Comedy, humour, laughter

1. Comedy, humour, laughter

2. “Analyzing humor is like dissecting a frog. Few people are interested and the frog dies of it.” (E. B. White) • “Tragedy is when I cut my finger. Comedy is when you fall down an open sewer and die.” (Mel Brooks) • “All tragedies are finished by a death, All comedies are ended by a marriage” (Byron: Don Juan)

3. Kazuo Ishiguro: The Remains of the Day (1989) • Mr Stevens and bantering • “It is curious how people can build such warmth among themselves so swiftly. It is possible that these particular people are simply united by the anticipation of the evening ahead. But, then, I rather fancy it has more to do with this skill of bantering. Listening to them now, I can hear them exchanging one bantering remark after another. It is, I would suppose, the way many people like to proceed. ... Perhaps it is indeed time I began to look at this whole matter of bantering more enthusiastically. After all, when one thinks about it, it is not such a foolish thing to indulge in – particularly if it is the case that in bantering lies the key to human warmth” (245)

4. Humour: culturally embedded • L. Wittgenstein: “What is it like for people not to have the same sense of humour? They do not react properly to each other. It’s as if there were a custom among certain people for one person to throw another a ball which he is supposed to catch and throw back; but some people, instead of throwing it back, put it in their pocket”

5. Cultural embeddedness • (1) shared cultural codes • (2) situational context (pragmatics) e.g. protocols of joke telling aggressivity and humour Four Weddings and a Funeral (Mike Newell, 1994)

6. terms • Comedy • The comic • Humour • Laughter • Satire, farce, travesty, parody, irony,

7. Theories of humour • A. Looking at the object of humour • (1) defect theory • (2) contrast theory • B. Looking at the laughing subject • - relief/release theory C. The relationship between object and subject • - superiority theory • Defamiliarisation theory • +comprehensive theories: Bergson, Freud

8. Defect theory • Aristotle: the comic is “some defect or ugliness which is not painful or destructive”. • “The ridiculous may be defined as a mistake or deformity not productive of pain or harm to others; the mask, for instance, that excites laughter, is something ugly and distorted without causing pain.” (Aristotle) • Hobbes: there can be pain in comedy, but only if it does not affect us

9. Contrast theory • incongruity, contradiction, discrepancy, incompatibility • perception of sg incongruous • James Beattie, Kant, Schopenhauer, Kierkegaard • Plato: contrast between one’s self-evaluation and one’s real value (the miles gloriosus)

10. Contrast theory- levels of contrast • Vocal: portmanteau words (slithy) • Rhetorical: Zeugma: “breaking the Queen’s peace and a few heads” (Kipling) • Grammar vs rhetoric: Archie Bunker and his bowling shoes: „what is the difference”? • Subject and style (travesty, burlesque) • Anachronism Misrecognition (Gogol: The Inspector General)

11. Salvador Dalí: Lobster-phone (1938)

12. incongruity • Kant: “In everything that is to excite a lively convulsive laugh there must be something absurd (in which the understanding, therefore, can find no satisfaction). Laughter is an affection arising from the sudden transformation of a strained expectation into nothing. This transformation, which is certainly not enjoyable to the understanding, yet indirectly gives it very active enjoyment for a moment. Therefore its cause must consist in the influence of the representation upon the body, and the reflex effect of this upon the mind.”

13. incongruity • Schopenhauer: “The cause of laughter in every case is simply the sudden perception of the incongruity between a concept and the real objects which have been thought through it in some relation, and laughter itself is just the expression of this incongruity.”

14. Incongruity – frustration of expectations • Pleasure? • Cognitive dissonance is disturbing • Ambiguity tolerance

15. Cognitive dissonance

16. Relief/release theory • Lord Shaftesbury’s “The Freedom of Wit and Humour” (1711) • Kant: “Laughter is an emotion that is produced by the shattering of some intense expectation.” • Herbert Spencer: “On The Physiology of Laughter” (1860) • Anticlimax (bathos)(Alexander Pope)

17. Superiority theory “Sudden glory, is the passion which makes those grimaces called laughter; and is caused either by some sudden act of their own, that pleases 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 favor by observing the imperfections of other men. And therefore much laughter at the defects of others, is a sign of pusillanimity. For of great minds, one of the proper works is, to help and free others from scorn; and to compare themselves only with the most able” (Hobbes: Leviathan)

18. Superiority, irony, parody „’You read much, John? ’Read what? ’Fiction. ’Do you? ’Oh sure. It gives me all kinds of ideas. I like the sound and the fury,’ he added enigmatically. That’s what rerading does to you: you start saying things like that. (Martin Amis: Money)

19. Freud:Jokes and Their Relation to the Unconscious • Joking, the comic and humour; in each, laughter releases psychic energy which turns out to be superfluous • Comic: energy of thinking (clowns) • Humour: energy of emotions (sympathy, empathy which is, after all, not needed: the pity is not needed and we laugh it off) • Joking: repressed drives

20. Freud • Jokes: innocent (pleasure only) and tendentious (violence and sexuality) repressed desires getting around censorship Formal mechanisms + repressed drives Vorlust (fore-pleasure)

21. Henri Bergson: Laughter (1900) • Indifference: “a momentary numbness of the heart” • Sy falls flat in the street • “the momentary transformation of a man into a thing”: mechanical rigidity • Rigidity of body and mind • Thales the astronomer who fell into a well while watching the stars

22. “the behaviour of the body, its gestures and movements are comic inasmuch as the body resembles a simple machine” • „the mechanical encrusted on the living”

23. Rigidity of mind • “In the newspaper they always give the age of deceased persons but never the age of the newly born. That doesn’t make sense” (Ionesco: The Bald Soprano) • Géronte: The heart is on the left-hand side, the liver on the right-hand side. • Sganarelle: Yes, indeed, that’s how it used to be with doctors of old. We, the new ones, however, have arranged medicine according to a different system.” (Moliere Le médecin malgré lui)

24. Language: automatisms • Puns: the ‘body’ of language appearing • (joke is a secret language inside words – David Mitchell) • Eg typos: „Officer accepting bride”; “szovjet állat” • Mistranslations • spoonerism: „You have deliberately tasted two worms and you can leave Oxford by the town drain.”

25. Comic rhymes • Ogden Nash’s poem “Fleas”: Fleas Adam Had’em.

26. Jack aranylovon érkezett, Joe ezüstön, Charles bronzon. • Be alert! England needs lerts. • P. G. Wodehouse’s line, “If it’s feasible, let’s fease it” • According to Freud, what comes between fear and sex?

27. Marriage is not a word, but a sentence. • Harwich for the continent, Frinton for the incontinent. • Karl Marx’s grave  another Communist plot. • Education kills by degrees. • Tóth Gyula bádogos és vízvezetékszerelő. • What is a myth? A female moth