Nasty, Brutish, & Short — but Funny: Hobbes on Comedy

The leaves are dying, people, but the semester itself refuses to die, sprouting new, snarling dragon-heads of academic minutia like the Hydra of Greek legend just when I think I've finally put the beast down.  What to do, in such a situation?  Grade the papers, correct the galley proofs, and haul oneself to the meetings?  Hardly.  My usual plan involves popping on my noise-cancelling headphones and listening to bootlegs of old Mitch Hedberg comedy shows.  Maybe it's because of this that I've been thinking a little about the theory of comedy.  Or maybe it's that I'm scheduled to speak in February on a panel about wit and contemporary poetry at the Louisville conference on literature since 1900 (Joyelle McSweeney will be there talking about Harryette Mullen, and Mike Theune will have something to say about wit and poetic form, so don't let my presence put you off coming).  Whatever the reason, I've been thinking about the nature of humor, and have been having bit of a disagreement with that most unlikely theorist of humor, Thomas Hobbes.

Most people who talk about humor theory seem to break the field down into three different areas: incongruity theory, relief theory, and superiority theory.  Incongruity theory is pretty much what you'd expect it to be: the idea that humor comes from strange, unexpected juxtaposition.  Kant is one of the bigwigs in this area, claiming, in The Critique of Judgment, "everything that is to excite a lively laugh there must be something absurd (in which the understanding, therefore, can find no satisfaction)."  You know this sort of thing: since we’re talking about philosophers, let’s use an example involving that soft-handed tribe: Monty Python’s famous skit involving philosophers playing soccer:

You know: there’s no why to the juxtaposition: it’s just weird, inexplicable, and incongruous, and the understanding, questing for an explanation for the juxtaposition, can find no satisfaction.  I’m actually not sure the skit holds up all that well, since between the filming of the skit and our own time there’s been a considerable diminishing of the notion that crossing high-culture with pop-culture involves incongruity.  So if you didn’t laugh, you can blame postmodernity.  But you get the idea.

Much of Mikhail Bakhtin’s thinking about laughter also involves incongruity, albeit of a somewhat more specific kind: his famous notion (propagated by his best advocates, Peter Stallybrass and Allon White) being the idea of “transcoding” — of juxtaposing the high or sacred with the low or profane, especially when the low and profane involve bodily functions. 

Relief theory is probably best exemplified by Freud, who argued that humor involved violating social taboos, giving us a sense of relief by letting us say the unsayable.  Lenny Bruce-style profanity falls under this category, as do many gender or ethnicity jokes, which allow the presentation of forbidden stereotypes in the special context of comedy.  This sort of thing can, of course, go badly, badly wrong, as it did in Michael Richards’ career-ending n-word gaffe of 2006.  It’s because of the potential for it to go so badly wrong that I’m restraining myself from adding a couple of my favorite examples (one ending “but it’s always money with you people” and the other ending “no, man, I never found the head” and both bound to offend someone, that being the nature of taboo-shattering humor).

Thomas Hobbes looks at things differently: the author of Leviathan was the pioneer of the superiority theory of humor, which maintains that comedy and laughter are found in the “sudden glory” we feel when we experience “some sudden conception of some eminency in ourselves, by comparison with the infirmity of others.”  There are certainly plenty of instances when this is true.  I remember taking a bunch of my student on a field trip to Chicago’s Millennium Park (it was for a class on the art and literature of Chicago I was co-teaching with an art prof, and we were doing a unit on public sculpture).  A couple of students took advantage of the early-September heat to walk into the reflective pool of Jaume Plensa’s Crown Fountain, a very postmodern, interactive piece of public art that encourages such things.  As the first student stood in the pool, she was blasted by one of the small jets of water that suddenly shoot up from the pool, getting pretty wet in the process.  Her friend thought this was hysterically funny — and it was, in a very Hobbesian way: suddenly, the observer, in her dryness and prudence, was superior to the soaked friend.  Just then, though, the laughing student got doused by one of the cascades that come from above, ending up much wetter than her pal, who hooted in appropriately Hobbesian derision at the fate of her hapless former mocker.  The unexpectedly superior position is the position from which we laugh.

Hobbes extends his theory a bit, too, saying that we can feel a “sudden eminency” not only with regard to others, but to our former selves: so, for example, if we were trudging along down a slippery, muddy hill, and suddenly started to slide down, but managed to maintain our balance and arrive quite suddenly at the end of the slippery slope, unsullied and no longer having to trudge tediously on, we’d laugh at our sudden unexpected superiority to our former position.

This is all well and good, but it’s far from exhaustive.  I’d like to propose an amendment to the Hobbesian theory, an amendment I’m deriving from two things that happened to my wife, Valerie, yesterday, both of which she found hilarious, and neither of which can quite be accommodated by the Hobbesian theory.

First, there’s the matter of Valerie’s morning commute.  She takes the mighty Metra train into Chicago every morning, but yesterday, due to some weird mechanical fiasco, the trains on her line were running very late.  She stood in the cold waiting for her train to arrive, but when it did, it didn’t stop.  Instead, in some attempt to get the commuter rails back on schedule, it blew by her at incredible speed, actually blowing her hat off her head.  This left her late and laughing at her predicament, with an emotion that could best be described as “well, fuck me, then.”  Something similar happened later in the day, when she returned home.  The sunroom in Stately Archambeau Manor is equipped with old-school blinds, the kind that roll down, and can be a bit temperamental, wanting to roll back up rather than stay where you’ve put them.  Valerie took a long time to carefully adjust and balance the blind so it would stay at the exact level she desired.  Then, as she turned her back and began to walk away, the blind rolled up at incredible speed, made a kind of Don Martin of Mad Magazine series of sound effects (FWAP FWAP FWAP, among others) and somehow, in defiance of the laws of God and physics, tore itself loose from its bearings, unrolling all the way to the floor like some kind of red carpet laid in front of a visiting dignitary, and finally cut loose from its roll altogether, drifting elegantly to the floor.  Shortly thereafter, the wooden roll itself dropped from the window, hitting the ground with a clunk and frightening the cat.

From my perch on the sofa this all seemed quite hilarious, in a strictly Hobbesian way: I hadn’t just invested my time in setting the blind just-so, so I was superior to She Whose Labors Had Come To Naught.  But Valerie laughed even harder than I did, once again feeling the humor of “well, fuck me, then.”

So here’s what I think was going on.  I think there’s a strange, pseudo-Hobbesian effect that comes into play when we experience a sudden sense of superiority not to someone else, and not to our former selves, but to ourselves in the present moment, a kind of doubled-consciousness.  Maybe the best way to get at it is to turn not to Hobbes, but to Jung.  Jung argued that one of the ways people deal successfully with difficult situations is to gain a certain detachment from their situation, without losing their sense of being within that situation.  Of the emotions produced by problematic situations Jung said “one certainly does feel the affect and is shaken and tormented by it,” but, he continues, “at the same time one is aware of a higher consciousness looking on which prevents one from becoming identical with the effect, a consciousness which regards the affect as an object, and can say ‘I know that I suffer.’”  So there’s the part of you that is upset at having fallen on your ass into the mud, with everyone looking on and laughing.  But, if you are able to develop a little distance, and not just suffer, but watch yourself suffer, you participate in the same Hobbesian sense of superiority, and laugh along with the giggling observers.  Sure, you’re humiliated.  But you’re also aware of your humiliated self as if from the outside, and you feel superior to the humiliation even as you experience it: you play a kind of emotional chord, with one note of suffering and one of the “sudden glory” of Hobbesian superiority.

We might call this the “well, fuck me, then” effect.  And, as a habitual faller-out-of-hammocks and dropper-of-meatballs-down-the-front-of-my-shirt, I can assure you, developing the doubled consciousness of the “well, fuck me, then” effect is a skill well-worth having.  It even got me through the second half of a speech I was giving in front of several hundred people after my glorious academic robes had been shat upon by an errant seagull.

Why The Right Wing Can’t Do Comedy

Among all kinds of writing there is none in which authors are more apt to miscarry than in humor, as there is none in which they are more ambitious to excel. It is not an imagination that teems with monsters... which is capable of furnishing the world with diversions of this nature...
— Joseph Addison, Spectator 35, 1711.

Darin Murphy has some interesting speculations up over at the Huffington Post about the failure of Fox News’ Half-Hour Comedy Hour, the show once trumpeted as the right wing’s answer to Jon Stewart and Stephen Colbert. Murphy sees the failure of the show largely in terms of the failure of the writers to grasp the nature of irony. There’s something to what Murphy has to say. But I think the waters run deep, here, and merit a little further investigation.

We could begin by asking why so few works of right wing comedy have been successful. The Half-Hour News Hour failed spectacularly. We can date the demise of Dennis Miller’s comedy career to the months after 9-11 when, understandably freaked out, he took a hard turn to the political right. Right wing attempts at comedy in the movies have done pretty poorly (remember P.C.U.? God, I wish I didn’t). Mike Judge’s King of the Hill can be pretty funny, and so can Penn & Teller in their show Bullshit, but I’m not sure you could call these conservative shows: they’re both kind of populist/libertarian hybrids. The right wing, which masters a lot of media formats in which even talented lefties tend to struggle (talk radio, say, or the personality-driven news commentary show) just can’t seem to do funny. And I don’t mean they can’t please irredeemably left-wing, egghead academic literary Green-party voters like, say, me. They can’t buy a win, even with a Fox News audience. What gives?

The answer can best be expressed in a syllogism, so dust off your notes to Logic 101 and check this:

Major Premise: Comedy is inherently subversive of authority.
Minor Premise: The right wing (at least in post-911 America) is deeply into authoritarianism.
Conclusion: Right wing comedy blows.

So, about that Major Premise — how do I know that comedy is inherently subversive of authority? Ladies and gentlemen of the jury, let me call as witness Mr. Mikhail Bakhtin, the foremost theorist of comedy in Stalinist Russia (which qualifies as a contender for World’s Toughest Gig, right up there with coal miner and “Guy In Charge of Weeding Norman Mailer’s Ear Hair”). Maybe it was the deeply authoritarian world of gray apparatchiks and political purges around him that got Bakhtin thinking about humor as the antithesis of authority. Be that as it may, Bakhtin’s thinking certainly didn’t endear him to the powers-that-were, who gave him a bit of a rough ride. I suppose I can see why the apparatchiks didn’t like Bakhtin: he insisted that everything delightful and funny was in some measure subversive of hierarchies and authorities, famously tracing the history of laughter back to medieval carnivals, where all the established hierarchies were suspended:

The suspension of all hierarchical precedence during carnival time was of particular significance. Rank was especially evident during official feasts; everyone was expected to appear in the full regalia of his calling... and to take the place corresponding to his position. It was a consecration of inequality. On the contrary, all were considered equal during carnival. Here, in the town square, a special form of free and familiar contact reigned among people who were usually divided by the barriers of caste, property, profession, and age.
—Rabelais and His World

Even something as low-grade and apparently apolitical as, say, the fart joke was in some measure transgressive for Bakhtin. Usually such jokes depend on a context where something we are meant to take seriously is dissed by being brought into association with despised and abject things like “the lower stratum of the body, the life of the belly and the reproductive organs” or “to acts of defecation and copulation.” I mean, think of it: involuntarily unleashing a truly noxious and garlic-scented belch on your own in the privacy of your own living room isn’t particularly funny, but doing it at a moment when you’re supposed to be a figure of authority (while, say, delivering your lecture on Hegel’s aesthetics to your seminar) will get you giggled at by your students. Or, uh, so I’m told.

So okay. Humor is subversive of authority. Any snickering kid who ever stuck an “Kick me” post-it on the back of an unsuspecting school teacher knows that. But what about the second part of our syllogism, the bit with the somewhat more contentious premise that the American right wing is into authoritarianism lately? Since I’m probably going to get some nasty email about this one, I figure I’ll call several witnesses: Theodor Adorno, John Dean, and Jack Block.

Hard-core Adornonauts know where I’m going with this, I’m sure: straight to The Authoritarian Personality, the 1950 book he co-wrote with a group of sociologists. Here, he defines the authoritarian personality as that type of deeply insecure subjectivity that yearns to submit to authority, that seeks stability and security above all else, that dislikes divergence and longs for conformity. Such a personality sees the world as crawling with threats, and sees salvation from these threats in powerful, unquestionable authority figures. People like this are susceptible to political manipulation, often (though not always) by the political right.

Adorno, of course, didn’t have anything to say about the American right after 9-11. But John Dean does. A guy with impeccable right-wing credentials himself (in addition to serving under Nixon, he describes himself as a “Goldwater conservative”), he argues in his 2006 book Conservatives Without Conscience that the conservative movement he has been loyal to all his life has taken a wrong turn, in exploiting insecurity and appealing to authoritarian sentiment (the need for certainty, the fear of the alien, etc.). In a time of great uncertainty, the party rode a wave of fear by appealing to and cultivating the kind of authoritarian personality Adorno described, building a Republican coalition based on such people. (Dean draws on the research of Robert Altemeyer, who updates Adorno’s work with new data).

Other new research points in the same direction. In fact, a recent article by Jack Block in the Journal of Research in Personality traced the political evolution of a group of 95 children over several decades, and came to the conclusion that the kids who grew up to be conservative had more authoritarian personality traits from the get-go. As Block put it in the Toronto Star, "the whiny kids tended to grow up conservative, and turned into rigid young adults who hewed closely to traditional gender roles and were uncomfortable with ambiguity” while "the confident kids turned out liberal and were still hanging loose, turning into bright, non-conforming adults with wide interests." The research seems to indicate, however preliminarily, a correlation between the right wing and a yearning for authority.

So okay. If we buy the Bakhtinian argument about comedy as subversive of authority, and if we find the sociological and psychological research on a correlation between the contemporary American right wing and authoritarianism convincing, then we’ve got an answer as to why the right can’t seem to do comedy: it runs contrary to their nature. Asking them to do comedy is like asking a bunch of sumo wrestlers to excel at basketball. Whatever their other virtues, they’re just not going to be good at it, at least not very often.

The authoritarian thesis also helps explain why the left does so poorly at talk radio and at O’Reilly Factor style television (listening to Al Franken on Air America was like watching a great sumo champion struggle to shoot a basket; watching Keith Olbermann on MSNBC is like watching a sumo wrestler somehow, amazingly, dunk and hang off the rim, which even more amazingly supports his bulk). Lefty-types don't work well in those formats, but the fit between those formats and authoritarian thinking is natural. I mean, if what you’re into is all that authoritarian stuff — submitting to a strong personality, being told that people unlike you are not only wrong but bad — you’re going to gravitate to talk radio and O'Reilly-esque TV. The authoritarian imagination teems with monsters (in the form of illegal immigrants, shadowy terrorists, and treacherous ivory-tower liberals). As Joseph Addison said centuries ago, such an imagination isn’t going to be good at playing for laughs.