The Irreducible Complexity of Humour

[Steve3007]

Many people have attempted to analyze humour and to come up with a set of categories into which all jokes can be placed. (20 seems to be a popular number. But, of course, 7 is also often deemed to be a good number when categorizing things). But it is also commonly understood that attempting to analyze the reasons why a joke is funny has a tendency to destroy that very funniness. So is it impossible to deconstruct humour? Does the joke's waveform collapse as soon as you try to observe it? Does this mean that jokes must be made of a fundamentally different substance from everything else and that, following Descartes, we can establish a kind of Jokian Dualism?

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Let's take an example:

Question: How does Bob Marley like his donuts?

Answer: Wi' Jam in.

On the face of it, this is a simple pun which works well if you are familiar with the works of the late great reggae artiste from Jamaica, with the fact that "Jam" is the British-English word for the fruit conserve known in some other English speaking countries as "Jelly" and that a donut (or doughnut) is a popular dessert food into which this conserve is often injected. (See? I'm already starting to destroy it. Let's see if I can finish the job.)

But it's perhaps surprising how many jokes, even the simplest ones, require a lot of specific background cultural knowledge and experience in order to be fully appreciated. For example, the joke I have just mentioned was one that I first heard from the working-class northern English comedian called Peter Kay. In that context, the utterance "wi' jam in" takes on cultural overtones.

Many, perhaps most, jokes rely on the unexpected breaking of rules and norms. One way to do this is to juxtapose concepts, sayings, ideas or worldviews from radically different cultural backgrounds. We can add to this the observation that people often fear the unfamiliar, the unkown or the foreign, and another common comic device seems to consist of inducing slight fear and then relieving it.

A part of the stereotypical character of the Northern English working-class (as with similar groups elsewhere) is a slight fear of, and feeling of inferiority to, unfamiliar exotic lifestyles or cultures. This is illustrated very graphically and humourously by the works of writers like Alan Bennett who were the first generation of their background to go to University, become successful in the London based media world and thereby be able to examine this phenomenon from both sides with exquisite accuracy and insight. (And, inevitably, the stereotype was turned upside-down by the Monty Python "Northern Playwrite" sketch: http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=YPSzPGrazPo)

Somebody like Bob Marley, and reggae culture, would certainly, in the past, have fallen into the category of unfamiliar and exotic. The phrase "wi' jam in", spoken in a northern English accent, is reassuringly familiar sounding while the phrase "We're jammin'" spoken in a Jamaican accent is exotic. Bringing these two together via the device of a pun achieves both the juxtaposition of alien worlds and the relief of fear and the sense of inferiority. There's the slight suggestion, as there is with a lot of Peter Kay''s humour, that an arty/intellectual/exotic culture has been brought down to size and made less daunting and full-of-itself by no-nonsense honest working class common sense. (The question of whether Reggae really is arty or intellectual is irrelevant. This is about perception, not reality.)

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This, it seems to me, is the main reason why humour appears to be irreducibly complex. It has the unique ability to encapsulate huge swathes of the entire history of whole cultures in deceptively simple-seeming sentences like "wi' jam in".


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Discuss.

[Belinda]

and another common comic device seems to consist of inducing slight fear and then relieving it.

Like Steptoe and Son in which sitcom are the competing moral claims of aged, dependent and annoying parent, and son's predicament who confronts his own desires and aged parent alternately. Real life situation well portrayed and treated lightly with empathy.

[Steve3007]

Yes! Brilliant. And a classic example of that theme which seems to be very common in British sitcoms: thwarted ambition; people trying and failing to break out of their social class. As you say, I guess the humour there comes from the empathy and recognition.

[Belinda]

Yes, the theme of social class too. Social class is quite frequently a topic that is unmentionable in polite circles.

[Steve3007]

It's also interesting that the actors who played Steptoe and Son found themselves in essentially the same predicament in real life. At least Harry H. Corbett did. He saw himself as a serious classical actor tyecast and chained for his entire career to a shallow sitcom character. Same kind of thing with the likes of Tony Hancock and Kenneth Williams. Almost all comic actors of that era seemed to be tragic in real life, often due the constraints that the social norms of society placed on them.

You don't get that so much in these modern uninhibited times. There's less and less to rebel against. I wonder if that will ultimately kill comedy. Or if we'll revert back to a new age of repression against which we can start to rage again.

[HANDSON]

As a simplifying factor I would offer the observation that in almost all cases humor, at least the kind that initiates an audible laugh is demeaning to someone or thing. Poking fun at someone or at oneself is the basis for most humor: point of fact, the multiplicity of ethnic, gender-related, age and social class-related jokes.

Simple puns may be the exception but they usually will not elicit a belly laugh.

[Steve3007]

That certainly seems to be the basis of a large class of jokes, and I don't think it's necessarily negative. It's often empathetic. We often laugh the most at failings, portrayed in others, that we recognise in ourselves. It's a laugh of relief that we're not alone. A lot of stand-up observational comedy is of this type.

But I wouldn't say it covers almost all types of humour. Another major category could perhaps be the "rule breaking" type that I mentioned in the OP. Challenging our conception of normality by showing us something bizzare or unusual. This can be something that breaks the established rules of anything from physics to the norms of human interaction.

[Simply Wee]

"You can pretend to be serious; you can't pretend to be witty". Sacha Guitry (1885-1957) I would think that a well mapped life can see others lost for the fog in their own, and that such truth when recognised allows one to retrace what they didn't account for, and that it comes back at us as though we too should have known it...and this we put our hands up to as humour...best reflected through comedy. I guess.