The Gag Reflex

Henri Bergson did write  Laughter: An Essay on the Meaning of the Comic and Freud wrote Jokes and Their Relation to the Unconscious, but it’s hard to believe our current generation of academics can effectively take time out of their Husserling to make salient points about the gags, word play, inflexibility (one of Bergson’s ideas) and farcical cases of mistaken identity (that characterize Roman Comedy for example). Even Daniel Dennett, a philosopher of consciousness, who is one of the authors  of the volume under consideration, Inside Jokes, in Tim Lewens TLS review, “What’s so funny?” (12/7/12) is suspect. The basic theory is summarized by Lewens as this: “we find things funny when our expectations are overturned.” Lewens finds that the theory “performs best” when the authors who also include Matthew M. Hurley and Reginald B. Adams, Jr. deal with “jokes and riddles.” But the authors are “on less secure ground when it comes to the comic effects of mimicry.” And Lewens proves his own mastery of humor when he takes them to task using Mel Brooks’s Blazing Saddles as an example. “Brooks’s cowboys are a rough, uneducated and vulgar bunch. It would be hard to argue that the audience has a committed expectation that these cowboys are the sorts of people who wouldn’t fart in company. Perhaps instead we have committed expectations for the frequency or loudness of farts, which the cowboys’ exuberance overturns.” To begin with this is a masterful analysis of an iconic scene and shows that philosophers can foster useful discussion even on a subject as defying of philosophical analysis as humor. It also brings to mind another great moment in the history of humor and that’s the famous Monty Python vomiting scene in which one person'a hurl produces a chain reaction. It would be hard to say that expectations are overturned in this piece of over-the-top vulgarity. Quite the contrary, “the gag reflex,” which is more at work in its physiologic than humorous form, is what makes the scene so believable and the viewer is left with only two choices: to laugh, or begin throwing up him or herself.

The Time Machine

H. G. Wells wrote a novel called The Time Machine. He wasn’t the first writer (nor the last) to fantasize about time travel. Today, with string theory and quantum notions like entanglement, in which a particle can be conceived of occupying two spaces at the same time, our most basic conceptions of time are challenged. Henri Bergson believed that time was essentially an invention of the mind, at least in the way we conceive the units of its progression. But when you think of it, the impulse to travel backwards and forwards or Back to the Future, as the hit movie put it, is really emotional. In The Seducer's Diary, Kierkegaard talks about the unhappiest man in the world, whose past is his future and whose future is his past, a man who, as the Internet Encyclopedia of Philosophy puts it, “hopes for that which can only be remembered, and remembers that which can only be hoped.” The search for a time machine, which reached fever heights in the Romantic era that fed Wells’s spirit, is an expression of the temptation of transcendence. For the Romantic, that which doesn’t exist and can’t exist is always much more enticing then the dreary and knowable present, which is overly emphatic and offers no hope of transcendence. “A Stop at Willoughby” is the title of a famous episode of The Twilight Zone in which the protagonist journeys back to an idyllic turn-of-the-century world that turns out to be death. To the extent that the Romantic sensibility still lingers in our culture, we are all time travelers, idealizing a past that is already gone and living in the hope of some future in which the occurrence of certain contingencies will bring about utopia—a word that literally means “that which doesn’t exist.”

Present Laughter

In Laughter; An Essay on the Meaning of the Comic, Henri Bergson finds the roots of the comic impulse in inelasticity, proposing that comedy germinates in rigid responses to crisis that avoid the nature of the reality. Thus, the innocent, Chaplinesque figure, the neophyte, the idiot savant, the rube, the Babbitt, the W.C. Fields blusterer are all frequently both objects and detonators of comedy. Jack D. Ripper’s unchanging use of the terms “precious bodily fluids” and “Russkies” in Dr. Strangelove fuels the syntactic parody of this seminal piece of latter twentieth century comedy. If one were to take a portrait of social satire in the fecund era of the ‘60s and ‘70s the way one takes a group shot a high school football squad, Strangelove would be the coach with his arms around MASH on the film side, with Catch 22 and Slaughterhouse Five representing the books. But where is the humor today? There are no Russkies. The real threat lies in kidnapped children in the Congo getting conscripted by self-appointed generalissimos who don the regalia of fallen empire. Where is the comedy in volcanic ash shutting down air travel, in a latter day version of the Icarus myth, in which the Polish president flies too low rather than too high in his over-eagerness to accept penance from an ancient enemy, in a man-made disaster (the BP oil spill) that outdoes anything nature could choreograph?  The job of the comedian is harder today because we have entered a post-absurdist age in which a creature named Survival rears its ugly head amidst the intellectual incongruities and pretensions of the age. Restoration playwrights like Wycherley, who named their characters for their foibles, would have had a party with the crazies captaining this Ship of Fools that we now call spaceship Earth—Mr.  Clueless and Miss  Loveless await their cues.  But laughter is short lived when you’re looking down the barrel of a gun, or in this case a car bomb sitting in Times Square.