Will
Self asks why people laugh at jokes which he doesn't find funny, and
whether there's such a thing as the wrong type of humour.
Nothing is funny twice - I mean that. In fact, most things
that are meant to be funny aren't even funny once, let alone twice. But
in that case - I can hear your protests helium-squeaking through the
ether - why do people repeat anecdotes, jokes and witticisms with such
frequency? Why do we listen to and watch repeats of comedy programmes?
Why do we chuckle indulgently when our partners tell the assembled
company about the amusing thing that happened to them in Madeira - or
possibly Margate - although we've heard it recounted 10,000 times
before, and every fibre of our being cries out not to laugh, but to
commit a grievous assault upon their repetitive person? The answer is
that humour is not produced by a formula or a recipe - guffaws cannot be
arrived at by a series of mathematical operations. You understand this
soon enough if you speak to anyone who works in the burgeoning academic
field of comedy studies.
I kid you not. Comedy studies. While most of academia is
straightforwardly risible, this is one area of scholarly endeavour
that's resolutely unfunny. Something about analysing what makes us laugh
uncontrollably, renders these scholars tight-lipped, ashen-faced and on
the distinctly uptight side. It could be those who are attracted to
comedy studies are already intractably serious, but I suspect it's also
an occupational hazard, the problem being that nothing is funny twice.
"Wit," Friedrich Nietzsche said, "is the epitaph of an emotion." And if
anyone should've been able to speak with authority on the matter it was
he, whose philosophy has at its core a theory of perpetual recurrence -
civilisation repeating itself, like a bad joke. What Nietzsche - who
wasn't exactly a laugh-a-minute - understood only too well, was that
laughter is a form of closure. When our diaphragms convulse, our
shoulders shake, and tears come to our eyes, we're no longer in any
position to experience the finer feelings that have been annulled.
Continue reading the main story
Find out more
- A Point of View is usually broadcast on Fridays on BBC Radio 4 at 20:50 GMT and repeated Sundays, 08:50 GMT
- Will Self is a novelist and journalist
And what are those finer
feelings? By and large, warmth, caring, love - the complex of emotions
that we gather together under the general heading of sympathy. Not all
humour consists in laughing at the spectacle of someone else's painful
pratfall - but the vast majority of it does. Even the subtlest of
ironising cries out for slapstick. I was once standing in a queue at
Schiphol Airport when I dropped the bulky English Sunday newspaper I was
holding under my arm. The multiple sections slid away across the
well-polished flooring, and the man behind me in the queue said a single
word, 'Zwaar', to his companion, who doubled up in silent laughter. As I
was leaving the airport I asked my own Dutch companion what this meant,
and he too had to restrain himself as he replied: "Heavy."
But rest assured, I'm not going to use the rest of our time
together to recount such formerly amusing incidents. I only raised this
one to underscore the fact that humour is, by and large, situational.
"You had to be there" is something often said when an anecdote falls
flat, just as "It's the way she tells them" is the explanation for why
we've succumbed yet again to a hopelessly old joke. Timing, serendipity,
the chance concatenation of otherwise irreconcilable phenomena, the
shock of the new - these are the elements that combine to produce that
sublime moment of hilarious abandonment, they cannot ever be precisely
repeated, try as we might. And we do try - and how very trying it is.
Not just the old school friend, who even well into middle age hasn't
quite grasped that his party piece has become a desiccated fig leaf
barely hiding his unfunny bone, but the continuous canned laughter that
accompanies the situational comedy of our own unfunny lives.
Friedrich Nietzsche 1844-1900
- German writer and philosopher, famous for saying "God is dead",
also for the concepts of eternal recurrence and the "ubermensch"
(superman)
- Believed science (especially Darwin) had revealed a world without inherent order or meaning
- Argued that the Christian system of faith and worship was not
only incorrect, but harmful to society because it suppressed the will to
power which was the driving force of human character
- Ideas were very influential in 20th Century philosophy and
literature. They were also wilfully interpreted by German Nazis to
justify their own ideology
- Nietzsche suffered a severe mental breakdown in 1889, and died after a series of strokes
BBC Radio 4 - Great Lives, Friedrich Nietzsche
You know the one I mean. You walk in on someone watching a
hilarious television sitcom, but rather than concentrating on the actors
and their exquisitely scripted lines, you hear instead the laughter
track, one that, while it may have been recorded using a live audience,
watching live comedy, has since been subjected to post-production, so
each physical flourish and verbal furbelow of the piece can be garnished
with appropriate laughter. The person you've walked in on continues to
happily chortle, but you - being so to speak out of sync - hear only the
counterpoint of artificial laughter: Chuckle… chuckle… titter… guffaw!
And again: Chuckle… chuckle… titter… guffaw!
This is the miserably contrived cachinnation that nowadays
follows us wherever we go, and we could be forgiven for taking it at
once universally and personally. The cosmos is laughing at our entire
species, revelling in the awful mess we've got ourselves into - and at
one and the same time bell-like laughter tolls for us, and us alone. In
some ways this hilarity over nothing whatsoever is a distinctively
modern phenomenon. The proliferation of stand-up comedy venues, the
tittering on television and the roaring on the radio - all of it
continues to increase in volume. For the most part the humour (if we can
call it that) constitutes obscenities, or the invocation of sexual or
other bodily embarrassment. The first time a comedian utters an
obscenity we laugh out of shock, when it's repeated we laugh a little
less - and so on until we're punch(line) drunk. By the time the
obscenity has been uttered for the umpteenth time we're reacting in a
Pavlovian fashion, as a laboratory dog salivates when an electric buzzer
has been substituted for a juicy steak. Our laughter has been processed
by repetition and then canned. We have become the laughter track for an
unfunny world.
The Crazy Gang, 1955
This is not to suggest that things were much funnier in the
past - or at any rate, you had to be there to find the way they told
relentless, repetitive innuendos remotely amusing. The organs of humour
were exactly the same - the genitals and the bowels - it's just that
they were draped in double entendres. But (I hear you still
expostulating), "That's never been the sort of thing I laugh at, I have a
sophisticated sense of humour, I delight in the subtlest of irony and
the most inventive of satirical tropes, I lose myself in the giddy
spirals of surrealistic verbal invention. It's you - you are the sourest
of pusses, you whose deep, lugubrious voice nonetheless descants with
callow cynicism. You want to make everything as cold and dark and
shrivelled as your own miserable sclerotic heart."
Taking the joke apart
"Analysing comedy is like dissecting a frog. Nobody laughs and the frog dies" - Barry Cryer
"Tragedy is when I cut my finger. Comedy is when you fall into an open sewer and die" - Mel Brooks
Well, up to a point, yes. I do think we could benefit from
losing a great swathe of so-called "humour" from our culture, and you
should've grasped by now that it's not the first "boom" I object to in
"boom-boom!" but the second. It's often said that there are only seven
plots, or three subjects for pop songs, but there's a far greater
paucity of jokes. Just two - the funny ones and their unfunny
reiteration. Humour, to be worthy of the ascription should be
spontaneous, playful and inventive. Some of the funniest times in my
life have occurred when a small group of friends, over an evening or
even a few days, have generated a dialect of comedic and satiric
references known only to us. Such in-jokes are often derided - but the
truth is that jokes are usually funny in inverse proportion to their
universality, because the more widely understood humour is, the more
likely it is to have been previously disseminated. And I think I may've
mentioned before that nothing - and I mean bupkis - is funny twice.
Will Self (far left) in Shooting Stars with Matt Lucas, Vic Reeves, Bob Mortimer and Ulrika Jonsson
I don't expect to win many converts to my campaign for real
amusement. I even anticipate attempts to silence me by what we must
perforce call organised comedy. Don't be surprised if I'm found with a
rubber chicken stuffed down my throat, or tickled to death in a back
alley. I shan't mind if you laugh at my death - after all, it hasn't
happened before - but on learning of it I hope you'll recall these lines
from Alexander Pope's Dunciad, his great satire on the unutterable
dullness of our repetitive culture: "You by whose care in vain decry'd
and curst/ Still Dunce the second reigns like Dunce the first."
No comments:
Post a Comment