How to Outdrink the RUSSIANS

Editorial note: click on the pics to view in full, they appear not to fit in the column!

Visiting St Petersburg before drinking vodka...

Russians have a tremendous reputation, to the point that most people don't even include them when discussing comparative merits related to drinking. It's like they're on a podium of their own, disconnected from us modest Europeans in the same way that their language is abstruse and maybe even hostile to our own.

After having spent some time in the city of St Petersburg, and even having learnt a little of their idiom, I can say that their reputation is only partly deserved. The full picture needs some elucidation. I can testify that the Russians drink spirits with a fervour and a stamina no-one in Europe, or anywhere else I know, have a hope in hell of matching. The prime lubricant is, of course, vodka. The way they down it is insane, and that's the end of it. Shot after shot after shot after shot after shot. And while they do assume a certain euphoria, little if anything else in their demeanour would reveal them to be drunk. They don't stagger, they don't slur, they don't fall down, they don't lose the thread of their conversations, they don't stop doing whatever it is they're doing. They do earn a killer breath, true, and they dance like idiots, but the latter is only because they don't know how to dance - their technique is poor of its own accord, with no need for the inebriation to explicate it.

They're very strong on other liquors as well. Cognac, brandy, rum, you name it. The heavier, the better, usually that's the rule. Sweeter spirits, of the type yours truly most enjoys, are considered to be toothpaste, if that.



What really surprised me about the Russians, and what makes them not just accessible but even relatively easy to outdrink, is that they can't take beer. Other drinks of lighter kind, like cheap champagne, are also a barrier for them. I know this sounds absurd, but I've seen it happen with my own eyes, and with multiple individuals. Hell, I even drank a few of them under the table myself. On one occasion on the Nievska, we went out three of us for a pub crawl and within the third beer they were already whoozing. I couldn't understand what the fuck was going on with them as the day before I'd seen them down a bottle of whisky between the two of them and they were waltzing down the Prospect. (This is another common practice which, when going out drinking with Russians, you must at all costs AVOID: they usually buy a bottle of heavy spirits at a supermarket on the way to wherever they're going, and they down it as they walk, so that by the time they get there, it's all finished. Try drinking with them at that point, and you'll be so drunk by the time you get to your destination that you probably won't be allowed inside, never mind start a duel).

It was only later in the night that I figured that what had messed them up had been the beer. They were so unaccustomed to it, that even a couple of litres had sent them flying. Russians are the diametric opposite of the Germans: while the latter can take obscene amounts of beer, but they faint if someone opens a bottle of limoncello in the vicinities and they perceive its scent, the Russians can imbibe enough vodka (et similia) to kill an adult mule, but they flake when having to handle beer. More than that, they don't even have the culture, the understanding or the conception of what beer is. There's one video where I'm downing a litre-pint (a rather common exercise at the Oktoberfest), and it happened to be shot in Petersburg. You've got to believe that the people around me were literally gaping, even though my pace was much of an adagio. They reacted just like I did when I first saw them downing vodka, as it were.

...and strolling through St Petersburg AFTER vodka. Yeah, that's snow

When drinking with a Russian, take care not to begin with the spirits until as late as possible. Demand that no drinking should start until it is 'officially' sanctioned, that is to say, at the pub. Then buy the first and maybe the second rounds of drinks yourself, and use the auctoritas awarded to you by your generosity to make these beer or cider. Try organising a drinking game involving several glasses of beer and the downing of them (this will increase the likelihood that everyone will stick to this beverage later on, too).

Keep to these rules, and you'll see that the egregious reputation of the Russians doesn't make for such an invincible dragon after all.

How to Outdrink the GERMANS

Everybody knows that the Germans rule the world in terms of beer. They have the best types of it in the world BY FAR, golden nectars that have not so much a taste as a song, and a real respect for it to boot. A home-made brew will rifle itself down your throat with an ease second only to that of mineral water. Much of the Germans' success as beer producers lies in their ability to innovate (a talent less marked, I feel, in their most obvious competitors, the British) as well as a willingness to integrate new cultures and ideas into their production methods. Pilsner, for instance, was originally brewed by the Czechs. It was only in the twentieth century that the Germans reabsorbed their methods and industry, and presented them to the world, resulting in their most popular beer, and in my opinion their best. Their 'athletes' are, understandably, very well prepared.

When I first went to live in that jolly Canaan of the malt consumer, back in fall 2008, I thought that I would never reach up to their level. Germans can drink beer in a way that nobody else in the globe can, amen. Even the Americans, who are notoriously strong with this beverage, are nowhere near their raw talent. I have seen Germans drink so many beers together as to baffle a restaurant sink, and show no sign after it other than a mild reddening of the cheeks. If you're thinking of undoing a German over this beverage, you can throw the sponge now.

A little practice in the field, however, proved to me that the act of outdrinking a German is not at all as impossible as it may seem. In fact, their strength also happens to be their major weakness - and one, I may add happily, that is quite easy to exploit. Germans are mechanical locomotives when it comes to drinking beer, but they seem to collapse very quickly if you throw a couple of tequilas or vodkas inbetween the pints. So all you have to do, really, is mix their drinks a little. Shuffle your cards. Mess up the clogs in their stomachs. On the whole, once you know their secret, it's actually quite easy.

Notice who's in the lead

One sentence that I've found to be broadly true for the German people is, 'They don't do X, but when they do X, oh man...'. For instance, they don't party much by comparison with, say, the Latin countries. But when they DO party, they throw some shit to remember. No doubt the best example of this is the Oktoberfest, the world's greatest beer-festival and one of the craziest, most fucking awesome things you can find or do in Europe. And the probate sentence is true of drinking as well. The Germans, contrary to expectations, don't have much in the way of a drinking (sub)culture, but when they *do* drink, they drink like hell. And they do this by drinking beer. They specialise. Beer is their chosen discipline. Their weakness is their failure to reach outside that discipline. Despite being second to none with malt-based beverages, they have little range or resilience outside of them.

If a German challenges you, accept the challenge. Drink two or three beers with him, then throw a few shots of your preferred liquor into it. Keep bringing them at regular intervals inbetween the pints, increasing the gradation if necessary, and the sausage-eater should be down over the medium term. Prost!

How to Outdrink the FRENCH

New series starting on my blog from today. I was pondering on what I had learnt by travelling around the world and how I could help others by that knowledge, and I thought this brief tactical manual on how to outdrink the different people of the world could come in aid of many people I know. Nay, even most of them (you know who you are).

So follow this brief guide over its panorama of the globe, and, barring the inevitable blunder, you'll soon be able to outdrink the planet!

One entry every two turnings of the sun, my good dandies. Today we're starting with my immediate neighbours, the French.

HOW TO OUTDRINK THE FRENCH



I'm going to start with the French if only because everybody seems to have an axe to grind with these guys. The English dislike them because these two people spent a hundred years killing each other (and eventually the Brits lost to an army led by an adolescent girl), the Italians dislike them due to antagonisms related to modern football, the Americans dislike them because George Bush convinced his country that the French have some kind of moral duty to send their eighteen-year-olds to get torn limb from limb in Iraq, the Russians dislike them because they still haven't got over Napoleon, and so on. Apparently even the French dislike the French, seen how a solid half of their modern art and literature, from Baudelaire and Rimbaud onwards, concerns hating their own society and the people surrounding them (the most recent I've heard is singer Damien Saez, whom I actually really enjoy, and the first chorus from the first song in his first album goes 'Another night and the French youth / goes out they'll have fun / because nothing here makes sense / and so we go dance / we act like we're happy / so we can close our eyes in peace / but nothing will be better tomorrow').

I'm starting with the French for another reason too, namely, that they're one of the lower 'difficulty levels.' As with other Mediterranean cultures, like Italy and Spain, and with no offence to anyone, these people are pussies when it comes to drinking. Drinking is more of an art than a sport to them. They know their wines backwards, like the Italians, and they really *understand* a drink when they bring it to their lips. In this sense, I mean it almost as a compliment when I say that French (and Italians) aren't good drinkers: they're just excessively sophisticated. They have too much respect for their glass to just down it.

Most French people can be steamrolled by a moderately competent or resilient drinker. In fact, if anyone aspires to learn how to drink and is willing to undergo a pilgrimage, I think the best place to start from is France. They're soft and they're friendlier than most people believe. A perfect training grounds.

Truth be told, they wouldn't even make it into this list if it weren't that to go drinking in France also involves some booby traps which have to be avoided, and which the newcomer has to be warned of. For, while the majority of the French couldn't outdrink a lizard of the desert, there *are* a few occasional individuals you'll meet in France who actually have the devil's stomach inside them, and these I shall refer to as the Elites.

A classical Elite, on the left.

Normally a population's drinking ability is distributed over a Gaussian curve, with lows at both ends and a peak at the average value (say, six pints on an empty stomach for the limit). France is tricky because these parameters do not apply. Instead, the individuals at the further extreme do not decrease exponentially in number as the pints go up. Your risk of finding one of the 'exceptions,' if your stay protracts itself, is considerable. The trick to outdrinking the French, then, is to identify your adversary before leaping head-first into battle. If the opponent displays indicators like a well-trimmed beard, stylish clothes, and a tendency to use words like 'aesthetical' in earnest, then finish him off. It will not take much of an effort. If other signs suggest to you that he may be an Elite, plan your approach with greater caution.

How do you recognise an Elite? Fortunately they are quite easy to spot. An Elite is a fat French man almost always above the age of 25, walking with bleary eyes and a constant big smile which he will flash whenever he sees you. His first gesture to greet you is a brutal pat in the back. He usually has an ill-shaved beard and reddened eyes, his room is a mess beyond reckoning, he picks his nose when alone AND in public, and his shoes look like something forgotten in a river two-hundred years ago and recovered after a war. My own first Elite went by the name of Stevo, a recluse who worked as a carpenter and lived by one of my best mates back when I was in the French Caribbean. We used to meet up for Pro Evolution Soccer sessions with beer and joints (lots and lots of joints) and on our first real session I made the mistake of underestimating him. I can't remember exactly what happened but judging by the photo in which I'm passed out on the carpet with fake moustache drawn onto my face, it seems things didn't turn out in my favour.



How do you deal with an Elite? It's not as hard as it may sound. Despite being drinkers of great stamina, Elites are normally incredibly stupid. As a consequence, they tend to break whatever rules you set up in the drinking challenge, but *to their own disadvantage*. Any smart drinker can just proceed at his/her own pace and let the Elite undo himself with his own hands. Don't hurry, let him slide into his fuck-ups without protesting, and you should make it just fine. And they won't even protest on the next day (unlike the Indians).

In conclusion, then, France is a great training ground and the French in general are an easy target to take down, but unseasoned visitors should beware of being lulled into complacency, at the risk of running into nasty surprises. Most commonly, these are represented by the Elites, but expect other contingencies to provide danger as well.

Also, have a modicum of care with French girls. They're much more able drinkers than their partners may suggest.

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.