Laughter
Theories of Laughter
Affective response.
jokes are a species of defamiliarisation
jokes bring together things that do not normally go together (metaphor/juxtaposed)
“The most common kind of joke is that in which we expect one thing and another is said; here our own disappointed expectation makes us laugh.” - Cicero
“man is the only animal that laughs and weeps: for he is the only animal that is struck with the difference between what things are, and what they ought to be. We weep at what thwarts or exceeds our desires in serious matters; we laugh at what only disappoints our expectations in trifles… To explain the nature of laughter and tears, is to account for the condition of human life; for it is in a manner compounded of the two! It is a tragedy or a comedy - sad or merry, as it happens.” - Hazlitt
The human condition
lives as forms of narrative, with shape (comedies or tragedies) - affective response (laughing or weeping)
separates the human from non-human animal
ethical consideration - gap between the world as it as and as it should be (is and ought)
Power in a joke, laughing at absurdity of the world, banned in authoritarian areas. Humour can be dangerous, through targets or the relationship between the teller and the listener of the joke.
Shared knowledge must be had between the teller and the listener.
Incongruity Theory
What the teller brings to the joke as well as the joke itself. In both laughter and weeping there is a loss of control of the body, surprising ourselves through unconscious response. One doesn’t decide to laugh or cry.
Superiority Theory
“Sudden glory is the passion which maketh those grimaces called laughter, and is caused either by some sudden act of their own that pleaseth them, or by the apprehension of some deformed thing in another, by comparison whereof they suddenly applaud themselves. And it is incident most to them that are conscious of the fewest abilities in themselves, who are forced to keep themselves in their own favour by observing the imperfections of other men.” - Hobbes.
Judgement of others causes laughter as we feel above others, or their behaviour.
Element of hostility
Jokes of sexism, racism etc.
People mock others to feel better about themselves.
Teller of the joke comes out on top
Our perception of what we are laughing at, not specifically aimed at what is being laughed at.
Maintaining the current values of a group
Relief Theory
Release of tension.
Attention that cant be expressed (Freud).
Majority of jokes are about sex or hostility towards others. Expressing a positive or negative tendency towards others (or both).
Expresses what people spend their lives not expressing. Tests social taboos, discussing items too serious to discuss seriously.
Helene Cixous
Many possible routes for readers in her work.
Medusa: daughter of seagods, mortal, lived in the far west near kingdom of the dead. Medusa became monstrous for sexual relations which was not consensual. Snakes as punishment, turning others to stone.
“I shall speak about women’s writing: about what it will do. The future must no longer be determined by the past. I do not deny that the effects of the past are still with us. But I refuse to strengthen them by repeating them, to confer upon them an irremovability the equivalent of destiny, to confuse the biological and the cultural. Anticipation is imperative.” - Cixous.
Ecriture Feminine:
Our glances, our smiles, are spent; laughs exude from all our mouths; our blood flows and we extend ourselves without ever reaching an end; we never hold back our thoughts, our signs, our writing; and we’re not afraid of lacking.
How women write and what they express
whether there is something within the writing which connects to a female perspective that is not the norm, as this deviates from the male pattern
no such thing as a singular notion of writing (not all women write the same)
very open, but counter intuitive - women have been encouraged to repeat dominating structures
“wouldn’t the worst be, isn’t the worst, in truth, that women aren’t castrated, that they have only to stop listening to the Sirens (for the Sirens were men) for history to change its meaning? You only have to look at Medusa straight on to see her. And she’s not deadly. She’s beautiful and she’s laughing.”
“when I write, it’s everything that we don’t know we can be that is written out of me, without exclusions, without stipulation, and everything we will be calls us to the unflagging, intoxicating, unappeasable search for love.”
refuses to take Freud seriously
Samuel Beckett
Theatre of the Absurd - enigmatic
“Beckett… was the first dramatist to use boredom to create dramatic tension and to show time as an endless vacuum somehow to be filled.” - Michael Billington
Waiting For Godot systematically breaks the expectations of a well made play (well-observed, convincingly motivated, witty and logistically built-up dialogue, structure)
long incongruous joke, failing to live up to expectations
notion of boredom is displaced, difference in what happens on stage and the audience’s reaction
tension due to audience building expectation which fails to be fulfilled, twice.
rejection to the forms of plays that make pain meaningful, its just suffering.
“I resume, so long as, so long as, let me see, so long as one, so long as he, ah fuck all that, so long as this, then that, agreed, that’s good enough, I nearly got stuck.” - Beckett
rejects structure
caused a shift in attitude for generation of philosophers, find doubt in their training and the dominant modes of thinking in French universities of the time.
in its refusal of expectations, Waiting For Godot shows laughter when used positively can become inclusion, invitation to laugh with the characters due to identification with the experiences had by characters
find value in the lives of those who would not normally be deemed valuable enough to have a play focus on, inconsequential actions of these characters.
broader but less well defined version of the human condition.