Introduction
Though there is a diversity in the theories of humor which have been offered by past thinkers, it is not a grand diversity. As John Morreall has pointed out, theories of laughter and humor can be roughly categorized into just three groups: superiority theories, incongruity theories and relief theories. Superiority theories of laughter and humor hold that when we are amused at something, it is because we find it contemptible, small and unthreatening. We laugh, according to this view, because we feel superior to the object of laughter. Incongruity theories, on the other hand, find the source of laughter in pleasant, incongruous shifts of one sort or another. In this case, we laugh out of surprise at the novel and amusing juxtaposition of sensations, perceptions or concepts. Finally, according to relief theories, laughter is the result of energy discharge. On this account, when we laugh, we do so because a quantum of otherwise unneeded nervous energy has gained release.
Each of these approaches has something to recommend as well as discommend it. While superiority and relief theories nicely characterize some of the feelings that we experience in many laughing situations, they are generally too narrow to capture all, or even most, of the conditions which are associated with amusement. On the other hand, incongruity theories, though they take note of an important structural feature of amusement, are generally too broad to show how this particular feature is uniquely important to amusement.
Laughter and humor do not necessarily, nor do they usually, occur together. There are times when we laugh for reasons other than humorous ones, just as there are times when we adopt a humorous attitude without laughing. This simple observation, if kept in mind, should allow us to avoid a common red-herring that is often involved in our present area of investigation. The philosophy of laughter and humor should not necessarily be concerned with trying to explain all forms of laughter, but only that phenomenon which we might call "humorous laughter." Humorous laughter is the kind of laughter which sometimes, but not always, accompanies amusement. When the focus of investigation is narrowed down in this manner we find that an approach combining aspects of incongruity and superiority theories is helpful in explaining instances of humorous amusement without laughter, while the further insights of relief theories prove useful in explaining full-blown humorous laughter.
In what follows, I shall examine the account given by John Morreall in his book Taking Laughter Seriously. In the course of this examination I will show the problems with his theory, as well as taking issue with his detailed criticisms of Freud's theory of laughter and humor. As Freud and Morreall, in my view, offer two of the most important philosophic treatments of humorous laughter, a battle between these two "wise guys" should prove quite interesting. May the best man win.
Morreall's Mistakes
In Taking Laughter Seriously, John Morreall sets out to offer a comprehensive theory of laughter. He rejects previous theories as incomplete since they are unable to "account for all cases of laughter."(1) Although his stated purpose is to offer a modified version of the incongruity theory which will successfully account for all laughter, Morreall is ultimately unable to do so, and he must consequently narrow his discussion to focus on the more restricted question of "laughter as a psychological response"(2) while leaving the question of laughter as an "interesting physiological phenomenon"(3) open and not fully accounted for. Morreall's mistake lies in his original assumption that it is possible to explain all laughter as stemming from a single, root cause. In fact, laughter is the physiological consequence of a variety of different mechanisms that no single explanation can account for, and so Morreall's own theory must fail at comprehensiveness no less than any of the others which he criticizes.
Morreall sums up his theory of laughter in one general formula: "Laughter results from a pleasant psychological shift."(4) When we laugh, he claims, we undergo a change from one psychological state to another. This change must be sudden and pleasant, and the feeling that accompanies it he calls "amusement." We can be amused by two major types of sudden, pleasant psychological shifts, according to Morreall. The first type includes those cases which result in non-humorous laughter. A pleasant shift in sensory input, as occurs in an infant when tickled, is the simplest instance of this category. With tickling, the intermittent stimulation of fingers on skin results in sensations which transport one from a state of psychological rest to a state of pleasant psychological agitation. In infants, Morreall claims, this shift is purely sensational, but in older children and adults the pleasure involved is complicated by non-sensational, conceptual factors. Another instance of non-humorous laughter results from pleasant shifts in perceptual input. Again, the simplest example of this sort of amusement occurs in infants before they have experienced conceptual development. The game of peek-a-boo results in laughter for an infant because the alternate appearance and disappearance of a face behind a pair of hands produces a pleasant psychological vacillation between absence and recognition. The infant has yet to develop an understanding that the face never really goes anywhere, but is simply hidden momentarily before being revealed in the next round of play.
The second major type of pleasant, psychological shift includes those cases which result in humorous laughter. Unlike purely sensational or perceptual changes, these shifts involve concepts and violations of their relationships to one another. As infants grow into adults, Morreall tells us, they develop increasingly complicated conceptual systems by which they see patterns in the world, and the violation of these patterns sometimes results in humorous laughter. In its simplest form, humorous laughter occurs when novelty is encountered. With the relatively simple conceptual system of a child there is ample opportunity to run into things which can't be assimilated by the concepts developed in the course of past experiences. Unthreatening novelty of this sort is pleasant, and so produces laughter. Morreall describes much of children's laughter as well as the laughter of "primitive" people upon exposure to Western technology as a reaction of this sort.
The more sophisticated a conceptual system becomes, the more opportunity there is for incongruity to develop between its components, and truly adult humor, according to Morreall, develops out of the juxtaposition of incongruous concepts. At first a child simply finds it funny to contrast words like "daddy" and "baby," but as it grows it learns to appreciate as amusing other kinds of violations, like inappropriate dress or behavior. In the process of further developing its logical capabilities, the child comes to laugh at the incongruities in jokes and riddles, comedic portrayals, etc. Ultimately, the development of a refined sense of humor involves the capacity to detect very subtle conceptual incongruities and to experience the accompanying psychological shift as pleasant.
Though Morreall does not consider amusement an emotion, he does give some attention to laughter which results from emotional shifts. In fact, this seems to comprise a third major category of laughing situations. When we experience a change from a negative or non-emotional state to a positive emotional state, Morreall claims that laughter results. For instance, upon unexpectedly running into a friend on the street, we may laugh as a result of our sudden feeling of happiness which contrasts with our previously neutral emotional state. Or, we may laugh upon realizing that our sadness over a friend's supposed death is unwarranted since the friend is actually still alive. In the latter case, the psychological shift from a negative to a positive emotion causes amusement, while in the former the same outcome results from the quick transition from a neutral to a positive emotional state. These emotional shifts, furthermore, may boost the enjoyment of conceptual shifts. So, while laughter at a man getting a pie in his face may be funny conceptually, it is even funnier if the man is a hated politician.
Morreall warns us not to put too much emphasis on emotional shifts because "an emotional shift is neither necessary nor sufficient for humor."(5) Instead, he insists that the real "essence of humor lies in the enjoyment of incongruity,"(6) and in fact that "a conceptual shift is both necessary and sufficient for humor."(7) More generally, all laughter can be explained in terms of pleasant psychological shifts, even the seemingly problematic cases of embarrassed and hysterical laughter. But these last cases, as well as Morreall's own admission that there are instances where laughter is induced by purely physiological means, in fact dooms his hope for a comprehensive theory of laughter.
Morreall himself points out that there are a number of kinds of laughter which his theory cannot account for. With multiple sclerosis, epilepsy, and the use of certain drugs, laughter is sometimes a symptom. Also, the deadly disease called Kuru results in uncontrollable laughter. Morreall doesn't see this as a problem, strangely enough, because as he says, "we do not have to account for these cases of physiologically induced laughter, any more than an account of crying would have to explain crying while peeling onions."(8) But a truly comprehensive theory of crying certainly should account for the physiological mechanisms involved in the behavior. It is not truly comprehensive otherwise. For Morreall to claim that his theory "provides the key to understanding all cases of laughter,"(9) and then to exempt a whole category of laughter from explanation is a not so subtle evasion.
Perhaps Morreall's theory, even if it is unable to deal with cases of physiologically induced laughter, can adequately deal with all other cases of laughter. But his method of accounting for what he sees as two problematic cases -- embarrassed and hysterical laughter -- raises doubts about this. Let's look at his treatments of these cases.
Remember that for Morreall, laughter is supposed to be the result of a pleasant, psychological shift. Laughter is distinct and separate from both the shift itself and from the feeling of amusement by which it is accompanied. When we laugh, it is because our minds have suddenly moved from one state to another, and we enjoy this movement. Laughter follows from these occurrences. With embarrassed laughter, however, Morreall tells us that it is the laughter itself that brings about a pleasant psychological shift. Because (a la James) the physical act of laughter is able to promote pleasant feelings, when in an embarrassing situation we may laugh to make ourselves feel better. Furthermore, since laughter is a natural sign of pleasure, it may act to disguise our discomfort from others. This is all very plausible, however it hardly fits with Morreall's theory as already elaborated. In this example, laughter is no longer the result of a pleasant psychological shift. It has become a reaction to an unpleasant psychological shift.
Likewise with hysterical laughter. Morreall tells us that in this case, the laughter is motivated by some trauma which overcomes its victim. The hysterical person's nervous system reacts by resisting the awful character of the traumatic event. As a defense mechanism against an impending mental breakdown, the nervous system naturally reverts to a type of behavior which normally accompanies amusement, and so the hysteric laughs. But if all laughter is supposed to be the result of a pleasant psychological shift, then hysterical laughter can't rightly be called laughter. First of all, the shift which triggers the laughter is supremely unpleasant. Second of all, the hysteric can hardly be said to be in a state of amusement. But amusement is just the feeling that Morreall claims that laughter is accompanied by.
We could continue finding counterexamples to Morreall's theory simply by enumerating all of those kinds of laughter which are associated with unpleasant situations: nervous laughter, insane laughter, angry laughter, disgusted laughter, horrified laughter etc. What we must conclude with even a single counterexample remains the same however. Morreall's theory is not adequate to explain all laughter. In this he fails. But the lesson that should be learned here is not that Morreall's theory is useless. It is, rather, that his own standards for a useful theory of laughter and humor are too high. Because of his unreasonably high standards, Morreall not only undercuts his own account, but he throws out every other treatment as inadequate, including one of the most sophisticated and impressive theories yet to be formulated on the subject. Let's take a quick look at Morreall's criticisms of the various traditional philosophical theories of laughter and humor, ending with an analysis of his criticisms of Freud.
The Traditional Theories and Morreall's Misrepresentation of Freud
The history of the philosophical investigation into the nature of laughter and humor can, according to Morreall, be divided into three distinct focuses: superiority theories, incongruity theories, and relief theories. None of these traditional approaches to the subject are satisfactory, he claims, because none of them are able to plausibly explain all forms of laughter. As we have already seen, however, this criterion for theory building may be too strong. Perhaps what we should be looking for is that theory which explains the most about laughter and humor. In fact, out of all the traditional theories, it is Freud's which offers the most sophisticated and comprehensive treatment of the subject without pretending to account for all laughter. He does this by combining elements from each of the three types of theories identified by Morreall. In the final assessment, Freud's theory beats out Morreall's.
Superiority theories of laughter date all the way back to ancient Greece, being found in the accounts of Plato and Aristotle, and they continue in the philosophies of Hobbes, Ludovici, and Rapp. According to this view, when we laugh, we do so because we understand ourselves to be superior to the object of our laughter. Laughter, in this way, is a demonstration of domination and triumph. We laugh at what is small and unthreatening to us, not at what is large and dangerous. As Aristotle puts it in Poetics, we laugh at what we take to be ridiculous either in ourselves or in others.
Superiority theories of laughter rely too much on observations derived from cases of derisive laughter, according to Morreall, and in this he may be correct. Not all, nor even most, laughter seems to hinge on this characteristic. Some laughter, for instance in cases of nonsense or purely verbal humor, or laughter at absurd situations, seems completely empty of the element of dominance and submission. Likewise, the laughter of a child at "peek-a-boo" seems difficult to resolve with this perspective. Furthermore, while it may be true that we sometimes laugh at portrayals of stupidity, ineptitude, or ignorance, it is also the case that these same characteristics can motivate us towards less than amused feelings. We may also react with anger, pity, upset, or any other number of negative emotions. The superiority theory, then, identifies neither a necessary nor a sufficient condition for laughter, though it does put its finger on an element found in some laughing situations.
Incongruity theories turn on the speculation that our laughter is motivated by the experience of some sort of unexpected disruption in our patterns of expectation. Both Kant and Schopenhauer are examples of philosophers who have held somewhat different incongruity theories of laughter. For Kant, when we laugh, we do so because "a tense expectation is transformed into nothing."(10) The example of a joke illustrates his point. In a joke, a joke teller constructs a story which culminates in a punch-line. The punch-line is a conclusion to the joking story which, though it fits in with what has preceded it, does so in an unexpected way. As the listener follows the tale, he forms expectations about where the narrative is headed. The joke teller knows this and purposefully subverts those expectations. The end of the joke transforms the listener's expectations into nothing, and as his mind vacillates back and forth between the lost expectation and the actual punch-line to the story, this movement is somehow communicated to the body and issues forth as laughter. With Schopenhauer, on the other hand, laughter results not because our expectations are transformed into nothing, but because we "get something that we are not expecting."(11) We laugh when there is an incongruity between a concept and the specific instance that concept applies to. For instance, in the case of irony we laugh because there is a total incongruity between "what is thought and what is perceived."(12) To say of a rude person that he has a lovely disposition may cause laughter for this very reason.
Despite the minor differences in their theories, both Kant and Schopenhauer identify the root of all laughter as incongruity, and in this Morreall finds a problem. Again he points out that there are instances where laughter occurs in the absence of any apparent incongruities, notably in the case of non-humorous, or non-intellectual laughter (solving a puzzle, enjoying a stunt). Furthermore, incongruity often provokes reactions other than laughter. It may provoke puzzlement or negative emotional reactions as well. A masked gunman shooting people in an office building is incongruous but does not make us laugh. So, as with the superiority theory, the incongruity theory cannot supply us with either a necessary or sufficient condition for laughter according to Morreall. We should note, however, that as with superiority theories, incongruity theories do point out a feature of some laughing situations.
The relief theory, as represented by Shaftsbury, Freud and Spencer, sees laughter as the result of the release of unneeded nervous energy. The repression of, or prohibition against, certain forms of behavior or modes of thought leads to a bottling up of vital energies which, when those repressions or prohibitions are circumvented, is expressed in laughter. Laughter here acts like a release valve which allows for the expression of otherwise forbidden impulses. Although Freud's theory combines features of all three approaches to humor and laughter, Morreall sees it as primarily a relief theory, and he has a number of objections to it. I hope to show that many of these objections are unfair and that Freud's theory is in fact one of the most systematic and successful accounts of laughter and humor that has yet been offered.
Freud's theory is considered by Morreall as a relief theory because it accounts for the pleasurable feelings involved in joking, comic and humorous situations by tracing them back to an economy in the amount of psychic energy summoned and used for a particular purpose. "The pleasure in jokes has seemed to arise from an economy in expenditure on inhibition, the pleasure in the comic from an economy in expenditure upon ideation (upon cathexis) and the pleasure in humor from an economy in expenditure on feeling."(13) Freud's theory is intended to explain only the laughter that occurs in these three "laughing situations," and so Morreall's catch-all criticism -- that this theory does not explain all varieties of laughter -- is misdirected. Freud never intended his theory to account for all laughter. It was only intended to explain joking, comic and humorous laughter.(14)
According to Freud, the development of jokes starts in play. With the playful juxtaposition of words and thoughts, children gain pleasure in exercising their own powers of manipulation by which they discover comfortable repetitions and amusing similarities in sound. The pleasure derived from this free play encourages the continued tinkering with words and thoughts as if they were things devoid of meaning. Their significance for the child lies solely in the control he exerts over them and the amusement which is thus derived. At the next stage of development, when meaning becomes attached to words, free play becomes jesting. In a jest, the logical nonsense of word play is recognized, yet the pleasure of such play still remains. The jest is a kind of "innocent joke" in that it has all the surface appearance of joking with none of its deeper purposes. All real jokes, on the other hand, are what Freud calls "tendentious."(15) Part of the pleasure we derive from them stems from the tapping of deep, repressed forces which can ultimately be traced back to the id instincts of life and death. A joke circumvents the psychological inhibitions which have been erected in us, and in so doing brings us pleasure, which Freud seems to equate with the liberation of psychic energy.
The manner in which jokes accomplish this task is through techniques which involve condensation and displacement. Condensation is the process by which a number of meaningful associations are attached to a single word, in jokes, or to an image, in dreams. For instance the word "bank" has condensed into it a number of meanings ranging from "financial institution" to "edge of a river" which may be drawn upon in the context of a joke in order to lead the mind in a variety of directions at once. This leading of the mind in various directions allows the second process, displacement, to occur. In the construction of a joke, the humorist intentionally manufactures a story in which the listener's attention is displaced onto a point of focus, only to be brought to another point of focus in the punch-line. The humorist tricks his listener into thinking the story is going in one direction, only to reveal an unexpected, but fitting, turn of events. This trickery allows the listener to think certain thoughts which would otherwise be prohibited, and it is the temporary lifting of the energy expended upon inhibition that issues forth in laughter at the joke.
For instance, consider the following joke: A Jewish man and a Chinese man are sitting in a bar when the Jewish man leans over and says to the Chinese man, "By the way, thanks for bombing Pearl Harbor. My brother died in that attack." The Chinese man looks puzzled and responds, "It was the Japanese who bombed Pearl Harbor. I'm Chinese." The Jewish man snorts, "Chinese, Japanese. It's all the same." At this the Chinese man leans over and says, "By the way, thanks for sinking the Titanic. My brother died on that ship." Now the Jewish man looks puzzled. "It was an iceberg that sunk the Titanic." The Chinese man snorts, "Iceberg, Goldberg. It's all the same."
The laughter upon hearing this joke is a result of the fact that at the beginning, our minds are directed towards a confusion between Chinese and Japanese that is not at all uncommon among ignorant people. As listeners, our distaste is aroused, yet there is a strong inhibition against expressing this hostility towards someone who has suffered during World War II, and especially a Jewish man who has so suffered. The response of the Chinese man liberates our quite justified hostility by displacing our attention onto the form of the faulty reasoning of the Jewish man. The Chinese man's assertion condenses the whole absurd process of faulty reasoning into just six words. The full "reduction"16 of this joke might be something like this: The Jewish man is emotionally upset about his brother's death in the war at the hands of the Japanese, and in his upset he can't tell the difference between a Chinese man and a Japanese man. But the Chinese and the Japanese are not the same people. Equating the two is ridiculous and ignorant. About the only similarities between the two are the facts that both are Asiatic peoples and that both the words "Chinese" and "Japanese" end in the letters "-nese." But these similarities cover over a whole range of differences. You might just as well ignore the differences between Jewish people and icebergs on the basis of the fact that many Jewish people have names that end in "-berg."(17)
Our laughter at this joke is the result of a savings in the energy used in inhibiting our hostile thoughts. Like a grounding wire, the joke carries away the energy invested in our inhibited thought and channels it into laughter. There is a savings insofar as the normally energized pathway which represents the inhibition loses its charge, and so the work of repression may cease at least momentarily.
Morreall objects to Freud's treatment of jokes for a number of reasons. First of all, he points out that the whole concept of "psychic energy" is vague. We have some feeling for the concept, he admits, in that the experience of laughter just feels like a release of energy. However, Freud introduces a number of distinctions into the idea which further muddy the waters. The pleasure in hearing a joke is supposed to come from an economy in the energy used for inhibition, and it is this "inhibitory energy" which Morreall finds problematic. On Morreall's interpretation of Freud, we must summon up a quantum of psychic energy for the suppression of forbidden feelings every time that we laugh at a joke, since it is just this energy which is "laughed off." "To accept Freud's account here we would have to say that when we express a hostile feeling instead of suppressing it, we 'summon' the energy to suppress it anyway."(18) The savings is not really a savings, then, says Morreall, since normally we think of saved energy as "energy that was never generated."(19)
But these criticisms misunderstand Freud's theories regarding repression. In the human mind, according to Freud, the normal state is one in which certain inhibitions are maintained on an ongoing basis. The process of maturation and acculturation consists in the development of an ego which is torn between the demands of the id and the superego. The ego, ruled by the reality principle, tries to mediate between the libidinous desires of the id, governed by the pleasure principle, and the moral demands of the superego. When this becomes problematic, censorship occurs, and the threatening thoughts are pushed down into the unconscious where they remain efficacious but consciously unrecognized. Though the tension of these thoughts is somewhat relieved in sublimated activities which siphon their energy off to do other forms of work, the continued repression of the thoughts themselves requires constant expenditures of psychic energy. What jokes (as well as dreams and slips of the tongue) do is to tap the power of repressed thoughts and so offer a temporary relief from the energy invested in the mechanisms of repression. Morreall's picture of Freud is thus somewhat distorted. There is no need to "summon up" a quantum of energy every time that we laugh at a joke. According to Freud, the genius of jokes is their ability to release repressed thoughts and thereby save us the trouble and energy it takes to repress them in the first place. The laugh at a joke is analogous to the fall one takes when preparing to sit down on a chair that is pulled away at the last minute. The exertion we brace ourselves for is all of a sudden unnecessary and our effort is discharged as clumsiness rather than useful work. In effect, a joke pulls the chair out from under our inhibitions.
A final criticism against Freud's theory of jokes which is offered by Morreall appeals to empirical evidence. Apparently an experiment by Eysenck has shown that "those who generally express their sexual and aggressive feelings tend to enjoy sexual and hostile jokes more than those who generally suppress their feelings."(20) This might be seen as a problem for a theory like Freud's which traces the power of jokes back to the strength of repression. If Freud's account is correct, we would expect to find just the opposite of what this experiment shows, says Morreall. The chronic venting of aggressive and sexual feelings should reduce the repressed energy that is available for a joke to draw on.
To be fair, we would really have to know much more about the experiment in order to make a decision on this point. For instance, it would be important to determine what kinds of other creative outlets the experimental subjects engaged in on a regular basis. Remember that in Freud's theory of mind all of our cultural, literary and artistic achievements -- and not just jokes -- gain their strength from the force of repression. Someone who gives vent to his aggressive and sexual feelings, even on a frequent basis, may very well be expected to laugh vigorously at aggressive and sexual jokes if his forms of expression are limited overall. A highly creative person has more frequent and intense opportunities to sublimate forbidden feelings, while less creative individuals find expression only through direct (and perhaps crass) avenues. To put it simply, in order for this experiment to give us useful information, we would need to know not only how repressed the subjects were, but how many opportunities they had in their life to sublimate their repressed thoughts and how sophisticated these sublimations were.
Besides jokes, Freud also addresses a category of laughter called "the comic." Whereas jokes are constructed, the comic is found in the environment. For instance, a child learning to dress himself may be comic in a naive sense. The child does not intend to do anything funny as it struggles with its clothing, trying to pull a shirt over its head, or tripping and falling as it tries to slip into a pair of pants. However, as we watch this struggle, we might be inclined to laugh because of the clumsiness and awkwardness of the ordeal. For most of us, putting on our clothes is no struggle whatsoever. We have learned to do so with ease, and the time when we had to expend vast amounts of energy on dressing ourselves is long gone. As we watch this struggle, we compare the effort that it would take for us to perform this same task and compare it to that of the child. When we recognize the inequality between the two expenditures, we laugh with the force of the excess energy left over from the comparison. There is an economy on ideation, or in other words on the amount of psychic energy utilized to understand the observed activity.
Morreall objects to Freud's account of the comic for at least three reasons. First, Freud suggests that when we think about the comic actions of a person, we actually imitate those actions in our minds and compare them to the way we would carry out those same actions ourselves. In doing so, we utilize more energy in order to understand big things than we do to understand small things, and we laugh when there is a discrepancy between the comparative efforts of these representations. This formula is, Morreall thinks, absurd. "Using it we would predict that astronomers, for example, must expend huge amounts of psychic energy, whereas watchmakers must expend almost none at all."(21) But here Morreall seems to confuse thinking about big things with carrying out in one's mind the operations involved in doing complicated things. According to Freud's formula, thinking about the precise, detailed and complicated work of the watchmaker may involve just as much energy expenditure as thinking about the astronomer's calculations. It makes no difference that one is concerned with the orbits of heavenly bodies while the other is concerned with the movements of a tiny timepiece. When Freud writes, "this innervatory energy that accompanies the process of ideation is used to represent the quantitative factor of the idea: that it is larger when there is an idea of a large movement than when it is a question of a small one,"(22) he does not mean, as Morreall apparently takes it, that thinking about physically big things takes more effort than thinking about physically small things. He means, rather, that thinking through the movements of complicated or exaggerated motions takes more energy than thinking through the movements of simple or minor actions. Compare for yourself the effort involved in thinking about drinking a glass of milk with the effort involved in thinking about flying an airplane. The latter takes much more energy expenditure on concentration, memory, and mental coordination than the former. If you were to observe someone utilizing as much effort in order to drink a glass of milk as a pilot would in flying an airplane, you would undoubtedly laugh. Some of the sight gags utilized in comedy shows like the Three Stooges rely on just this technique.(23) Conversely, someone who uses the amount of energy appropriate for drinking a glass of milk when he is, in fact, flying an airplane might also make us laugh at the ease or, perhaps, the ineptitude with which he carries out the task. Without a safe, aesthetic distance we might even experience negative emotions like fear because of what we take to be the pilot's incompetence. This observation, that the comparison between the expenditures of energy upon ideation need not simply be between our own lesser expenditure and another person's greater expenditure, undermines another of Morreall's criticism's of Freud. If we do sometimes laugh in the presence of those who expend less energy than we, we are, according to Freud, actually laughing at ourselves and our own inexpertise.
Morreall's second criticism of Freud's treatment of the comic is that Freud does not explain how the supposed comparison that occurs in comedy actually liberates any superfluous energy at all. When we try to understand the movements of another as compared with the way we ourselves would carry out those same movements, the energy summoned for those purposes is all used up in the work that is done to understand each representation. Nothing is left over, according to Morreall, because "nothing is superfluous -- the small packet is used in mentally representing the small movements we would make, and the large packet is used in mentally representing the large movements."(24) But again, this oversimplifies Freud's discussion on the topic. When we observe a comic action, it is more than simply the incongruity between the mental representations of our own and another's actions which liberates a quantum of energy for laughter. Part of the procedure involves a comparison between what we take to be the mental expenditure of the comic individual in relation to his own physical expenditure. This comparison is then further contrasted with our own imagined expenditures under the same circumstances. "Thus a uniform explanation is provided of the fact that a person appears comic to us if, in comparison with ourselves, he makes too great an expenditure on his bodily functions and too little on his mental ones; and it cannot be denied that in both these cases our laughter expresses a pleasurable sense of superiority which we feel in relation to him."(25) In other words, we laugh in triumph when we imagine that we could do something more efficiently than someone else. The energy liberated is that which is attached to the plan of action which is imagined and then abandoned as inexpedient.
Freud's discussion of these issues presupposes a mind/body connection which involves actual physical processes running in union with the mental functions. He seems to imagine the nerves in the body as playing an important part in a cathexis. A cathexis actually energizes a neurological pathway, and it is this activation which requires continued work and force. To imagine the movements and mental processes of another person is to energize an actual physical nerve path, and it is just this effort which provides the energy which is liberated in laughter. For instance, suppose I find the actions of a mime comic. The first thing that I notice is that the muscular movements of the mime are overly constrained given his natural circumstances. If I was in the same circumstances, I would be moving freely. What is this guy doing? Two energized neural pathways open up at this point. With the one, I represent what I take to be the vast amount of mental work that the mime must be engaged in order to produce his restricted movements. With the other, I represent my own imagined expenditures in a situation in which there is no apparent need for such restriction. Both pathways require work to keep them open. When I realize that one of the representations is useless to me, it gets shut down, and the residual energy is discharged in laughter.(26)
Morreall's third and final criticism of Freud's theory of the comic consists of a flat out rejection of the assertion that all comic situations involve a comparison between the effort we ourselves and another would expend in a certain circumstance. "Many comic situations involve a person trying to extricate himself from some predicament in just the ways any of us might, should we find ourselves in his shoes."(27) But Freud himself writes, in discussing what he calls "the comic of situation", "The characteristics of the person who provides the comic effect do not in this case play an essential part: we laugh even if we have to confess that we should have had to do the same in that situation."(28) The comparison that yields laughter in this case is not between ourselves and others, but between the capabilities of human beings in general and the might of the world. Social conventions, bodily needs, and other necessities are cited by Freud as interfering with our activities at times, and in this we sometimes find comedy. He gives the example of a person whose serious undertaking is interrupted by the need to go to the bathroom. We find this funny not because we would do differently, but because in comparison to his earlier activities, the comic person appears ridiculous. We open up one energized pathway to represent the serious, active person. Another represents the passive person overcome by nature. We laugh off the former, not with derisive feelings, but with feelings of human community. What Freud has in mind here might be similar to the familiar distinction between laughing at someone and laughing with them. In comedy of the situation, we laugh with others.
The last category of laughter that Freud addresses is "humor." He gives scant attention to this in Jokes and Their Relation to the Unconscious, and Morreall for this reason seems to find Freud's exposition on the topic mysterious. I myself find Morreall's puzzlement over Freud's treatment strange, since Morreall includes in his book The Philosophy of Laughter and Humor a later essay by Freud which specifically deals with humor.(29) For Freud, whereas the laughter in jokes results from an economy in inhibition and the laughter in comedy results from an economy in ideation, the laughter in humor results from an economy in feeling. The case of humor involves the summoning of energy for an emotional purpose which becomes superfluous. "There is no doubt that the essence of humor is that one spares one's self the affects to which the situation would naturally give rise and overrides with a jest the possibility of such an emotional display."(30)
A perfect example of humor involves the story of a condemned man who, upon approaching the gallows, says, "What a wonderful way to begin the week." The terrifying situation of facing impending death normally would be thought to be accompanied by feelings of terror and fear. The attitude of this condemned man, however, denies those feelings, or instead rejects them, and instead makes a joke, thereby extracting pleasure from what would be an otherwise painful situation. The humorist is uniquely capable of extracting pleasure from a painful world by interpreting circumstances in a manner differently from the way that most people would naturally interpret them. He "laughs off" the cathected energy which was previously invested in negative feelings, and in so doing brings himself and others pleasure. The humorist possesses the talent which allows for the making of jokes, and in the process he appears comic to others.
Humor, then, is the attitude which makes jokes and comedy possible, according to Freud. It does so by understanding reality, but refusing to be constrained by it. Instead, it strives for pleasure, even in the face of overwhelming circumstances. In these ways, Freud considers humor a form of neurosis. "...the denial of the claim of reality and the triumph of the pleasure principle, cause humor to approximate to the regressive or reactionary processes which engage our attention so largely in psychopathology."(31) However we value the power of humor for its ability to reinterpret, and thereby dominate the world around us. The humorist exerts a supreme interpretational power when he refuses to feel the pains of the world as pains, and this is a power which humans admire and respect. We think of the humorist as a kind of hero; courageous in the face of danger, and rebellious in the face of nature.
Freud thinks of the humorous attitude as a kind of defense mechanism, and in fact as "the highest of the defensive processes."(32) In displacing the psychic energy naturally summoned for one affect into the service another, humor allows us to guard against depression and despair in the face of the necessities of nature. Humor empowers us to resist against what reality tells us it is hopeless to resist against. This mighty task is not always accompanied by laughter, however. Whereas the measure of the effectiveness of jokes and comedy can be found in the amount of laughter they produce, the pleasure in humor is more subtle and sustained. The possession of a humorous attitude, instead of giving one pleasure ready-made, allows one to fashion one's own pleasures from the raw material of the world.
Freud or Morreall?
The question may be asked, why does Morreall spend so much time trying to refute Freud's theory in such detail when he undertakes only a general dismissal of most of the other traditional theories of laughter and humor? The answer is not long in coming. Freud's theory represents one of the most detailed, comprehensive and sophisticated theories available, and in fact it stands as the only real competitor to Morreall's proposed theory. In light of the previously observed mistakes committed by Morreall, both in the building of his own theory and in his attacks on Freud, it is worthwhile to inquire into the relative merits of Freud's and Morreall's approaches.
Freud's theory of laughter and humor is, like Bergson's theory, not just consistent with, but is in fact an outgrowth of, a more broad theory of the mind. Freud's intention in writing Jokes and Their Relation to the Unconscious was to follow up on an informal observation by Wilhelm Fliess who, upon reading The Interpretation of Dreams, noted that the examples of dreams in the latter book "were too full of jokes."(33) Freud was himself not unaware of this, and in fact had spent some time collecting Jewish jokes for analysis. The result of his efforts is a theory of laughter and humor which seeks to explain the phenomena of jokes, comedy and humor in the same terms he used to explain other psychological phenomena, and thereby to fit this account into his overall picture of mental processes. Far from being simply tacked on to the rest of his account of the mind, Freud's treatment of laughter is entirely consistent with his general psychoanalytic theory, and in fact works to illuminate other aspects of the more general theory.
Morreall's theory of laughter and humor is not accompanied by a comparable theoretical framework. His interest is solely in finding the necessary and sufficient conditions for laughter. His motivation for this undertaking is the observation that no previous theory of laugher and humor has been successful in accomplishing this task. To recognize this deficiency and attempt to meet it is certainly worthwhile, however, as already demonstrated above, Morreall himself is no more successful in this area than those he criticizes. So, whereas Freud finds success in the expansion and illumination of his own general theories, Morreall fails to meet the very criterion which he himself sets up for an adequate theory of this kind.
Freud, by combining elements of the superiority, incongruity and relief theories, offers an account which not only analyzes the techniques of jokes, comedy and humor, but also speculates on the deeper motives and drives which power the mechanisms of these phenomena. For Freud, the explanation of laughter in terms of any single formula is inadequate to account for the rich subtlety of the phenomena. Some laughter is purely physiological, and this he defers treatment of (though it could perhaps be explained in terms of energized neural pathways). Some laughter, however, does involve mental processes, and this sort comes in many varieties and occurs in many situations. In his treatment of jokes, comedy and humor, Freud identifies some of the structural components that at least seem to accompany many laughing situations. He does not pretend to have discovered them all, and he sensibly writes, "Can we feel sure that none of the possible techniques of jokes has escaped our investigation? Of course not. But a continued examination of fresh material can convince us that we have got to know the commonest and most important technical methods of the joke-work."(34) In these techniques, it is the incongruous surprise afforded by condensation and displacement which proves important.
But Freud is much too ambitious to end his account here. Drawing on his more general theory of the mind, he offers a further account of the psychological forces which explain why the structural mechanisms operative in the various laughing situations operate to produce their effects. Economies in the expenditure of psychic energy drawn upon to perform the work of inhibition, ideation and feeling serve just this purpose. This further attempt to provide a deep, psychological account for the pleasure involved in laughing situations at least gives us a reason why the amusement of laughter feels like the release of bottled up energy.
It should be noted as well that another strength of Freud's theory is that it is careful to distinguish between laughter and the states of amusement which he calls laughing situations. The forces and mechanisms which produce amusement do not necessarily produce laughter, and his account is especially noteworthy for its ability to explain not only the range of our amusement, but also its varied intensity. The key in this matter is the economy with which the technical methods of joking, comedy and humor displace cathexes. This boils down to the amount of mental labor performed in a given situation; the more work, the less laughter. Humor, the most work intensive of the forms of amusement, also results in the least amount of laughter, though the superior, commanding pleasure that it affords is well worth the effort.
Though Morreall hopes to explain all laughter with a single formula, his project is in the end far less ambitious than Freud's. Morreall is satisfied with going only as far as Freud goes in Part A of Jokes and Their Relation to the Unconscious. In Taking Laughter Seriously he offers a form of the incongruity theory which discards the observations of superiority and relief theories as unnecessary, and so his account rests predominately on describing the structural incongruities that he finds in any example of laughter that comes across his desk. But this does not tell us why we find incongruity amusing. Elsewhere, Morreall does offer an evolutionary account of the emergence of amusement at incongruity which explains its attraction to us in terms of the development of rationality. In his paper "Amusement and Other Mental States," our amusement at unthreatening incongruity is accounted for in terms of "our drive to seek variety in our cognitive input,"(35) and through its connection with abstract ways of thinking, it is associated with the detachment of rationality. Amusement encourages and is made possible by the kind of abstract thinking which also makes rationality possible, and because of this it is "tied to our race's general survival strategy of being rational animals."(36) While this gives more substance to Morreall's account overall, it still does not help us to theoretically appreciate the deeper, individual and subjective experience of amusement. Any theory of laughter, I imagine, will have to fit into the evolutionary picture of our species. We would have no problem fitting Freud's account into such a picture as well, and it, in addition, has the advantage of providing a deeper psychological picture than does Morreall's theory.
And so it seems the winner is Freud, by a knock-out.
Conclusion
My discussion in this paper has been focused on the weaknesses in John Morreall's account of laughter and humor. Morreall attempts to formulate a bold, new theory of laughter and humor, but in doing so he acts a bit too boldly (1) in asserting that an adequate theory of laughter and humor should account for all types of laughter, (2) in proposing a universal formula for laughter inadequate to deal with cases of laughter which occurs in unpleasant situations and (3) in rejecting all past theories, especially Freud's, for being incomplete. Morreall's criticisms of Freud especially neglect the sophistication and subtlety of Freud's important insights into the nature of jokes, comedy and humor. None of this is intended to discount Morreall's own insights into laughter and humor. I think that his theory is highly informative and useful, and that in incongruity it identifies a key structural component of laughter and humor. I also think, however, that Morreall's account should incorporate elements of superiority and relief theories into its explanatory arsenal and abandon the false hope for a theory of laughter and humor which strives to explain all laughter in terms of a single formula.
Bibliography
Bergson, Henri. Laughter. (The Macmillian Company, 1911).
De Sousa, Ronald. The Rationality of Emotion. (The MIT Press, 1997).
Freud, Sigmund. Jokes and Their Relation to the Unconscious. (W.W. Norton & Co., 1989).
Morreall, John. Taking Laughter Seriously. (State University of New York Press, 1983).
____________(ed.) The Philosophy of Laughter and Humor. (State University of New York Press, 1987).
Notes
1 John Morreall. Taking Laughter Seriously. (State University of New York Press, 1983), p. 38.
2 Ibid, p. 57.
3 Ibid, p. 58.
4 Ibid, p. 39.
5 Ibid, p. 47.
6 Ibid.
7 Ibid.
8 Ibid, p. 57.
9 Ibid, p. 59.
10 Immanuel Kant. Critique of Judgment. (Hackett Publishing Company, 1987), p. 203 - 204.
11Morreall. Taking Laughter Seriously. p. 17
12 Arthur Schopenhauer. The World as Will and Idea, in The Philosophy of Laughter and Humor. John Morreall (ed.) (State University of New York Press, 1987), p. 57.
13 Sigmund Freud. Jokes and Their Relation to the Unconscious. (W.W. Norton and Company, 1989), p. 293.
14 Another indication of the fact that Freud did not intend to account for all laughter is found in the section titled "The Motives of Jokes -- Jokes as a Social Process." "And since laughter -- not all laughter, it is true, but certainly laughter at a joke -- is an indication of pleasure, we shall be inclined to relate this pleasure to the lifting of the cathexis which has previously been present." p. 181.
15 Freud himself seems to overcomplicate the distinction between jests and jokes by introducing the term "innocent joke." An innocent joke, like a jest, is non-tendentious. However, Freud later asserts that strictly speaking, all jokes are tendentious. It is probably best to eliminate the term "innocent joke" altogether and simply use the term "jest" for consistency's sake.
16 Freud's term for the explanation of a joke.
17 This reminds me of a funny story concerning the rock musician Frank Zappa. Apparently he had been invited to be a guest on a TV talk show which was hosted by a man with a wooden leg. The gimmick of this man's show was to berate and insult his guests, to the delight of the audience. When Frank Zappa arrived on stage the first thing the host said to him was, "So, does all that long hair make you a woman?" Zappa simply responded, "No. Does that wooden leg of yours make you a table?"
18 Morreall. Taking Laughter Seriously. p. 31.
19 Ibid.
20 Ibid, p. 32.
21 Ibid, p. 33.
22 Freud, p. 238.
23 Henri Bergson's theory of comedy depends on analyzing all cases of laughter in these terms. Bergson sums up his account of comedy in the formula "something mechanical encrusted on the living." (Bergson, p. 49) All laughter is directed towards those instances where the natural operations of the human body or mind appear artificial and mechanical. We expect a human organism to exhibit graceful, lively movement, so when it does not, we are struck by the incongruity. Bergson's account is quite similar to Freud's in a number of respects, containing elements of incongruity, relief and superiority theories. It is also striking in this respect that Bergson finds comedy to be "the same nature as that of dreams." (Bergson, p. 186) He finds the mechanisms of faulty reasoning and association to be the same as "the behavior of the intellect in a dream" and calls comedy a "sane type of madness." (Bergson, p. 186) Bergson's book came out in 1900, five years earlier than Freud's. Morreall refers to Bergson only in passing, but he does not seem inclined to categorize Bergson's theory as a simple relief theory along with Freud's. See: Henri Bergson. Laughter. (The Macmillan Company, 1911)
24 Morreall. Taking Laughter Seriously. p. 33.
25 Freud, p. 242.
26 See: footnote 9, Chapter VII, "Jokes and the Species of the Comic." Freud. Jokes and Their Relation to the Unconscious.
27 Morreall, p. 34.
28 Freud, p. 243.
29 Taking Laughter Seriously was, however, published before The Philosophy of Laughter and Humor.
30 Sigmund Freud. "Humor," in: John Morreall (ed.) The Philosophy of Laughter and Humor. p. 112.
31 Ibid, p. 113.
32 Freud. Jokes and Their Relation to the Unconscious. p. 290.
33 Ibid, p. xxvi.
34 Ibid, p. 104.
35 Morreall, Philosophy of Laughter and Humor. p. 201.
36 Ibid, p. 222.