anyone actually failing. The taboo-destroyer doesn't have to be there, or at least s/he can be in the background, like the film director who produces the movie (but really, his/her presence is immaterial... even if we don't know that person at all, or even know that s/he exists, we will laugh all the same).


The subject of representation combined with sex inevitably brings our minds to pornography. This is a bit of a special case and it's worth saying a few words about it. There's certainly lots of liberated sex in there, but it hardly qualifies as comedy. We don't laugh when watching pornography. The point is that porn is about enacting a fantasy, not violating a law; in the space of the fantasy, there ARE no laws, except for that of the will of the fantasiser. In order for there to be a law, you must acknowledge an Other. In a fantasy, and therefore in pornography, the self regresses into a private sphere where there is no Other person and the whole natural world goes and works exactly according to the self's laws. What makes porn interesting for our purposes is that even though pornographic representation isn't Taboo humour, porn itself is a taboo object and therefore makes for the stuff of jokes in films and comedies of this type. So even though reading porn isn't funny, seeing someone reading porn is; this is invariably combined with a Fail joke, and as a result we get the sketch of someone being caught reading porn, or some 'loser' whose loser-ness is defined precisely by his reading porn (a paradoxical combo: we laugh at the Fail of the loser who reads porn, and because of the fact that suddenly porn is allowed to us!).

Taboo humour is more than just sex, though. We've got endless jokes involving copulation, but we've also got a wealth of them involving just shit, piss, vomit, farting and all sorts of other disgusting stuff, and these work according to the very same principle. Unsurprisingly, they are all considered together to be obscene jokes. Why are THESE things funny? They're not as obvious as the sex, but they're still objects of taboo.


Cum is not too hard to explain, because it's metonymic for sex, so of course it would be Taboo humour. Also quite easy to explain is burping - it's the liberation of a physical need which is usually prohibited by the rules of good manners (an expression of the overarching social order). Now by extension, much like we can explain burping, we can similarly explain farting, and we can extend this to explain shit. We want to shit wherever we like, but it's not allowed. Also note that the anus, along with the mouth and the sexual organs, is one of the erogenous zones of the body and the infant learns to associate it to pleasure very early.

This is why we laugh at disgusting things, provided that they're related to the liberation of our physical processes - something disgusting is a violation of an order, and therefore of a law. In this sense the Taboo principle activates humour even when there's no bodily involvement. Blasphemy, insulting the monarchy or the church, bad manners, politically incorrect humour of all types also falls under our category. The film Borat recently gave us a very clean example. The guy does nothing over the course of the film other than violate codes of good manners and behaviour, be it verbally or physically. The higher the authority he is insulting, the greater the Taboo that is being broken - and therefore the funnier the joke.

One more thing must be said before coming to a close. I've tried to keep psychoanalysis out of this series as much as possible, but here it's impossible not to bring it in. I mentioned defecation as an example of Taboo humour because it reflects our desire to release our bowels wherever and whenever we want. But in reality the desire that we are talking about is not a desire to defecate per se. Rather, the act of defecation is symbolic for a greater desire for unbounded physical liberty, what Freud calls the Pleasure Principle, that is to say, the possibility of satisfying every urge and desire instantly. In this sense, our desire is so chtonic that it is not even about sex. The taboo always throws back to the one same urge, the same subconscious projection: the body with no confines, no law and no restriction - the body, indeed, as its own law.

This can also be formulated as the Dionysian principle, at the heart of all Dionysian values, symbolised by the O. (It may seem that I'm going out on a limb here, but people who have read my work know how important Apollo and Dionysos are to me...) It follows that taboo humour is represented by a breach of Apollonian values (themselves symbolised by the I), which is the same thing as an affirmation of Dionysian ones. The two things are not in conflict - indeed, the breach and the affirmation occur simultaneously in the same act or gesture.

Dionysos. It always goes back to him

Apollo and Dionysos were first formulated by Nietzsche as a more functional duality to understand humanity, history, representation or whatever stuff 'wisdom' is made of than the age-old one of Good and Evil (two concepts which Nietzsche famously disbelieved in). Apollo and Dionysos do not correspond to good and evil, but they both have positive and negative aspects, and both can stand for 'good' or 'evil' according to the circumstance. In the case of Dionysos, the aspects of this dualism are wonderfully illuminated by the taboo principle. On the positive side, there is the sheer euphoria of fucking, the irreproducible, self-sufficient inebriation of the orgasm, of laughing till you think you'll die, of getting drunk, a sensual epiphany which at its peak is transcendent of all morals and laws, and before which any form of order and difference - even language - falls away and becomes redundant. On the negative side, there is the horror of a world where everything is base and featureless, where all possible ideals and good feelings are dragged down into an equal mud by the howling power of obscene jokes, where you can not say "I love you" or "Let us be friends" without instant peals of derision echoing all around you. Any pleasure or beauty that is passing and temporal is inherently Dionysian, the more so in proportion to its brevity, while the nightmare of the Dionysian world is that nothing is durable or permanent (exactly the opposite is true of Apollo, where every good thing is timeless and transcendent, but never actual and present). The mad god, blessing and cursing with the same hand, on the same altar, at the same ceremony - this is Dionysos.

It will be remarked that taboo humour is much more explicit now than ever before. There's more obscenity and more images of cum and shit in our films and TV than there's ever been, and by far. Needless to say, this has prompted much concern about the 'degradation of our morals,' that age-old cliche' that once-dominant social groups use to bemoan their loss of power. I'm not sure if I've ever read of an age or a country in which people said that morals, culture and society were on the up, even marginally so (perhaps it's only ever been the case under totalitarian governments...). For what it's worth, though, I see no reason to worry. Taboo humour has the power to degrade ideals only to the extent that these ideals have the power to affirm themselves. Debasing humour has become more aggressive and liberated only because the rhetoric of the dominant ideologies has itself turned increasingly offensive. When films and books and TV become more persuasive (and violent) in telling us that we should go to war, buy their products, wear their clothes and believe in their faiths, only then does the offence of taboo jokes raise its bar and offend more fiercely. But taboo does not have the power to change the real moral face of society. In order to do that it would have to establish its own counter-morals, and therefore its own ideals - and the moment that it tries to do something like that, it becomes vulnerable to its own methods. Taboo will never raise itself beyond itself. It presents no threat to our culture, no more so than our culture in general presents an offence to our spirits (not a rhetorical figure, that).

So that's about it, with regards to taboo humour. I said previously that comedy has a very brief half-life. Societies change, and humour also changes, because it is built on the values of said societies. I think taboo may be the exception. Precisely because it refers to a universal subconscious desire, its jokes remain practically identical across ages and nations. The instances of obscenity in the Greek comedies, for example, were among the very few moments when I actually laughed. I guess we must give obscenity some credit for this, if for nothing else. So fuck!

COMEDIC PRINCIPLE # 2 – THE ABSURD.

PART I – The Absurd as an extension of the Fail principle and the subordination of the latter to the former.

The second class of comedy follows from the Fail principle and extends it into a new and distinct territory, which I shall refer to as the Absurd.

The two classes, though different, are intimately connected. Fail humour makes evolutionary sense; the Absurd is an extension of the principle which only genuinely appears in human culture with the birth of representation. You don't really get the Absurd in nature, though you can get some basic forms of it in everyday language (more on this later).

The principle of Fail is that something going against your intentions is funny (technically, it has to be someone else's intentions, but we've been over that). The Absurd broadens this idea and brings it to the point that anything going against your expectations is funny. Of course, when an intention fails, there's also a failed expectation; and that still qualifies as a Fail. But it's possible to have a reversed expectation with no intentions being thwarted for any subject. You could argue that then we're just talking about a case of “Expectation Fail!” which therefore falls under the same initial category. But the theorem does not hold, because it is the breaking of OUR expectations, and not SOMEONE ELSE's, that is funny to us – and at the heart of Fail humour, as I discussed in the last entry, there's the idea that it has to happen to some Other, and the more Other the victim is, the funnier the joke.

With Absurd humour, we react by laughing when something happens that is completely and powerfully removed from what we expected (this has no evolutionary utility – it is, as we said, an outgrowth or even a by-product of the neurological principles at work in basic Fail humour). Here we must postulate the idea that, when the Absurd is activated, we are witnessing something that happens. But witnessing what, exactly?

The simplest answer is to say: witnessing the contrary of what we expect. If a super-muscled man comes out to address a crowd and the voice he speaks with turns out to be squeaky like that of Mickey Mouse, people will laugh. The muscled man isn't necessarily failing, unless he didn't intend to speak like that. But if that's his normal voice, then there's no Fail. It's just funny because it's the opposite of what we thought. (The connection between Fail and Absurd is here quite open: you can pull the argument by the sleeves to say that there's a *perceived* fail in the man's inability to produce a masculine voice, but the idea is clearly stretched. After all, it would be funny even if it were the other way round – a teeny dwarf suddenly speaking out in a booming, roaring, tenor voice, which is aggrandising rather than debasing. And so we cannot call this Fail humour, not in the same sense; it's something different).


A good example for our purposes is sarcasm. Sarcasm is, fundamentally, Absurd humour. It is simply a case of someone saying the opposite of what you would expect, or what would make sense in a given circumstance. You can argue there's a Fail in there, because the sarcastic comment is either *addressed* to a designated 'victim' (“You're elegance personified, really” to someone who puts no attention in his wardrobe) or *about* a negative, dislikeable object (“What you call the country of eternal sunshine,” said someone I knew during a rainstorm in Spain, and this we could label as “Weather Fail!” – except that of course this also is stretched, because weather has no 'intention,' and therefore cannot 'fail'!). But notice that what's funny is not the fail in itself, it's the comment about it. In other words, it's not the thwarted intention, but the thwarted expectation that is the source of the humour.

Most cases of the Absurd do contain a fail, even if a minor one, because this class of humour too, like all others, knows very few cases of purity. The Monty Python sketch on the middle-class twit of the year, for instance, is an Absurd short film which also refers to the very obvious social failure of its protagonists / victims. But these Fails are subordinated to the Absurd nature of the representation, which provides the real source of laughter by the measure of its absurdity. The rule is that the greater the incongruence, anachronism or whatever, the funnier the sketch. Something that is only slightly unexpected may be strange, but it's not funny if it isn't outright absurd. After all, we get marginally thwarted expectations every day, and we don't think any of these are funny.

To the extent that the Absurd principle takes over the main comedic function, a Fail may not be necessary at all, or it may be so subtle that it's hard even to formulate what it is. I would argue that the sketch of the philosophers playing football, also by Monty Python, is an example of such a case. The only failure I can see at all is that the philosophers can't execute the procedures of a football game, but the idea of their presence on that field to play is so outlandish in the first place that you can't imagine they would intend to play at all. It's a Fail which you've got to go pretty far to fetch, and out of your way.



PART II – Histories and examples of the Absurd.

I've used the shibboleth that Absurd humour is equal to something being the opposite of what we expect. But in reality, and this is important, the absurd doesn't have to be the contrary of our expectations. It can be just any strong deviation from them. And this too is exemplified by the Monty Python football sketch: there is no dialectic relation between philosophy and football, so seeing the Greeks and the Germans playing the sport, while very distant from our expectations, is not the contrary of them.

So to define this as concisely as possible, Absurd humour is simply a case of something deviating from our expectations, where the greater the deviation, the funnier the joke. It is almost exclusive to the world of representation; you seldom get this type of humour appearing spontaneously in the natural world.

A couple of words on its practical manifestations. The words 'Absurd comedy' usually brings to mind the French dramatic tradition of the 20th Century, mostly in Beckett, Ionesco and a few others. In reality, though, the people who have done the most to cultivate and develop this type of comedy are the British, and by quite the distance. They have a far greater number of comedians in the field and a more enduring tradition, starting from the aforementioned Monty Python, who specialise in the most intelligent, sophisticated and amusing Absurd comedy in the world, and on to a whole list of followers (and/or plagiars). Some of these are clever (Brasseye comes to mind), others are forgettable, to the point I won't even mention them on this blog. The French, on the other hand, hardly transcend the contained and short-lived tradition which developed right after the war, not in duration, style, method or medium. I may be misinformed about this, but my impression from my time in Paris is that the French Comedy of the Absurd is dead – there's no-one writing plays in the style of Beckett and Ionesco anymore, or even following on from their footsteps. Sure, there's revivals and regular re-enactments of these plays and other attempts to celebrate them, but the most creative work is done in other fields (and, most importantly, in other genres – the French DO have an incredibly rich tradition in comedy, from Moliere onwards, but it's not of the Absurd type at all). This is understandable, because in my opinion that type of comedy isn't very good. There may be a certain literary merit to the works of these playwrights, but I can't say I found them funny. Furthermore, while British Absurd comedians are true artists of the people, enjoying immense popularity at home and even a good measure abroad, the French Absurdists are among the most elitist of all modern writers. Their plays are hard to follow, hard to understand, and potentially boring if you aren't in the right mindset. It's the type of stuff I couldn't recommend to friends or family except for those within literary academia. So it's only natural that the British work in the genre should have enjoyed an extensive following, one which is still at work and developing today, while that of the French should have decayed.


This prevalence of the Absurd in British comedy must have played a part in developing the stereotype of so-called 'British humour,' which is known abroad as a particular type of irony, often very subtle and/or hard to understand. In reality it's not about irony at all (I shall discuss irony too in the coming posts). Instead, it's about a particular way of breaking expectations by means of nonsense. It's certainly not limited to television – The Hitchhiker's Guide to the Galaxy is a popular case of the Absurd in literature, and I've asked around: its humour is unfathomable anywhere but in England. More importantly, it extends itself to everyday talk and lingo. THIS is the major difference between the French and the English in this field. When you hear British people speak with each other, you'll detect certain turns of phrase which distinguish themselves for their absurdity. A man will rant for fifteen minutes about how terrible the amusement park at Brighton was, to the point of committing suicide, etc. and his interlocutor will respond with a terse: 'So it wasn't very good, eh?' This seems to be a variant, or a subset, of sarcasm. You don't get this type of stuff outside those rainy islands. More, the British even have a whole subgenre of jokes, almost unique to their culture (at least from what I've experienced), which are Absurd twists of incredible purity: “Why did the man fall off the bike? Because they threw a fridge at him.”

I normally like to go into the history of the literature I discuss, but I can't say much about Absurd humour before the 20th Century, British or otherwise. In part it's the fact that comedy, whatever its genre, has a very brief half-life. The things we find funny change from society to society and therefore from times to times – remember that we laugh to express our agreement or disagreement with a person and his/her values, and since values change all the time, so do the objects of humour. This is the reason why, even though tragedies from four-hundred or two-thousand four-hundred years ago are still extraordinarily moving and enjoyable, comedies by Aristophanes or Lope de Vega or even Shakespeare are seldom funny. You'll enjoy them and smile and nod at their wit, but you almost never laugh hard.


But another important reason why I can't go much into the history of this stuff is that British humour only developed a predominantly Absurd tradition in recent times. If you look at Shakespeare's comedies or Byron's verse, the comedic principles are classical (more on these in future entries), much like they were in France or in Spain. Unless there's whole veins of jokes and dramas which have remained obscure (and this is entirely possible), we must conclude that a taste for the Absurd has developed only lately in the circles of major comedy.

One last 'genre' before closing – it would be tempting to see that type of comedy popularised by Mel Brooks, Leslie Nielsen, and the Wayans brothers as an American tradition of the Absurd. They are, after all, completely nonsensical and they often even sink into gratuitious metatextuality just to subvert expectations. But such an assertion would not be true. These movies contain much absurdity, but they hardly restrain themselves from throwing other types of jokes at us either, of the most varied and unbridled kind. There's absurd sketches in there, but there's also almost every other comedic principle in action too (including Fail, of course). Really we should see these films not as case-studies or samples of the Absurd, but as open forums where anything goes, where every aspect of representation is subordinated to the comedic principles themselves, to the point that the story, the characters, or the film's inner consistency, are all of no consequence face to the opportunity of pulling a laugh. And so we cannot say that these represent the American Absurd, not in the same way that Monty Python and Ionesco stand for the British and French Absurd(s?).

With these considerations I've said everything about Absurdity (and it's probably too much anyway). It's time to turn to our third comedic principle. In the next entry, of course.

I: Why it's funny to see people Fail

Having discussed why we laugh in my previous entry, I was going to post an article now on what makes us laugh specifically, in other words, what exactly is funny and why. The argument, however, proved far more ambitious than I anticipated, and it seems I shall have to deal with it in a series (four more entries including this one, I'm expecting). So you'd better get used to the topic of comedy because it's going to dominate the writing on this blog for a while...

Ok. There's a wealth of different 'genres' or types of humour, but in my opinion most of them can be resumed into a few central modes, with the other types being mere combinations, variations or spin-offs of these modes. Black humour, for instance, employs a specifically macabre tone or imagery compared to its alternatives, but the comic mechanisms it makes use of are not unique to the genre. In fact they're identical to those you find in other types of jokes. Similarly, you can make distinctions between romantic comedies, coming-of-age comedies, pants movies, British comedies, comedies of errors and what have you, but the difference between all of these is not the way they make us laugh. They've got great tonal variations, and they touch on different topics, and they may have different presentations or stylistic traits, but when it comes to the funny bits, they still return to the same principles. What are these principles, and how many of them are there?

Broadly speaking, I can think of four foundational classes of humour. I shall dedicate this blog entry to the first of them. The other three will be dealt with on my blog over the coming thirty days or so, time permitting.

COMEDIC PRINCIPLE # 1 – FAIL HUMOUR.


I wasn't sure how to call the first class of humour. I was thinking of 'Contrarian' or 'Thwarted intentions,' but ultimately I just adopted Fail. It's not a name I particularly like (and I may change it in future articulations of the argument), but it's familiar jargon by now thanks to the Americanism of using 'Fail' as a noun rather than as a verb (with greater emphasis – the 'epic fail!'). You can find endless collections of Fails in google images and on Youtube, and you'll also frequently hear expressions like 'goalie fail' when a goalkeeper scores an own goal, or 'relationship fail' when a girlfriend is disappointed by something her boyfriend just did (or viceversa). It's always very simple stuff, relating to accidents or bloopers or mistakes. Usually the idea seems to be that anything going contrary to a person's intentions is funny, but the core principle is even more primal than that, and we can describe it more or less like this:

Anything that doesn't work is funny, as long as it belongs to someone else.

This is just an application of the principles described in the Why do we laugh entry. The crucial aspect is that the subject of the Fail has to be a distinct, recognizable OTHER. If the 'victim' is a skater on Youtube who falls from a concrete step, we're bound to laugh to a degree proportional to how spectacular his fall (and therefore his failure) is – provided that an excessive damage isn't caused, in which case the reverse sentiment of empathy gets switched on and we feel concern instead of amusement. Exactly how much damage is 'excessive damage'? Our personal sensitivity and our own experiences will have an influence (if I've once broken my leg while skateboarding, I'm less likely to laugh at a falling skater) – and this goes to show, again, how unpredictable the homo sapiens individual is. But a good guideline is this: the more alien the victim from ourselves, the more pain we can tolerate him/her to take before it stops being funny. If a member of my family falls from the skateboard, or my girlfriend, I'm far less likely to laugh than if it is the anonymous skater on Youtube. Were I to read about a group of people accidentally blowing themselves up with a grenade, I wouldn't find it funny; but if it's a band of raving Nazi skinheads attempting to throw the grenade into a synagogue, I'd probably laugh a bit or at least smirk, because they are so remote from my social circle that even such a horrible disaster fails to cause empathy (and in fact has an ironic ring given their original intent).


The degree to which someone or something is alien or external is contextually determined. As usual with homo sapiens, you can't just categorise things and make broad sweeping rules. I'm never going to laugh at my brother if he gets hurt in public and other people are laughing at him as well, because I recognise him as closer to my social circle than all the other people. He is, after all, part of the tightest social circle of them all, which is the family. But I may laugh at my brother if it's just the two of us, or us two and our parents, and he trips on his laces and falls (without getting too injured, obviously), because in this case it's enough for him not to be me to invest him with a foreign aura. Similarly, I probably wouldn't laugh even at the Nazi soldiers if they blew themselves up while in combat with, say, a horrible alien species invading our planet – because in that case, they still have more in common with me than with the other element. Their failure would be my own. Commonality, the measure which determines how much pain can be taken before something stops being funny, is not absolute but relative.

Due to its communal and social nature, Fail humour is at the heart of racist and sexist jokes, among other things. More frequently than not these jokes are poor on irony and wit. They simply take a (usually degrading) trait attributed to the category in question and augment it by hyperbole. How do you kill a nigger in a car? Place his head out of the window and let his lips slap him to death. There isn't really a 'reversal of intent' there, or an ironic construction. There's barely even an insult, because 'big lips' isn't much of a degrading trait (unlike jokes which compare blacks to shit or describe women as stupid... though of course the joke is still offensive, inasmuch as it seems to imply that there is a 'correct,' and therefore non-criminal, way of killing black people). There's just an image which exaggerates a trait supposed to belong to (and identify) black people, that is to say, the big lips. The thing that makes this 'funny,' to racist sensitivities anyway, is that it draws a line between us and the Other(s). 'They' are different from 'us' and we can distinguish them because their lips are so big. The communal nature of the laughter mechanism then kicks in, and we define our 'alliance' as white people by laughing (this would have been useful in tribal communities – a group of people laughing at you looks threatening - remember that laughter is also a way of baring teeth - and denotes confidence and dominance, so a tribe laughing together at another tribe are sending a very clear signal).

Note that laughter kicks in only if the highlighting of this difference is done in terms of a Fail – in this case, the black person's death. Yes, you can have jokes based on the same mechanism which seem to have no failure in them and in fact sound almost complimentary, such as quips on the length of a black man's penis, but there's still a Fail in there, and it's still racist: the Fail is that of the black man to be defined by anything else other than his sexuality. Jokes based on the idea of black people having super-schlongs are projecting blacks as no more than walking dicks, and are therefore degrading them (though I think you could use this premise to change the object of the racism, if you were to make a joke where the implied Fail is that of the white man and his smaller penis. But I can't really bring to mind jokes which do this, given how little anti-white racist humour I've encountered). This same exact process is at work when we make jokes or sing jingles about supporters of a rival football team, for instance. Again, the degree to which this is funny depends on the subject: the more racist s/he is, the funnier it will seem, because s/he will feel the 'alliance' more deeply.

Discrimination humour mingles with other forms of humour, the way they all do. There's racist/sexist/homophobic jokes which actually demonstrate clever, witty or ironic constructions. A 'pure' racist joke is in fact not as easy to find as you may think – even the 'big lips' one I mentioned earlier makes use of other funny principles aside from mere discrimination (and we shall come to these principles in future entries). When it comes to the Fail class of humour, it's so primal that other than the 'video of the guy falling down,' you can't do much with it unless you throw in other comic genres as well.

But before this type of amusement gets completely defamed, I should say that the Fail mechanism doesn't have to be discriminatory. If targeted towards individuals rather than ethnic, national or sexual groups, then it won't be socially divisive (even if it may be offensive). Here's how Jerome K. Jerome, one of the greatest of comedic writers, informs us of his mates' ineptitude at packing suitcases. When George is hanged, Harris will be the worst packer in this world. This double insult thrown almost casually into the phrase is funny because it implies a.) the social failure (or 'fail') of Harris, who can be expected to be hanged some day, and b.) his otherness with respect to our (social / intellectual / moral) group, since we subsist under the same law and community but are not under threat of being hanged. The casual quality of the tone implies that it's something we all already know, and therefore reinforces the sense of community and alliance.


I said that most jokes based on Fail also make use of other forms of humour. Correspondingly, Fail humour is itself employed by other, more sophisticated comic genres. I'm thinking that comics and animation make use of anthropomorphised animals partly because it makes their slapstick easier to digest. By dressing their fundamentally human characters in the robes of animals, they make them more alien and therefore easier to laugh at. They also diminish them considerably as human beings: these are not men, but men degraded to the status of animals, and so not legitimate in our moral group. (This makes sense in light of the Aristotelian statement that comedy is about people who are slightly worse than we are. I'm assuming he meant morally).

Intriguingly, human characters themselves can play important roles in animation films where the protagonists are animals. Think of the old ladies in Tom and Jerry or Sylvester and Tweetie, who are NEVER the 'victims' and always the 'punishers.' Their human appearance goes hand in hand with this role: if they were the ones who Failed, then they'd be represented as animals. No-one wants to laugh at an old lady getting hurt (for that matter no-one wants to laugh at a cat getting hurt, but remember that Sylvester and to a slightly lesser extent Tom are not cats, but humans degraded to the level of cats). There's exceptions, like the rival of Bugs Bunny, that bald guy who consistently gets the shit beaten out of him. In that case something slightly more complex is at work, I think there's more than just Fail humour coming into play, but the Fail element is probably that of a man so inept that he is overpowered by a rabbit (among the most harmless of creatures).


Aside from the old ladies, though, I'm musing on the figure of the mindless 'baby' who constantly and innocently endangers him/herself and has to be rescued by the despairing protagonist(s). It's a common figure which has been given its most interesting expression, to my knowledge, in the Roger Rabbit mythology (link to an exemplary short). Of course, the baby *cannot* get hurt. There is no figure more immune to Fail humour than that of the infant. Roger Rabbit, by contrast, as the human character so idiotic that he is no better than a rabbit, goes through all sorts of injuries and we still laugh at him. (To an extent, anyway, because after a while the degree of injuries gets so extreme that we start rooting for Roger over the baby, Tom over Jerry, and so on. This is a familiar feeling to anyone who's watched a bit of cartoons).

Fail humour is the most basic and primal type of comedy. Other types follow on from this genre, but complicate it to the point that it becomes something recognizably different. The second of our four classes of humour will be the subject of my next blog entry.

Why do we laugh?

Most discussions I hear or read on the question of why we laugh tend to treat it as a quasi-mystical issue. The argument goes, more or less, that since it's one of those things that distinguish us from animals, like our sensitivity to music, then it must be something profoundly spiritual, deep and hard to fathom. I'm probably not well versed enough on the subject, but it doesn't seem like such a complex question to me. I also don't understand why you don't find an explanation of why we laugh in so-called common knowledge, like GCSE Biology textbooks. Maybe my own understanding of this subject is wrong? Am I missing something?

Anyway, I'm going to throw down some thoughts which I'd ruminated upon quite the while ago, but never committed them to writing – the issue seemed too obvious for this to seem necessary! But since I haven't found a lucid and basic explanation elsewhere (mostly the question seems to be discussed in psychoanalitical essays which are far more complex than I feel they should be), I'll just write this all down, because otherwise I'll just forget, and then what's the point of having thought of it at all? I don't expect I'll be saying anything particularly original, but it may make for a differently interesting read from the usual cultural criticism.

So then – why do we laugh?

Most of the sounds, gestures or smells produced by the human organisms (excluding, therefore, external agents like the sound of an object impacting with someone's body or an odour resulting from contact with a foreign substance) are social signals. Like the howl of wolves or the singing of birds, their purpose is to indicate something to the group we live in. If infants cry, for instance, it usually serves to call for help from their mothers. Unsurprisingly, we tend to cry much less when we grow up – and women, who are less capable of physically defending themselves and therefore more likely to require protection, cry more easily than men in most cases.

Laughter is, similarly, a useful social signal. Its purpose is that of defining and consolidating social hierarchies. It may seem a somewhat redundant or bizarre behavioural trait, to produce these loud cries convulsively, but then we must consider that homo sapiens is among the most complex of social animals, and the (evolutionary?) mechanisms required to sustain its societies are correspondingly very complex – or at least, more subtle than those of other social animals.

Ants, termites, bees and other social insects, for instance, determine their hierarchies genetically. Once a drone is born, it will stay a drone all its life. It will never behave like any other thing (potentially, circumstances can lead an ant to change caste, perhaps to substitute a dying queen, but again the event is highly scripted and predetermined, and can be reproduced with different hives in fairly simple laboratory conditions). Human societies are less predictable. What an individual will become within a group, and what his/her social use/contribution will be, depends on a very sophisticated combination of variables, many of which are determined by the conditions in which s/he grows up. The process of mating exemplifies the differences as well. Termites reproduce according to scripted and mechanical processes. A hive's reproductive history is, to my knowledge, pretty much the same for any given one, with variations only in the rate of success (which is determined by the resources available, not by the 'personality' of the termites mating). When it comes to humans, predicting who we're going to fall in love with, why and when, or how any given relationship is going to go, is a task so unearthly that the subject is ubiquitously treated with even more mysticism than laughter.

There's always got to be one...

In explaining the phenomenon, it will be remarked that you never laugh about 'good' things. If you laugh, it always means that something has gone 'wrong.' Among the simplest funny things is the sight of someone tripping, slipping, or otherwise falling down while in the middle of normal activities. Often seeing people getting hurt is funny, provided they don't get too hurt (in which case other mechanisms kick in and we become worried for the person in question). Even seemingly innocuous jokes with language, like puns or double entendres, make us laugh only inasmuch as they represent an *error.* Even though no-one gets hurt, there's been a failure of some type (specifically, communication), and we laugh at this failure. The greater the failure, the funnier the situation – a respected professor's blooper is funnier the more embarrassing it is and the richer its unintended suggestions are, and this is the principle of irony. I'll say more on this and other specific types of humour later, but in the meantime, I'll point out that this is what led Robert Heinlein, in his milestone novel Stranger in a Strange Land, to conclude that laughter exists to suppress pain. We laugh at painful things because otherwise there would be just too much pain to deal with. This interesting argument made me think a lot when I was a kid.

The mechanism of empathy, it can be agreed, has developed in homo sapiens because it makes societies work better. If we feel bad at the sight of other people feeling bad, and we want to prevent them from feeling that way, then of course it's going to foster cooperation, and a group that cooperates has far greater chances of survival than one internally broken. So empathy makes perfect evolutionary sense for social animals. Laughter is, I think, the opposite of empathy. It leads us, at least to a certain extent, to enjoy the ill-fortune of others. Why would this be useful from a social/evolutionary point of view?

Laughter always implies other people. As Freud famously stated, you never laugh alone. Now we can agree that other people laughing *with* you is one of the best things in life, while other people laughing *at* you is one of the least desirable. Try picturing what this means in a social group. If two males engage in a conflict which will have consequences in terms of the leadership of the group, people will laugh at whoever they do not recognise as legitimate leader. They will laugh WITH their 'candidate' of choice, and AT his adversary. So it's almost a natural expression of democratic vote. Chances are, the laughter may be so effective at outlining the social situation that physical conflict may even be averted. But laughter does more than that. It also consolidates alliances. Three women who dislike a man will laugh at the latter's back. In this way, even without any hostility being openly expressed, or even formulated, the three individuals will have silently (or, well, not so silently) defined themselves as allies. They don't need to SAY to each other, 'Let us be allies against that man.' That would expose the one who proposes this idea to considerable danger: if the others don't agree, she's in trouble, because she has defined herself as the 'traitor' figure. But laughter will arise spontaneously among three people who agree, with no need of being publically defined and, as importantly, with almost no need of anyone taking the dangerous 'first step,' because laughter escalates simultaneously and reciprocally (as we know, laughter is contagious), and all it takes to 'begin' is an innocent and non-committing smile. The alliance will hold, at least until other laughter comes to dispel, modify or redirect it.


So it seems quite straightforward to me that laughter isn't a mystical mysterious thing, at least not in terms of the knowledge we have today. In a species which isn't as predictable in the behaviour of its members as ants or bees, it's a fundamental signal for people to understand where each other stands. The fact that it has evolved in homo sapiens is logical. Without laughter, social processes would be much more complicated, and far more verbal communication would be required, which is less effective (and more dangerous) at this type of social game than laughter.

Obviously, I'm not proposing a purely utilitarian/materialistic understanding of laughter. It is precisely humanity's unpredictability that allows laughter to transcend its original function. While it still helps social dynamics, like allowing friendships to coalesce more quickly, or in the process of seducing a partner, it's now understood to be mainly recreational. Similarly, even though the purpose of sex is reproduction, people make love nowadays at least just as much for the sheer enjoyment of it, and only a minority of our sexual partners will actually bear or rear our children. This distortion of the original evolutionary purpose means that we experience laughter in ways and occasions which do not always have a social purpose. If we sit on a chair and watch a funny video on Youtube, we laugh on our own, which defeats the biological point. Furthermore, laughing at dramatic representations (i.e. comedies) has a certain function of gelling people together, but mostly it too is abortive, because there's no-one being laughed at. We're laughing at a screen. How then is our 'vote' expressed by laughter any relevant, when there aren't even any candidates?

Actually, the figure of the comedian may seem a bit puzzling, in light of the arguments I proposed. Given the humiliating power of laughter, wouldn't anyone's priority be to *avoid* being laughed at, in whichever way possible? Isn't a professional comedian an absurdity, then, since s/he seeks to be laughed at as much and as long as possible, and indeed feels gratified when s/he succeeds in this task? (There's a lot of pronouns coming up and I don't want to repeat him/her and s/he at every line, so I'll just use the masculine for the next paragraph...).

But there is no puzzle here. As I mentioned, in comedies there's no-one being laughed at. What we laugh at is not the comedian himself as an individual, but at the representation he is projecting. A comedian *simulates* an accident; he pretends to fall down or get hurt. If it really were an accident, that person wouldn't be a comedian, because you can't professionally have accidents – it's a total contradiction in terms! (The Jackass show aims to contradict my statement, but though they obviously play on the principles we discussed – of pain/injury to others as funny – their skits are still scripted and controlled, and therefore aren't accidents. It would be an accident, with them, if they did NOT get hurt – and yes, that would be funny too, seeing them botching up a sketch and all of them coming out unscathed). And so a comedian is never being laughed at himself, but people are laughing *with* him at his representation. He is essentially presenting something and saying “Look, this is really funny.” And if they agree with him, of course they would feel gratified – they are, in a primordial sense, telling him that they want him as their leader, or at least that they are his allies.

I hope I've put up a decent argument as to the functions and purposes of laughter. The question that follows naturally from this discussion is that of comedy. Given why we laugh, *what* do we laugh at? Which events are funny and which are not, and why? Are there different types of laughter, and if so, what categories do they fall under? Is there an ethical distinction to be made in laughter, that is to say, are there good and bad types or ways of laughing, and if so, what are they?

To all of these questions my next blog-post is going to be dedicated. It normally takes me a few days to conclude a two-part text, but this time the subject is difficult and it will require patience (besides, I'm back to working on the ship and I'm so busy I could die!). At least a week, then, but probably longer than that, and we'll have a post on The Question of Comedy.