Redeeming Laughter

Redeeming Laughter
The Comic Dimension of Human Experience

PETER L. BERGER

W
DE

G
WALTER DE GRUYTER
BERLIN · NEW YORK
 About the Author

Peter L. Berger is a University Professor at Boston University. He is

the author of many books in sociology and religion, including The Social
Construction of Reality (with Thomas Luckmann), The Sacred Canopy, A
Rumor of Angels and, most recently, A Far Glory: The Quest for Faith in an
Age of Credulity.

Copyright © 1997 by Walter de Gruyter & Co., Berlin

All rights reserved. No part of this publication may be reproduced, stored
on a retrieval system, or transmitted in any form or by any means,
electronic, mechanical, photocopying, recording or otherwise, without
prior permission in writing from the publisher.

Die Deutsche Bibliothek - CIP-Einheitsaufnahme

Berger, Peter L.:
Redeeming laughter : the comic dimension of human experience /
Peter L. Berger. - Berlin ; New York : de Gruyter, 1997 DBN: 95.027928.5©
ISBN 3-11-015562-1 SG: 11

Library of Congress Cataloging-in-Publication Data

Berger, Peter L.
Redeeming laughter : the comic dimension of human experience / Peter L. Berger,
p. cm.
Includes bibliographical references and index.
ISBN 3-11-015562-1 (cloth : alk. paper)
1. Comic, The—Religious aspects—Christianity. 2. Wit and humor—Religious
aspects—Christianity. I. Title.
BR115.C63B47 1997 97-12095
233—DC21 CIP

British Library Cataloguing in Publication Data

Berger, Peter L.
Redeeming laughter : the comic dimension of human experience
1. Comic, The - Religious aspects 2. Comic, The - Psychological aspects
I. Title
152.4 ' 3
ISBN 3-11-015562-1

10 9 8 7 6 5 4 3 2 1
To the Memory of My Father
George W. Berger
 Table of Contents

Prefatory Remarks,
Self-Serving Explanations and Unsolicited Compliments ix
Prologue xiii

PART I. ANATOMY OF THE COMIC

1 The Comic Intrusion 3

2 Philosophers of the Comic, and

the Comedy of Philosophy 15

3 Laughing Monks:
A Very Brief Sinitic Interlude 39

4 Homo Ridens:
Physiology and Psychology 45

5 Homo Ridiculus:
Social Constructions of the Comic 65

6 Interlude:
Brief Reflections on Jewish Humor 87

PART II. COMIC FORMS OF EXPRESSION

7 The Comic as Diversion:

Benign Humor 99

8 The Comic as Consolation:

Tragicomedy 117

9 The Comic as Game of Intellect:

Wit 135
vili Table of Contents

10 The Comic as Weapon:

Satire 157

11 Interlude:
The Eternal Return of Folly 175

PART III. TOWARD A THEOLOGY OF THE COMIC

12 The Folly of Redemption 187

13 Interlude:

On Grim Theologians 197

14 The Comic as a Signal of Transcendence 205

Epilogue 217
 Prefatory Remarks, Self-Serving
Explanations, and Unsolicited
Compliments

People who work in bookstores tend toward a pessimistic worldview, or

so I have observed. This is very understandable, given both the quantity
and (mostly) quality of the merchandise they are obliged to sell. And
then there is the problem of classification: just where in the store is a
particular book to be located? I can foresee that this book will raise this
question in a particularly irritating fashion, thus contributing to the
malaise already afflicting what I consider to be one of the more honor-
able occupations in our generally depressing age. Is this book to be
placed in the humor section? In religion? In sociology? The predomi-
nance of Jewish jokes might suggest Judaica, the defense of Oscar Wilde
gay and lesbian studies. By currently fashionable principles of literary
theory, the author is the very last person to say how a book is to be
understood. Nevertheless, if a choice is to be made, I would suggest a
division: some books under humor, some under religion. It is certainly
about humor; and the underlying argument as well as the finale are
religious, and the title intends to make this clear from the beginning.
People who review books are, of course, even more pessimistic than
those who sell them. As someone once observed, even-handed malice is
the cardinal virtue of the critic. This book will provide ample oppor-
tunity for the exercise of this virtue. It takes its material from many
fields, in most of which I have no professional competence. I have made
an effort to use my sources responsibly, and I have taken some advice,
but I'm confident that there are misinterpretations and, more important,
omissions at various points of my argument. This knowledge has caused
periodic attacks of anxiety during my work on the book. I have consoled
myself with two thoughts. First, the literature about the nature of the
comic, while vast, is singularly unsatisfactory in answering some of the
basic questions about the phenomenon, partly because so few authors
have been willing to step beyond the boundaries of their professional
competencies; in other words, the comic is a subject that cries out for
unprofessional treatment. Second, I have reached an age, tottering on
χ Redeeming Laughter

the edge of senility, where I can afford to be reasonably nonchalant

about what people say about me. However, I will say this much in my
defense: I have no delusions about being some sort of Renaissance man;
I do have certain obsessions. I have been obsessed with the question of
the nature of the comic all my life, ever since my father, an inveterate
teller of jokes, encouraged me to tell my own about the time when I
entered kindergarten, where according to reliable sources I made a nui-
sance of myself as I faithfully followed the paternal mandate. Sooner or
later, I had to write this book.
It is easy to say what this book is not. It is not a jokebook, though I
very much hope that readers will occasionally laugh. Put differently, it is
a book about humor, but not primarily a humorous book. It is not a
treatise in any of the intellectual disciplines from which it draws, and my
own discipline of sociology is not at all central to my main argument.
And, while it draws mainly on works of literature to illustrate the differ-
ent modes of the comic, it is not a work of literary criticism.
This book is a prolonged reflection about the nature of the comic as a
central human experience. Its main argument can be stated succinctly:
Humor—that is, the capacity to perceive something as being funny—is
universal; there has been no human culture without it. It can safely be
regarded as a necessary constituent of humanity. At the same time,
what strikes people as funny and what they do in order to provoke a
humorous response differs enormously from age to age, and from soci-
ety to society. Put differently, humor is an anthropological constant and
is historically relative. Yet, beyond or behind all the relativities, there is
the something that humor is believed to perceive. This is, precisely, the
phenomenon of the comic (which, if you will, is the objective correlate of
humor, the subjective capacity). From its simplest to its most sophisti-
cated expressions, the comic is experienced as incongruence.
Also, the comic conjures up a separate world, different from the world
of ordinary reality, operating by different rules. It is also a world in
which the limitations of the human condition are miraculously over-
come. The experience of the comic is, finally, a promise of redemption.
Religious faith is the intuition (some lucky people would say the convic-
tion) that the promise will be kept.
Even if the main argument of this book is stated in such a brief form,
it must be clear that it cannot be sustained within any given intellectual
discipline. Philosophy would be the only plausible candidate but, as
becomes clear quickly, philosophers have been of only modest use in the
exploration of the comic phenomenon. Having started on the argument,
I had to improvise as I went along. I had no foolproof method at hand
(the word foolproof, come to think of it, is very appropriate here). The
aforementioned kindergarten stood in Vienna, which may be of meth-
 Prefatory Remarks xi

odological relevance. If I have a method at all here, perhaps it could be

called a baroque one. It is based on the assumption that there are hidden
connections and a hidden order behind the near-infinite richness of the
empirical world, and that the order is ultimately God-given and salvific.
Therefore, it does not matter where one begins an exploration or which
path of inquiry one takes: the underlying realities will disclose them-
selves in one way or another. Put in baroque terms, the shortest distance
between two points is the circle. Finally, when one gets there, one will
laugh.
My editors, who are naturally worried, have advised me that, in view
of the complicated character of this book, I should give the reader some
kind of preview or overview of the contents. Fair enough. So here goes:
The book begins naively (or, which is more or less the same thing,
phenomenologically) by just looking at the experience of the comic as it
appears in ordinary life, without recourse to any academic disciplines.
Overall, the book is divided into three parts. Part I deals with what could
be called the anatomy of the comic—that is, with the question of just what
it is. So as not to induce in the reader a state of unbearable suspense, let
me say right away that no conclusive answer will be forthcoming (though
some excellent reasons for why such an answer is not possible). Nev-
ertheless, as one looks at the findings and the speculations coming out of
different approaches, a clearer picture of the phenomenon does emerge.
The approaches surveyed are those of philosophy, physiology (a passing
glance only, since I'm not only incompetent but monumentally incompe-
tent in this area), psychology and the social sciences. There are two
interludes, tangents off the main argument. While my own education
forced me to rely mainly on Western sources, it is important to keep in
mind the universality of the comic phenomenon; one interlude, then,
deals with humor in East Asia. The other interlude is a reflection on
Jewish humor, which uniquely illustrates some of the points I want to
make here.
Part II is a tour d'horizon of different genres, or forms of expression, of
the comic. These are mostly illustrated by examples from literature. Of
course, there is no intention here of presenting the authors of these
works in any depth; they are simply used here as what Max Weber
called "clear cases"—cases, that is, of the different comic genres. The
comic forms of expression discussed (not necessarily an exhaustive list)
are benign humor, tragicomedy, wit, satire, and (most important for the
main argument) the strange counterworld of what the Middle Ages
called "folly." Authors used by way of illustration are, among others,
P. G. Wodehouse, Sholem Aleichem, Oscar Wilde, and Karl Kraus. (An
odd collection, no doubt. If there is a comic section in the hereafter, I
wonder how they get on together. The mind boggles at some of the
xii Redeeming Laughter

possibilities.) I regret that I could not use any visual expressions of the
comic here, but to do so would have made this book inordinately expen-
sive and my editors even more worried.
Part III is my attempt to pull together the religious implications of the
argument. It is, so to speak, an exercise in lay theology. (I am a Lu-
theran, of a rather heterodox sort, and I believe in the priesthood of all
believers, ipso facto in the right of all believers to think theologically.)
One chapter deals with the relationship of folly and redemption. An
interlude tries to face up to the question of why it is that most theo-
logians are such a humorless lot. The final chapter, looking at the comic
as a signal of transcendence, narrowly avoids the charge of being a
sermon. I conclude with the wonderful poem of Gilbert Keith Chester-
ton about the donkey on which Jesus rode into Jerusalem.
Some acknowledgments are in order. If I were to thank all the indi-
viduals who have helped me think about the nature of the comic
(mostly, by first making me laugh), I would have to go on for many
pages, and my editors would pass from worry to rage. I should mention
my oldest friend, Wolfgang Breunig, who was with me in the kinder-
garten where I first made a pest of myself as a teller of jokes, who still
lives in the same house on the Petersplatz where he lived then, and who
has endured my jokes ever since with admirable patience. This particu-
lar book was started (without malicious intent, I stipulate) by Ann Bern-
stein, who visited Boston a few years ago and, as intellectuals are wont
to do, asked me what I was working on. When I answered that I wasn't
working on anything in particular, she said, "Why don't you write a
book on humor? You tell so many jokes." I replied that this was a
ridiculous idea. Some three hours later it struck me that, of course, this
is what I should do.
As I proceeded with this (literally) ridiculous project, a number of
friends and colleagues made helpful suggestions. First among them is
Anton Zijderveld, one of the very few sociologists who has done impor-
tant work on humor. I would also like to thank Ali Banuazizi, John
Berthrong, Noel Perrin, Christopher Ricks, and Ruth Wisse. I would
very much like to say that any faults of this book are entirely due to
them, while I am solely responsible for its merits.
Brigitte Berger has listened, patiently and critically, to my writings for
almost as long as she has been listening to my jokes. This book, too,
owes very much to her attention and suggestions. Diya Berger, whose
smile becomes ever more knowing, has taught me much about the ori-
gins of humor in the wonders of childhood (see Chapter 4, note 9).
Finally, I want to thank my editors, Bianka Ralle and Richard Koffler.
They have been greatly supportive.
 Prologue

Amid the variety of human experiences of reality, or of what appears to

be reality, the experience of the comic occupies a very distinctive place.
On the one hand, it is ubiquitous. Everyday life is full of comic inter-
ludes, of occasions for humor, of little jokes as well as more elaborate
ones. What is more, the experience of the comic is universal. While its
expression differs greatly from one culture to another, there is no hu-
man culture without it. On the other hand, the experience of the comic
is highly fragile, fugitive, sometimes hard to remember. What seems
funny in one moment may suddenly take on a tragic quality in the next
moment, a joke may be so subtle that it barely reaches the level of full
attention, and this is why only a short time later it may be difficult to
recall just why something evoked amusement. The fragility of the comic
becomes particularly evident as soon as the attempt is made to analyze it
intellectually, as anyone knows who has ever tried to explain a joke. All
of this means that the comic is something of a mystery. Just what is this
experience, and how does it relate to other human experiences?
Human beings make judgments about truth, about goodness, about
beauty, and philosophers have been worrying for some three millennia
how the validity of such judgments can be established. Yet the comic
does not fall under any of these primeval categories. Take the joke, that
most succinct form of verbal humor. It makes little sense to ask whether
a joke is true. To be sure, it may refer to situations that, in terms of one's
knowledge of the world, could not have occurred—say, a joke about a
political figure involved in an event that in fact took place before or after
the time when this individual was in power. But this error, this "un-
truth," may have little bearing on whether the joke is funny or not;
indeed, the point of the joke could actually be this empirically false
juxtaposition of person and event. The comic effect of a joke also bears
little relation to the realm of moral judgment. Of course it is possible to
make moral judgments about the context in which a joke is told and
about the intentions of the joke-teller. Proverbially, one should not tell
tales about gallows in the house of someone who was hanged, and the
insensitivity of someone who does merits moral condemnation. The
same goes for jokes that are intended to denigrate this or that group of
people—racist jokes, anti-Semitic jokes, and so on. It is even possible to
xiv Redeeming Laughter

say that the very contents of a particular joke are immoral—as with the
sort of hatred-inspired jokes just mentioned, or with jokes that seem to
extol cruelty or are based on blasphemy. Yet, while stipulating all these
moral points, there remains the disquieting fact that, after one has fully
explained why this joke is morally reprehensible, it may still be funny.
More than that, one of the important social functions of humor seems
always to have been to outrage conventional moral sentiments. While
humor can clearly be used for good or evil purposes, the comic as such
appears to be strangely beyond good and evil. Finally, it makes just as
little sense to ask whether a joke is beautiful or ugly. There is a realm of
esthetic experience and a realm of comic experience, but the two seem to
be quite independent of each other.
There is, of course, an enormous literature about different mani-
festations of the sense of the comic—books on comedy as a dramatic
form, on irony and satire, on the sense of humor of different nation-
alities and regions, on different categories of jokes, on social roles em-
bodying the comic such as court jesters and clowns, and on festivals
based on humorous merriment such as the carnival. However, there is
a relative paucity of writings about the nature of the comic as such,
certainly if compared to the libraries of books about the nature of truth,
goodness, and beauty. Few philosophers have bothered to think seri-
ously about the funny. Undoubtedly this has something to do with the
aforementioned fragility of the comic experience. Try to grasp it, and it
dissolves. How many jokes could survive treatment by philosophers?
But there is also the widely assumed notion that the serious and the
funny exclude each other. After all, one cannot simultaneously pray
and joke, declare one's love and joke, contemplate mortality and
joke—or at least such simultaneity would require a very big effort, one
likely to be misunderstood by most people. There is a good word for
the inappropriate insertion of humor into a serious situation—the
word is frivolity. It is frivolous to make jokes during a religious ceremo-
ny, a proposal of marriage, or a funeral. Conventionally, then, the
comic appears to be banned from all truly serious occasions. This social
fact has led many to the view that the comic is a superficial or marginal
aspect of human life, in which case it would be perfectly understand-
able that serious thinkers have not paid much attention to it. The pre-
sent book is grounded in the conviction that such a view is very much
mistaken.
This is a book about the comic, that mysterious component of reality
that is detected, or believed to be detected, by what is commonly called a
sense of humor. Again, in common usage it is said that someone lacks a
sense of humor if he or she is unable to detect the presence of the comic.
Writing a book about the comic could be construed as prima facie evi-
dence of such humorlessness. Conversely, the witness to such an en-
 Prologue XV

deavor may well find it funny in the extreme. It calls out for a humorous
antithesis, as occurs when a philosopher lecturing on metaphysics loses
his pants or has a visible erection or an irrepressible attack of the
hiccups—the physical taking comic revenge on the pretension of the
metaphysical. In other words, people who write books on the comic are
legitimate targets for parody, satire, and other aggressive modes of the
humorous response to intolerable seriousness.
I know all this, and it makes me very nervous. It is not so much that
I'm anxious that others may make fun of this enterprise. Much more
nervous-making is the suspicion that my own sense of the ridiculous
will make it impossible for me to proceed for very long. How can one
take apart something that is so fragile? Or hold up for scrutiny what is
inherently fugitive? Is it not ludicrous to expect that, after having thor-
oughly examined the structure of comic experience, one will with a serious
face declare to the world what it is? In (probably futile) self-defense—and
that means, mainly, defending myself against my own sense of humor—
let me say at the outset: I have no such expectation. Also, as will become
clearer later on, I would have to be mad to hold such an expectation, for,
if I'm right in my intuitions about the comic, if I could ever say, This is
what it is, I would be in possession of the innermost secret of existence.
The comic, because of its elusive nature, can only be approached both
circumspectly and circuitously. One must be very, very careful, or the
thing will break before one's eyes. One cannot attack it directly, one
must go around it, round and round, again and again. Perhaps then it
will not be frightened away. Perhaps then it will stand still long enough
to yield a slightly better glimpse of what it may be underneath its many
guises. This much I can say with great assurance: No certainties will
emerge from this particular exploration.

Around the turn of the century a newly ordained rabbi was sent out from
his yeshiva on the lower East Side of New York to become the first rabbi to
minister to a congregation in Alaska. His old teacher bid him farewell,
blessed him, and said, "And remember, my son, always remember—life is
like a cup of tea."
The young rabbi went out to Alaska, and he was very busy there, but
every now and again he would think of what his teacher had said, and he
would wonder what this saying meant. After seven years his congregation
let him take a vacation. He went back to New York, visited the yeshiva, and
went to see his old teacher. "I've always wanted to ask you this," he said.
"When I left the yeshiva, when you gave me your blessing, you said to m e —
'life is like a cup of tea.' Tell me rebbe, what did you mean?"
"Life is like a cup of tea?" asked the old man. "I said this?"
"Yes, you did. What did you mean?"
The old man thought for a while, then he said, "Nu, maybe life is not like
a cup of tea."
xvi Redeeming Laughter

There is an, as it were, Hinduized version of the same story. The

difference is nuanced, but the nuance makes it worth telling.

This young American was traveling in India, looking for the meaning of
existence. He was told that way up there, on one of the most inaccessible
peaks of the Himalayas, there was a holy man who was supposed to know
the answer. The young American spent many weeks wandering, enduring
great hardship, and finally reached the place where the holy man resided.
There he was, sitting immobile, his eyes fixed on the distant peak of Mount
Everest.
"My name is John P. Shulze," said the young American. "I'm from
Cleveland, Ohio, and I'm looking for the meaning of existence. I'm told that
you know. Can you tell me?"
The holy man, without moving his gaze from the distant peak of Mount
Everest, intoned solemnly, "Life is like the lotus flower."
The young American said nothing, pondering this profound saying.
There was a long silence. Then a slight frown crossed the holy man's brow.
He looked away from the distant mountain and, in a worried tone, said to
the young American, "Do you have any other suggestions?"

And this story leads, for whatever reason, to another. It is not clear that
there is any connection.

Mrs. Shapiro, from Brookline, Massachusetts, was also traveling in the

Himalayas, in search of a holy man who lived on one of the most inaccessi-
ble peaks of that mighty mountain chain. After many weeks of travel,
enduring great hardship, she finally reached that place. A young disciple of
the holy man received her and told her, "The holy man is very busy. Today
is Tuesday. He can see you on Friday, at three in the morning. In the
meantime you can stay here in this cave."
Mrs. Shapiro stayed in the cave from Tuesday evening until very early
Friday morning. It was very cold, she had to sleep on the ground, and there
was nothing to eat except for wild berries and churned yak milk. On Friday,
just before three in the morning, the young disciple came to pick her up. He
led her to another cave. And there sat the holy man. Mrs. Shapiro went
right up to him. She said, "Marvin, come home!"

I have told three jokes. Two of them are Jewish and the third one, if one
may put it this way, has a Jewish undertone. This should not be surpris-
ing. Some of the best jokes are Jewish. Much has been written about
Jewish humor. Why are there so many Jewish jokes? There are
many reasons that can be given. Historical reasons: jokes are stories that
must be cleverly told, and Jewish culture (for profoundly religious rea-
sons) is probably the most verbal in human history. Psychological rea-
 Prologue xvii

sons: jokes relieve suffering, and what people have endured more suffer-
ing over the centuries than the Jews? Sociological reasons: through much
of their history the Jews have existed on the margins of societies, and
marginality makes for a comic perspective. And then there is the most
profound reason, a theological one: the Jews are the people who have
invented God (or, if you will, who have discovered Him—or, if you really
will to think theologically, whom He has invented). But that is a story that
will come much later in these ruminations.
Come to think of it, I have now adumbrated most of the major themes
with which I intend to deal in this book. As I go round and round my
effervescent topic, I must discuss some history, some psychology, some
sociology, and in the end I will find myself asking some theological
questions. Perhaps I should stop right now, stop with the adumbrations.
The joke would then be on me, certainly not on the reader, for then there
would be no reader. A Chinese sage is reputed to have said, "If you have a
choice, it is better that the joke be on someone other than yourself." I take
this as an encouragement to go on.
Though I cannot resist the temptation to tell yet one more Jewish story.
It is a classical one, which was alluded to in the title of the late Irving
Howe's autobiography.

In the old days, somewhere in Eastern Europe, a traveler arrived in a

shtetl in the middle of winter. There, outside the synagogue, an old man sat
on a bench, shivering in the cold.
"What are you doing here?" asked the traveler.
"I'm waiting for the coming of Messiah."
"That is indeed a very important job," said the traveler. "I suppose that
the community pays you a good salary?"
"No, not at all," said the old man. "They don't pay me anything. They
just let me sit on this bench. Once in a while someone comes out and gives
me a little food."
"That must be very hard for you," said the traveler. "But even if they
don't pay you anything, surely they must honor you for undertaking this
important task?"
"No, not at all," said the old man. "They all think that I'm crazy."
"I don't understand this," said the traveler. "They don't pay you. They
don't respect you. You sit out here in the cold, shivering, hungry. What
kind of a job is this?"
The old man replied: "It's steady work."
 I
Anatomy of the Comic
 1
The Comic Intrusion

As we begin our circling around the phenomenon of the comic, a num-

ber of general questions at once suggest themselves: What is it? Where is
it? How is it used? What does it mean? Given our circuitous approach
(which is, or so it seems, dictated by the nature of the phenomenon), it
will not be advisable to attempt answers to these questions in a rig-
orously systematic way. But it does make sense to make a preliminary
stab, at least, at tackling the first question: What is this thing we are
talking about?
An English-speaking individual with a measure of higher education is
likely to start by taking out that great philological monument, the Oxford
English Dictionary. Even if one is not interested at the moment in the
ways a word has been used all the way back to Beowulf and the Canter-
bury Tales, one hopes at any rate to get an idea of current usage from the
OED. Here, then, are some relevant definitions. Under comic: "Calcu-
lated to excite mirth, intentionally funny." And a second definition:
"Unintentionally provocative of mirth; laughable, ludicrous." This
seems a bit awkward: Why not simply say that the comic is something
that, whether intentionally or not, is perceived as funny? In any case,
this does not get one very far. Not to put too fine a point to it, what is
really said here is that the funny is something that is seen to be funny.
Then under humor: "That quality of action, speech or writing, which
excites amusement, oddity, jocularity, facetiousness, comicality, fun."
And a Β definition: "The faculty of perceiving what is ludicrous or amus-
ing, or of expressing it in speech, writing, or other composition; jocose
imagination or treatment of subject." Added to these wonderfully im-
precise if not circular definitions is the curious comment: "Distinguished
from wit as being less purely intellectual, and as having a sympathetic
quality in virtue of which it often becomes allied to pathos."
This does take one a little further. It makes a useful distinction be-
tween a quality of certain human realities and the faculty of perceiving
that quality. Phenomenologists get at the same distinction by talking
4 Anatomy of the Comic

about the noematic and the noetic aspects of a phenomenon. The distinc-
tion will be useful later on in these ruminations, as it will protect against
the confusion of the comic phenomenon as such with its physiological
foundations or its social-psychological functions. The OED also makes
clear that the comic (or, as here, the "humorous") can be found in
actions, in speech, or in written materials. Beyond that, one is again left
with a good deal of confusion. What is the difference between jocularity
and facetiousness? Between comicality and fun? One would think that
comic and humorous are synonyms in their adjectival form. Or perhaps
one might say that the sense of humor is that faculty which perceives the
comic (or, if one prefers, comicality). One could go on. Comedy: "That
branch of the drama which adopts a humorous or familiar style, and
depicts laughable characters and incidents." Joke: "Something said or
done to excite laughter or amusement; a witticism, a jest; jesting, raill-
ery; also, something that causes amusement, a ridiculous circum-
stance." One could go on; I think not.
I have been using the second edition (1991) of the Compact OED. That
is the one that weighs a ton, or so it seems, and that one can only read
with the help of a magnifying glass thoughtfully provided by the pub-
lisher. After quite a short time one's eyes hurt; at least mine did. The
discomfort provoked a fantasy. I have no idea how the OED is composed.
I imagine that there must be committees of scholars. Do they meet? I
visualize them as small groups of fussy dons, the men in frayed tweed
jackets, the women wearing sensible shoes, all staying within walking
distance of the British Museum in one of those splendidly uncomfortable
bed-and-breakfast places in Bloomsbury. Would there be a committee on
mirth and jocularity? If so, is it too fanciful to think that these people,
indulging in the witty malice that is at the core of the English academic
ethos, might play some jokes of their own? "We'll show those bloody
Americans who buy the OED . . . " Chuckle, chuckle . . .
Let us, for now, shelve the question of just what the comic is. Inevita-
bly, we will have to return to it. Instead, let us turn to the second
question that suggested itself: Where is it? Or more precisely: Where
amid the vast panoply of human experiences does the comic manifest
itself? In approaching this question, one can employ a useful distinction
made by Max Weber in the case of religion: he distinguished between
the religion of the "virtuosi" and that of the "masses" (such as, for
instance, between the Catholicism of Teresa of Avila and that of the
ordinary people showing up for mass on Sunday morning). A similar
distinction can usefully be made here. There are "virtuosi" of the
comic—not just great comic writers (Aristophanes, Shakespeare, Mo-
lière, etc.), but great jesters and clowns and stand-up comedians, or the
great joke-tellers such as once inhabited the coffeehouses of Central
 The Comic Intrusion 5

Europe. But there is also the comic of the "masses," and this is what we
should look at first.
As soon as we do this, we are struck by one overwhelmingly evident
fact: The comic is ubiquitous in ordinary, everyday life. Not all the time, of
course, but weaving in and out of ordinary experience. And it is not the
virtuosi of the comic that we have in mind here, but quite ordinary
people—specimens, if you will, of l'homme comique moyen. Let us visual-
ize a day in the life of such people—we will call them John and Jane
Everyperson, an ordinary American couple. They wake up in the morn-
ing. John is one of those people who wake up instantly, jump out of
bed, and are ready to go. Jane is of the other kind, the one who wakes
up slowly, reluctantly, not out of laziness but because waking reality
seems quite implausible as she reencounters it. She wakes up, sees John
prancing about (perhaps he does morning push-ups, or perhaps he is
just purposefully going about his toilette and the serious task of getting
dressed), and the sight seems quite ludicrous. Perhaps she laughs, or
perhaps she suppresses laughter out of marital delicacy (after all, this
absurdly active individual has just emerged from her bed and is her
husband), but the fact is that the first conscious thought in her mind that
day is a perception of the comic. John, let us assume, comes to the comic
a little more slowly (activists usually do). But he does make a joke at
breakfast, perhaps about the toast he has just burned, or about the
couple in the adjacent apartment (the walls are thin) who can once again
be heard making love in the early morning. Then the Everypersons'
young children come in, pretending to be the monsters they saw on a
television show last night, and now everyone is laughing. Then John
and Jane read the newspaper; he laughs at a cartoon; she makes a
sarcastic comment about the latest folly of the government. All these
expressions of the comic—and, mind you, they haven't even finished
breakfast yet!
It would not be difficult to pursue them in equal detail throughout the
day. John's boss engages in heavy, sadistic irony in berating a subordi-
nate at a staff meeting; in revenge, John and his colleagues enact a
parody of the boss safely while he is away during lunch. Jane is blessed
(or afflicted) with colleagues at work who are compulsive joke-tellers;
during their lunch hour they vie with each other in this activity: "Have
you heard this one?" "I think I can top yours!" "Do you know the latest
Al Gore story?" And so on. Perhaps Jane has her own jokes to tell;
perhaps she is that wish fulfillment of every compulsive joke-teller—the
patient listener who always laughs when the punch line comes, because
she has forgotten the joke although she has heard it before more than
once. In either case, she participates in yet another experience of what
our OED authors would call jocularity. Needless to say, the afternoon
6 Anatomy of the Comic

and the evening are not immune to these reiterated appearances of the
comic. Perhaps John and Jane spend the evening actually attending a
performance by one of the currently available virtuosi of the comic—a
Woody Allen movie, say, or a Jackie Mason show. Without going into
any further details, it is clear that the comic appears and reappears
throughout their waking hours. It is even conceivable that one of them
dreams of a joke, laughs in the dream, and then wakes up laughing.
Unless John and Jane are philosophically inclined, they have proba-
bly never reflected on the nature of the comic. They recognize it when
they see it, at least most of the time (once in a while their sense of humor
deserts them), and at least within their own sociological context (we can
leave aside for the moment the problem they would encounter in recog-
nizing humor if they were suddenly transported into a very different
context—say, a Chinese village where a group of peasants are telling
each other funny stories). To say that they recognize the comic when
they see it is to say that there is a sector of reality that, in their percep-
tion, is separated from other sectors, precisely the sector of the comic, to
which laughter is the most appropriate response. This sector may be
entered for an extended period of time, as on the occasion of watching a
comedy film or attending the performance of a comedian, or even of
participating in a protracted joke-telling session (these are the times
when they may observe that their jaws are beginning to hurt from
laughing). Mostly, however, this comic sector is less long-lasting, mo-
mentary, even fugitive. Recognizably different though it is, it weaves in
and out of the rest of reality as experienced in the course of the day. A
joke is told in the midst of a conversation about, say, business matters;
having told the joke, the individual may return to the previous topic by
saying something like, "But now, seriously." At the same business meet-
ing one of the participants suddenly burps audibly; the others are
amused by this eruption of incongruous physicality amid the serious
activity of negotiating a multimillion-dollar contract; but precisely be-
cause the business at hand is so serious, they quickly suppress their
sense of humor.
In ordinary, everyday life then, the comic typically appears as an
intrusion. It intrudes, very often unexpectedly, into other sectors of real-
ity. These other sectors are colloquially referred to as serious. By impli-
cation, then, the comic is unserious. We will later on have reason to
question this interpretation of the ontological status of the comic; in-
deed, we may even dare to propose that the comic is the most serious
perception of the world there is. For the moment, though, let the con-
ventional distinction stand: The comic is posited as an antithesis to
serious concerns. This perception of an antithesis is commonly ex-
pressed when people are trying to take the edge off a humorous obser-
 The Comic Intrusion 7

vation that might offend, when the joke has "gone too far." The conven-
tional formula by which this is done is the statement, "But it was only a
joke!" Put differently, "This was not meant to be taken seriously!" Those
to whom this explanation is made—that is, those who were the butts of
the joke—are then expected to acknowledge that no offense was in-
tended and that none is taken. If they make this concession grudgingly,
they implicitly testify to the fact that the conventional line between
serious and unserious discourse is not as clear as is generally assumed.
In other words, they are probably correct in suspecting that the joke that
"went too far" touched a raw reality and therefore is much more than
only a joke.
In trying to become clearer about the empirical location of the comic,
we can make use of two authors, Alfred Schutz and Johan Huizinga, a
philosopher and a historian, respectively. Neither was particularly con-
cerned about the comic as such, but some of their ideas can be helpful at
this juncture of our reflections.
One of Schutz's major contributions was his delineation of different
sectors of what human beings experience as reality, most succinctly in
his essay "On Multiple Realities." 1 He was particularly interested in the
relation between the reality of ordinary, everyday life, which he called
the "paramount reality," and those enclaves within the latter, which he
called "finite provinces of meaning." The reason for the first term is
quite clear: This reality is paramount because it is the one that, most of
the time, is most real to us—in his words, "the world of daily life which
the wide-awake, grown-up man who acts in it and upon it amidst his
fellow-men experiences within the natural attitude as a reality." 2 The
second term is less felicitous; perhaps Schutz would have been better
advised to use a term of William James, which he cites in the beginning
of his essay—"subuniverses." In any case, finite provinces of meaning
or subuniverses are experienced as the individual temporarily "emi-
grates" from the paramount reality of everyday life. The latter is per-
ceived, most of the time, as most real because it is the reality within
which we engage in actions with palpable consequences and which we
share with the largest number of other human beings. Its accent of
reality is strongest and most enduring, so that the other zones of experi-
ence exist, so to speak, as islands within it. Yet these other experiences,
while they are attended to, have their own "accent of reality." As one
shifts from the paramount reality to one of the finite provinces of mean-
ing and then back again, each transition is experienced as a kind of
shock. Examples of such finite provinces of meaning are the worlds of
dreams, of the theater, of any intense esthetic experience (say, of being
drawn into a painting or a piece of music), of a child's playing, of
religious experience, or of the scientist engaged in a passionate intellec-
8 Anatomy of the Comic

tual pursuit. And, indeed, Schutz gives an additional example (not elab-
orated upon): " . . . . relaxing into laughter if, in listening to a joke, we
are for a short time ready to accept the fictitious world of the jest as a
reality in relation to which the world of our daily life takes on the
character of foolishness." 3
Is the comic a finite province of meaning in Schutz's sense, and if so,
how does it differ from other finite provinces of meaning?
Each finite province of meaning, according to Schutz, has a number
of characteristics: A specific "cognitive style," different from that of
everyday life; a consistency within its specific boundaries; an exclusive
sense of reality, which cannot be readily translated into that of any other
finite province of meaning or of the paramount reality, so that one can
only enter or leave it by means of a "leap" (here Schutz employs the
term of Kierkegaard to denote the passage from unbelief into religious
faith); a different form of consciousness or attentionality; a specific sus-
pension of doubt (or epoché, to use the phenomenological term); also,
specific forms of spontaneity, of self-experience, of sociality, and of time
perspective (here Schutz uses Henri Bergson's term durée).
These characteristics may at first seem overly abstract. Let us concre-
tize by applying them to what is perhaps the most universal finite prov-
ince of meaning—the world of dreams. As we dream, we are clearly
moving in a world whose rules are radically different from those of
awake everyday life; a different logic prevails, as it were. Things that are
impossible in the one world are taken for granted in the other. For
example, we can be in two places simultaneously, we can enter another
person's thoughts, we can move forward and backward in time, we can
communicate with dead people. Yet all these things, which would be
dismissed as illusions in the paramount reality, are experienced in a
matter-of-course, taken-for-granted way in the world of a dream. While
it lasts, the dream is real, indeed more real than the awake world; we
suspend doubt for its duration. We move spontaneously in this dream
world, as if we had always known it. And, obviously, our sense of self,
of other people, and of time differs sharply from the manner in which
these exist in the awake world. Most revealingly, the transition from one
world to the other is experienced as a sort of shock, or leap. This be-
comes very evident in the experience of waking up from an intense
dream. We then return to reality in distinctive stages, the reality at issue
being, of course, precisely the paramount reality of everyday life; as we
leap out of the dream, the contours of the everyday world at first appear
unreal—the bed on which we lie, the furniture of the bedroom, the
plans for the day ahead. We may then engage in various more or less
ritualized activities in order to shift back the accent of reality to this other
world. We look at the clock to see what time it is (it is morning in the
 The Comic Intrusion 9

"real world"; it was evening in the dream). We look out of the window
(this is Boston; in the dream it was Vienna). We get up, get something to
eat perhaps, speak with someone in person or on the telephone (this is
my wife here, not the dead grandfather in my dream). And so on.
Gradually or quickly, depending on temperament, the paramount real-
ity reasserts itself (Jane Everyperson, as we have seen, returns gradu-
ally; John manages the transition in one energetic jump). If all goes well,
by breakfast time the reality of the dream will have faded and the clam-
orous world of everyday life (newspaper, noisy children, the agenda for
the day) will have reasserted itself. We may then (though sometimes it is
difficult to put into words) tell others about our dream. But we will
reassure them and ourselves that it was, after all, only a dream.
Both the similarities and the differences between the reality of dream-
ing and of the comic are readily evident. One can compare a dream with,
say, a joke that may itself have a certain dreamlike quality. Imagine a
dissident in the former Soviet Union, who has a dream in which he tells
off the most powerful Communists—a case of wish fulfillment par excel-
lence. Then, later on that day, he sits with a group of fellow dissidents
and tells an anti-Communist joke. Soviet-dominated Europe was a great
producer of jokes, as oppressive political situations often are (we will
have occasion later on to look at the political uses of humor). The follow-
ing is taken, more or less at random, from a rich reservoir of such jokes:

Gorbachev wakes up and looks out of the window at the sun.

"Good morning, sun," he says. "Do you have a message for me?"
"Yes, Comrade President," replies the sun. "It is dawn over the Soviet
Union."
At midday Gorbachev looks out of the window again and says, "Well,
sun, do you have another message for me?"
"Yes, Comrade President," says the sun. "It is high noon over the
Soviet Union."
In the evening Gorbachev looks out once more and asks the same
question.
The sun replies, "I'm in the West now. Go to hell, Mike!"

The similarities are there: Both the dream and the joke are enclosed
worlds within which the reality of everyday Soviet life is suspended.
Different logics apply, both in society and in nature—the docile citizen
becomes a defiant rebel, a man can converse with the sun. The catego-
ries of time and space, the relation to oneself and to others, are all
different. And there is the shock upon reentering the world of everyday
life. The dissident wakes up, looks at his watch, has breakfast, reads the
newspaper (the same old Pravda—alas), and the massive reality of
everyday life in the Soviet Union reasserts itself. His rebellious encoun-
10 Anatomy of the Comic

ter with the regime was, unfortunately, only a dream. Similarly, having
told his joke, the dissident finds himself jolted back to the paramount
reality. A likely side effect of this shock is the sudden suspicion that one
of the listeners may be an informer. He may then laugh apologetically
and say, "Of course, this is only a joke." This may or may not impress
the authorities to whom the informer reports.
But there are also differences: Most obviously, the dream is a solitary
experience, the joke-telling a social one. This is related to the fact that
the world of the dream is more self-enclosed, with (while it lasts) a
stronger accent of reality. The little world of the joke is much more
loosely inserted into the world of everyday life, is therefore more fugi-
tive, more vulnerable. Also (though this is less important), the dream is
a passive experience, it "happens" to the individual. The joke-telling is a
deliberate act; the individual "makes it happen." (This is true in this
instance, as in all instances of joke-telling; it is less important for a
general understanding of the comic, because there are many instances
where the comic also happens to an individual, where it, so to speak,
overcomes the individual just as a dream does.)
Take one more example, this time a joke with no obvious political
content (though, conceivably, it could have political undertones in cer-
tain situations):

This optimist has died and wakes up in hell. It turns out that hell is a
vast ocean of feces in which the damned are submerged up to their chins.
The optimist looks around and addresses the person next to him who has
evidently been around for a longer time: "So, this is what hell is? A big
ocean of feces?"
"Yes," says the neighbor. "This is what it is."
The optimist thinks for a moment, then says, "Well, at least we're only
buried up to our chins."
At this moment a strange noise is heard in the distance. Putt-putt. Putt-
putt.
"What is this noise?" asks the optimist.
His neighbor replies, "That is the devil in his motorboat."

Here, indeed, is all the stuff for a nightmare—death, hell, an ocean of

feces, being buried, the devil. The aforementioned similarities and dif-
ferences between a dream of hell and a joke involving hell pertain here
as well, but there is an additional, significant difference. The dream of
hell, we may assume, is one of pure terror. In the joke, however, the
terror is, as it were, suspended or bracketed. The joke has a benign
quality that the nightmare absolutely lacks. Perhaps this is the "sympa-
thetic quality" mentioned in their description of humor by the OED
lexicographers chuckling away in their Bloomsbury bed-and-breakfast.
 The Comic Intrusion 11

One may say now that there are different types of finite provinces of
meaning, the difference consisting in the degree of emigration from the
reality of everyday life. The dream is probably the most completely
enclosed type, the dreamer having emigrated completely from the para-
mount reality. It is not possible to be simultaneously awake and asleep
(though, of course, in the transition there are intermediate stages).
There are experiences of the comic that have a very similar quality—for
example, sitting in a darkened theater and being completely absorbed in
the comedy being enacted on the stage. Most of the time, however, the
comic is experienced in a less total, less enclaved manner. It appears
within everyday life, momentarily transforms the latter, then quickly
disappears again. It may even be a sort of "subtext" within everyday life,
a pianissimo accompaniment to the "serious" themes to which one must
attend in the "real world." The comic, then, definitely constitutes a finite
province of meaning in a Schutzian sense, but it is a finite province of
meaning with quite distinctive traits.
It may be further useful to compare the experience of the comic with
two other realms of experience that also, clearly, constitute finite prov-
inces of meaning—the experiences of the esthetic and of sexuality. They
too are capable of creating realities that, for a time, are exclusive and fully
enclosed. Thus one may be totally absorbed in esthetic contemplation or
in a particularly intense sexual scene. Schutz (who was from Vienna, that
most theatrical of cities) liked to refer to the experience of the theatergoer;
As the lights go out and the curtain rises, the reality of everyday life fades
away and what goes on up there on the stage seems to be the only reality
there is. And as the curtain falls and the lights go on again, one returns to
the allegedly more real world, typically in stages. Mutatis mutandis (the
nontheatergoer might be tempted to exclaim, "vive la difference!"), the
same might be said of an intense sexual experience: The clothes come off,
and for a while there seems to be nothing more real than what the two (or
the several) naked bodies are doing to each other. As the clothes are put
back on again, or even earlier, the reality of everyday life will reassert
itself in its full nonsexual repertoire of themes and roles. This is not to say
that these two "worlds of phantasms" (Schutz's phrase) may not be
rudely interrupted. There may be a fire alarm in the theater, or an irritated
neighbor may bang on the wall of the love nest. Indeed, a sudden
eruption of one's sense of humor may critically disturb either experience
and suddenly deprive it of its unique reality: One of the actors on the
stage may forget his lines and utter a hilarious spoonerism, or one of the
participants in the orgy may slip and fall off the bed. But, after all, even
the most intense dream can be suddenly interrupted by something that
happens in the real world.
All the same, what the comic has in common with esthetic and sexual
12 Anatomy of the Comic

experience is precisely the aforementioned fugitive or subtextual quali-

ty. In the middle of a business negotiation one may suddenly be over-
come by the beauty of the view from the window and, for a moment, the
serious business at issue may fade out. Similarly, one may find oneself
mentally undressing the person with whom one is negotiating this par-
ticular business transaction and, for a moment, this angle on the situa-
tion may be more interesting than the business deal being negotiated.
The serious business person will, of course, quickly suppress these situ-
ationally irrelevant intrusions and return attention to the ongoing nego-
tiation. Still, there are unserious individuals who will forget themselves
and give in to their esthetic or erotic impulses; such individuals (unless,
perhaps, they are already at the very top) are unlikely to have a brilliant
business career.
Like the esthetic and the sexual realities, the reality of the comic can
relate to everyday life in nuanced ways. It may lead one to escape
everyday life, for a moment at least, perhaps for longer periods of time,
in some cases permanently. It may also challenge the reality of everyday
life; the example of the political joke (subversive by definition) well
illustrates this possibility. Also, it may even enhance everyday life if it
appears in a nuanced, moderate form: A light joke may actually facilitate
the ongoing business negotiation, as may the esthetically pleasing decor
of the board room or the mild frisson of sexual attraction. In these cases,
of course, the comic, the esthetic, and the sexual are experienced in a
highly controlled, domesticated form. They are not allowed to interfere
with the mundane business at hand. The mores and manners of society
are always available for such containment. The paramount reality of
everyday life always defends itself against the ever-present danger of
being swept away by those other realities lurking behind its facades. In
this sense, the comic, the esthetic, and the sexual realities are always, at
least potentially, subversive. If allowed to emerge in their full force, they
are capable of inundating the serious concerns of everyday life with their
alien logics. The artist and the libertine are potentially dangerous fig-
ures; so is the virtuoso of the comic. But, of course, the danger of
subversion is mutual. Everyday life is threatened by the finite provinces
of meaning; conversely, it in turn poses a constant danger to the fragile
reality of every finite province of meaning. In the normal course of
events, everyday life is the stronger party.
Before we conclude this preliminary exploration of the comic intru-
sion into everyday life, we may usefully compare the comic with a
related but distinct phenomenon that is also seen as antithetical to
seriousness—the phenomenon of play. On this we can use as a guide
the by-now classic work Homo Ludens by the Dutch historian Johan
Huizinga. 4
Huizinga's book proposes a daring and far-reaching thesis, namely,
 The Comic Intrusion 13

that all human culture, beginning with language, has its origin in play.
This thesis, convincing or not, does not have to preoccupy us here. But
Huizinga's delineation of the ludic phenomenon is so close to our pre-
sent topic that we ought to take it into account. From the beginning of
his argument Huizinga insists on the autonomous, the sui generis quality
of play. He actually starts out by comparing play with laughter and the
comic, then insists that it is different from either: Play does not usually
provoke laughter among either the players or any possible spectators,
and there is usually nothing funny about people at play. But neither
does play fit under other categories of human experience: "Play lies
outside the antithesis of wisdom and folly, and equally outside those of
truth and falsehood, good and evil. Although it is a non-material activity
it has no moral function. The valuations of vice and virtue do not apply
here." 5 And, Huizinga adds, play is also different from esthetic experi-
ence, though there are some affinities. For our purposes, though,
Huizinga's most important observations are to the effect that, if one
were to use the Schutzian category once more, play is clearly a finite
province of meaning to which individuals can emigrate from the reality
of everyday life: "Play is not "ordinary" or "real" life. It is rather a
stepping out of "real" life into "a temporary sphere of activity with a
disposition all of its own." It is "an intermezzo, an interlude in our daily
life." And again: "Play is distinct from "ordinary" life both as to locality
and duration. This is the third main characteristic [after the previously
mentioned ones of freedom and disinterestedness] of play; its secluded-
ness, its limitedness. It is "played out" within certain limits of time and
place. It contains its own course and meaning." 6
The similarities with the comic are obvious. The comic too is an
interlude—literally, an in-between playing or in-between game. In be-
tween what? Well, clearly, in between the serious, mundane activities of
everyday life. This quality, as Huizinga develops at great length, applies
to all forms of play, from the simplest to the most complex—a child
playing alone with some pebbles or with toys, a group of children play-
ing a game together (Jean Piaget and George Herbert Mead have shown
how crucial such playing is in the socialization process), and adults
playing any number of games—poker or chess, soccer or baseball, all
the way to the sacred games of religious and political ritual. In every one
of these activities the players step out of ordinary life into a separate
reality with its own logic, rules, distribution of roles, and coordinates of
space and time. As the players reenter ordinary life—say, winners and
losers shake hands—they may also say, as after a dream or a joke, "It
was only a game."
But the dissimilarities are also important. Perhaps most important:
The comic is more exclusively human than play. Animals play; animals
do not laugh or joke. Also, homo ludens has a greater capacity to create an
14 Anatomy of the Comic

enclosed reality than homo ridens. To repeat the terms we have used
before, the comic is more fugitive, more interwoven with the fabric of
everyday life; conversely, play is less likely to be a subtle subtext, rather
requires a more deliberate separation from ordinary activities. Playing, it
seems, must always be deliberately initiated (this is what Huizinga
means by its freedom); it is made to happen. The comic can also be
deliberately constructed, as in the telling of a joke or the staging of a
comedy, but very often it simply happens to or befalls the individual.
Conceivably, the experience of the comic is rooted in the human propen-
sity to play. It may even be describable as a form of playfulness, but if
so, it is a very distinctive form. Perhaps this distinctiveness is disclosed
by the fact that only human beings laugh, while they share with animals
the capacity to play. Finally and very significantly, while there are per-
ceptions of all sorts involved in playing, the latter remains primarily a
form of action. By contrast, while the comic may be represented by spe-
cific acts, it is primarily a form of perception, a uniquely human one. The
comic is perceived as the perception of an otherwise undisclosed dimen-
sion of reality—not just of its own reality (as a player perceives the
reality of a game), but of reality as such. The comic intrusion is the
occurrence of this perception in every possible realm of experience.
The comic is an exclusively human phenomenon. It is also universally
human. It goes without saying that the experience of the comic differs as
between human cultures. To paraphrase Pascal, what is funny on one
side of the Pyrenees is not funny on the other side. The same can be
said, though, of esthetic experience or sexual attractiveness, and indeed
(as the original statement by Pascal had it) of convictions of truth and
error. This cultural relativity of the comic experience is important, but it
tells us little if anything about the cognitive validity of its alleged percep-
tion. And it leaves us with the question we shelved some pages back:
the question of just what it is that is supposedly perceived.

Notes

1. Alfred Schutz, "On Multiple Realities," in Collected Papers, Vol. I (The

Hague: Nijhoff, 1962), 207ff.
2. Ibid., 208.
3. Ibid., 231.
4. Johan Huizinga, Homo Ludens: A Study of the Play-Element in Culture (Bos-
ton: Beacon, 1955).
5. Ibid., 6.
6. Ibid., 8f.
 2
Philosophers of the Comic, and
the Comedy of Philosophy

The history of Western philosophy begins with a joke: This is only a

slight exaggeration. In the dialogue Theaetetus, Plato puts the following
anecdote into the mouth of Socrates:

[T]he jest which the clever witty Thracian handmaid is said to have made
about Thaïes, when he fell into a well as he was looking up at the stars.
She said that he was so eager to know what was going on in heaven that
he could not see what was before his feet. 1

And Plato adds the observation that this mockery applies to anyone
who gets involved in philosophy. Actually, the anecdote has an earlier
version. Plato took it from Aesop's Fables, where the fall is attributed to
an anonymous astronomer. But why Thaïes? And is there any reason
why the handmaid (who, in some versions of the story, is described as
being pretty as well as clever) should be from Thrace?
Attributing the prototypical pratfall to Thaïes places it at the very
dawn of Greek philosophy. Thaïes of Miletus was one of the early pre-
Socratics, living from the mid-seventh to the mid-sixth century B . C . E .
Herodotus puts him at the top of his list of Seven Sages. Thaïes is
known, among other things, for his belief that water is the primal ele-
ment and for his statement that the world is full of gods. He predicted a
solar eclipse in 585 B.C.E., a feat that, no doubt, necessitated a lot of sky-
gazing. If Plato wanted to suggest that the philosophical enterprise
lends itself to being laughed at, he could not have chosen a better phi-
losopher to make his point. It is less clear why the clever (and, one
would like to think, pretty) handmaid should come from Thrace. Unen-
cumbered by the weight of classical scholarship, one may speculate.
Thrace, it so happens, is the land where the cult of Dionysus is sup-
posed to have originated. If this speculative interpretation is given cred-
ence, the little anecdote confronts the protophilosopher with the proto-
16 Anatomy of the Comic

comedian, throwing light on the origins of Greek comedy as well as

Greek philosophy.
Classical scholars, of course, disagree about almost anything. But
there is widespread agreement to the effect that both comedy and trag-
edy originated in the cult of Dionysus. 2 The former, one may suppose,
has the more profound Dionysian roots. Aristotle states that the word
comedy derives from komodia, the song of the komos, which was the fren-
zied crowd participating in the Dionysian rites. Classical literature is full
of descriptions of these rites—ecstatic, orgiastic, violating all conven-
tional decencies in both words and deeds, and for all these reasons
eminently dangerous. Dionysus is the god who violates all ordinary
boundaries, as do his devotees, who become satyr-like creatures, a gro-
tesque hybrid of humans and animals. Comedy retains these Dionysian
features, even when in later times they are toned down—domesticated
or defanged, as it were. The comic experience is ecstatic, if not in the
archaic sense of a frenzied trance, in a mellower form of ek-stasis, "stand-
ing outside" the ordinary assumptions and habits of everyday life. The
comic experience is orgiastic, if not in the old sense of sexual promis-
cuity, in the metaphorical sense of joining together what convention and
morality would keep apart. It debunks all pretensions, including the
pretensions of the sacred. The comic, therefore, is dangerous to all es-
tablished order. It must be controlled, contained in some sort of enclave.
It could be said that comedy as a performing art is already such a con-
tainment of the comic experience, ritualizing it in socially acceptable
forms and confining it within the boundaries of the dramatic stage. The
spectators laugh in the theater, and that may keep them from laughing
in and laughing at the solemn performances of religion and the state.
In Greek mythology and religion, Dionysus, the god of darkness and
primeval passions, is commonly counterposed to Apollo, to the god of
sunlight and reason. This counterposition was made famous in modern
philosophy by Nietzsche, in The Birth of Tragedy out of the Spirit of Music,
and Nietzsche's distinction between the Dionysian and Apollonian ele-
ments in human culture has been widely applied. Yet the two gods,
though opposites, are also linked—as are comedy and tragedy. It was at
Delphi, Apollo's principal sanctuary, that Dionysian rites were incorpo-
rated into the worship of the god of sunny reasonableness. 3 It is not
difficult to imagine how this might have come about; indeed, it is pos-
sible to imagine how a piquant comedy could be written around this
event. Imagine the priests engaged in the decorous ceremonies honor-
ing the presiding deity of the Delphi sanctuary, and then imagine their
annoyance whenever a Dionysian komos would barge in and disrupt the
orderly proceedings with its obscene shrieks and ecstatic convulsions.
Then one day a wise and somewhat Machiavellian priest had a bright
 Philosophers of the Comic 17

idea. "Look," he said to his colleagues, "we clearly cannot get rid of
these terrible people. Let us instead put them on the payroll and give
them a safe place in the program." And so the Dionysian comedians
were allocated their own slot in the sanctuary's agenda—say, Tuesday
and Thursday, from three to five in the afternoon. During those times
they could shriek and convulse to their hearts' content, leaving the non-
Dionysian staff to go about their serious business the rest of the week.
The basic formula here is that incorporation entails containment. It is, by
the way, an excellent formula for containing all sorts of revolutionaries,
but that is another story.
Both philosophy and comedy came to bloom in fifth-century Athens.
Socrates probably lived from 469 to 399 b.c.e.; Aristophanes' first play
was performed in 427 (and, of course, Aristophanes had some very nasty
things to say about Socrates in a later play). But before comedy was
established as a separate dramatic form, it was a part of tragic dramas—
if you will, it had its own slot within the tragic program. That slot was a
so-called satyr play, Dionysian in style, which followed the tragic perfor-
mances as a kind of postlude. In the most literal sense of that phrase,
it provided comic relief. Relief from what? Well, relief precisely from
the utmost seriousness of tragedy. After the tears came laughter. This
laughter did not annul or deny the emotions evoked by the tragic specta-
cle. But presumably it made these emotions more bearable, permitting
the spectators to leave the theater and to return to their ordinary pur-
suits with a modicum of equanimity. Thus the domestication of the
comic ecstasy was both psychologically and politically useful.
Given the ubiquity of the comic in human experience, one would
expect that philosophers paid a lot of attention to it. Surprisingly, this is
not the case—not in Greek philosophy, and not since then. Perhaps this
is a case of Thaïes failing into the well over and over again. Still, the
manner in which philosophers have both dealt and failed to deal with the
comic experience does help to advance an understanding of the phenom-
enon. In other words, the present chapter has some justification.
Plato's Theaetetus does not primarily deal with the comic; the anecdote
about Thaïes and the Thracian handmaid is more in the nature of an
aside. Plato did write another dialogue, the Philebus, in which comedy is
dealt with at some length. 4 The overall question discussed here is
whether a life of pleasure is to be preferred over a life of intelligence;
Philebus (literally "Loveboy") argues for the former, Socrates for the
latter. The topic of comedy is raised in the context of Socrates' argument
that there can be combinations of pleasure and distress. The audiences
at both tragedy and comedy enjoy their tears and their laughter. But the
pleasure derived from comedy is of a particular kind: it is based on
malice, at enjoyment over the misfortune of others. Comedy ridicules
18 Anatomy of the Comic

those who think that they are richer, stronger, more handsome, or more
intelligent than in fact they are, and the audience enjoys these discrep-
ancies. Socrates and Philebus had agreed earlier that malice is a form of
distress (not very convincingly, one may say), so that the enjoyment of
the audience could be seen as supporting Socrates' view that pleasure
and distress can be combined. This issue may not be terribly interesting,
but the Philebus does point to the debunking theme in the comic experi-
ence, a theme that was to arouse enduring interest in later analysts of
the phenomenon. The pratfall, as it were, is pointed to as a central
element in the comic experience. The notion of malice as underlying the
enjoyment of comedy was also to continue in later discussions. Since
malice is hardly an admirable quality, this also raises an ethical issue: Is
there something morally reprehensible about comic laughter? Plato, it
may be said, was obsessed with the importance of order, a most serious
business. It stands to reason, then, that he would have his doubts about
laughter.
Aristotle had a good deal to say about both tragedy and comedy,
mainly in his Poetics. Unfortunately, the second book of that work, in
which there was an extended treatment of comedy, has been lost (a fact
that is made much of in Umberto Eco's novel The Name of the Rose). But
here is one passage from the extant text of the Poetics that, at any rate,
gives some clues as to Aristotle's view:

As for comedy, it is . . . an imitation of men worse than the average;

worse, however, not as regards any and every sort of fault, but only as
regards one particular kind, the Ridiculous, which is a species of the Ugly.
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. 5

Comedy here is seen as an "imitation" (mimesis), that is, as a specific

representation of reality. "The Ugly", "mistake", "deformity"—all these
terms refer to a basic discrepancy, a rupture in the fabric of reality. The
comic representation discloses the discrepancy; again, one may say, the
pratfall appears as a primal comic experience. These themes are also
present in Plato. Aristotle adds another point: Different from tragedy,
comedy allows the contemplation of these aspects of life in a painless
manner. Aristotle's idea about the purging quality, the catharsis, of
tragedy is well known: tragedy purges its spectators by pity and fear.
Did Aristotle believe that there was also a comic catharsis? If so, would it
be a purging by pity without fear? Eco is not the only one who would like
to know. In any case, there is an interesting and probably correct insight
here: The comic experience is painless, or at least relatively painless as
compared with tragedy, because it undertakes a greater abstraction from
 Philosophers of the Comic 19

the empirical reality of human life. Aristotle seems to believe that, be-
cause of this, comedy is more harmless than tragedy. If so, in this he
would have been in error.
The themes raised by Plato and Aristotle apparently resonated
throughout classical antiquity, whenever authors looked at the phenom-
enon of the comic. Cicero may be taken as representative of this continu-
ity. Here is a key formulation from his treatise on oratory:

[T]he seat and as it were province of what is laughed at. . . lies in a certain
offensiveness and deformity; for these sayings are laughed at solely or
chiefly which point out and designate something offensive in an inoffen-
sive manner. 6

Cicero is concerned with public speaking rather than with the theater
(and not only in this treatise; he was, after all, primarily a lawyer and
politician), which somewhat shifts the emphasis. Again, though, there
is mention of deformity, of an underlying discrepancy. But Cicero's
interest in the present context is mainly practical. He advises caution in
the use of ridicule by an orator, since it might offend the feelings of his
audience in a way that will undermine the intended purpose of the
oratory. He discusses a long list of jokes used in speeches by various
Roman public figures (most of these jokes require elaborate footnotes to
be comprehensible today and very few will be taken as funny by a
modern reader). Here once more the ethical question is raised: Are there
occasions when one should not use ridicule? Beyond such moral and
practical matters, Cicero adds another perspective on the comic phe-
nomenon: The most common kind of joke, he maintains, is when we
expect one thing and another is said. Ambiguity, that is, is an important
element of the comic. Cicero also discusses what he calls "ironic dissim-
ulation," when one says the reverse of what one means. Cicero would
certainly have appreciated the irony in Shakespeare's rendition of Mark
Antony's oration on the occasion of Caesar's funeral—"I come to bury
Caesar, not to praise him" (though Cicero, a staunch republican of the
old Roman type, was hardly in sympathy with Mark Antony's politics).
The classical approach to the comic, essentially sour and troubled by
moral scruples, continues in early Christian and medieval thought. 7
Neither the patristic authors nor the scholastics had much good to say
about laughter, which was frequently interpreted as a reprehensible
diversion from the proper Christian task of weeping over the sins of this
world and getting ready for the joys of the next world. Needless to say,
this does not mean that there was no laughter and no sense of the comic
during all this time. If nothing else (and there was much else), there was
the exuberant comic explosion of the carnival, a festival in true apostolic
20 Anatomy of the Comic

succession from the Dionysian orgy. We will have to look at this later in
this book. The Christian philosophers had little to add in this area to the
perceptions of their pagan predecessors. It is only with the coming of
modernity that some new themes appear in the writings on the comic by
Western philosophers. 8
At the very beginning of the modern era stands a comic masterpiece,
Erasmus's The Praise of Folli/. Itself an extended joke, it takes its form
from the medieval carnival, which was also known as the Feast of Fools.
The idea of the book occurred to Erasmus in the summer of 1509 while
riding across the Swiss Alps on a journey from Italy to England. He
wrote the book while staying with his friend Thomas More in London
(there is a word play in the title, alluding to More's name—the Greek
word for folly is moria). Erasmus was ambivalent in his later attitude
toward this work, and defended himself against its critics by saying that
he did not really mean what he wrote there, that the book was intended
to be an innocent jest. If so, the joke was finally on him, since it is this
book rather than any other of his many writings that posterity has come
to consider his greatest accomplishment.
The book is a long sermon by personified Folly (Stultitia) herself,
dressed in the cap and bells of the fool's professional attire. Folly pro-
claims herself as a divinity, "fountain and nursery of life," and argues at
length that all good things in life depend on her. It is through Folly that
men can live spontaneously, unreasoningly, and it is only in this way
that life can be tolerable. Through the words of Folly (if you will, in her
comic perspective), all the pretensions of mankind are unmasked. Eras-
mus, who had had unpleasant experiences with academics, especially
those from the University of Paris, takes particular delight in debunking
the pretensions of philosophers and other intellectuals (whom he de-
scribes as "those who strive for eternal life by issuing books"):

People still make much of that celebrated saying of Plato, that the state will
be happy when philosophers become kings or kings become philosophers.
In fact, if you consult the historians, you will find that no prince ever
played a state more than when the scepter fell into the hands of some
pseudophilosopher or devotee of literature. 9

And here is Erasmus's characterization of the philosophers:

How delightfully they are deluded as they build up numberless worlds; as

they measure the sun, the moon, the stars and their orbits as if they were
using a ruler and plumb line; as they recite the causes of lightning, winds,
eclipses, and other unfathomable phenomena, without the slightest hesi-
tation, as if they were confidential secretaries to Nature herself, the archi-
tect of all things, or as if they came to us straight from the council chamber
 Philosophers of the Comic 21

of the gods. At the same time, Nature has a grand laugh at them and their
conjectures. For that they have actually discovered nothing at all is clear
enough from this fact alone: on every single point they disagree violently
and irreconcilably among themselves. Though they know nothing at all,
they profess to know everything. 1 0

The same passage goes on to say that these philosophers, who claim
to see universal ideas, sometimes cannot see a ditch or a stone in their
path. The English translator footnoted this with a reference to Aesop
and to the Theaetetus: Thaïes rides—or rather, pratfalls—again.
Folly ranges across a wide swath of human life and thought in her
sermon. Much of the satire continues to bite more than four centuries
later, and therefore continues to give pleasure. But for the present con-
siderations Erasmus's book is important for another reason: Perhaps for
the first time, here is the presentation of what could be called a full-
blown comic worldview. It is that of a world turned upside down, grossly
distorted, and precisely for that reason more revealing of some underly-
ing truths than the conventional, right-side-up view.
Erasmus' modern compatriot, Anton Zijderveld, has pointed to the
same worldview in the title of his book on the sociology of the Fool—
Reality in a Looking-Glass (a work that will be examined later in this book).
Erasmus, as it were, summarized and canonized the perceptions of the
world that a long line of jesters, court-fools and comic actors has adum-
brated before. Perhaps for the first time, Erasmus suggests that the
comic experience (which is just what Folly personifies) can provide an
alternate and possibly more profound view of the nature of things.
Descartes, whose work falls into the first half of the seventeenth
century, is frequently considered to be the first modern philosopher
(there are other candidates for this title, but an adjudication of the sev-
eral claims is hardly the concern of this book). He had some things to say
about laughter in his Passions of the Soul; they are mildly interesting.
Descartes thought that laughter is a kind of physiological malfunction (a
view that, with some reformulation, may still be valid today) and that
what happened when people laugh is a sudden acceleration in the flow
of blood (this may have to be dismissed as erroneous). Somewhat more
interesting than Descartes' fanciful physiology is his view of what
causes the bodily mishap of laughter: The shock caused when one
comes on something surprising and possibly dangerous; he calls this "a
surprise of admiration":

"It is when we encounter an object that surprises us, which we judge to

be new or different from things we know or different from what we
suppose that it should be. This results in our admiring it and being aston-
ished by it." 1 1
22 Anatomy of the Comic

This suggests two aspects of the comic experience that were to be

elaborated in later interpretations: the distinctive interaction of mind
and body in the act of laughing, and the sensation of shock that triggers
the act. These are valid insights, whatever the scientific status of Des-
cartes's ideas concerning human physiology.
For whatever reasons, the seventeenth and eighteenth centuries wit-
nessed an explosion of interest in the phenomenon of the comic across
Europe. In France this coincided with the appearance of Molière's come-
dies. The premiere of his Tartuffe was performed in Paris in 1664 and was
followed by a vociferous controversy. It was attacked as being morally
dangerous and harmful to religion, and Catholic circles kept it from the
stage for five years. Molière defended himself in the preface to a new
edition of the comedy in 1669. The key sentence of this defense stated
that "the usefulness of comedy is that it corrects the vices of m e n . " 1 2 In
direct contradiction with the long line of pagan and Christian critics of
the comic, there came now a spirited defense of comedy as a moral
enterprise.
The classical skepticism as to the moral status of the comic, however,
had not disappeared. In England, Thomas Hobbes, in Human Nature
(1640) and Leviathan (1651), had some nasty things to say about laughter.
Echoing Plato, he sees laughter as one of man's worst attributes, its
purpose being to boost self-esteem at the expense of the less fortunate.
This negative view was much criticized, especially by the Earl of
Shaftesbury (An Essay on the Freedom of Wit and Humor, 1714), w h o sees
wit, if in good taste, as a means of differentiating between truth and
falsehood, and between virtue and vice. Wit, therefore, is socially use-
ful, indeed has a philosophical and ethical significance. The debate con-
tinued throughout the eighteenth century. 1 3 In 1776, in On Laughter and
Ludicrous Composition, James Beattie opined that laughter is caused by
"an uncommon mixture of relation and contrariety, exhibited or sup-
posed to be united, in the same assemblage." Laughter, he thought,
became increasingly refined—due, among other things, to the increas-
ing influence of women in polite society. This, he believed, was a very
good thing. Somewhat earlier, Francis Hutcheson (Thoughts on Laughter)
put forth what became the key term in the evolving theory of the
comic—laughter, he argued, is the response to a perception of
incongruity.
In the German-speaking world, as in France, the debate was closely
related to disagreements over the moral status of comic dramas. Partic-
ularly at issue were the popular harlequin (Hanswurst) comedies, which
derived from the medieval tradition of Folly and provided the occasion
for more or less open criticisms of established institutions. Thus in 1770
the Austrian government banned all Hanswurst performances in Vienna,
with only partial success. But the debate over the moral and political
 Philosophers of the Comic 23

dangers of comedy inevitably led to reflections about the intrinsic nature

of the comic. In other words, ethics led to epistemology: Is the comic
experience a moral good? But what is it in the first place? 14
Moses Mendelsohn (Philosophical Writings, 1761) thought that laugh-
ter is caused by the contrast between perfection and imperfection,
though he also emphasized the subjectivity in the perception of such
contrast—what makes one person laugh, saddens another. Justus
Moeser (Harlequin, or Defense of the Grotesque-Comic, 1761) saw laughter as
a fundamental human need, caused by the spectacle of size without
strength:

A man falls to the ground. Next to him a child also falls. One laughs at the
former, because one would attribute strength to his size, enough strength
to prevent his fall. By contrast, the child's fall evokes pity. 1 5

Kant, who wrote about everything, also wrote about laughter. Signifi-
cantly, he did so in the context of an esthetic theory, that is, a theory
about the nature of the beautiful. This allocation of the comic to the field
of esthetics was going to continue in philosophy for a while. It is signifi-
cant because, however grudgingly, it concedes the epistemological sta-
tus of the comic experience: It is not just a physiological or psychological
process, but also involves a distinct perception of reality. Thus in his
Critique of Judgment Kant defines beauty as the object of a representation
"without concepts." 16 Presumably Kant would not have been happy
with this reformulation, but one might say that the comic experience,
like esthetic experience (and perhaps as a variant of the latter), provides
a perception of reality different from that provided by reason. To use
Pascal's famous phrase, the comic would then appear as a form of the
"reason of the heart." In his extended discussion of laughter, Kant fol-
lows Descartes in describing what he thought to be its physiology. 17
This one may safely omit. He also stresses the medicinal use of laughter:
It comes out of a feeling of health, it furthers the business of living
(Lebensgeschaeft) of the body, and thus shows that the soul can become
a physician for the body. But when he gets to the epistemological
question—the question of what it is that provokes laughter—Kant ex-
pands on Hutcheson's key concept of incongruity: Laughter is caused by
the perception of "something contradictory" and (this is Kant's original
contribution) by the "sudden transformation of a tense expectation into
nothing." To illustrate this "sudden transformation . . . into nothing"
("ein Affekt aus der ploetzlichen Verwandlung einer gespannten Erwartung in
nichts"), Kant tells a number of stories (or, if you will, jokes):

An American Indian watches an Englishman open a bottle of ale, which

flows out in the form of foam. The Indian cries out in astonishment. When
the Englishman asks what there is to be astonished about this, the Indian
24 Anatomy of the Comic

replies, "I'm not astonished by the foam coming out of the bottle, but by
how you managed to put it into the bottle in the first place."
The heir of a rich relative wants to give him a festive funeral and hires
professional mourners. He complains, "The more money I give them to
look sad, the happier they look."
Someone tells a story of a man whose hair, because of a great grief,
turned gray overnight. Someone else, upon hearing this story, tells
another—about a merchant, who returned from India with a ship full of
valuable goods, which he had to throw overboard to save the ship in a
heavy storm. He was so upset that his wig turned gray overnight.

One may conclude that telling jokes was not a forte of the Sage of
Koenigsberg. But he certainly grasped a central element of every joke,
and thus possibly of the comic experience in general: A grotesque incon-
gruity, perceived suddenly in the face of a quite different expectation. In
the telling of jokes, this perception is delivered in what in English is
called the punch line, a phrase that nicely conveys Descartes's idea of
the shock that causes laughter. In German the phrase is die Pointe—the
point at which, in Kant's understanding, the expectation collapses into
nothing.
An influential critic of Kant's view of the comic was Jean Paul (Aesthet-
ics, 1804), the nom de plume of Jean Paul Richter, a copious author of
humorous and satirical works. 18 Jean Paul thought that Kant's view was
too narrow: The comic comes not only when a strained expectation is
reduced to nothing; the opposite can provoke it—when something sud-
denly comes out of nothing. But he is also critical of the, as it were,
epistemological thrust of the Kantian view. Like Mendelsohn, he
stresses the subjectivity of laughter. One man weeps at what another
laughs about. The comic always resides in the subject, has no objective
status. Still, Jean Paul too cannot avoid altogether the question of what,
psychology apart, the comic perception is in itself. It is, he thinks, the
contrast between what someone tries to be and what in fact he is. The
comic, once again, is understood as an experience of incongruity. Its
social usefulness lies in its debunking power. But Jean Paul, unlike all
the philosophers, not only analyzed the comic but actually produced
comic literature. It should not surprise, then, that he says that finally
humor has no purpose beyond itself; it should be enjoyed for itself.
As one looks at the development of this discussion through the sev-
enteenth and eighteenth centuries, one sees how the epistemological
question, as to what the comic is in itself, increasingly comes to the fore
over and beyond the moral question of what it may be good for. As far
as the latter question is concerned, one also discerns an increasingly
positive view of the comic as against the pejorative bias of classical
antiquity and the Christian tradition. The development of comedy as a
dramatic genre in all the major European countries certainly accounts in
 Philosophers of the Comic 25

part for the increasing interest in the comic. It is possible to speculate

that there may also be a connection with the emergence of modern
consciousness. The genius of modernity (whether one views it as a good
or an evil spirit) is to disaggregate, to debunk, to look behind the facades
of the social order. This inevitably results in a vision of all sorts of
incongruity. The affinity with the comic perspective is plausible.
The gigantic figure of Hegel stands astride the entire history of philos-
ophy in the nineteenth century. What he had to say about the comic,
regrettably, is somewhat less than gigantic. He too discussed the phe-
nomenon under the general rubric of esthetics. 19 Comedy, Hegel states,
displays a world without substance, and because of this it negates any
purposes that may arise within it. 20 It is, as it were, a parallel world—
somehow weightless, made of air, in which actions can be lightly begun
and just as lightly ended. Hegel differentiates the ridiculous from the
comic. The ridiculous is, literally, that which produces laughter, and
virtually anything can do that. One may laugh out of benevolent wis-
dom, or in mockery and contempt, or out of despair. Comic laughter—
that is, laughter provoked by the comic—is defined more narrowly. It is
the result of actions within that parallel world in which anything can
happen:

Here pretty and worthless purposes are accomplished with an appearance

of great seriousness and after elaborate preparations. Yet, after these pur-
poses collapse, their author can rise up from his fall in free cheerfulness,
just because his purposes were so negligible that nothing is really lost
when they fail. 21

If one tries to associate this (not exactly weightless) prose with an

image, one can easily visualize a clown jumping up after a pratfall.
Whether Hegel was thinking of a clown or not, the image is helpful in
understanding what he intended to convey.
But Hegel also follows what by his time had become a tradition:
conceptualizing the comic in terms of incongruity. The comic arises out
of contradictions, and these can be of different kinds. Hegel mentions
the contradiction between effort and result (this is perhaps the clownish
contradiction, between capacity and ambition, between purposes and
external accidents). All these are perceived as ridiculous and can lead to
a comic resolution (komische Aufloesung). Most generally, the comic arises
out of the contradiction between human subjectivity and the substance
of reality (das Substantielle)—if you will, between the real world, which is
very heavy indeed, and the light, weightless world to which the human
spirit aspires. It is possible, however, that this last sentence overin-
terprets Hegel (which is not necessarily troubling).
It is a well-known fact (though perhaps a regrettable one) that some
26 Anatomy of the Comic

people, after being subjected to even a very minor quantity of Hegelian

prose, feel urgently in need of comic relief (or, if you will, komische
Aufloesung). And, speaking of incongruity as a key theme in the philoso-
phers' contemplation of the comic, one may plausibly give some
thought to elephants. Since the extinction of the dinosaurs, the elephant
has been the largest animal on earth. Its huge size is awe inspiring. But,
like all huge things, it becomes comic when confronted by the puny.
Man himself, of course, is puny when compared to the elephant. In the
following episode, one may speculate that the mouse, a puny animal
indeed, stands in for man:

A mouse meets an elephant. The mouse is male, the elephant female.

The elephant is in a good mood and looks down benevolently upon the
little mouse, "Hello, little mouse. I am so big and you are so small. That is
very funny. I like you, little mouse." The mouse is encouraged by this and.
says, "Oh, Miss Elephant. Allow me to tell you a wish I have had for many
years. I have always wanted to make love to an elephant. Will you let me?"
The elephant laughs uproariously, slaps her hind legs with her trunk, and
says, "Why not? Just go ahead, little mouse." The elephant lies down
under a coconut tree and accommodates herself to the mouse as best as
she can. And the mouse gets busy fulfilling his old wish, amid great
efforts. [See Hegel, above, on effort and result, not to mention capacity
and ambition.] While the mouse exerts himself, the elephant hardly no-
tices what is going on. Indeed, she falls asleep. But then a gust of wind
moves through the trees, a coconut falls off and hits the elephant on the
head. She wakes up and exclaims, "Ouch!" Whereupon the mouse says
solicitously, "Oh, I'm sorry. Did I hurt you?"

One may also speculate that the discrepancy between mouse and
elephant, man and elephant, adumbrates the fundamental discrepancy
between man and the elephantine enormity of the universe. In that case,
the ambition of the human mind to understand the universe is remark-
ably akin to that of a mouse wishing to make love to an elephant. Could
one think of a better metaphor for the intrinsic incongruity of the philos-
opher's enterprise?

There was once an international congress of philosophers. An Indian

philosopher is talking to an American: "You Westerners have a completely
wrong idea about the universe. You believe that the earth is a globe going
around the sun. That is a mistake. The earth is a flat disc supported on the
back of an enormous elephant."
"Very interesting," says the American. "But what supports the
elephant?"
"There is a second elephant underneath the first," says the Indian.
"And what supports the second elephant?"
 Philosophers of the Comic 27

"Ah yes, there is a third elephant supporting the third."

And before the American can ask another question, the Indian philoso-
pher says, "My good chap, you may as well face it. There are elephants all
the way."22·

Karl Loewith once characterized nineteenth-century philosophy as

the slow decomposition of the gigantic carcass of the Hegelian system.
The image is not very attractive, but it is pertinent. According to
Loewith, the three principal actors in this drama were Marx, Kierke-
gaard, and Nietzsche. 23 Of those three, Kierkegaard had most to say
about the comic, in observations scattered throughout his opus. Kierke-
gaard's main interest, of course, was religious, and his particular focus
was on irony as a precursor of religious insight. The word irony comes
from the Greek for dissembling: The ironist plays a game of pretending
with his audience. He always means something else than what he
says—more than he says, or less so, or at any rate something different.
In this sense, almost all of Kierkegaard's opus is an enormous exercise in
irony, one work after another appearing under different pseudonyms,
each pseudonym representing a different position—a game of masks or,
if you will, of peekaboo, behind which the author hides and from which
he sporadically reveals himself. Only at the very end of the opus, and
indeed of his life, did Kierkegaard emerge from the pseudonymous
masks with his passionate attacks on the established church of Den-
mark, written under his own name.
An important discussion of the comic occurs in the Concluding Un-
scientific Postscript, which appeared under the pseudonym Johannes Cli-
macus. 24 Here are two key formulations:

What lies at the root of both the comic and the tragic . . . is the discrepan-
cy, the contradiction, between the infinity and the finite, the eternal and
that which becomes. 2 5

The tragic is the suffering contradiction, the comical, the painless

contradiction. 26 Both statements recall earlier philosophical formulations
that were discussed previously in this chapter. The former statement
recalls Pascal's description of man as the midpoint between the infinite
and the nothing, and, as with Pascal, the context is clearly religious. The
incongruity is, so to speak, cosmic. It is precisely for this reason that the
comic can be seen as a sort of antechamber to religious faith.
There is a certain irony in the fact that the latter statement is followed
by a long footnote that is a miniessay on the nature of the comic. Should
every ironist produce ambiguous texts and put his most developed
thoughts into footnotes? This one actually consists of a long list of jokes,
each one containing a contradiction that is putatively painless: A child of
28 Anatomy of the Comic

four turns to a child of three-and-a-half and says patronizingly, "Come

now, my little lamb." A man in a restaurant eats salad with his fingers,
then says to the waiter, "Ah, I thought it was caviar." A baker says to a
poor person, "No, mother, I cannot give you anything; there was anoth-
er here recently whom I had to send away without giving anything; we
cannot give to everybody." Are these stories really painless? Perhaps,
but there are situations in which these and similar jokes could illuminate
quite painful realities.
For instance, the last of the jokes in the preceding paragraph is remi-
niscent of a joke told in East Germany at the time of the Communist
regime:

A man enters the haberdashery department of an HO, which was the

acronym for government stores. He asks to see some undershirts. "I'm
sorry," says the salesperson. "You are in the wrong place. You have to go
to the next floor. There they have no undershirts. Down here we have no
shirts."

But Kierkegaard was not primarily interested in the nature of jokes.

He saw humor as the last existential stage before faith, as a sort of
incognito faith. These are insights that will have to be taken up again
toward the end of this book. For now, it is enough to point out that
Kierkegaard too stands squarely in what can be called the incongruity
school in the philosophical treatment of the comic.
Probably the most important philosophical work on the comic in the
twentieth century is Henri Bergson's Laughter (Le Rire), originally pub-
lished in 1900. 27 Before Bergson gets to his central thesis he discusses a
number of important issues connected with the phenomenon. He em-
phasizes that laughter is a purely human phenomenon. Other animals
may evince laughterlike symptoms, but only human beings truly laugh.
Specifically, only human beings laugh because someone or something
strikes them as funny (apes may grin, but it is unlikely that they do so
because they have just heard a good joke). Also, according to Bergson,
laughter is a group phenomenon and thus has social functions (this is
debatable: surely there is such a thing as solitary amusement—but let
that pass for now). More important, Bergson discusses a rather puzzling
aspect of the phenomenon: The emotional texture of the comic experi-
ence. In order to laugh at what strikes one as funny, one has to curtail
whatever strong emotions one might otherwise have in the situation, be
it pity, or love, or hatred. Put differently, the comic occurs in a strangely
antiseptic sector of perception, purged of emotions, and thus very simi-
lar to the mind-set of theoretical contemplation:

The comic demands something like a momentary anesthesia of the heart.

Its appeal is to intelligence pure and simple. 28
 Philosophers of the Comic 29

This is a significant observation. It can easily be put in the Schutzian

language used in an earlier chapter: The experience of the comic occurs
in a finite province of meaning. This entails an abstraction from the
meanings that the same events or persons would otherwise have in
everyday life. And in that respect, at least, it is similar to what Schutz
called the "theoretical attitude"—that is, the abstraction that must be
performed if one is to subject a phenomenon to intellectual analysis.
Take two cases: An individual about whom I greatly care suddenly
falls flat on his face. If I allow myself to laugh at this pratfall—that is, if I
let myself perceive it as comic—I must for the moment bracket my
feelings of pity or concern, because these would prevent me from laugh-
ing. But suppose that I'm a physician. My interest now is to diagnose
my friend's condition, and to that end I must also bracket my personal
feelings. In other words, both the act of comic perception and the act of
medical diagnosis require an abstraction from the web of meanings and
emotions that constitute what Schutz called the paramount reality of
everyday life. And, come to think of it, my laughing at the pratfall could
also be called a kind of diagnosis. (One may reflect here that the Greek
word literally means "knowing through" or, if you will, "seeing
through": to perceive the comic or to perceive an underlying medical
condition it is necessary to see through the surface of events.)
Two images succinctly illustrate Bergson's central thesis. One is the
pratfall, already discussed exorbitantly ever since Thaïes of Miletus fell
into his well. The other is that favorite children's toy, the jack-in-the-
box. In both instances what occurs is a kind of automation. Something
living is reduced to something mechanical, and it is precisely this reduc-
tion that strikes one as funny. Bergson sums up a discussion of various
comic gestures:

The attitudes, gestures and movements of the human body are laughable
in exact proportion as that body reminds us of a mere machine. 2 9

Put differently, we laugh when the sheer physicality of an individual

overwhelms his social or moral pretensions: The philosopher falls into a
well. The professor fails to notice that his nose is dripping. The prophet
farts.
Bergson too is in the incongruity tradition of explaining the comic, but
he defines the incongruity rather narrowly. Specifically, his central thesis
is that the comic incongruity is that between mind and body, or between
life and matter. This explanation makes wider sense in the context of
Bergson's philosophy of life, of the élan vital that for him defines human-
ity, but this need not be of concern here. Bergson's thesis goes a consider-
able distance in explaining the phenomenon, but its universal
applicability may be questioned. To be sure, it points up very well one
30 Anatomy of the Comic

important case of comic incongruity, but the phenomenon is not ex-

hausted by that case. Thus, for an important example, Bergson's ap-
proach helps one to understand the very large place occupied by sexuality
in the universe of humor. The sexual drive, more than any other, consists
of an intrusion of the merely physical into the pretensions of social roles—
body over mind, if not exactly matter over life: the philosopher, in the
midst of pronouncing on an intricate problem of epistemology, has an
involuntary erection (of which he may not even be aware). But there are
large areas of humor that cannot be made to fit into this scheme. Take
political humor, for example. Whatever the incongruity is here, it is not
that between mind and body, life and matter. The same goes for humor
dealing with the alleged qualities of different ethnic or social groups.
All the same, Bergson moved the philosophical discussion of the
comic beyond the point reached before him. The figure of Don Quixote
fascinated him, and it embodies well the qualities of the comic as Berg-
son saw them. Don Quixote moves through the world in a sustained
abstraction from the reality of everyday life (which, of course, is the
world of Sancho Panza). He is a kind of somnambulist, inspired by what
Bergson calls a "strange kind of logic." His actions are dreamlike, always
border on absurdity (as seen from the standpoint of ordinary reality),
but they also have a unique quality of freedom. Specifically, they are free
of empirical tests: no evidence can persuade Don Quixote that the noble
knights and distressed damsels of his world of chivalry are actually
simple denizens of the ordinary Spanish countryside. Precisely this free-
dom is what makes Don Quixote a hero of the comic.
Bergson, unlike many of his profession, fully understood the limits of
philosophical analysis. At the conclusion of his book he evokes the
image of a child playing on the beach on which the receding waves have
left behind a residue of foam:

The child . . . picks up a handful, and, the next moment, is astonished to

find that nothing remains in his grasp but a few drops of water. . . .
Laughter comes into being in the self-same fashion. It indicates a slight
revolt on the surface of social life. . . . It, also, is a froth with a saline base.
Like froth, it sparkles. It is gaiety itself. But the philosopher who gathers a
handful to taste may find that the substance is scanty, and the aftertaste
bitter. 30

In conclusion three more recent philosophers will be briefly looked

at—one German, one French, and one American. Each one carried the
discussion a bit farther.
Joachim Ritter, whose essay on laughter first appeared in 1940, is
sometimes cited as having demolished the whole notion of the comic as
incongruity. 31 He emphasizes the great variety of laughter, from the
 Philosophers of the Comic 31

gentle smile to the loud guffaw, and the equally great variety of phe-
nomena deemed to be laughable. The comic does indeed involve incon-
gruity, but what is perceived as incongruous is highly relative and
depending on how reality as such is perceived. Put differently, the
comic always depends on the specific life-world within which it occurs.
Thus one cannot laugh at jokes coming out of life-worlds that one does
not understand. This is why, for example, it is difficult for a modern
reader to find humor in the allegedly comic episodes narrated by Cicero.
The best Jewish jokes fall flat in China. And what seems uproariously
funny to a group of construction workers fails to amuse members of the
English department at Harvard, and vice versa.
Ritter is, of course, quite right about the historical and sociological
relativity of the comic incongruity. But this undeniable fact does not in
itself invalidate the notion that the comic consists of an underlying per-
ception of incongruity that transcends the relativities of time and space.
By analogy, it is possible (for philosophers and others) to inquire into
the underlying structures of language and the manner in which it sym-
bolizes reality, while being fully cognizant of the fact that there are many
different human languages and that reality is symbolized differently,
say, in Chinese than in Hebrew. Ritter himself seems to return to a sort
of incongruity theory at the end of his essay. Humor, he says, is a kind
of game. Yet it is also a kind of philosophy, showing up the limits of
reason in the face of the vastness of reality. The game then becomes
serious, indeed dangerous. Indeed it does. But if this is a perception that
unites a Thracian handmaid with a modern German philosopher, in
essence a perception of incongruity, then one should not be overly
fixated on the relativities enumerated by Ritter.
Francis Jeanson's work on laughter appeared in 1950.32 His is a phe-
nomenological and existential approach—that is, an approach that does
not reduce the phenomenon of the comical to the result of some uncon-
scious, mechanical process (there is a critical edge here against psycho-
analysis), but rather treats it in humanly meaningful (or, as Jeanson
says, "moral") terms. Laughter is an intentional act, in the phenome-
nological sense of intentionality—that is, laughter always reaches out
toward an object. But it does so in a very distinct manner. It is similar to
dreaming, in that it has a "spontaneous reflection" by which its reality is
justified in the same act in which it is produced. This formulation recalls
Bergson's term of somnambulism used to describe the comic peregrina-
tions of Don Quixote. But the most important aspect of Jeanson's analy-
sis is his description of the liberating power of laughter. Jeanson agrees
with Hobbes that one laughs out of a sense of superiority. But the latter
does not necessarily arise from contempt, as Hobbes believed. One does
not always laugh at the expense of someone else, with the aim of putting
32 Anatomy of the Comic

someone else down. Laughter can come out of the sovereign knowledge
of being free. The smile, therefore, is the supreme form of laughter,
because in it a subject expresses his freedom and his mastery of himself.
In this connection it is useful to look at the date of Jeanson's
publication—shortly after the liberation of France, when the imagery of
the Resistance was very much alive in French minds. 33
One of the best formulations of the philosophical problem of the comic
is found in a work published in 1961 by Marie Collins Swabey. 34 She
emphasizes the importance of differentiating the physical, psychological,
and social circumstances that stimulate laughter from what it is about. In
other words, she refuses to give up the philosophical inquiry into the
essence of laughter because of the relativities of its location in time and
space. Like Bergson, she insists that laughter is not simply an emotional
expression that affords no satisfaction to the intellect. Rather, she insists
on the cognitive character of the comic, on its capacity to enhance under-
standing. To make this point clear, Swabey distinguishes what she calls
"comic laughter" from other types of laughter. Thus one may laugh
because one is being tickled, or out of joy, or in embarrassment. Those
forms of laughter are of no interest to Swabey. She wishes to explore the
distinctive laughter brought on by the perception that something is
funny—comic laughter as distinct from any other kind. The question is
just what this intellectual or cognitive contribution of the comic is.
Swabey notes that since about the eighteenth century there has been
widespread agreement that the essence of the comic lies in incongruity.
But there have been different views as to how to define this incongruity
(that is, between what and what is the incongruity supposed to lie), and
more importantly as to whether the incongruity is only perceived sub-
jectively or has an objective referent. Swabey strongly comes out for the
latter point of view. The perception that a particular item of reality is
comic makes sense against the background of a general view of reality.
This particular event is perceived as comic against a general background
of, implicitly, noncomic reality. One could put it this way (hopefully
without going against Swabey's intentions): The perception of the comic
is the perception of something that falls out of an overall order of things.
Or again, to say that something is incongruous implies a notion of congru-
ity. Thus the perception of the comic depends upon (if you will, is
parasitical upon) the basic human urge to order reality. Comic laughter
is, so to speak, the philosophical instinct in a lower key.
The cognitive element of the comic excludes utter silliness or non-
sense (though, of course, these may occasion laughter—but not comic
laughter in Swabey's sense). Swabey discusses this cognitive capacity
of the comic through different forms in which it is expressed—irony
and satire, wit and humor (the various definitions of these need not be
of concern for the moment). In all of these, though, the perception of
 Philosophers of the Comic 33

the comic is more than a purely subjective expression of emotions or of

unconscious drives. This is probably at its most sophisticated in those
expressions that are primarily in language and where (as, say, in the
telling of witty stories of a political sort) there is the deliberate purpose
of throwing light on reality. Swabey also rejects the notion that the
comic experience is primarily hedonic, rooted in a quest for pleasure.
Of course laughter can give pleasure, but this is not what it is finally
about:

The lover of the comic is directed to a goal with imputed objectivity, to

something beyond the subjectivity of the experience itself. . . . The search
for the comic is not directed simply at the experience of the comic; the
object of laughter is not merely the enjoyment of laughter. 3 5

Comic laughter can be a weapon, as particularly in irony and satire,

but over and beyond these social functions there is the comic intuition of
an order of things within which human life can make sense:
There is yet another recent philosopher whose work on laughter will
have to be taken into account. This is Helmut Plessner, one of the
influential figures in what on the continent of Europe is known as philo-
sophical anthropology. But Plessner's work falls on the boundary be-
tween philosophy and human biology, and it will more profitably be
examined after this chapter. At the conclusion of this one, it is time to
ask whether this jet-propelled journey through the history of Western
philosophy has yielded any results.
In classical and medieval philosophy, discussions of the comic are
few and far between, and where they occur they tend to deal with the
moral issue of laughter (usually in a pejorative mode). Modern philoso-
phers, especially over the last two hundred years, have paid much more
attention, yet it is safe to say that the results are not overwhelming.
There is also a good deal of repetition. Perhaps this should not surprise
us. Philosophers are only surpassed by theologians in the propensity to
take their own theories very seriously, and the comic perspective funda-
mentally puts all seriousness in question. But there is probably a deeper
reason for this gingerly treatment of the topic than the self-aggrandizing
tendency of philosophers. The philosophical enterprise as such makes
for awkwardness in dealing with the phenomenon of the comic, and this
may help to explain the reluctance of so many philosophers to deal with
it. Philosophy, after all, is the awesome attempt to embrace all of reality
in an order of reason. The comic, by its very nature, escapes this em-
brace. If it is to be intellectually grasped at all, it probably has to be by
way of some form of Pascal's reason of the heart. That is why a number
of modern philosophers have placed this topic under the rubric of esthe-
tics, even though esthetic experience is notably different from the expe-
34 Anatomy of the Comic

rience of the comic. As the philosopher tries to hold the comic in his
hands it turns to froth and seems to evaporate, as in Bergson's parable of
the child playing on the beach.
Nevertheless, at least two significant insights may be drawn from this
survey: The experience of the comic is the perception of something
objectively out there in the world, and not simply (though it is also that) a
subjective experience determined by the relativities of history and soci-
ology. In other words, there is a cognitive component to the experience. If
so, what is it that is known here? And that is the second insight, carried
over with considerable consistency from one philosopher to another: the
incongruity between order and disorder, by the same token between
man, who always seeks order, and the disorderly realities of the empiri-
cal world. In other words, the incongruity perceived here discloses a
central truth about the human condition: Man is in a state of comic discrep-
ancy with respect to the order of the universe. T h a t is w h y D o n Q u i x o t e is
such a powerful and enduring embodiment of the comic spirit, far be-
yond the particular circumstances of Spain at the end of the feudal
period, which Cervantes intended to satirize.
This insight is succinctly expressed by Baudelaire, not a philosopher
but a poet, who was moved to philosophize in a notable essay on the
comic in art published in 1855:
Since (laughter) is essentially human, it is also contradictory, that is to say
it is at once a sign of infinite grandeur and of infinite wretchedness: of
infinite wretchedness by comparison with the absolute Being who exists as
an idea in Man's mind; of an infinite grandeur by comparison with the
animals. It is from the perpetual shock produced by these two infinities
that laughter proceeds. 36

Baudelaire also calls laughter "satanic." This word had special mean-
ing for Baudelaire's poetry, but it also points to the demonic, the sinister
quality of the comic spirit that already revealed itself in the Dionysian
frenzy at the origins of Greek comedy. But Dionysus and Apollo are
profoundly linked. The disorder of the former bears implicit witness to
the order of the latter, as Apollo's priests at Delphi appeared to have
understood. The comic is au fond a quest for order in a disordered world.
This theme runs through all the forms in which the comic has expressed
itself, be it in actions, visual representation, or language.
The comic experience provides a distinctive diagnosis of the world. It
sees through the facades of ideational and social order, and discloses
other realities lurking behind the superficial ones. The image of the jack-
in-the-box, evoked by Bergson, says more than he proposed. One first
sees an ordinary box, familiar and unthreatening. Then, suddenly,
something or someone not ordinary at all pops out of the box. But it then
 Philosophers of the Comic 35

becomes clear at once that this other something or someone was present
in the box all long. The jack-in-the box reveals that things are not what
they seem. There is an untranslatable German word for this: Dop-
pelboedigkeit. It is derived from the theater, where it denotes a stage that
contains more than one level. While the actors go through their motions
on one level, very different and putatively sinister actions take place on
the other level, which lies below the surface. The dividing structure is
fragile. All sorts of unexpected things may pop up from "downstairs,"
just as holes may suddenly open up and make things and people disap-
pear from "upstairs" into the alien world below. The comic discloses
that everything that is taken for granted in ordinary life possesses this
character of Doppelboedigkeit. For this reason, the comic is always poten-
tially dangerous. As Kierkegaard saw very clearly, this makes for its
affinity with religious experience.
The philosopher looks at the sky and falls into a hole. The accident
reveals the philosopher as a comic figure. But his pratfall is a metaphor
for the human condition as such. The comic experience refers to the
mind thrown into a seemingly mindless world. At the same time it
suggests that perhaps the world is not mindless after all.

Notes

1. In B. Jowett's English edition (1892), quoted in Karl-Josef Kuschel,

Laughter: A Theological Essay (New York: Continuum, 1994), II. An exhaustive
history of this anecdote from classical antiquity to modern times may be found in
Hans Blumenberg, "Der Sturz des Protophilosophen," in Wolfgang Preisendanz
and Rainer Warning, eds., Das Komische (Munich: Fink, 1976), Uff. (I have not
made up these references!)
2. Bernhard Greiner, Die Komoedie (Tuebingen: Francke, 1992), 25ff.
3. Walter Burkett, Greek Religion (Cambridge, Mass.: Harvard University
Press, 1985), 224.
4. Plato, Philebus, trans. J. C. B. Gosling (Oxford: Clarendon, 1975).
5. Aristotle, Poetics, in The Basic Works of Aristotle, ed. Richard McKeon
(New York: Random House, 1941), 1459.
6. Cicero, De Oratore, trans. J. S. Watson (Carbondale, 111.: Southern Illinois
University Press, 1970), 150.
7. Cf. Kuschel, Laughter, 43ff.
8. The following is excerpted from an as yet unpublished (perhaps even
unwritten) review of the present book by Dorothy Hartmund, the late distin-
guished professor of classical studies at Southern Illinois A&M University):
Berger's offhand remarks about medieval thought are as irresponsible as his
absurdly inadequate treatment of classical antiquity, reinforcing one's considered
opinion that social scientists with a smattering of humanistic education should leave
36 Anatomy of the Comic

such topics to those with the proper credentials in the humanities. It is, of course,
possible that Berger has never heard of Duns Scotus's work De ridendo gentium or of
Abelard's elegantly slim essay Sic et fortasse. But even he should have come across
Thomas Aquinas' massive Risibilia, available in my own English translation (Risi-
bilities, Centralia, 111., 1957). 1 would also refer him to the authoritative analysis of
this work by Dominic O'Malley, S.J., in the latter's Scholastic Humor (Notre Dame,
Ind., 1985), p. 2033 ff. It is clear that Berger cannot read Latin (not to mention
Greek), but, if one is to judge by his footnotes, he can claim at least some reading
knowledge of German and French. He might, then, profitably turn to the lively
scholarly debate unleashed by Edith O'Malley, O.S.B., who tried to show in her
brilliant article "The Woman Behind Thomas" (Journal of Feminist History, III: 1990,
p. 68 ff.) that the Risibilia, among other works by the great scholastic, was pla-
giarized from the writings of sister Placida, the learned abbess of Rimini. Vide
Dorothy Hartmund, "Die lachende Nonne aus Rimini" (Zeitschriftfuer die Wissenschaften
des Altertums, CX: 1991, p. 65 ff.); Jean-Jacques Abukassim, "Le mythe de ¡'abesse
Placidam" (Annales medievales, LI: 1992, p. 2 ff.); and my own response to Abukassim
(in the following issue of the Annales).

9. Desiderius Erasmus, The Praise of Folly, trans. Clarence Miller (New

Haven: Yale University Press, 1979).
10. Ibid., 85f.
11. From Les Passions de Γ âme, art. 124, quoted in Francis Jeanson, Significa-
tion humaine du rire (Paris: Editions du Seuil, 1950), 22. [My translation.]
12. C f . P a u l H a b e r l a n d , The Development of Comic Theory in Germany During
the Eighteenth Century (Goeppingen: Kuemmerie, 1971).
13. On the relation of comedy as a performing art and theories of the comic
during this period, cf. Greiner, Die Komoedie, 47ff.
14. Cited in Haberland, Comic Theory, 70f. [My translation.]
15. Immanuel Kant, Kritik der Urteilskraft (Frankfurt: Suhrkamp, 1977), 124.
16. Ibid., 272ff.
17. Haberland, Comic Theory, 80ff.
18. Georg Wilhelm Friedrich Hegel, Vorlesungen ueber die Aesthetik (Frank-
furt: Suhrkamp, 1970), 520ff.
19. Lest I be accused of being obscurantist, here is Hegel's own phrasing:
"eine Welt, deren Zwecke sich deshalb durch ihre eigene Wesenslosigkeit zerstoeren"
(ibid., p. 527). [Okay, Hartmund, how about translating that into Latin?!]
20. Ibid., 529. [My translation.]
21. These elephantine observations of mine are taken from my essay "A
Lutheran View of the Elephant," first published (where else?) in InterLutheran
Forum (Advent 1978), then republished in an expanded edition of my A Rumor of
Angels (New York: Anchor, 1990), 109ff. As Rabbi Meir of Vilna, Talmudist, put
it so well: "If an author cannot borrow from himself, from whom can he bor-
row?" [That, Hartmund, was written in Lithuanian Yiddish. I'd like to see you
take a stab at it!]
22. Karl Loewith, Von Hegel zu Nietzsche (Frankfurt: Fischer, 1969).
23. Johannes Climacus, Concluding Unscientific Postscript, trans. David
Swenson (Princeton, N.J.: Princeton University Press, 1941).
24. Ibid., 82f.
25. Ibid., 459.
 Philosophers of the Comic 37

26. An English translation of the full text is in Wylie Sypher, ed., Comedy
(Garden City, N.Y.: Doubleday, 1956).
27. Ibid., 64.
28. Ibid., 79.
29. Ibid., 189f.
30. Joachim Ritter, "Ueber das Lachen," in Subjektivitaet (Frankfurt: Suh-
rkamp, 1974), 62ff.
31. Jeanson, Signification humaine.
32. Shortly after World War II, David Rousset, who had been in the French
Resistance, published a book on his experiences in Nazi concentration camps. I
cannot locate this work now, but I recall one interesting passage, in which
Rousset asked himself whether he had learned anything from this experience.
He answered by saying that he had learned very little that he had not known
before. But among the few things he had learned was the insight that the comic is
an objective constituent of reality, regardless of the circumstances, however
wretched, in which it is encountered.
33. Marie Collins Swabey, Comic Laughter: A Philosophical Essay (New Haven:
Yale University Press, 1961).
34. Ibid., 162.
35. Ibid., 247.
36. Charles Baudelaire, The Essence of Laughter, transi. Gerard Hopkins (New
York: Meridian, 1956), 117.
 3
Laughing Monks
A Very Brief Sinitie Interlude

All the authors discussed in the preceding chapter are taken from the
history of Western philosophy. It would be a grave mistake to gather
from this that reflection about the comic is an exclusively Western preoc-
cupation. The phenomenon of the comic as such is universal. Not only
do all human beings laugh (and presumably have been laughing ever
since homo sapiens mutated away from his simian relatives), but no hu-
man culture has been studied that does not have a concept of the comic.
In other words, not only laughter but comic laughter is universal. In all
likelihood this cannot be said with regard to systematic reflection about
the comic, be it by philosophers or other theorists. It is all the more
important to recognize that there are cases of this outside Western civili-
zation. One clear case is Sinitic civilization.
Travelers in East Asia—China, Japan, Korea—quickly note that
people in the region laugh on occasions where Westerners or other
foreigners would not. Interpreters of the region have given many expla-
nations for this phenomenon. People laugh to get over moments of
social awkwardness, to indicate deference, or to give evidence that the
situation is amicable. These facts are of no particular interest here. Trav-
elers also quickly observe that people in these countries find things
amusing that they themselves would not, and vice versa. Any American
or European who has tried to spice a lecture with jokes in Tokyo or
Hong Kong will have discovered this to his dismay. This set of facts
belongs to the comparative sociology of the comic and will have to be
considered a little later on. But Sinitic civilization has also produced
highly intriguing instances of comic philosophy and indeed philoso-
phers who are hard to distinguish from comedians. Probably most im-
portant in this matter is the Taoist tradition and movements influenced
by it.
A colleague with extensive experience with the dialogue between
world religions has remarked that the most difficult partners in this type
40 Anatomy of the Comic

of exercise are the Taoists. 1 This is not at all because they are intolerant
or dogmatic. On the contrary, it is because they keep laughing, treating
those solemn ceremonies of interfaith communication as a huge joke.
Scholars of Taoism will have to decide whether this comic propensity is
intrinsic to this tradition or only characterizes some of its protagonists.
Probably the foremost example is Chuang Tzu, or Master Chuang. 2 He
died about 280 B . C . E . , and the book under his name probably contains
chapters of which he is the authentic author and chapters written by
imitators belonging to his school (this sort of amiable, indeed reverent
plagiarism was, of course, by no means peculiar to China, as biblical
scholars among others know all too well). The book actually begins with
what can only be called a joke. It is, to be sure, a very Chinese joke, and
a foreign-devil reader must make something of an effort to get it. But a
joke it is, of sorts, and it may properly be called a philosophical joke:

In the Northern Ocean there is a fish, its name the Kun, its size I know not
how many li. [One li is about one-third of a mile.] By metamorphosis it
becomes a bird called the P'eng, with a back I know not how many li in
extent. W h e n it rouses itself and flies, its wings darken the sky like clouds.
With the sea in motion this bird transports itself to the Southern Ocean,
the Lake of Heaven. In the words of Ch'i Hsieh, a recorder of marvels,
" W h e n the P'eng transports itself to the Southern Ocean, it thrashes the
water for three thousand li, and mounts in a whirlwind to the height of
ninety thousand li, and flies continuously for six months before it comes to
rest! . . . " A cicada and a young dove giggled together over the P'eng. The
cicada said, " W h e n we exert ourselves to fly up onto the tall elms, we
sometimes fail to get there and are pulled back to the ground, and that is
that. W h y then should any one mount up ninety thousand li in order to go
south?!" 3

May a non-Sinologist venture an interpretation? One must ask: Why

do the cicada and the dove giggle over this cosmic bird? One is then
reminded of Hegel's characterization of the comic effect in a discrepancy
between effort and result. What is the point of this enormous effort, the
cicada implies, when all it accomplishes is moving the bird from one
place to another? The experience cannot be very different from that of
moving from the ground to the top of an elm tree, and even that is
hardly worth it. There is a truly Hegelian komische Aufloesung here: The
mythological fish-bird performs marvels of metamorphosis and avia-
tion, and the result of all this monumental exertion is negligible. One
may as well stay where one is (a classically Taoist piece of advice). The
cicada and the dove giggle, and thereby are saying: Come off it, P'eng—
we refuse to be impressed!
T h e b e s t - k n o w n p a s s a g e f r o m M a s t e r C h u a n g is t h e f o l l o w i n g :
 Laughing Monks 41

Once Chuang Chou [that was his full name] dreamt he was a butterfly,
fluttering here and there just as if he was a butterfly, conscious of follow-
ing its inclinations. It did not know that it was Chuang Chou. Suddenly he
awoke; and then demonstrably he was Chuang Chou. But he does not
know now whether he is Chuang Chou who dreamt he was a butterfly or a
butterfly dreaming he is Chuang Chou. 4

This passage well illustrates Master Chuang's method, according to

Kuang-ming Wu, who has been instrumental in interpreting this author
to English-speaking readers. Master Chuang himself claimed that his
method was "no method" (wu fang), but that may be understood as an
ironic comment, just as the butterfly story is both irony and an example
of the "no method" method. And that method is essentially comic. It
demolishes taken-for-granted reality, disclosing its fragility, and thus
liberates the mind to take a fresh look at the world. The second chapter
of Master Chuang's book, which is often regarded as unintelligible,
according to Wu is actually a parody of different schools of philosophy,
including the Confucian ones. Here is how Wu characterizes this philos-
ophy of the comic:

The comic lies in a juxtaposition of incongruous elements, such as big nose

and small hat, small pants and big shoes, and the like. Since life seems to
us a juxtaposition of the incongruous, an appropriate mode by which to
approach life may well be the comical.

Humor and irony induce self-recognition to liberate us from our pris-

on of self-content. 5
Another example of Master Chuang's comic "no method" will have to
suffice:

A man of Sung who traded in ceremonial caps traveled to the state of Viet.
But the people of Viet cut off their hair and tattooed their bodies, so the
caps were of no use. Yao brought order to all the people under heaven and
brought peace to all within the four seas. He went to distant Mount Kuyeh
to visit the Four Masters. Upon returning to his capital on the north bank
of the Fen River, he fell into a doze and forgot all about his empire. 6

Taoism, undoubtedly because of its very nature, never became a

world religion. But its spirit penetrated many areas of Chinese culture
and through it other parts of East Asia. Probably its most important
consequence was its influence on the Chinese reception of Buddhism.
When that Indian faith was first brought to China, Chinese intellectuals
thought that it was a variant of Taoism. Despite some similarities, this
was, of course, a misunderstanding. But Buddhism underwent a pro-
found change as it was absorbed into Sinitic civilization. The Ch'an
42 Anatomy of the Comic

school of Buddhism, which became Zen in Japan, exemplifies this Sini-

fication. A number of scholars, Kuang-ming Wu among them, have
argued that Ch'an/Zen is precisely a modification of Buddhism in the
spirit of Taoism. And its monks are famous for their raucous laughter.
The most characteristic exercise in Zen monasteries is what in Japan is
called the koan. A koan is a parable or riddle exchanged between a master
and his disciples, but the solution is never a straightforward or rational
one. Identically worded solutions may be deemed correct or false, de-
pending on the master's assessment of a disciple's spiritual state. Or the
solution may be a violent act or an obscene gesture. The koan is a perfect
development of the Taoist "no method." Many instances of the koan can
be described as jokes. The purpose is always to deconstruct reality and
thereby to attain liberating enlightenment.
Probably the most famous koan is ascribed to Hakuin Ekaku, a Zen
monk who lived from 1685 to 1768. He instructed his disciples to listen
to the sound of one hand clapping (sekishu no onjo), which has been
taught ever since as the essence of the Zen view of reality. 7 Here is a
typical koan, this one attributed to Master Yunmen:

Question: What is your statement about going beyond buddhas and sur-
passing the ancestors?
Answer: A sesame rice-cake.8

Or take the following:

Butei, Emperor of Ryo, sent for Fu-daishi to explain the Diamond Sutra.
On the appointed day Fu-daishi came to the palace, mounted a platform,
rapped the table before him, then descended and, still not speaking, left.
Butei sat motionless for some minutes, whereupon Shiku, who had seen
all that happened, went up to him and said, "May I be so bold, sir, as to
ask whether you understood?"
The Emperor sadly shook his head.
"What a pity!" Shiko exclaimed. "Fu-daishi has never been more
eloquent." 9

The liberating result intended by this method allows a good deal of

self-mockery. The ability not to take oneself seriously is a good test of
whether true enlightenment has taken place:

A monk asked Master Busshin, "Do heaven and hell exist?"

" N o , " the master said without hesitation.
Some samurai happened to be within earshot and, amazed at Busshin's
answer, asked him the same question. The time, again without hesitation,
the master said, "Yes."
 Laughing Monks 43

When accused by the samurai of being contradictory, Busshin said,

"Well, if I tell you there's neither heaven nor hell, where would the alms
come from?" 10

Hakuin, the master of clapping with one hand, was not only a Zen
teacher but also a painter, calligrapher, and poet (often in slang). At the
age of seventy-one he added the following verse to a highly unflattering
self-portrait:

Loathed by a thousand buddhas in the realm of a thousand buddhas,

hated by demons among the troops of demons,
this foul-smelling blind bald-head
appears again on someone's piece of paper.
Damn! 11

Between Taoism and Zen there are all the components of a comic
philosophy: The diagnosis of the world as a mass of incongruences. The
radical debunking of all pretensions of grandeur and wisdom. A spirit of
mocking irreverence. And, in the end result, a profound discovery of
freedom. Erasmus's Stultitia, wrapped in saffron robes, has been wan-
dering around East Asia for many centuries.

Notes

1. I owe this observation to John Berthrong, who also introduced me to

Master Chuang. I express my gratitude amid spasms of Taoist laughter.
2. Cf. E. R. Hughes, ed., Chinese Philosophy in Classical Times (London:
Dent, 1942), 165ff.; Kuang-ming Wu, Chuang Tzu: World Philosopher at Play (New
York: Crossroad, 1982), and The Butterfly /\s Companion (Albany: SUNY Press,
1990).
3. Hughes, Chinese Philosophy.
4. Ibid., 184.
5. Wu, Butterfly, 264, 374.
6. Victor Mair, ed./trans., Wandering on the Way: Early Taoist Tales and Para-
bles of Chuang Tzu (New York: Bantam, 1994), 7.
7. Cf. Kazuaki Tanahashi, Penetrating Laughter: Hakuin's Zen and Art (Wood-
stock, N.Y.: Overlook, 1982).
8. Ibid., 84.
9. Lucien Stryk and Takashi Ikemoto, eds., Zen (Chicago: Swallow, 1981),
xxxii.
10. Tanahashi, Penetrating Laughter, 121.
11. Ibid., 19.
 4
Homo Ridens
Physiology and Psychology

If one fully understood the phenomenon of laughter, one would have

understood the central mystery of human nature. That mystery is how
human nature is constituted by a body that is part and parcel of biolog-
ical evolution, and by that elusive entity variously called mind, soul, or
spirit.
There can be no doubt that, whatever else it is and by whatever it is
provoked, laughter is a physiological process:

As a muscular phenomenon, laughter is easy to describe. It consists of

spasmodic contractions of the large and small zygomatic (facial) muscles
and sudden relaxations of the diaphragm accompanied by contractions of
the larynx and epiglottis. Laughter differs from smiling simply in that the
smile does not interrupt breathing. 1

It is a reflexoid process controlled by the "old brain" (thalamus and

hypothalamus), which governs other reflex activity and purely emotion-
al behavior, and not by the palliai cortex, which governs cognitive facul-
ties. Konrad Lorenz called laughter a "reflex of capitulation": A tension
is built up and is then suddenly released, at which point the organism
collapses into or, so to speak, capitulates to laughter. This physiological
process can be provoked by purely physical stimuli, of which tickling is
the best known. There are also the effects of nitrous oxide ("laughing
gas") and the symptoms of a number of diseases (such as Alzheimer's
and multiple sclerosis).
Even a moment's reflection will point to a profoundly puzzling para-
dox: How can the same physiological process resulting from tickling also
be triggered by a sophisticated political joke?And what business does
the "old brain" have to get involved with the highly cognitive faculty
that makes it possible for an individual to grasp the political joke?As
asserted above, a full answer to these questions will have to await the
46 Anatomy of the Comic

final solution of the mystery of human nature, more precisely the solu-
tion of what many philosophers have called the mind/body problem. In
the meantime, however, a more modest step is necessary. One will have
to accept the difference insisted upon by Marie Collins Swabey, one of
the philosophers looked at earlier in this book—namely, the difference
between comic laughter and all other forms of laughter. 2
Human beings laugh when tickled, when spontaneously happy,
when suddenly freed from fear or tension—or when comprehending a
subtle exercise of wit. Within the argument of this book, of course, only
the last occasion for laughter is of real interest. But precisely because of
its proximity to some central questions about human nature, comic
laughter must also be compared with these other forms of laughter.
Needless to say, such comparison will not end the age-old philosophical
enterprise of defining man, but it will place the case of comic laughter
within a wider anthropological context. Homo ridens puzzles because he
stands at the intersection of what is most and what is least animal about
human beings.
Do animals laugh? Apparently this is a question about which there is
some disagreement. Apes grin, and the physiology of this is similar to
the human one just described. Apes grin when engaged in rituals of
greeting and of appeasement, the latter signaling that there is no real
danger or that the appeaser hopes that there is no real danger. The
similarities and dissimilarities between these behavior patterns with
comparable human ones are certainly interesting, but little would be
gained for the present argument if these were further pursued. One
thing is quite certain: No ape has ever grinned after being told a political
joke (or, for that matter, any other sort of joke). With a good conscience,
then, the question of whether animals laugh can be left to the zoologists
and other interested parties. The distinctive character of human laugh-
ter, though, will have to be considered further.
Laughter clearly is a phenomenon that involves both body and mind.
It thus points to the curious relationship of human subjectivity and its
embodiment. The same goes for weeping, its twin phenomenon. The
most significant treatment of both phenomena in the framework of a
philosophical anthropology has been that by Helmuth Plessner. 3
Plessner's work stands in a tradition of continental-European philo-
sophical reflection about the nature of man of which Max Scheler
was probably the most outstanding twentieth-century representative. 4
Scheler, while insisting on the unity of human nature against any ver-
sion of mind/body dualism, characterized man as being different from
animals (or, if one prefers, other animals) by both being and having a
body. An animal is its body, which it has in common with man, but man
also has his body as something from which he can subjectively distance
 Homo Ridens: Physiology and Psychology 47

himself and that he can consciously make use of for this or that purpose.
Plessner takes up this characterization, and emphasizes that this pecu-
liar relationship to the body must always be kept going in a precarious
balance. Both in laughing and in weeping this balance comes unhinged.
The control that the individual normally has over his body collapses,
indeed the individual collapses into laughing or weeping. At least for a
moment, he no longer has but is his body (in Scheler's terminology). Yet
it is not his body but he that laughs or weeps, and he laughs or weeps
about something. In other words, even in the midst of this collapse into an
involuntary and uncontrolled bodily condition, the individual retains
intentionality: If asked, he can say w h y — t h a t is, about w h a t — h e is
laughing or weeping. The very collapse reveals man as a "double
being," both embodied and yet somehow existing also beyond this
embodiment (though it should be noted that Plessner, like Scheler, care-
fully distances himself from a dualistic anthropology that would posit
mind or soul over against the body).
Plessner's key category to describe this peculiar feature of human
nature is man's "eccentric position" (exzentrische Position). Man is "eccen-
tric" {decentered would perhaps be the better term in English) because his
body is experienced both as a condition and an object. Normally, an indi-
vidual controls his body, and uses it both as a physical instrument and
as a vehicle of expression. Thus the hands, for example, can be used
both to operate a tool or a weapon and to engage in gestures signaling
anger, desire, appeasement, or what have you. Both kinds of usage
presuppose consciousness: The individual, in either use of his hands,
knows what he is doing. That very knowledge creates distance between
himself and his bodily actions. This distance constitutes his eccentricity.
An animal lacks the consciousness and thus lacks the distance; com-
pared to man, it is centered. In laughing and weeping, man's habitual
control over the uses of his body is lost. He "falls into" laughing or
weeping. But this is still very different from an animal, which cannot fall
into a bodily state because it has never been outside it in the first place.
And, unlike an animal, a human individual knows that he is laughing or
weeping, and what is more he can tell why he is doing so.
An important distinction made by Plessner is between true laughter
and purely reactive laughter (as when a person is being tickled or given
laughing gas). True laughter is about something; reactive laughter is not.
Also, true laughter is very close to playing, indeed always has about it
an air of playfulness. Plessner's true laughter, however, is not identical
with Swabey's comic laughter. Thus one may laugh simply out of joy or
relief, and this will be true laughing in that one can clearly tell why one
is laughing ("Because I'm so relieved by the diagnosis just given me by
my doctor"). Neither explanation relates to the comic. Yet comic laugh-
48 Anatomy of the Comic

ter is one very important form of true laughter and of course it is the one
most relevant here.
Plessner agrees with Bergson that the comic always has a human
referent. If we laugh at animals or inanimate objects, it is because they
remind us of human beings. Plessner also agrees with what, as was
shown earlier, has been a persistent motif in the writings of modern
philosophers about the comic—namely, that the comic is essentially
about incongruity. Plessner adds the insight that man's eccentricity is
the quality that enables him both to perceive the comic and to be an
object of comic perception. Only man belongs to different levels of be-
ing, and this multiple experience of reality is the basis of comic percep-
tion. This is a fundamental anthropological fact that cannot be reduced
to this or that historical situation. Therefore, the comic as such is not a
social phenomenon, though of course the contents and occasions of
comic perception vary socially to an enormous degree: What is funny on
one side of the Pyrenees is not at all funny on the other side (to para-
phrase Pascal tongue-in-cheek, literally). Put differently, what is
laughed at and when one may appropriately laugh are socially relative,
but the underlying incongruity of the comic experience is grounded in
an anthropological reality that transcends all social variations. As such,
of course, it is universal (or, of one prefers, is a cross-cultural constant).
Man's eccentric position allows man to perceive the world as both
constrained and open, as familiar and strange, as meaningful and mean-
ingless. One could say that Plessner adds the comic to what Scheler
called man's distinctive "world-openness". But further, both laughter
and weeping place an individual in marginal or border situations
(Grenzlagen), where the habitual balance of his existence is disturbed.
(Yet these situations are by no means rare or extraordinary. The com-
mon, ordinary occurrence of these phenomena reveals man as essen-
tially a marginal being.
Plessner has written a short, elegant essay on the smile in addition to
the larger work on laughter and weeping. 5 He emphasizes the differ-
ence between smiling and laughter, despite the fact that in several lan-
guages (though not in English) the two are etymologically related
(subridere in Latin and sourire in French, with cognate terms in other
Romance languages, all denoting "sublaughter"; laecheln in German,
meaning "little laughter"). If Plessner is right, this etymology is mislead-
ing: The smile is not a subcategory of laughter, though related to it, and
as with laughter one could distinguish the comic smile from other forms
of the phenomenon. The essential difference is that, unlike laughter, the
smile is a controlled expression; there is no "collapse": "In laughing and
weeping man is the victim of his spirit, in smiling he gives expression to
it" 6 The smile, even in the midst of shame or grief, indicates that an
 Homo Kidens: Physiology and Psychology 49

individual somehow stands above these circumstances, "as if he carried

the kiss of a goddess on his forehead." Thus, albeit in very different if
not opposite ways, both laughter and the smile disclose essential fea-
tures of humanity. And, of course, both can be responses to the experi-
ence of the comic.
In the course of evolution, when did man first laugh or smile?We may
assume that this was the moment when man first emerged as man. One
is tempted to linger on it in fantasy: This still rather simian-looking
creature giggling uncontrollably, perhaps on the occasion of one of his
fellows suffering a spectacular pratfall. The moment, alas, is not retriev-
able. But perhaps it can be adumbrated, on the theory that evolution is
somehow replicated in the development of each individual. The mo-
ment when an infant first smiles or laughs is, of course, very commonly
experienced—typically to the immense delight of the infant's parents.
The laughter of children has been studied in some detail by psycholo-
gists, and it is of some interest for understanding the topic of this book. 7
The smile of an infant is an essential sign of social interaction. It is a
trigger (a Lorenzian Ausloeser) for parental response, the first form of
dialogue between the infant and the adults in charge of him. At first it
does not differentiate between the individuals to whom it is directed,
signaling contentment just as the infantile yell signals discomfort. Very
soon, though, the smile indicates recognition of specific individuals,
most commonly, of course, of the mother. Normally it is an optical
response, though infants born blind smile upon hearing a familiar voice.
The development of laughter comes later and is rather different in mean-
ing. It is a symptom of relief, of tension or fear overcome. In the psycho-
logical development of the child, there is a step-by-step progression
from the primal smile to the smile of embarrassment, joyful laughter,
laughter at a comic situation, laughter in a group, aggressive laughter at
an outsider, and finally (a somewhat depressing climax) the laughter of
Schadenfreude. The chronology of this progression has been studied ex-
haustively by psychologists and need not be of concern here. What is
significant, though, is that at each step laughter signifies an experience
of relief (Entlastung), both physically and psychologically.
There is widespread consensus among child psychologists that such
an experience of relief is the primary cause of comic laughter. Cross-
culturally, it appears, young children react with laughter to two games
that adults play with them almost instinctively: the games of peekaboo
and of jack-in-the-box (the latter actually being an enhancement of the
former by means of a mechanical device). The peekaboo effect is primal.
The adult looks at the child, typically smiling, then hides for a few
moments, then reappears. The jack-in-the-box mimics the same se-
quence. The child is distressed by the disappearance of the familiar face,
50 Anatomy of the Comic

relieved by its reappearance. The response is laughter. The timing is

important. If the disappearance takes too long, the child will be anxious
and start to cry, and the reappearance will not trigger laughter in that
case; the child must be comforted, reassured. In other words, the disap-
pearing act must remain within the confines of a game; the ludic charac-
ter is lost if the act is stretched out too much; it then ceases to be comic,
becomes serious. The formula goes something like this: pleasure/an
interruption of pleasure/mounting anxiety/cathartic relief. One psychol-
ogist writing in the 1920s, perhaps in the first flush of Freudian excite-
ment, has even compared this primal comic experience with an orgasm. 8
Be this as it may, the peekaboo game is only the beginning, though it
suggests much about the psychology of what comes later. A true sense
of the comic in the child depends upon his internalization of the adults'
reality. The Schutzian categories employed earlier in this book can be
helpful again. In the world of an adult there is a clear demarcation
between what Schutz calls the paramount reality—the reality of wide-
awake, everyday life that one shares with most people most of the
time—and the finite provinces of meaning (which include dreams and
fantasy worlds) into which one escapes periodically. In the world of the
young child these demarcation lines are much more fluid. Dreams and
fantasies merge into the real world, weave in and out of it. Put differ-
ently, the young child cannot as yet differentiate between various levels
of being and therefore cannot grasp the incongruity between them—
that incongruity which is constitutive of the comic experience. As the
child comes to experience these levels, true comic experience becomes
possible. The puppet theater, much beloved among children where that
institution exists, is a good illustration of this. In a physically obvious
way the events depicted there are separated from real life. What hap-
pens there would be very terrifying indeed if it occurred in real life—the
puppets knock each other on the head, say terrible things to each other,
even disappear into oblivion. This fantasy world does have a certain
reality (precisely the fugitive reality of a finite province of meaning), and
the child who watches does experience a frisson of anxiety. But the
puppet reality is indeed finite, the anxiety is limited by this knowledge,
and there is relief from real anxiety by the very fact of this limitation. The
transition from one level of being to another is perceived as incongruous
and ipso facto comic. It can easily be observed that some children are too
young for this: They do not understand that the events of the puppet
theater are not to be taken seriously, they are really terrified, and instead
of laughing they cry. Very probably individual children differ as to the
chronology of this development. Most psychologists appear to agree
that, in most children, a fully formed sense of the comic is established by
the age of five or six, when children can themselves make jokes and
 Homo Ridens: Physiology and Psychology 51

derive enjoyment from this. 9 While this development occurs sponta-

neously, it also seems that children can be educated in comic under-
standing. Parents with a strongly formed sense of humor can obviously
encourage their children to acquire it. Sometimes this encouragement
can be annoying to outsiders trapped in such a family of determined
comedians. One can easily recall situations in which one had to sit
through the performance of, say, a six-year-old endlessly telling a series
of infantile jokes, to the unrestrained applause of his admiring parents.
One psychologist has made the distinction between what he calls
"sociopositive" and "socionegative" laughter. 1 0 There is harmless or in-
nocent laughter, which enhances the solidarity of a group, and mali-
cious laughter, which is at the expense of someone who is thereby, at
least momentarily, excluded from the group. The child progresses from
the first to the second type. Perhaps the early inability of children to
engage in malicious humor is one of the reasons why childhood has
been called innocent. In any case, for better or for worse, comic laughter
can be of either kind. The same psychologist has suggested that there is
the possibility of retaining the capacity for innocent laughter in adult life
and that this can be a great help in meeting the exigencies of life. Folk
wisdom has long held the view that this capacity (more or less what is
commonly meant by a sense of humor) is conducive to good health. As
will be discussed shortly, there is some evidence in support of this view.
Leaving aside the physiology of laughter and the biographical devel-
opment of the sense of the comic, the principal psychological question is
that of the uses of the comic experience. Put differently, the question is
about the psychological functions of the comic experience. In what fol-
lows, the categorization employed is the one suggested by Avner Ziv,
an Israeli psychologist who has managed to write about this topic in a
lucid and indeed witty manner that avoids the esoteric style to which
many of his fellow psychologists are addicted. 1 1
Ziv begins his list with the aggressive function (thus paying respect to
a tradition of interpreting the comic that goes from Plato to Hobbes in
Western philosophy, as was indicated earlier). Modern psychology sug-
gests that this dour view is not altogether false. 1 2 Ziv cites Stephen
Leacock: "The savage who cracked his enemy over the head with a
tomahawk and shouted, 'Ha, ha' was the first humorist." Experiments
trying to establish what people laugh at do indeed show that a common
occasion for comic laughter has to do with belittling, humiliating, or
debunking an individual or an entire group of people. This, of course, is
mostly the case with irony and satire, the most aggressive forms of
humor, but aggression is also present in other forms of the comic experi-
ence. Put simply, humor can be used as a weapon. Ziv mentions an old
Arab institution, the hid ja. It dates from tribal times and refers to the
52 Anatomy of the Comic

practice of reciting satirical poetry belittling the enemy on the eve of

battle. But this form of humor is not peculiar to warring Bedouins.
The aggressive use of humor can range from comically defined physi-
cal assaults (pranks, practical jokes), through visual representations
(such as cartoons), to verbal acts running on a scale from an ad hoc
sarcastic remark to a play by Aristophanes. The verbal prototype is the
put-down joke. The aim can be to put down a group, an institution, a
belief system. A classical (if morally reprehensible) version of this is
what in America has been called the Polish joke, belittling this ethnic
group as being allegedly stupid. It has cross-cultural variants—Frisian
jokes in Germany, Belgian jokes in France, Irish jokes in England, New-
fie jokes in Canada (referring to inhabitants of Newfoundland), Por-
tuguese jokes in Brazil, Van der Merwe jokes told by English-speaking
South Africans (referring to their Afrikaans-speaking compatriots). This
is not a complete list. The capacity for ethnocentric malice is clearly
universal. Other types of jokes belittle a group for alleged traits other
than stupidity—greed, laziness, sexual promiscuity, sexual frigidity,
and so on. Cases in point would be, respectively, jokes directed against
Jews, African-Americans, Puerto Ricans, WASPs. A point to note is that,
however deplorable the sentiments expressed in these jokes may be
from a moral standpoint, they may nevertheless be perceived as funny;
indeed, the very fact that such jokes may be deemed morally offensive
may enhance their attractiveness as a forbidden pleasure. No useful
purpose would be served by giving examples of this variety of aggres-
sive humor here (readers will have no difficulty, alas, remembering
examples from their own experience). Instead, jokes expressing aggres-
sion of a nonethnic sort may serve by way of illustration.
Professional groups with high status—such as lawyers and psychia-
trists in America—are preferred targets of comic aggression:

It has been announced by the National Institute of Health that in future

lawyers rather than rats will be used in experiments conducted under NIH
auspices. This has three advantages. One: There are more of them. Two:
There is no danger that one will get fond of them. And three: There are
some things that rats won't do. 1 3
In a building containing a number of psychiatrists' offices two of them
frequently find themselves using the same elevator coming in or leaving.
One evening they go down together and one of them turns to the other: I
have been meaning to ask you about this for a long time. There is some-
thing I don't understand. At the end of the day I'm completely exhausted,
disheveled; I can barely make it out of the office. You on the other hand
look as fresh and chipper as when you come in the morning. I don't get it.
In our profession, when one has to listen all day to these awful sto-
ries. . . . To which the other psychiatrist responds: W h o listens?!
 Homo Ridens: Physiology and Psychology 53

Aggression against institutions (this one is from Italy where, possibly

by dint of long familiarity, respect for the Roman Catholic church and its
dignitaries has not been very high for a long time):

This happened around the turn of the century, when moral standards
were still quite intact. An unmarried young woman, just before going into
labor, said to the attending physician, "Please, you must help me. If I
come home to my village with this baby, my father will kill me."
The doctor told her not to worry. It so happened that in the same
hospital the Archbishop of Bologna was undergoing an appendectomy.
When he came out of anesthesia the doctor sat at his bedside and told him,
"Your eminence, a miracle has occurred. You have given birth to a son."
The archbishop is appalled, denies the possibility. The doctor keeps insist-
ing, says that the archbishop, as a prince of the church, cannot deny the
possibility of miracles. Finally the archbishop gives in and accepts the
baby.
The baby grows up in the archiépiscopal palace, turns out to be a sturdy
lad. On his eighteenth birthday the archbishop calls him in and addresses
him as follows: "My son, today you come of age and it is time that you
know about your origins. You grew up in the belief that I am your father.
That belief is mistaken. I am your mother. Your father is the Archbishop of
Pisa."

Aggression against a belief system: For example, in the Soviet Union

a genre of jokes called "Questions to Radio Yerevan" circulated, sup-
posedly reporting on questions addressed to a mythic radio station in
Soviet Armenia. The jokes cleverly attacked the bases of Communist
ideology.

Question: What is capitalism?

Answer: The exploitation of man by man.
Question: What is Communism?
Answer: The reverse.
Question: We know that the tsarist regime was very bad. How is it that it
was more popular than the Soviet government?
Answer: It governed less.

Or take this American assault on a very American religious belief

system:

A Catholic priest, a rabbi, and a Christian Science practitioner meet in hell.

They ask each other how they got there. The Catholic priest says, "Well, it
was late on a cold winter evening. My housekeeper brought me a cup of
tea and a snack. I could not resist the temptation, I grabbed her lustily—
and then there was a clap of thunder, and here I am." The rabbi said, "I
54 Anatomy of the Comic

was at a reception. On the buffet table I saw some delicious ham sand-
wiches. I could not resist the temptation. I picked up one of the sand-
wiches, there was a clap of thunder, and here I am." The Christian Science
practitioner says, "I am not here."

Depending on who tells these jokes, there may be feelings of inferi-

ority or resentment that are given vent by putting down people and
institutions held responsible for these feelings. But no matter who tells
the jokes, there is the Hobbesian effect of feeling superior to those
targeted by the jokes, the savoring of a moment of triumph. But there is
also a circumvention (in Freudian language, a sublimation) of the taboo
against aggressive actions, a taboo that in one way or another neces-
sarily exists in every human society. In other words, one deals a verbal
blow rather than a physical one. This is almost always the less risky
course, And not only under repressive regimes.
If the taboo against aggression is one of the pillars of any social order,
then the tabu against illicit sexuality is another, equally important one.
And if humor is used to subliminally circumvent the former, it is equally
functional in circumventing the latter. 14 It is, of course, in terms of
sexuality that Freud invented the concept of sublimation in the first
place. It occupies an important place in what one may call the hydraulic
model of the psyche that Freud designed—an invisible system of
pumps, repressed libidinal urges being pushed down, coming up again
in strangely distorted forms. Needless to say, one does not have to
accept this psychological model in its entirety in order to find useful
some of Freud's brilliant insights. His work most relevant to the present
topic is the long essay "Wit and Its Relation to the Unconscious," which
was first published in 1905. 15
There is actually very little about sexuality in this work, unless one
knows the larger Freudian context. (There is, if you will, little redeeming
prurient interest.) The main point of the work is an elaboration of
Freud's at first startling discovery of the similarity between jokes and
dreams. It came a few years after he had published his The Interpretation
of Dreams, one of the seminal works in the emerging conceptualization of
psychoanalysis. Freud's theory of wit is essentially an extension of his
theory of dreams.
Wit is seen by Freud as a subcategory of the comic (about which he
has few original things to say). It is characterized by a playful approach
to reality, by the discovery of hidden similarities and connections, by
linking up what is normally separate, and by giving sense to what is
normally perceived as nonsense. Except for the element of playfulness,
all these qualities are as characteristic of dreams as of the exercises of
wit. And both dreams and jokes are also marked by a great economy of
 Homo Ridens: Physiology and Psychology 55

effort, by contraction and brevity. In this connection Freud cites a fa-

mous line by Shakespeare's Polonius (Hamlet, 11:2): "Brevity is the soul
of wit." Both in dreams and in jokes, these shared qualities all serve a
basic psychological function: Repressed thoughts are pushed into the
unconscious, out of which they reemerge wearing various disguises.
This disguised reemergence is, of course, what the concept of sublima-
tion refers to. Applied to wit, one might aptly call it an extended psy-
chology of the game of jack-in-the-box. Its root technique Freud calls
"condensation with substitutive formation." There is typically ambi-
guity, double meaning, and play on words. One of Freud's examples
refers to the then-recent Dreyfus affair in France: "This girl reminds me
of Dreyfus. The army does not believe in her innocence." (This joke
certainly exemplifies both "condensation" and "substitutive formation."
It is less clear just what was repressed here.) There is a preponderance of
Jewish jokes among Freud's examples. This can readily be attributed to
Freud's social situation. It has also led to speculations about Freud's
ambivalent relation to Judaism and Jewishness, but that is a topic that
cannot be pursued here. 16
In the Freudian view, the underlying psychological mechanism in
both dreams and jokes is substitute gratification or wish-fulfillment:
"Wit affords us the means of surmounting restrictions and of opening
up otherwise inaccessible pleasure sources." 17 Again without neces-
sarily buying into the entire Freudian scheme, this is clearly correct with
regard to many if not all sexual jokes. Sexuality has a dark, threatening
side. In the sexual joke, this threat is neutralized, rendered harmless.
Take the twin fears of impotence and frigidity (the first two jokes are
told by Ziv):

A man to the woman he has just made love to: Do you ever wonder what it
is like to experience this as a man?
The woman: Do you?
A man in the same circumstance: Have I hurt you?
The woman: Why do you ask?
The man: You moved.

Or take the fear of homosexuality:

A bear is charging this hunter in the woods. The hunter fires, and misses.
The bear breaks his rifle in two, sodomizes the hunter, then walks away.
The hunter is furious. The next day be is back in the woods, with a new
rifle. Again the bear charges, again the hunter misses, again he is
sodomized. The hunter is now beside himself. He is going to get that bear,
if it's the last thing he does. He gets himself an AK-47 assault rifle, goes
back into the woods. Again the bear charges and, believe it or not, again
56 Anatomy of the Comic

the hunter misses. The bear breaks the assault rifle, gently puts his paws
around the hunter and says "Okay, come clean now. This isn't really
about hunting, is it?"

Or take the fear of diminishing sexual powers with aging:

This old man is on a walk when he comes upon a frog. The frog
addresses him: "This is your lucky day. I'm a talking frog and I've been
sent here specially for you. If you just say the word, I'll turn into a beauti-
ful woman and I'll do anything you want."
The man picks up the frog, puts it in his pocket, and resumes his walk.
After a while the frog gets restless: "Hey, you up there. Didn't you hear
what I said?"
The old man says, "Yeah, I heard you. But I figure, at my age, rather
than a beautiful woman, I'd prefer to have a talking frog."

Wit can be employed as a form of rebellion against authority. Most

political jokes have this function. But Freud argues that there is a deeper
rebellion; that against reason. This implies a kind of infantilization, a
return to what Freud calls the "old homestead" of childhood in which
wishes come magically true and in which playing (including the play
with words) makes up much of life. Joking is, in a way, becoming a child
again for a few moments, and that in itself is a source of pleasure.
For his own theoretical reasons, Freud makes a sharp distinction
between the comic (which one "finds") and wit (which one "makes").
This is a useful distinction. But Freud also asserts that "Wit is . . . the
contribution to the comic from the sphere of the unconscious." 18 That is
a much more dubious formulation. All the same, Freud contributes to an
understanding of the comic. His discovery of the parallels between
dreams and jokes can quite easily be detached from his hydraulic model
and indeed from his theory of the unconscious. It fits neatly into
Schutz's understanding of both dreams and humor as finite provinces of
meaning. Wit creates a separate reality, luminous with magical power,
with its own distinct rules, some of which Freud correctly identified.
And even if one is not persuaded that all jokes (or dreams, for that
matter) express wish-fulfillment, many do indeed sublimate desires,
including sexual desires, that are normally frustrated by society.
Then there is what Avner Ziv calls the social function of the comic. 19
This involves many issues of macrosocial institutionalization (such as
comedy, the carnival, court jesters, circus clowns). These will be dealt
with in the next chapter and can be put aside for now. But psychologists
have mainly studied the microsocial dynamics of humor—that is, the way
humor functions in small groups—and this should be looked at here.
As already mentioned, the smile and laughter play a crucial role in
 Homo Ridens: Physiology and Psychology 57

early socialization. They continue to play an important role in adult

social relations, typically signaling friendliness, relaxation, solidarity.
More specifically, the evocation of comic laughter is a common means by
which individuals seek acceptance by others. Most individuals do this at
one time or another. There is also the specific role of the group clown or
comedian, an individual to whom the task of making everyone laugh
has been explicitly or tacitly assigned. Sometimes this assignment is
deliberately sought, sometimes it is inflicted without or even against the
individual's desires. This role is near universal, in the most varied
groupings and in different cultures. Humor functions sociopositively by
enhancing group cohesion. The formula here goes something like this:
Those who laugh together, belong together. A newcomer to just about
any group is well-advised to find out quickly what people in this group
laugh about—and, just as important, which topics are considered to be
inappropriate for humorous treatment. Almost inevitably, though,
humor also has socionegative aspects. It draws the boundaries of the
group and ipso facto defines the outsider.
The boundary-marking function of humor becomes very clear in the
case of so-called in-group jokes. Take the following two variants of a
recent genre of American intellectual jokes:

What happens if you cross a Unitarian with a Jehovah's Witness?

A person who goes from house to house, and doesn't know why.

What happens if you cross a Mafioso with a deconstructionist?

Someone who makes you an offer that you cannot understand.

Try telling the first joke to someone with no knowledge of American

religion, the second to someone unacquainted with postmodern literary
theory. For another example:

This Jewish fellow was on vacation out west, met this Native-American
girl, fell in love, married her, and took her back to New York. After a year
she goes home for a visit.
"Are you happy?" her folks ask her. "Oh, yes, very happy."
"Is he treating you right?"
"Oh yes, he is just great."
"And what about his family? We've been told that Jews don't much like
it if their children marry outsiders. How does his family feel about their
son marrying an Indian girl?"
"Oh fine. They've been wonderful to me. They've even given me a new
name. They call me Sitting Shive."

To find this joke funny one has to know the Jewish practice of mourn-
ing, sitting shiva (or shive) and, in a leap of arcane Americana, associate
58 Anatomy of the Comic

this with the historic warrior-chief, Sitting Bull. Try telling this joke to
some visiting German, even one who speaks very good English.
Humor can also be used to soften hierarchical relationships. Ziv tells
the story of how a supervisor responded to an employee who has yet
again missed a day of work: "Don't forget that your grandmother has
already died twice." Such jocular maneuvers are nowadays recom-
mended very earnestly as "management tools." But also humor can be
used (socionegatively) as an instrument of social control within a group.
Here the individual who dissents from or does not measure up to the
norms of the group is punished by ridicule. This less user-friendly utili-
zation of the comic is commonly used in Japanese executive training
workshops, part and parcel of the sadistic initiation for which this insti-
tution has become notorious.
There is also what Ziv calls the defensive function of humor. 20 This is
not really a separate category. It is another variety of sublimation, al-
ready discussed in terms of reducing the anxiety incurred by aggression
and sexuality. But more generally, humor can help manage fears associ-
ated with any threat, no matter what the case. Ziv reports on an experi-
ment he conducted with young children. They were shown two short
videos, one a very harmless, cuddly one, the other a rather frightening
one. This was followed by a play period, after which the children were
told that, before leaving for home, they could watch one of the two
videos again. A large majority of the children chose the second, the
frightening video. This experiment, Ziv argues persuasively, exem-
plifies the pleasure that both children and adults derive from horror
movies, roller coaster rides, and other experiences that provide a frisson
of terror without being really threatening. The pleasure comes from the
relief from fear, a relief that, given the situation, can be confidently
anticipated. However, humor also functions to contain terror deriving
from events that are threatening in actual fact. Humor in war, in hospi-
tals, and in other circumstances in which death or serious injury is a real
possibility, is a well-known fact. There may be no atheists in foxholes, as
Cardinal Spellman observed during World War II, but there are plenty
of humorists.
A genre of jokes that illustrates this defense function is the one vari-
ously called black humor, gallows humor, or sick jokes. Some of these
jokes refer to specific terrors, others relate more generally to the terror of
mortality, as respectively in the following two examples:

A doctor has just received two laboratory reports on two of his patients,
one of whom was found to have AIDS, the other Alzheimer's. Unfor-
tunately, the lab has failed to put names on the reports, so that the doctor
doesn't know which is which. Just then the wives of one of the patients
 Homo Ridens: Physiology and Psychology 59

calls. She is very worried about her husband, wants to know the test
results. The doctor thinks for a moment, then says, "Here is what I sug-
gest. Send him out for a walk. If he comes back, don't make love to him."

A child: May I play with grandmother?

The mother: No, I'm not going to unscrew the coffin a third time.

People whose professions regularly confront them with death or

acute physical dangers are particularly given to macabre humor. Funeral
directors are a case in point:

A funeral director has finished laying out the corpse for viewing. He
calls in the widow and asks her whether her husband looks all right to her.
"Yes, fine," she says. "Only one thing: I think my husband should
wear his blue suit for this occasion, the one I gave you."
" N o problem," says the funeral director. "It'll only take one minute."
And really, it only takes one minute before the funeral director calls the
widow back into the viewing room.
"Is this all right now?" he asks.
"Yes, indeed," says the widow. "But tell me, how come you could
make the change so quickly?"
"Oh, that was easy. Just switched heads."

The relief provided by defensive humor is psychological. But there is

also evidence to the effect that humor is related to physical health and
that it helps individuals recover from physical illness, as Kant indicated
in his discussion of the comic. 21 Not all humor does. There is unhealthy
laughter, presumably associated with socionegative humor. But posi-
tive, essentially harmless laughter appears to be health-inducing. Thus
it was found that hospital patients recover faster if they can look at their
situation with humor. An appreciation of the comic appears to be pos-
itively related to the will to live and the capacity to cope with illness.
Also, humor facilitates the interaction between patients and hospital
personnel, as well as relations between different echelons of the latter.
Beyond that, humor has been deliberately used as a therapeutic tool,
especially by psychotherapists. 22 This may involve various forms of kid-
ding, but also irony or satire. The latter, it has been argued, can be
conducive to insight: the patient laughs and ipso facto gains new insight
into his condition:
A psychotherapist told the following story:

One of his patients kept complaining about his wife's blatant un-
faithfulness. She regularly invited her lover home, they made love on the
sofa in the living room no matter whether the husband was home or not,
they even left the door open when they were doing it. The therapist had
60 Anatomy of the Comic

been suggesting to this man that he should begin to assert himself. Then
one day the man came in for his session, looking very satisfied with
himself. "Well, today I really followed your advice. I really asserted
myself."
"What did you do?"
"I insisted that they close the door!"
At that point the therapist lost his professional cool and started to laugh
uncontrollably. The patient was at first offended, then started to laugh
too. This, according to the therapist who told the story, marked a positive
turn in the course of the therapy.

In this story, seeing the point of the humor (in fact, a joke culled from
real life) had a cognitive impact. This leads to what, in the context of the
present argument, is the most interesting of the functions listed by Ziv,
which he calls the intellectual one. 2 3
At about four months of age, children laugh when tickled. At about
eight months, they laugh at the game of peekaboo. At about one year of
age they laugh at inappropriate behavior by an adult, such as the adult
drinking from the child's bottle, walking on all fours, or making funny
faces. Each step in this development involves an expansion of cognitive
capacity, even the first. For while tickling is, as previously stated, a
trigger for a physiological reflex, it is noteworthy that, not only must the
tickling be performed by another person (one cannot tickle oneself), but
for most children this person must be familiar. What is more, the tickler
must, by his behavior, indicate that it is a game that is being played, that
he has no aggressive intent; if the child is truly afraid, the same tickling
movements will fail to produce laughter. At about two years of age,
children will themselves engage in elaborate games of pretend, includ-
ing word play and complicated structures of incongruity, often accom-
panying these activities with smiles or laughter. 24 At each step of this
comic evolution there must exist, at whatever different levels of sophis-
tication, the cognitive act of distinguishing what is pretend from what is
for real. After the previous discussion of how philosophers have dealt
with the comic experience, it will come as no surprise that psychologists
have pointed out that this cognitive act involves the perception of incon-
gruity: "One of the first indications of amusement [is] founded on incon-
gruity. Incongruity is the basis for understanding the intellectual aspects
of humor." 2 5
The comic experience, already in young children, offers a release
from the tyranny of the reality principle, a release from reason into a
peculiar zone of liberty. Freud saw this very correctly. But because of his
preoccupation with the mechanisms of what he thought of as the uncon-
scious (an irrational entity par excellence), he failed to appreciate that
the comic experience has a crucially important cognitive or intellectual
function. This function is dependent on the ability to think in more than
 Homo Ridens: Physiology and Psychology 61

one dimension. It is, of course, most visible in wit, the most intellectual
form of humor, but it is always present, at least potentially, in all mani-
festations of the comic. The psychological findings on this fully support
the philosophical thesis of Marie Collins Swabey.
The most interesting contribution to the cognitive psychology of
humor was made by a nonpsychologist. Arthur Koestler, best known for
his brilliant novels on the ideological madnesses of the twentieth centu-
ry, became increasingly interested in his later years in the processes of
scientific discovery and thus in the psychology of creative thinking. The
entire first part of his major work on the latter subject is devoted to
humor. 26 He claims that three creative activities are closely related, em-
bodied respectively in the jester, the sage, and the artist: the acts of
creation in humor, in scientific discovery, and in the innovative art. He
further claims that the boundaries between these three forms of cre-
ativity are fluid. The quality common to all three is "the perceiving of a
situation or idea . . . in two self-consistent but habitually incompatible
frames of reference." 27 This is exemplified in two jokes he tells (they are
reworded here). The first is also told by Freud in his essay on wit:

The marquis finds his wife in bed with a bishop. He doesn't say a word,
but goes to the window and blesses the people walking under it. When his
wife asks him what he thinks he is doing, he replies, "He is performing my
function; I will perform his." 2 8

The other joke in turn makes fun of Freudian psychoanalysis:

Two Jewish ladies are talking.

"My son is in psychoanalysis," says the first. "It seems that he has an
Oedipus complex."
To which the other lady replies: "Ach, Oedipus, Shmoedipus. Main
thing, he loves his mother."

Both jokes juxtapose normally incompatible frames of reference, in the

first case the logic of marital honor with that of the division of labor, in
the second the conceptual edifice of psychoanalysis with the common-
sensical world of Jewish motherhood.
The term coined by Koestler for the distinctive cognitive act involved
here is "bisituation." It is the capacity to associate, to draw together two
(or more) previously nonassociated aspects of reality. In German there
are two verbal constructions that aptly express this feat: mitdenken (to
think with), and zusammendenken (to think together). When this act is
successfully accomplished, it brings with it a catharsis—the experience
of "eureka!" or if one prefers, the "aha! experience." This is the structure
of any creative act, but especially that of intellectual innovation—be it by
the humorist, the scientist, or the creative artist. Koestler here adum-
62 Anatomy of the Comic

brates what Thomas Kuhn in his work on scientific revolutions has

called a "paradigm shift": Science does indeed progress through the bit-
by-bit accumulation of empirical data, as has been conventionally ar-
gued, but the big steps forward in science then come suddenly, with a
jump from one theoretical framework into a new one. Koestler's central
thesis is that getting the point of a joke is very much the same act as
solving a scientific problem (or, for that matter, any kind of intellectual
problem). This is a cathartic event. But the emotional catharsis is depen-
dent on a cognitive perception. In the case of satire, the comic percep-
tion shades off into social science.
Further differentiations are possible—between voluntary and invol-
untary humor, between formal and informal humor. There are some,
not terribly illuminating data on what kind of people laugh at what sorts
of humor. But directly connected with the intellectual function of humor
is the distinction between creative and receptive humor, which leads to
the question: Who are the comedians? 2 9 Both amateur and professional
comedians tend to be creative people—in Ziv's wording, people with
"the ability to look beyond the obvious." Data indicate that such people
tend to be men rather than women (who in turn are better at receptive
humor—that is, they more readily laugh at the antics of comedians).
This almost certainly tells nothing about the creative abilities of the two
sexes, being rather rooted in socially defined gender roles. American
data show a preponderance of Jews in the ranks of professional come-
dians, which fact can be easily related to what Thorstein Veblen called
the "intellectual preeminence" of the Jews. Both forms of preeminence
can be explained by the twin causes of an age-old Jewish culture of
learning, honed in the subtleties of Talmudic argumentation, and the
social marginality of Jews in Christian societies, which favored the skep-
tical, potentially sardonic perspective of the outsider. The somewhat
sparse findings on professional comedians also indicate a poor family
background marked by parental conflict. Wit in these circumstances is
cultivated early as a defense mechanism. Very probably the question,
Who are the comedians? is more usefully answered in sociological rather
than psychological terms. The question then becomes, How is the comic
institutionalized? This, precisely, is the next topic to be taken up.

Notes

1. N o r m a n Holland, Laughing: A Psychology of Humor (Ithaca, N. Y. : Cornell

University Press, 1982), p. 76.
2. Marie Collins Swabey, Comic Laughter.
3. Helmuth Plessner, "Lachen und Weinen," in Philosophische Anthropologie
(Frankfurt: Fischer, 11941] 1970), 13ff.
 Homo Ridens: Physiology and Psychology 63

4. Max Scheler, Die Stellung des Menschen im Kosmos (Munich: Nymphen-

burger Verlagshandlung, [1928] 1949).
5. Helmuth Plessner, "Das Laecheln," in Plessner, Philosophische Anthro-
pologie, 175ff.
6. Ibid., 185. My translation.
7. J. V. T. Greig, The Psychology of Laughter and Comedy (New York: Cooper
Square, [1923] 1969), pass.; Paul McGhee, "Human Development: Toward a Life
Span Approach," in Paul McGhee and Jeffrey Goldstein, eds., Handbook of
Humor Research, vol. 1 (New York: Springer, 1983), 109ff.; Reinhard Lempp, "Das
Lachen des Kindes," in Thomas Vogel, ed., Vom Lachen (Tuebingen: Attempto,
1992), 79ff.
8. The aforementioned J. Y. T. Greig. This author (whose gender is left
undefined) was registrar of Armstrong College in the University of Durham. It is
tempting to imagine how his (or her) hypothesis was received in a provincial
British university in the 1920s.
9. 1 feel constrained, however, to report the following (although it seems
appropriate that such grandfatherly bragging should be kept out of the text and
be modestly confined to a footnote): When my granddaughter Diya was three
years old, she made her first fully authenticated joke. She was coming down the
stairs, proudly exhibiting a new dress. Her father said to her, "Hello, my beau-
ty!" She smiled (she knew what she was doing) and replied, "Hello, my beast!"
10. L e m p p , "Das Lachen des Kindes."
11. Avner Ziv, Personality and Sense of Humor (New York: Springer, 1984). In
what follows, I make extensive use of Ziv's argument. If I may once more cite the
legendary Rabbi Meir of Vilna, "If you find something good, don't be embar-
rassed to enjoy it!"
12. Ibid., 4ff; C. R. Gruner, Understanding Laughter (Chicago: Nelson Hall,
1978); Lawrence La Fave et al., "Superiority, Enhanced Self-Esteem, and Per-
ceived Incongruity," in Antony Chapman and Hugh Foot, eds., Humor and
Laughter: Theory, Research and Applications (London: Wiley, 1976), 63ff.; Dolf Zill-
man, "Disparagement Humor," in McGhee and Goldstein, Handbook, vol. 1,
85ff.
13. Washington gossip had it that this was one of President Ronald Rea-
gan's favorite jokes.
14. Ziv, Personality, 15ff.
15. Sigmund Freud, "Wit and Its Relation to the Unconscious," in A. A.
Brill, trans./ed., The Basic Writings of Sigmund Freud (New York: Modern Library,
[1905] 1938), 633ff. Wit is Brill's translation of the German Witz. The German
word can mean either wit or joke. Other English translators have given the title
of Freud's work as "Jokes and Their Relation to the Unconscious." Either transla-
tion does justice to Freud's intention. The joke is the most succinct form of wit.
16. Cf. John Murray Cuddihy, The Ordeal of Civility (New York: Basic Books,
1974). Cuddihy argues that what Freud was really talking about (and repressed!)
was the conflict between modern civility and unassimilated Yiddishkeit or Jew-
ishness, summed up in the lapidary formula "the id is the yid." Maybe so. Se non
e vero . . .
17. Freud, "Wit and Its Relation," 698.
64 Anatomy of the Comic

18. Ibid., 782.

19. Ziv, Personality, 26ff; Antony Chapman, "Social Aspects of Humorous
Laughter," in Chapman and Foot, Humor and Laughter, 155ff.; Antony Chapman,
"Humor and Laughter in Social Interaction," in McGhee and Goldstein, Hand-
book, vol. 1, 135ff.
20. Ziv, Personality, 44ff.
21. Vera Robinson, "Humor and Health," in McGhee and Goldstein, Hand-
book, vol. 11, 109ff.
22. Harvey Mindess, "The Use and Abuse of Humor in Psychotherapy," in
Chapman and Foot, Humor and Laughter, 331ff.
23. Ziv, Personality, 70ff.; Thomas Shultz, "A Cognitive-Developmental
Analysis of Humor," in Chapman and Foot, Humor and Laughter, Uff.; Jerry Sals,
"Cognitive Processes in Humor Appreciation," in McGhee and Goldstein, Hand-
book, vol. 1, 39ff.
24. Jean Piaget, Play, Dreams and Imitation in Childhood (London: Macmillan,
1951), pass.
25. Ziv, Personality, 71 f.
26. Arthur Koestler, The Act of Creation (New York: Macmillan, 1964), 27.
27. Ibid., 35.
28. This is an anecdote told by Chamfort about the court of Louis XIV. Jokes
do travel!
29. Ziv, Personality, 130ff.; Howard Pollio and John Edgerly, "Comedians
and Comic Style," in Chapman and Foot, Handbook, 215ff.; Maurice Charney,
"Comic Creativity in Plays, Films and Jokes," in McGhee and Goldstein, Hand-
book, vol. 11, 33ff.
 5
Homo Ridiculus
Social Constructions of the Comic

The clue to an understanding of the place of the comic in society is its

profound affinity with religion and magic.
Social order, when it functions well, envelops the individual in a web
of habits and meanings that are experienced as self-evidently real. This,
as discussed earlier, is what Alfred Schutz called the paramount reality
of everyday life. Despite this semblance of solidity, social order is always
vulnerable to disruptions. These disruptions are caused, among other
things, by the intrusions of other realities. The sacred is one such intru-
sion. The comic is another. The two have a lot in common, which is why
saints and fools have often had an uncomfortable similarity. Any socio-
logical treatment of the comic must take cognizance of this initially
strange-seeming affinity. This has been adumbrated by Anton Zijder-
veld, one of the very small number of sociologists who have dealt sys-
tematically with the comic phenomenon. 1 In discussing the nature of the
comic. Zijderveld uses the term fascinane, which Rudolf Otto, in the
classic work The Idea of the Holy, employed to describe the strange ambi-
guity of attraction and dread that typically accompanies religious experi-
ences. The comic, when it manifests itself in full force, engenders a
similarly ambivalent fascination. So, of course, does magic (which dif-
fers from religion in that it is typically done by individual practitioners
rather than social groups).
Both the sacred and the comic constitute what Schutz called finite
provinces of meaning—islands, as it were, within the fabric of ordinary,
everyday reality. They are simultaneously alluring and anxiety-
provoking. If allowed to take over, they threaten normal reality. The
person who lacks a sense of humor, or at any rate fails to see what is
funny about a particular joke or humorous observation, feels irritated,
perhaps even angry. He has been had, as the English phrase goes, and
this fact discloses the vulnerability of his taken-for-granted normality.
But the person who does get the point and who accordingly laughs at a
66 Anatomy of the Comic

humorous story or action also cannot sustain the laughter for too long a
period before a certain anxiety develops. A few jokes can be very pleas-
ant; a barrage of jokes, going on and on, will cease to be pleasant. The
ominous dimension of the comic will then come to the fore. As with the
sacred, the comic must be contained, domesticated, if its potential threat
to social order is to be prevented from realization.
In the case of the comic, one may observe a gradation of threat, from
harmless or innocent humor to the grotesque inversion of all accepted
norms. The gradation runs from a mild joke to biting satire. If one wants
to visualize the gradation, one could trace it from, say, the gentle fun of
a Norman Rockwell picture to the savage humor of a Goya or Daumier.
There is finally what has traditionally been called folly, in which the
entire world is turned upside down. This is why Zijderveld uses the
metaphor of the looking-glass in his analysis of traditional folly. In its
mirror-effect the normal social world is both distorted and sharply
illuminated.
Both the sacred and the comic can be contained in space, or in time,
or in both. There are sacred places and sacred seasons. In the case of the
comic, however, containment in time is much more important than
containment in space. There may indeed be places that have been desig-
nated as the proper locales for comic performances. Most obviously, a
building may be called a cabaret or even named the Opéra Comique.
Other places, while also serving different functions, may have come to
be defined as locales in which one may expect to hear jokes or witty
conversation, such as the salons of eighteenth-century Paris or the cof-
feehouses of Central Europe in more recent times. Yet the coffeehouse is
not like a cathedral. The latter is itself sacred space, the former is space
that is not in itself comic but that offers an occasion for the comic. The
difference is interesting, and not too easily explained. Perhaps an expla-
nation may be sought in the exceedingly fugitive character of the comic
experience. Time flattens all experiences, including that of the sacred.
This is the process that Max Weber called routinization: The extraordin-
ary becomes ordinary with repetition, indeed becomes a routine. The
comic is peculiarly subject to this process. This is why one cannot effec-
tively keep telling the same jokes to the same people:

A recently incarcerated individual has his first exercise period in the pris-
on yard. One prisoner calls out, "Thirty-four!" Everyone laughs. Anoth-
er prisoner calls out, "Twenty!" Again everyone laughs. This goes on for
a while. Then the new prisoner asks an older convict what is going on
here. "You see," says the old convict, "most of us have been here a long
time. We all know each other's jokes. So we have given them numbers
and instead of telling the jokes, we just call out the numbers." The new
prisoner thinks that this is an excellent idea. He wants to try it too. So he
 Homo Ridiculus: Social Constructions of the Comic 67

calls out, "Forty-one!" Nobody laughs. "Fifteen!" Nobody laughs. And

so on. "What did I do wrong?" asks the prisoner. "Was I not telling
numbered jokes?" "Yes," says the old convict, "but it's a matter of how
you tell them."

As was discussed in an earlier chapter, the comic most commonly

appears in frequent though brief intrusions into ordinary social interac-
tion. So that these intrusions can be perceived as indeed being comic,
there is a need for what sociologists call a definition of the situation.
These definitions not only determine the proper times for comic inter-
missions; they also draw the parameters of what may be treated com-
ically. Put differently, there will always be conventionally understood
signals announcing the appearance of the comic. These may be verbal. A
joke may be introduced by the phrase, Have you heard this one?, a
sardonic remark by a somewhat disarming preface such as, I hope you
will not be offended if I say. . . . But more commonly the signal will be
nonverbal: A shift in intonation. A conspiratorial smile. A sort of antici-
patory laugh. Or a wink. Needless to say, these signals will vary as
between social groups and settings. A wink in one group may signal a
joke, in another an attempt at seduction. In a gathering of salesmen the
phrase, Have you heard this one? may announce a joke; in an assembly
of politicians it may be the preface to the latest gossip about the gover-
nor or some inner circle of power. The parameters of acceptable humor
will vary as between salesmen, business executives, construction work-
ers, or cloistered nuns. There is, as it were, a microsociology of the
comic here, much of it already discussed in the preceding chapter. 2 But
such signals are also institutionalized across entire societies, allowing at
least in principle a macrosociology of humor. Thus there is something
like a national sense of humor, which will usually be further differenti-
ated by region, ethnicity, and class. In line with what has been said
earlier on the need to contain or domesticate the potentially explosive
power of the comic, one may add that there are differences in degree of
this in different social settings. Thus, for example, one may compare the
restrained, understated humor of upper-class American WASPs with
the wit and surrealism of American Jewish humor. Perhaps Jews are
more ready than WASPs to face up to the intrinsic vulnerability of social
order; they certainly have the historical experience for it.

As the comic typically intrudes into ordinary social life in brief, even
spasmodic moments, it is all the more important that people understand
just when to laugh and what to laugh at. Every sociology student in
America has learned the famous statement by W. I. Thomas, "If people
define a situation as real, it is real in its consequences." Thomas would
not disagree with a paraphrase: If people define a situation as comic, it
68 Anatomy of the Comic

will be comic in its effects. As the comic situation is socially defined, it is

at the same time contained. Now one is permitted, even expected to
laugh; when the comic moment has passed, one can (perhaps with some
relief) revert to "for serious" interaction. Again, there will signals for
this transition. They may be verbal: "And now, seriously . . . " More
often they will be nonverbal. The intonation shifts again, the smile dis-
appears, no more winking. But these signals are not just ad hoc, in-
vented anew by the participants in a particular interaction. Rather, the
signals are diffused through entire social groups or societies, and people
learn them in the course of socialization along with the rest of the social-
ly constructed symbol system. The term "laughing culture" has been
used to denote this phenomenon. 3 The term "comic culture" is probably
preferable.
A comic culture can be described quite simply as the definitions of
comic situations, roles, and acceptable contents in any social group or
society. Once again, it is possible to differentiate micro- and macro-
sociological aspects of the phenomenon. There are comic cultures en
miniature, within families, groups of friends, or other people in ongoing
face-to-face interaction with each other. And then there are the comic
cultures of regions, miscellaneous subcultures (such as ethnic, religious,
or professional ones), and entire societies.
The comic culture of families is frequently created by young children.
Little Johnny or little Jeannie said something very cute at age three, and
ever since the whole family falls into maniacal laughter every time this
historic dictum is quoted or alluded to. Anyone outside the family may
have difficulty in seeing the humor, but this is just the point: the out-
sider is precisely identified as such by his failure to understand the
comic culture of the in-group. In this, comic culture performs the same
important social function of all symbol systems: it draws the boundary
between insiders and outsiders. Comic culture is inclusive and exclusive
at the same time. The same goes for all intimate groups other than
families. There will be a common stock of experiences to which insiders
refer or allude in a code that the outsider does not know. If the outsider
is to be eventually included in the group, he will have to learn this code.
This can be a difficult and lengthy learning process. Knowing when and
at what to laugh is an important part of the process by which the out-
sider is, so to speak, naturalized within the in-group and vicariously
internalizes its history. As in the joke about the convicts in the prison
yard, it is not enough to call out the numbers; one must know how to tell
the funny stories. An interesting case in point is what happens upon
marriage, at least in modern societies. The marriage partners come not
only from different families but very often from widely different social
backgrounds. They begin to construct a common world of meaning in
 Homo Ridiculus: Social Constructions of the Comic 69

what can be called the ongoing marital conversation. 4 In the course of

this they internalize, often in a somewhat modified or reinterpreted
form, each other's premarital histories. This includes the allegedly
amusing episodes. After some years of this, each spouse can tell the
funny stories of the other's past as well or even better than the one to
whom they originally happened. Old married couples, like the convicts
in the prison yard, can chuckle away as they give each other coded
shorthand signals that are completely incomprehensible to anyone else.
One could go on endlessly about macrosociological comic cultures,
and indeed there are many books about such cultures—books on the
humor of the American South or the different regions of Germany, of
Irish-Americans or African-Americans, of doctors or lawyers, or indeed
of entire nations. 5 While it might be entertaining to provide samples of
these here, it would do little to advance the argument of the book. It
should be pointed out, though, that there is often considerable di-
vergence between an empirically observable comic culture and popular
myths about it. Thus it is probably correct that the comic cultures of
large, cosmopolitan cities (such as New York, Paris, or pre-Nazi Berlin)
are sharper and more witty than the comic cultures of their respective
provincial hinterlands. But there are also comic stereotypes that proba-
bly have little empirical basis. Thus in Iranian folklore three cities have
been associated with different comic figures: Rasht with loose women
and their stupid cuckolded husbands, Tabriz with bucolic fools, and
Isfahan with practitioners of witty repartee. 6 It is very doubtful if these
stereotypes have much to do with the real comic cultures of these lo-
calities. Another point should be made here: There has always been a
distinction between the comic culture of the streets and that of formal
comedy—say, between what ordinary Parisians laughed at while taking
a break at Les Halles and what their highly educated compatriots
laughed at while watching a performance at the Opéra Comique. The
distinction is that between the comic in the life world and that in fiction. 7
In most cases, the latter must be rooted in the former, or it will be either
not funny or downright incomprehensible. The exception would be eso-
teric esthetic elites who cultivate an idiosyncratic sense of humor that
deliberately eschews what other people find amusing.
Leaving aside the aforementioned imperative of containing the threat
that the comic potentially holds for social order, the social uses or func-
tions of the comic are basically the psychological functions writ large.
They can be conveniently subsumed under Avner Ziv's typology dis-
cussed in the previous chapter. There is the aforementioned boundary-
drawing function: A comic culture delineates the boundaries of the
group and ipso facto identifies those who are excluded from it. A classi-
cal Jewish joke makes this point with elegant succinctness:
70 Anatomy of the Comic

A Jew, commenting on someone or other: "Nebbich!"

A Gentile listening to this: "Just what does nebbich mean?"
The Jew: "You don't know what nebbich means? Nebbich!"

Then there is aggression and the sublimation of taboos. Closely re-

lated to this is the rebellion against oppression. Examples of these given
in the previous chapter would do equally well here. What should be
strongly emphasized is what Ziv calls the intellectual function of the
comic. As we argued in several earlier passages of this book, the comic
faculty in human beings, whatever else it may be, is also a cognitive one.
It brings about distinctive, objective perceptions of reality. If this is true
philosophically and psychologically, it is certainly also true sociologi-
cally. Comic perceptions of society often give brilliant insights into the
latter. A good cartoon or a good joke can often be more revealing of a
particular social reality than any number of social-scientific treatises.
Thus the comic can often be understood as a sort of popular sociology.
Take the phenomenon of American capitalism and its effect on Ameri-
can culture—the ubiquity of competition, the excesses of consumerism,
business success as a dominant value. These have been dissected and
criticized from different angles, not only from the ideological left. Com-
plex theories and unreadable tomes could be cited. Alternatively, one
could tell the following three jokes:

Two businessmen are on safari. Suddenly they hear drums in the distance.
Their native guide calls out "A lion is heading this way!" and promptly
disappears into the bush. One of the two businessmen sits down and puts
on running shoes. "What are you doing?" says the other businessman,
"You can't outrun a lion." "I don't have to outrun the lion," says the first
businessman. "I only have to outrun you."

An American businessman is in India. An Indian colleague wants to

sell him an elephant: "Special price for you: One thousand dollars, that's
all."
"Look, I live in Chicago, in a one-bedroom studio apartment on the
thirtieth floor of an apartment building. What would I do with an
elephant?"
"Okay, okay. Eight hundred dollars."
"No, as I told you."
"Okay, okay. Seven hundred dollars."
"Look, let me tell you again. I live in a one-bedroom apartment, on the
thirtieth floor . . . "
"Ah, you are a hard bargainer? Let me make my last offer: Two ele-
phants for eight-hundred-and-fifty."
"Good. Now you're talking!"

Two partners in New York's garment district are facing bankruptcy. They
 Homo Ridiculus: Social Constructions of the Comic 71

decide that one will commit suicide, the other will collect the insurance
and save the business. They draw straws. The loser cries a bit, writes a
note to his wife, then goes up to the roof and jumps off. His partner
watches from the window. As the suicide falls, he looks into the windows
of the competitors on the higher floors. As he falls by his partner's win-
dow, he calls out his last words on earth: "Cut velours!"

The experience of the comic is a human universal. Comic cultures can

differ greatly. Some social scientists, especially anthropologists, have
tried to generalize on the cross-cultural character of some manifestations
of the comic. Among them, in two different generations, have been two
distinguished British scholars: A. R. Radcliffe-Brown and Mary Douglas.
Although he did not coin this phrase, Radcliffe-Brown popularized
the concept of "joking relationship." 8 This is defined as follows: "A
relation between two persons in which one is by custom permitted, and
in some instances required, to tease or make fun of the other, who in
turn is required to take no offense." 9 There are two versions of this,
symmetrical and asymmetrical. In a symmetrical joking relationship the
two persons can make fun of each other, be it at the same time or on
different occasions. In an asymmetrical joking relationship one person is
the comedian, the other must always be the straight man. Radcliffe-
Brown gives examples from Africa (his original field), Asia, Oceania,
and North America. Joking relationships are found, for example, be-
tween in-laws and between grandparents and grandchildren. A few
cases involve entire tribes or clans. Always, the relationships evince
what Radcliffe-Brown calls a "peculiar combination of friendliness and
antagonism." His theory of the function of these relationships is sum-
marized as follows: "Both the joking relationship which constitutes an
alliance between clans or tribes, and that between relatives by marriage,
are modes of organizing a definite and stable system of social behavior
in which conjunctive and disjunctive components . . . are maintained
and combined." 10 Or, if one prefers: "If you can no longer hit them with
a machete, hit them with a joke!"
Radcliffe-Brown belonged to the so-called functionalist school of Brit-
ish social anthropology (which later bloomed into so-called structural-
functionalism in American sociology), and his discussion of joking
relationship suffers from the limitations of this school. The main limita-
tion is brought out by a concept often used by Talcott Parsons, the most
influential American sociologist who carried on where Radcliffe-Brown
and his associates left off—the concept of "system maintenance." Social
phenomena are analyzed in terms of their contribution to the stability of
the social order, to maintaining the system. This approach has been
rightly criticized as overemphasizing the rational, systemic character of
72 Anatomy of the Comic

human societies. Mary Douglas, in her essay on the comic, criticizes

Radcliffe-Brown as being both too abstract and too obsessed with sys-
temic order. 11
Douglas also uses miscellaneous ethnographic materials, though
most of them are from Africa. Using both Bergson's and Freud's theories
of the comic, she sees joking as "an attack on control," with "a subver-
sive effect on the dominant structure of ideas." The scatological aspects
of humor provide a good illustration of this. Yet there is no intention
here of actually overthrowing the controlling structures. Rather, the
comic is a "play upon form," a momentary relativization that is pleasur-
able in itself as well as permitting the sublimation of forbidden desires.
In order to preserve this harmless character of humor, comic situations
must be signaled as such: Have you heard this one? and the like. There
is a paradox here: Jokes are antiritual, yet joking is itself established in
rites. One could say that joking ritualizes antirites. As Douglas puts it,
"The message of a standard rite is that the ordained patterns of social life
are inescapable. The message of a joke is that they are escapable. A joke
is by nature an anti-rite." 12
Douglas comes close here to the dimension of containment that has
been emphasized in this chapter, though she does not quite get there. In
any case, joking provides a relief from social classifications and hier-
archies, a softening of the boundaries, "a temporary suspension of the
social structure." It can also be a form of ritual purification, as in cases
where joking is used to cleanse an offender from certain sexual offenses,
Douglas's discussion of the comic phenomenon is most profound when
she describes the joker as a great relativizer, indeed as "a kind of minor
mystic." One could also say that the joker is a kind of minor magician.
He waves his magic wand and, at least for a moment, the harsh contours
of social reality melt away and imagination can fill the resulting empty
space. Douglas enumerates a number of joker-gods—the Greek Proteus,
the Hindu Ganesh, the Yoruba Legba (who continues in sinister forms
in Haitian Voudun). She then claims that it is "not too bold to suggest"
that some African cultures, through their joking rites, have developed
their own philosophy of the absurd. These rites attempt to express the
unfathomable, often in highly poetic forms. In this context Douglas
refers to Victor Turner's work on the cult of Chihamba among the
Ndembu of Zambia. 13 If Douglas is right (and she very probably is),
cults like that of Chihamba represent the unlversalization of Erasmus's
vision of the rule of Lady Folly.
Thomas Luckmann, in his book The Invisible Religion, which has be-
come a classic in the sociology of religion, makes a very useful distinc
tion. 14 He distinguishes between institutionally diffuse and institutionally
specific religion. Through much of history, religion was not relegated
 Homo Ridiculus: Social Constructions of the Comic 73

to specialized institutions; rather, it was diffused through all social

institutions—kinship, the polity, the economy. Only in some societies
have there been institutions defined specifically as dealing with religion;
the Christian church has been such an institution (enormously impor-
tant, of course, in the development of Western civilization). A similar
distinction can be made with regard to the comic. Much of the time it is
diffused throughout the whole spectrum of social institutions, popping
up virtually everywhere, without a specific institutionalization of its
own. There are loose cases of institutionalization, which might be called
intermediate stages. Such a case would be the "appointment," by tacit
consent, of an individual to be the comedian in a small group (this case
was discussed previously as an example of the microsociology of the
comic). But also there have been specifically institutionalized roles and
aggregates of roles with the assignment of representing the comic. The
most important of these roles has been that of the fool; aggregations of
the role, sometimes in highly organized form, can be found in different
versions ranging from elegantly stylized comedy to the chaotic world of
the carnival. 15
In modern usage the terms fool and folly refer either to stupidity or to
madness. Traditionally, in European languages, the terms had a wider
meaning. Traditional folly, in Anton Zijderveld's description, was "be-
yond sanity and insanity." Looking at the accounts of folly in the Middle
Ages and the Renaissance, we would clearly classify some of its practi-
tioners today as mentally retarded or psychotic. Even then, it was recog-
nized that some fools were slow or crazy. But an interesting distinction
was made, that between "natural" and "artificial" fools. The former
were destined to play the fool by some congenital defect; the latter chose
to play the fool as a result of what today would be called a career
decision. In France there was a wonderful phrase defining the latter
case: such an individual was a fou en titre d'ofßce—an officially accredited
fool, if you will—a fool ex officio. Some of these individuals were clearly
not crazy and anything but stupid. They were performing an institu-
tionally defined social role. If some of them happened to be mentally
retarded or psychotic, that fact was, strictly speaking, irrelevant to the
role performance. The role represented and indeed reproduced a spe-
cific perspective on reality—precisely that of folly. It was a surreal, an
upside-down perspective. It embodied quite clearly the central features
of the comic analyzed by philosophers and psychologists—incongruity
on the one hand, sublimation and a strange kind of liberation on the
other.
In Western civilization, the roots of the fool go back to classical antiq-
uity, especially to the Dionysian cult and its later Roman adaptation, the
festival of the Saturnalia. The more proximate roots are in the Middle
74 Anatomy of the Comic

Ages, specifically the various types of "wandering folk" (called fahrendes

Volk in German), which crowded the roads of Europe for centuries. They
were a motley band—pilgrims, preachers, scholars, minstrels, brigands—
but also every kind of entertainer—musicians, jugglers, acrobats. The
medieval fool was an amalgam of all of these, often appearing in the
garb of any of them, recognizable as distinctive only by the role he
performed. The wandering fools were frequently of monastic origin,
individuals (usually men, though there were some cases of renegade
nuns) driven from their monasteries in punishment for their own mis-
deeds, by a desire to be free of monastic discipline, or by economic
circumstances. A French term for these monastic escapees was goliards.
They constituted a bizarre mixture of vagabondage, crime, scholarship,
and entertainment, living by their wits, relegated to the margins of
society, always on the move. In a slightly ironic way one might apply to
them the label a "free-floating intelligentsia," which Karl Mannheim
coined for a much more recent phenomenon (Mannheim applied the
term to modern intellectuals, who are very rarely free-floating; the
goliards fit his idea much better).
A good deal of goliard literature has survived, as well as other ac-
counts of medieval and Renaissance folly. Zijderveld described it as "a
brimful and coarsely joyous reality" and as "a world of freedom outside
the confines of church and society." 16 In this marginal world, the fool
enjoyed a strange freedom (the German Narrenfreiheit). In word, song,
and action he was allowed to debunk both religious and secular authori-
ties (though, obviously, there were occasions when some of the authori-
ties lost their tolerance and suppressed the folly). A key theme in folly
was inversion. It was expressed literally in language and ritual—Latin
sentences pronounced backwards, Catholic ceremonies performed in
inverted order. But more generally everything was turned upside down
in the enactments of folly—all social differentiations (including gender)
and hierarchies (including those of the church) were obliterated, paro-
died, or turned upside down. In the late Middle Ages, in a curious
synthesis, folly merged with death, as expressed in the carnivallike
"death dance" (Totentanz). Zijderveld observed that folly and death ap-
peared here as the "twin revelers." Folly, which relativized and sub-
verted all social order, finally foreshadowed death, which obliterates all
social order once and for all.
Folly as a general cultural phenomenon began to decline in the early
modern period. Zijderveld explains this fact in terms of what Max We-
ber called rationalization. He is very probably correct in this explanation.
If so, the principal culprit is the rising bourgeoisie, that most rational
and serious class. But as folly began to disappear from the streets, it was
immortalized in literature. 17 In 1494 Sebastian Brant's book The Ship of
 Homo Ridiculus: Social Constructions of the Comic 75

Fools (Das Narren Schyff) was published. Here, following a long eccle-
siastical tradition, folly was perceived and condemned as sinful. But not
long after, in 1515, came the publication in High German of a collection
of stories about the great fool and prankster Till Eugenspiegel, "a kind of
peg on which all kinds of funny stories about pranks, tricks and jests
could be conveniently hung." 1 8 Erasmus's Praise of Folly, published in
1511, was probably the first positive treatment of folly in European litera-
ture (even if, as was mentioned earlier, Erasmus kept saying that he did
not really mean it, that it was not "for serious"—one should not believe
him). One might say, though, that in this Erasmus is more representa-
tive of a medieval perspective than (as is usually maintained) of a mod-
ern worldview. 1 9
At the same time, folly became professionalized. Both as literature
and as profession, folly moved off the streets. In this move it lost both its
rootage in popular culture and its marginality. The most important insti-
tutionalization of this move was the role of the court fool. 2 0 Folly was
now confined in the courts of the ancien regime, this last bastion of
an earlier nonbourgeois culture. Here too there were "natural" fools
(among them dwarfs, for whom the aristocracy, especially its ladies, had
a bizarre and frequently lascivious affection). But mostly the court fools
performed their role en titre d'office. Some of them were highly sophisti-
cated professionals, periodically exercising considerable power. They
were known not only for their wit (which, of course, was the defining
precondition for their profession), but also for their political cunning
and personal malice. Having no outside base of support, the court fool
was totally dependent on the good will of the monarch who kept him,
and it was undoubtedly this dependence and the resultant complete
loyalty that endeared the role to the monarch. Needless to say, the good
will of the monarch was something that one could not rely upon. Thus
the role of the court fool was a very precarious one. But even while he
could bask in the monarch's favor, the court fool's existence was not
very enviable. He had to march around in an absurd costume and, while
exercising his wit, keep alert at all times to the shifting moods and
prejudices of his master. In a real sense he was a sort of pet. Indeed, at
some courts the fools had to sleep in the dogs' kennel. European courts
contained fools from the sixteenth through the eighteenth centuries, but
the decline in the institution began around 1700.
Zijderveld sums up this final period as follows: "First absolutist mon-
archs could do without their parasitical fools, then the society which
they themselves lived off as true parasites could do without these mon-
archs. In this sense, the decline of the court fool was the prologue to the
decline of absolutism and thus the prologue to the Revolution of
1789." 2 1 This, of course, was the moment when the Goddess of Reason
76 Anatomy of the Comic

usurped the throne of Lady Folly. Or so it seemed. Looking back on the

two centuries since this usurpation one may well conclude that the new
rational divinity has produced more destructive folly than was ever
dreamed of when Stultitia roamed the streets and strutted in the palaces
of Europe.
Zijderveld's view is that folly died with the triumph of modern ratio-
nality and that any attempts to revive it are futile. He may be too
pessimistic about this. Again, the analogy with religion is useful. One
reason why Thomas Luckmann made the distinction between institu-
tionally diffuse and institutionally specific religion was to run against
the widespread view of sociologists at that time (in the 1960s) that de-
cline of churches was to be equated to decline of religion. Against this
Luckmann insisted on the continuing importance of an "invisible reli-
gion," diffused through many sectors of society and not confined to
specifically religious institutions. The same may well be the case with
folly. Institutional embodiments of folly, such as the goliards or the court
fools, may have disappeared. But folly almost certainly continues in
institutionally diffuse ways and it may pop up in the most unexpected
places. But there have even been institutional continuities. Leave aside
for the moment the development of the comic theater and its profession-
al comedians, which we will look at briefly a little later. Also leave aside
the popular theater, such as vaudeville and burlesque in America, in
which many elements of traditional folly reappear in unexpected guises.
One may focus instead on one distinctly modern institution—the circus
and its clowns. 2 2
The circus as an institution originated in the late eighteenth century,
thus coinciding more or less with the demise of the court fool. It was an
emphatically nonaristocratic institution, at first patronized by the bour-
geoisie and then commanding much broader popular appeal. It began
with an arena for equestrian exhibitions started by one Philip Astley on
the outskirts of London in 1768. In a circular riding ring he staged feats
of horsemanship, acrobatics on horseback, and he interspersed these
with comic skits. The last of these, of course, became the domain of the
clown, a figure in direct apostolic succession from the medieval fool via
the Harlequins and Pierrots of the formal theater of the early modern
period. Within twenty-five years, now under the name of circus, Ast-
ley's invention was introduced throughout Europe and North America.
It has survived every since.
Here is a description of the circus clown dating from 1802: "rustic
appearance, vacant or gazing eyes, arms dangling, yet the shoulders
raised, the toes turned inwards, a shambling gait with a heavy step,
great slowness of conception, and apparent stupidity of mind and man-
ner." 2 3 The figure has hardly changed since then. Neither has the bulk
 Homo Ridiculus: Social Constructions of the Comic 77

of his repertoire, with its stylized pratfalls, games of peekaboo, and feats
of magic invulnerability. A prototypical clowning scene involves the
clown's antagonist, a serious figure, going after him with a hammer or
some other weapon. The clown eludes the antagonist, executing ver-
satile evasive maneuvers despite his seeming awkwardness, and when
he is finally caught and hit over the head and thrown to the ground, he
always j u m p s up again, unhurt and invincible. Like the fool, the clown
is a magician. And, like the world of folly, the world of the circus creates
an oasis of enchantment within the reality of modern rationality. Most
modern adults, at least those with a measure of "higher" education, are
not easily amused by the antics of the circus clown. Children invariably
are. This is revealing. For even if, as Max Weber believed, the modern
world is one of radical disenchantment, every generation of children
recreates the enchanted garden from which the Goddess of Reason was
supposed to liberate mankind. Children immediately identify with the
clown and his world. O n e might put forth the thesis that they know
something that their elders have forgotten.
In the history of the circus, as in other manifestations of comic cul-
ture, one can observe a dialectic between popular and high cultural
forms. The circus clown as such is rarely an object of attention by serious
cultural critics, though some of the great virtuosi of circus clowning have
b e e n — s u c h as Grock (1880-1959), a Swiss clown w h o dominated Eu-
ropean circuses for many years, and Oleg Popov, the star of the Moscow
Circus beginning in the 1950s. It is only a short step from these circus
figures to comic actors and mimes such as Charlie Chaplin, Marcel Mar-
ceau, and Jean-Louis Barrault. The career of Chaplin in the development
of motion pictures suggests, all by itself, that the announcement of the
final demise of the fool has been premature.
Nor is the fool a role limited to Western civilization. 2 4 There are re-
ports of official jesters at the courts of the Incas and the Tokugawa
shogurt. Clowns (vidusaka) appear in ancient Indian plays, and this the-
atrical convention continues in contemporary Japanese drama. 2 5 Cere-
monial clowns have been studied in certain African cultures. 2 6 Possibly
the most interesting cases of ritual folly outside Western civilization
come from several Native American cultures. Here one finds ceremo-
nial fools, who are supposed to engage in what is nicely called con-
trary behavior. This includes transvestism, backward speech, mockery
of sacred rituals, and revolting acts (such as drinking urine). The sim-
ilarity to the medieval European practices described earlier is striking.
The fool also occupies a place in Native American mythology. The
best-known description of one such case is Paul Radin's account of the
so-called trickster cycle of the Winnebago Indians. 2 7 The mythical
trickster is Wakdjunkara, a fool of classical form, whose exploits are
78 Anatomy of the Comic

strongly reminiscent of Till Eugenspiegel and the latter's probably an-

tecedents in the Middle East.
These cross-cultural appearances of the role of the fool are especially
interesting because it is unlikely that all of them can be explained by
cultural borrowings. Cultural diffusionists might hypothesize that the
fool was invented in, say, India, and then wandered off in all directions.
To be sure, there very probably was some such diffusion (certainly in the
case of Till Eugenspiegel). However, it is stretching the explanatory
power of diffusionist theory to assume that it can account for phenome-
na stretching from medieval Europe to Tokugawa, Japan from East Afri-
ca to the plains of North America—all before the development of
modern communications. A more functionalist interpretation suggests
itself. It seems plausible that folly and fools, like religion and magic,
meet some deeply rooted needs in human society. The cross-culturally
common features of the phenomenon suggest what these needs might
be: the violation of taboos, the mockery of sacred and profane authori-
ties and symbols, reversals of language and action, and a ubiquitous
obscenity. All of these are nicely subsumed under the Native American
term contrary behavior. What could be the social function of this? Clear-
ly, there are psychological functions writ large, as was observed earlier.
Zijderveld uses the phrase "safety-valve hypothesis" to describe these:
Society allows the carefully circumscribed expression of prohibited im-
pulses and, by doing so, prevents their disrupting the social order "for
serious." There is certainly something to that. Beyond this, however,
social order is enhanced by allowing a place within it of counterthemes,
counterworlds. Zijderveld quotes the Dutch sociologist W. F. Wertheim,
who described the phenomenon of folly as a "counter-point to the lead-
ing melody," thus finally contributing to the integration of society. 28
This is probably as far as functionalist explanations can carry one. As
Mary Douglas criticized A. R. Radcliffe-Brown, it does not go far
enough. Zijderveld understands this. He sees in folly the element of
magic, the numinous quality of a counterworld that is haunting the
world of ordinary life and thereby putting it in danger. This quasi-
magical, quasi-religious character of the comic is intrinsic to its very
nature and as such universal. It haunts all societies, and all societies
must find ways of protecting themselves against it. Given this, it should
not be surprising that the fool appears in so many places.
Formal comedy has been, ever since Aristophanes, an important
manifestation of high culture in Western civilization.29 Yet comedy, as
performed for the aristocracy or the bourgeoisie, ever again derived
inspiration from the comic culture of the general populace and in turn
influenced the latter (especially, of course, since the advent of modern
media of mass communication). Medieval fools reappear in new forms
 Homo Ridiculus: Social Constructions of the Comic 79

in Shakespeare's plays (and not only in those categorized as comedies),

in Cervantes's Don Quixote and, probably in the most elegant transfor-
mation, in the commedia dell'arte, especially those of Harlequin and Pier-
rot, who in turn helped shape the character of the circus clown. Its dirty
old man with the baggy trousers, Pantalone or Pantaloon, experienced
an American incarnation in the comedian of burlesque theater and coun-
try fair. Busy literary scholars, if they try hard enough, could probably
trace some of the obscene jokes that have titillated audiences in these
American locales of emphatically low culture all the way back to the
verbal orgies of the goliards.
The theater, as a physical structure and as a social organization, is the
setting for formal comedy. It contains both actors and audience in an
ongoing interaction. The audience is an essential part of the event, creat-
ing an antiphony of performance and laughing response. Thus comedy,
true to its cultic origins, constitutes a sort of ceremony, even in its most
modern versions. The same is true of the cabaret and the performances
of stand-up comedians. The ceremonial element, of course, is lost when
a solitary reader immerses himself in the written text of a comedy, as it is
lost when comedy is transmitted through the modern media of radio,
film or television. There can be little doubt, though, that the comic
experience is diluted as a result. By the same token, the task for the
creator of comedy (the comic author or actor) becomes more difficult in
the absence of a live audience. It is instructive that the producers of
television comedies have found it useful to invite live audiences to the
studio during filming and to broadcast canned laughter when the come-
dy goes on the air.
The theater has always been a magical place. This quality has repeat-
edly been noted. This is a place where anything might happen, a place
of mystery and fascination. The magic of the theater, of course, ex-
presses itself in tragedy as well as comedy, and it is intrinsic to the
Aristotelian catharsis that ideally is engendered by either. The catharsis
of comedy, as was noted earlier, is different from that of tragedy. Albeit
sometimes in very muted tones, it reiterates the primeval catharsis of the
Dionysian orgy. The theater as an institution rigorously contains this
chaotic element—in space, in time, and through the constraints of artis-
tic form. The modern theater is a building: What is plausible inside the
building is not plausible outside it. The comic performance is scheduled
at certain hours on certain days: at other times its fantastic reality can be
put aside. Comedy as played in the theater follows very specific rules
and conventions: This ensures that not quite "anything might happen."
When the performance is over, one leaves the building and, somehow
refreshed, returns to the "standard time" (Alfred Schutz's term) and the
routine activities of ordinary social life.
80 Anatomy of the Comic

Bernhard Greiner, a historian of comedy, has proposed that comedy

is constituted by an act of "doubling" (Dopplung). That is, comedy estab-
lishes a counterworld to the world of ordinary life. Tragedy, of course,
does the same. It could be argued, though, that the doubling of comedy
is more radical. Tragedy, after all, is always based on the actual realities
of the human condition.
Consequently, the necessary suspension of doubt (what phenome-
nologists call the epoche) must be more radical in the case of comedy. The
tragic hero incurs guilt, his efforts to avert destiny are doomed to fail,
the consequences of his actions are ironically perverse, and in the end he
typically dies. The tragic drama compresses and stylizes these events in
a manner that requires a certain epoché, yet all these components of the
tragic trajectory are in fact present in the empirical realities of human
life. By contrast, the comic hero is eternally innocent, he triumphs over
all adversities, the ironic consequences of his actions actually turn out to
be to his advantage, and in the end he typically marries or triumphs in
love. To enter into this counterworld surely requires a more radical
epoché. The comic author and the comic actor must seduce the audience
into this epoché, a task that is arguably more difficult than that of their
colleagues in the business of producing tragedies. The distinctively com-
ic suspension of doubt or disbelief is necessitated by the most accom-
plished works of Shakespeare or Molière, as it is by the flimsiest operetta
or the crudest episodes told by a vaudeville comedian.
The commedia dell'arte was the fullest reappropriation of the Dionysian
element and its magic in modern theater. 30 It is virtually impossible to
appreciate this by reading its texts. There is a very close linkage between
word and action, which the written text cannot reproduce. One can
attempt an approximation of the experience by looking at pictures, such
as the famous ones by Antoine Watteau. The commedia dell'arte was
drama cast in quite rigid forms, almost liturgical in character. There were
fixed characters, costumes and masks, stereotyped movements, and
schematic plots. Yet within these forms there was great variability
through improvisations, both spoken and acted out. What was pre-
sented to the audience was the magic of a rich, densely populated coun-
terworld. The principal characters present themselves as timeless,
mythopoetic figures, headed by Harlequin (originally Arlechino), the
prototypical fool who began his career as a stumbling rustic bumpkin
and who was transformed in France into Pierrot, a witty philosopher.
Ever since, fools and clowns have alternated between these two proto-
typical characters. Then there was Columbina/Columbine, Harlequin's
saucy girlfriend (the two were immortalized in music as Papageno and
Papagena in Mozart's Magic Flute); the aforementioned Pantalone; fol-
lowed by Dottore, the timeless embodiment of the fraudulent expert;
 Homo Ridiculus: Social Constructions of the Comic 81

Capitano, a strutting, macho man of action whose efforts are invariably

frustrated (he was originally depicted as a Spaniard); and the wily ser-
vants (zanni), to w h o m Arlechino originally belonged (he reappears in
this character in Cervantes's Sancho Panza and as Leporello in Mozart's
Don Giovanni). If one were a Jungian (a possibility not recommended
here), one would say that these figures are archetypes surfacing from
the deepest levels of the collective unconscious of Western civilization;
the non-Jungian can still marvel at their enduring fascination.
The commedia dell'arte had three sources: the commedia erudita (formal
comedy) of the Renaissance, popular dramas, and the traditions of the
carnival. The dialectic between high and popular comic culture can be
clearly observed here. And as with the more popular forms of comedy,
the commedia dell'arte, in its improvisations, provided occasions for sharp
satire directed against every kind of authority. This repeatedly led to
political difficulties, as when the Theatre Italien in Paris was temporarily
closed in 1697. Many years later, during the post-Napoleonic period of
political repression, the Viennese comic actor and author Johannn
Nestroy gave elegant form to this tradition of satire. He was only tempo-
rarily restrained from practicing it by the prohibition of all improvisa-
tions by the censorship office. All police states must worry about
improvisation. Yet the alternation of formal stylization and spontaneous
improvisation is one of the very essences of comedy. Greiner's charac-
terization of the commedia dell'arte could be applied to comedy in general:
"Nothing in this world is certain, everything could be revealed as illu-
sion from moment to the next. Such a world is only tolerable if only the
moment counts. Earlier events must not have been congealed into de-
pressing 'treasury of experience,' future events must not be anticipated
as possible threats. Thus this form of theater liberates from the heavi-
ness of life." 3 1
Finally, a different social construction of the comic must be looked at
here. Here there is containment in time only. It is spatially unbounded,
with relatively loose forms of behavior and speech, and with no dividing
barrier between performers and audience. Here, even in modern times,
one is closest to the Dionysian komos. The generic term for this institu-
tion is carnival.32 It is originally a European construction, but it has
absorbed into itself very different cultural elements (as in the carnivals of
Brazil and the Caribbean). There are also analogs in non-Western
cultures.
Originally, of course, the term carnival (literally, goodbye to the flesh)
refers to the festivities on the Tuesday before Ash Wednesday, the last
expression of joie de vivre before the fasting period of Lent. The schedul-
ing of the event within the Christian church year is instructive. The wild
celebration of all the joys of the flesh is already overshadowed by the
82 Anatomy of the Comic

impending gloom of Lent, life is celebrated in the shadow of death. The

generic use of the term was employed by the Russian scholar Mikhail
Bakhtin (of whom more in a moment). It is useful, since the carnival
spirit has not been limited to Mardi Gras. A whole series of festivals has
been characterized by the same eruption of folly. There was notably the
Feast of Fools, celebrated in Western Europe at the New Year and orga-
nized by the lower clergy (the same resentful population from whom the
goliards were recruited). There were other celebrations, mostly observed
in the period between Christmas and Epiphany. All of these events were
planned and conducted by organizations that constituted, as it were,
committees or fraternities of fools. This form of social organization has
survived to the present day, as for instance in New Orleans, where
these groups are closely related to the overall status system in both the
white and black communities.
To get a sense of these events the following description is useful. It is
taken from a statement by the Theological Faculty of Paris in 1444. The
statement, describing the Feast of Fools, was intended to put a stop to
these practices (it failed to do so):

Priests and clerks may be seen wearing masks and monstrous visages at the
hours of the office. They dance in the choir dressed as women, panders or
minstrels. They sing wanton songs. They eat black puddings at the horn of
the altar, while the celebrant is saying mass. They play at dice there. They
cense with stinking smoke from the soles of old shoes. They run and leap
through the church, without a blush at their own shame. Finally they drive
about the town and its theaters in shabby traps and cars; and rouse the
laughter of their fellows and the bystanders in infamous performances,
with indecent gestures and verses scurrilous and unchaste. 3 3

One of the most influential interpretations of the carnival is that of the

aforementioned Mikhail Bakhtin, in a book written in 1940. 34 The aim of
the book is to place Rabelais within the history of the "folk culture of
humor. " The most important expressions of the latter, according to Bak-
htin, were in the ritual events generically subsumed under the term
carnival, in verbal compositions of various sorts (including parodies) and
in an assortment of popular curses, oaths, and ditties. In all of these
Bakhtin detects a common idiom, which evolved over centuries going all
the way back to the comic rituals of classical antiquity. This is the idiom
of "carnival laughter." It was, and is, characterized by a profound egali-
tarianism (official hierarchies ignored or turned upside-down). It was
festive; not individual but "laughter of all the people"; universal in
scope, perceiving the entire world as folly; ambivalent, in that it was
both deprecating and triumphant. Bakhtin also uses the phrase "gro-
tesque realism" to describe this idiom. It debunked all idealistic preten-
 Homo Ridiculus: Social Constructions of the Comic 83

sions and emphasized the grossest bodily functions: "Laughter de-

grades and materializes." 35
Some of this reads as if the carnival spirit was a sort of precocious
dialectical materialism. Leaving aside the question of whether Bakhtin
really believed this or whether these Marxist tones provided protective
coloring against the Stalinist censors of the time, this quasi-revolutionary
interpretation of the carnival is highly unpersuasive. As Zijderveld points
out in his discussion of the same phenomena, there was hardly ever the
intent here of overthrowing either secular or ecclesiastical authorities.
This, however, does not touch upon the accuracy of Bakhtin's descrip-
tions, nor on the profoundly subversive force of the Dionysian comic,
though this subversion must be understood in a metapolitical sense. This
indeed is well-expressed in Bakhtin's formulation of the Renaissance
conception of laughter:

Laughter has a deep philosophical meaning, it is one of the essential forms

of the truth concerning the world as a whole, concerning history and man,
it is a peculiar point of view relative to the world; the world is seen anew,
no less (and perhaps more) profoundly than when seen from the serious
standpoint. Therefore, laughter is just as admissible in great literature,
posing universal problems, as seriousness. Certain essentials aspects of
the world are accessible only to laughter. 3 6

Such laughter is indeed subversive, but in a sense far removed from any
Marxist theory of revolutionary consciousness.
Bakhtin also emphasizes what has repeatedly been pointed out in the
preceding discussions here—that the laughing culture of the Middle
Ages and the Renaissance created a counterworld:

It [medieval laughter] builds its own world versus the official world, its
own church versus the official church, its own state versus the official
state. Laughter celebrates its masses, professes its faith, celebrates mar-
riages and funerals, writes its epitaphs, elects kings and bishops. Even the
smallest medieval parody is always built as part of the whole comic
world. 3 7

One might add that this doubling is characteristic of all creations of the
comic spirit, though rarely with the force or completeness of the tradi-
tional carnival. This kind of laughter liberates (the aforementioned Nar-
renfreiheit). It allows at least temporary victories over fear, including the
fear of death (note again how the late medieval dance of death incorpo-
rated the symbols and gestures of the carnival). The grotesque, obscene,
and scatological treatment of the body is an intrinsic part of this over-
coming of fear—the most vulnerable, least spiritual aspects of human
84 Anatomy of the Comic

existence are magically rendered harmless in these parodies. In this

context it is not irrelevant to note that Rabelais studied and later taught
medicine at the Montepellier Medical School, where there was much
discussion of the therapeutic power of laughter. It is from there that
Rabelais derived his concept of the "joyous physician." Perhaps one
might also fantasize about the possibility of a joyous sociologist, one
who has incorporated a Rabelaisian comic vision into his understanding
of the precariousness of society.
The carnival may be seen as the final stage in the progression of the
comic from brief interruption of social order to the full-blown construc-
tion of a counterworld. These comic intrusions are temporary, but they
are always there as haunting possibilities, simultaneously liberating indi-
viduals and making the guardians of order very nervous. The institutions
that contain and channel the comic intrusions are available for sociologi-
cal analysis, even though it has only been possible to look at a few of
them, and then only cursorily, in this chapter. Still, the basic character of
these institutions should by now have been somewhat clarified.
Contrary to Zijderveld's pessimism, folly has not disappeared from
the modern world, just as religion and magic have not disappeared.
Specific institutional forms appear and disappear, but the comic experi-
ence is grounded in anthropological necessity and it will invent new
forms of expression whenever earlier ones have become obsolete. The
procession of all the figures of folly continues, literally in contemporary
carnivals (Venice, Cologne, New Orleans, most richly in Rio de Janeiro),
but also in the perennial comic imagination. The procession of fools
marches down the centuries, on all continents. Here is a consoling
thought: The procession will not end while the human story lasts.

Notes

1. Cf. Anton Zijderveld, Reality in a Looking-Glass: Rationality through an

Analysis of Traditional Folly (London: Routledge and Kegan Paul, 1982), 39f. This
chapter is strongly dependent on this uniquely useful book. Also cf. Zijderveld's
earlier work Humor und Gesellschaft: Eine Soziologie des Humors und des Lachens
(Graz: Styria, 1976), and the annotated bibliography on the sociology of humor
edited by him, in Current Sociology, 31:3 (winter 1983). There is mythopoetic
plausibility to the fact that Zijderveld teaches sociology in Rotterdam in the
university named after Erasmus.
2. On the microsociology of humor, cf. Zijderveld, Humor, 67ff.
3. Cf. Hermann Bausinger, "Lachkultur," in Thomas Vogel, ed., Vom Lachen
(Tuebingen: Attempto, 1992), 9ff. Bausinger did not coin this term. It is a Ger-
man translation of the Russian of Mikhail Bakhtin, whose interpretation of the
carnival will be discussed presently.
 Homo Ridiculus: Social Constructions of the Comic 85

4. Cf. Peter Berger and Hansfried Kellner, "Marriage and the Construction
of Reality," in Peter Berger, ed., Facing Up to Modernity (New York: Basic Books,
1977), 5ff.
5. Just as an example of this genre, cf. Herbert Schoeffler, Kleine Geographie
des deutschen Witzes (Goettingen: Vandenhoeck & Ruprecht, 1955). Edited and
with a commentary by none less than the philosopher Helmuth Plessner (whose
work on laughing and weeping was discussed earlier), this book covers the
major German-speaking regions and gives examples of the allegedly distinctive
humor of each. There are similar works on, at any rate, most if not all Western
countries.
6. I'm indebted to Ali Banuazizi for this example.
7. Cf. the collection of short papers under the heading "Das lebensweltliche
und das fiktionale Komische," in Wolfgang Preisendanz and Rainer Warning, eds.,
Das Komische (Munich: Fink, 1976), 362ff.
8. A. R. Radcliffe-Brown, Structure and Meaning in Primitive Society (New
York: Free Press, 1968), 90ff. These are essays originally published in the 1940s.
9. Ibid., 90.
10. Ibid., 95.
11. Mary Douglas, Implicit Meanings (London: Routledge and Kegan Paul,
1975), 90ff.
12. Ibid., 103.
13. Cf. Victor Turner, Chihamba, the White Spirit (Manchester: Manchester
University Press, 1962.)
14. Thomas Luckmann, The Invisible Religion (New York: Macmillan, 1967).
15. The definitive sociological work on the fool is Anton Zijderveld's previ-
ously cited Reality in a Looking-Glass. For very useful historical works, cf. Barbara
Swain, Fools and Folly (New York: Columbia University Press, 1932); Enid
Welsford, The Fool: His Social and Literary History (Gloucester, Mass.: Peter Smith,
[1935] 1966); William Willeford, The Fool and His Scepter (Evanston, 111.: North-
western University Press, 1969). Less useful for the present purposes, but with
some interesting data, is a work by another sociologist, Orrin Klapp, Heroes,
Villains and Fools (Englewood Cliffs, N.J.: Prentice-Hall, 1962).
16. Zijderveld, Reality, 52.
17. Cf. Barbara Koenneker, Wesen und Wandlung der Narrenidee im Zeitalter
des Humanismus (Wiesbaden: Franz Steiner, 1966).
18. Zijderveld, Reality, 83. The antecedents of Till Eugenspiegel have preoc-
cupied generations of literary scholars. Many of the stories can be traced to the
Middle East, from where they came to Europe in the figure whom the Turks
called Nasreddin Hodja. Some may ultimately go back to Persia and India. Once
again, the fool reveals himself as a broadly cross-cultural if not universal figure.
19. On the place of Erasmus's book in the evolution of the Narrenidee, cf.
Koenneker, Wesen und Wandlung, 248ff.
20. Zijderveld, Reality, 92ff.
21. Ibid., 126.
22. Cf. John Towsen, Clowns (New York: Hawthorn, 1976).
23. Ibid., 88f.
86 Anatomy of the Comic

24. Cf. Zijderveld, Reality, 131ff.

25. Clifford Geertz discussed this in various works on Japanese culture, but
for a recent vivid description of comic theater in Bali cf. Ron Jenkins, Subversive
Laughter (New York: Free Press, 1994), 13ff. Jenkins, who teaches at Emerson
College, has the distinction of also being a graduate of the Ringling Brothers
Clown College in Florida. His book testifies to the fact that this has helped him
achieve empathy with comedians in Bali and everywhere else.
26. Cf. Geoffrey Gorer, Africa Dances (London: John Lehmann, 1949), 125.
27. Paul Radin, The Trickster: A Study in American Indian Mythology (New
York: Philosophical Library, 1956).
28. Cf. Zijderveld, Reality, 146ff.
29. Cf. Greiner, Komoedie.
30. Cf. ibid., 69ff.
31. Ibid., 73. My translation.
32. Cf. Zijderveld, Reality, 60ff.
33. Ibid., 61f.
34. Mikhail Bakhtin, Rabelais and His World, trans. Helen Iswolsky (Cam-
bridge, Mass.: MIT Press, 1968). Bakhtin has recently been rediscovered as an
alleged precursor of contemporary literary theory. Be this as it may, there was a
"Bakhtin school" in Russia in the 1920s, in line with the so-called discourse
analysis of Ferdinand de Saussure and Roman Jakobson. All of this is only
marginally relevant to the argument of this chapter (though it puts in a broader
framework Bakhtin's analysis of comic idiom). The cited book, though written in
1940, did not become available until the 1960s because of the author's political
difficulties. It is not hard to understand why the Stalinist authorities were less
than happy with Bakhtin's view of the rebellious nature of the carnival and of
comic laughter in general.
35. Ibid., 20.
36. Ibid., 66.
37. Ibid., 88.
 Interlude
Brief Reflections on Jewish Humor

It is no accident (as Marxists used to say) that many of the jokes cited in
the preceding chapters have been Jewish. The best jokes are Jewish
jokes. This is a well-known fact among, at any rate, college-educated
Americans of whatever ethnic or religious background. The college edu-
cation is relevant only insofar as Jewish humor tends toward a high level
of sophistication; whatever else a college education may be useful for
today (this is a very controversial issue that cannot be pursued here), it
does lead to the acquisition of a measure of sophistication. At least since
the 1950s Jewish humor, both in its explicit form and in what might call a
certain covert infiltration (the tone is Jewish even if the content is not),
has become a central ingredient of American comic culture. It is not only
that so many entertaining writers and professional comedians have been
Jewish. More significant is the fact that a distinctively Jewish comic
sensibility has become established in the culture at large. Thus, for ex-
ample, midwestern or southern college students of undiluted gentile
antecedents will learn to use Yiddish phrases or even affect a Yiddish
intonation when they want to appear witty. Humor has been an impor-
tant element in the cultural ascendancy of Jews in America.
This development is interesting in itself. And, of course, there have
been a number of works exploring the historical evolution of Jewish
humor. It cannot be the present purpose to look into these works or to
analyze the manner in which Jewish influences have shaped recent
American culture. However, the case of Jewish humor is important also
in that it helps to clarify the dynamics by which a comic culture is
socially constructed, and these brief reflections are intended to contrib-
ute to this clarification.
Whatever may have been the earlier roots of Jewish humor, such as in
the Talmudic literature, the more proximate origins are to be found in
the Yiddish culture of eastern Europe, both in its folklore and in its
higher literary expressions. The latter is represented by such classic
88 Anatomy of the Comic

Yiddish authors as Sholem Aleichem or Yitzchak Leibush Peretz, but

this literature derived its inspiration from the pulsating vitality of Yid-
dish culture as lived by ordinary people. It flourished within the con-
fines of the shtetl and remained impenetrable to the gentile world
outside (not that m a n y gentiles had an interest in penetrating it). But
with the coming of emancipation in the nineteenth century this culture
burst out of its centuries-old confines and transmuted itself into a m u c h
more complicated synthesis. To some extent this occurred in a n u m b e r
of metropolitan centers to which large numbers of J e w s migrated, both
in Eastern and Western Europe. It was especially in the cities of the
erstwhile Austro-Hungarian monarchy that a distinctive comic culture
developed, a comic culture that could not be divorced from its Jewish
c o m p o n e n t s . T h e coffeehouse, as it emerged as a strategic urban institu-
tion in this region, was a central locale of this comic culture. It flourished
with particular splendor in the three great capitals of Vienna, Budapest,
and Prague, but it was to be found as well in such lesser urban centers as
Zagreb, Brno, and Czernowitz. There, in the peculiar late-evening atmo-
sphere permeated by the aroma of too much coffee and too m a n y ciga-
rettes, was cultivated a form of wit as impenetrable to the outsider as
had been the comic culture of the shtetl. Now, however, insiders and
outsiders were n o longer identified only in terms of ethnicity and reli-
gion, for m a n y non-Jews fully participated in these esoteric exchanges.
In a heartbreaking way, and in the virtual absence of living Jewish
interlocutors, faint echoes of this distinctive comic culture can still be
heard in this region today. It is a sign of the invincible survival p o w e r of
the Jewish people t h a t — e v e n as Nazi barbarism had destroyed most of
Jewish culture in E u r o p e — i t found n e w incarnations in America and in
Israel. T h e comic culture of Israel, by its very nature, is an intra-Jewish
affair. It is in America that large numbers of gentiles have been drawn
into the magic world of Jewish humor.

T h e distinctiveness of Jewish h u m o r is not explained by its subject

matter. T o be sure, there are s o m e notable deficits. T h u s Jewish h u m o r
contains almost no scatology and remarkably little sexuality (even the
j o k e s about sexual situations are usually about something else, such as
m o n e y or the complexity of family relations). O n e can say that Jewish
h u m o r is at a great distance from the raucous carnival laughter that
Mikhail Bakhtin goes on about. But that is also true of other comic
cultures (for example, that of the Irish). T h e compilers of an anthology of
Jewish h u m o r describe its subject matter as follows: " F o o d (noshing is
sacred), family, business, anti-Semitism, wealth and its absence, health
and survival." 1 With the obvious exception of anti-Semitism, however,
these topics occur in other comic cultures as well. There is a matter of
form. M o d e r n Jewish humor, in Europe as well as in America, h a s
 Interlude: Brief Reflections on Jewish Humor 89

refined the form of the joke. While the comic, as has been strenuously
argued throughout this book, is a universal human phenomenon, the
joke as a form of comic creativity is not. There are cultures with rich
comic traditions where people rarely if ever tell jokes (this seems to be
the case, for instance, in Eastern Asia). For the present purpose, the joke
can be described simply as a very short story with a comic twist at the
end (the punch line). Jewish humor, for a very long time, has brought
forth a cornucopia of jokes. Undoubtedly this has deep roots in Jewish
cultural history, going back to Talmudic times and the rabbinical pro-
pensity to make a point by telling a story, usually a short one. Again,
though, the joke is not a uniquely Jewish form of comic expression. It
has roots in medieval and Renaissance comic culture; its origins are
probably in the Middle East (as in the tales of Nazreddin Hodja), possi-
bly in India.
The distinctiveness of Jewish humor lies not so much in either its
subject matter nor in its expressive form. Rather it lies in its peculiar sen-
sibility, its tone. C'est le ton qui fait la musique. It is a sharp, cutting tone.
It is strongly intellectual, which makes for its association with urbanity
and sophistication. It also has a surreal dimension, which one is tempted
to call religious in origin. One example will have to serve here. Business
has been listed as one frequent topic for Jewish humor. More specifically,
a common theme in Jewish jokes is the superior acumen of the Jewish
businessman (ironically, the same theme that occurs in a pejorative mode
in gentile jokes is an occasion for self-congratulation when it is treated in
Jewish jokes—it is not just a question of how jokes are told, but by whom
and whenl). This theme is not unique either. It was common in American
humor, long before it was infiltrated by Jewish sensibilities. There was the
comic figure of the Yankee peddler, a smart city-slicker who always
outsmarted country bumpkins and other people with inferior business
sense. Here is a story about this character dating from before 1800:

A Yankee captain is drinking in a London tavern when some locals try,

unsuccessfully, to lure him into a card game. He refuses, and they leave.
The landlord asks him to pay for everyone's drinks, as is supposedly the
London custom when someone turns down an invitation to play cards.
The Yankee puts on a stricken expression, draws out some silver coins,
then asks for another bottle. As the landlord goes to fetch it, the Yankee
scrawls the sum allegedly owed on the mantelpiece, and underneath it
writes "I leave you a Yankee handle for your London Blades," then runs
out the door. 2

There is wit here, of a certain intellectual quality (the word blade in the
English of that period meant a smart character as well as the edge of a
knife). It hardly compares, though, with the sharpness of Jewish jokes
90 Anatomy of the Comic

on the same theme. One may recall here the joke told in the preceding
chapter of the businessman in New York's garment district who com-
mits suicide so that his partner can collect the insurance and whose last
words, as he falls by his partner's window, consist of the recommenda-
tion to cut velours. Or take the following joke:

Two partners in the garment business face a crisis. They have a huge
number of madras shirts on supply and no buyers. Then, wonderfully, a
buyer from out of town comes in and orders a thousand shirts. There is
just one thing, he says: He must get confirmation from the home office;
but, unless he sends a telegram by the end of the week to cancel, the order
stands. The partners are very anxious. The days go by. On Friday, just
before closing time, a Western Union boy delivers a telegram, The part-
ners blanch. With an effort of will one of them tears open the envelope,
then calls out to his partner, "Abe, wonderful news! Your sister has
died!" 3

Is there any way of explaining this very distinctive comic style? An

exhaustive explanation may remain out of reach, but some suggestions
are possible. Two can be made with some assurance, based on the two
historical factors of Jewish marginality and Jewish intellectuality. More
cautiously, one may point to some features of Judaism as a religious
tradition.
In Western civilization Jews were a marginal group for many centu-
ries. This in all likelihood made for a certain clear-eyed perspective on
society in and of itself. When emancipation came, this marginality did
not altogether cease, but it became more nuanced. In a very curious way,
Jews were both inside and outside the European societies that had given
them citizenship. One may hypothesize that it is precisely this ambiva-
lence of being simultaneously an insider and an outsider that makes for a
disillusioned, skeptical view of society. The classical American sociolo-
gist Thorstein Veblen has accounted in this way for the extraordinarily
large contribution that Jews have made to Western intellectual life since
emancipation. He characterizes the modern Jewish intellectual as "a
skeptic by force of circumstances." 4 However, in twentieth-century soci-
ology the two writings that most accurately make this point are two
essays that, though both were authored by Jews, do not deal with the
Jewish situation as such. These are the essays on the social role of the
stranger by Georg Simmel and Alfred Schutz. 5 Simmel does indeed
mention what he calls the classical example of Jewish history in Europe,
but his aim was to delineate the social type of the stranger in a general,
cross-cultural manner. The stranger embodies a peculiar "unity of near-
ness and remoteness" and this condition leads to a distinctive posture of
detachment and objectivity. Thus the stranger sees many things that the
 Interlude: Brief Reflections on Jewish Humor 91

native, who takes them for granted, fails to see or sees much less sharp-
ly. Schutz consciously wrote his essay on the stranger as an addendum
to Simmel's text. He particularly emphasizes that the stranger's taken-
for-granted world is much more precarious than that of the native. He
too mentions the objectivity that comes from having to learn, as an
outsider, the rules of the game dictated by the in-group. In addition,
though, as Schutz poignantly puts it, there is "his own [the stranger's]
bitter experience of the limits of "thinking as usual," which has taught
him that a man may lose his status, his rules of guidance, and even his
history and that the normal way of life is always far less guaranteed than
it seems." 6
The pilgrimage of Jews through Western history as outsiders/insiders
goes a long way to explaining their intellectual preeminence (to use
Veblen's phrase) in modern culture. It also helps to explain the distinc-
tive character of modern Jewish comic culture, spanning its flowering in
Yiddish to its amazing resurgence in America. As has been argued ear-
lier, the comic invades and subverts the taken-for-granted structures of
social life. It reveals their incongruities and their fundamental vul-
nerability. This is a perspective that comes more readily to the stranger.
It is a deeply disturbing, indeed dangerous perspective. This is at least
one reason why modern Jewish consciousness has been a perennially
troubled one. The Yiddish saying that it is shver tsu zein a yid (difficult to
be a Jew) has been verified even in some of the most rarified products of
the modern Jewish mind. Unfortunately, the same skeptical, implicitly
dangerous perspective on society and all its works has also fueled the
anti-Semitic mentality. In any case, one encounters here once more the
doubling (Dopplung) of vision that Bernhard Greiner has proposed as
the essence of comedy.
Jews have had to survive in this ambivalent situation and much Jew-
ish with has been put at the service of this survival. This has produced a
distinctively Jewish version of gallows humor or black humor. The fol-
lowing jokes may provide illustrations:

Three Jews have inadvertently strayed close to the sultan's harem and
have caught a glimpse of its beautiful denizens in skimpy dress lounging
in the garden. The Jews are caught and brought before the sultan. He
orders that they be punished by having large quantities of fruits stuffed
into their behinds. However, since they strayed into the forbidden area
inadvertently, the sultan, as a gesture of mercy, will let them choose the
fruits. The first chooses grapes, the second bananas. The sultan's hench-
men begin the very painful process of pushing huge quantities of these
fruits into the respective behinds. Suddenly the first man begins to laugh.
"What is there to laugh?" asks the second. "Look," says the first, "here
comes Moshe with his melons!" 7
92 Anatomy of the Comic

Under some tyrannical regime or other three Jews are about to be shot.
The officer in charge of the execution offers them a last cigarette. The first
accepts, so does the second. The third refuses. Whereupon the second
turns to him and says, "Moishe, don't make trouble!"

And the following recent American joke has no explicit Jewish refer-
ence. Yet, arguably, it has a definite Jewish flavor—precisely the tone
that was mentioned earlier:

A doctor is talking to his patient: "I have good news and bad news.
Which do you want to hear first?"
"Give me the bad news first."
"Well, the bad news is that the X-rays clearly show a tumor."
"So what's the good news?"
"The good news is that I'm making out with the X-ray technician."

Even if marginality is a causal factor in the genesis of Jewish humor, it

cannot be the only factor. There have been other marginal groups, in
Europe and elsewhere, who did not develop anything remotely resem-
bling Jewish comic culture—the Gypsies, say, or the Tinkers. Another
important factor, almost certainly, was the distinctive Jewish intellectual
tradition, especially as it has developed since the Talmudic period. This
tradition, of course, is grounded in the very character of rabbinical Juda-
ism and the centrality of law in the latter. Other religious traditions, of
course, have been much concerned with law—Roman Catholicism with
its development of casuistry, or Islam with its different legal schools
interpreting the shari'ah. But it is probably fair to say that Judaism is
unmatched among the world religions in the central place it has given to
legal reasoning, to the endless intellectual efforts to understand and
refine the requirements of halacha. Christian writers have often misin-
terpreted this as an arid legalism, thus overlooking the fervent religious
passion that vibrates through all these disputations, a passion grounded
in the commitment to discern and follow the will of God in all areas of
human life. All the same, rabbinical Judaism is above everything a reli-
gion of law, a law that must be ongoingly studied, argued over, and
applied to new situations. No other religious tradition has called its
place of worship a shul, or made study and scholarship the essential
religious vocation. An anecdote tells of a famous rabbi being asked by
one of his disciples how God occupies himself in eternity. "He studies,"
replied the rabbi. The reply, one may assume, was only half-facetious.
Talmudic study developed a specific intellectual method, that of pil-
pul, a form of dialectical reasoning. Teachers and students interact in a
process of questions and answers, defining and redefining a legal prob-
lem, citing authorities from the past, trying to arrive at solutions that do
 Interlude: Brief Reflections on Jewish Humor 93

justice to new situations. There can be little doubt that this unique
cognitive style (to use another Schutzian term) carried over into the
period when Jewish minds turned to secular problems. It is a cognitive
style of making fine distinctions, putting things together and taking
them apart again—a cognitive style that turned out to have a very good
fit with the requirements of modernity. 8 The same cognitive style can be
detected in Jewish wit. The question of whether some Talmudic pas-
sages were intentionally comic must be left to the experts. But it is
difficult to avoid the impression that some of these ancient rabbis were
chuckling as they debated what one recent author has called "strange
and bizarre problems" in the Talmud—for instance, the problem of the
number of crumbs brought by a mouse or a rat into a house cleaned for
Passover that would nullify the cleansing, or the question of whether a
golem (an artificial being created by magic) is entitled to participate in
communal prayer. 9 Be this as it may, one may propose that minds
honed by this methodology were made ready for Jewish humor. The
habits of pilpul may still be detected in modern Jewish jokes. The follow-
ing is a perfect example:

A Jewish man is sitting in a railway carriage in the old country. A

considerably younger man, evidently also Jewish, joins him after a while
and sits across from him after a perfunctory greeting. As the train begins
to move, the younger man says: "Excuse me, could you tell me what time
it is?"
The older man does not reply.
"Excuse me again, but could you tell me what time it is?" The older man
looks out the window. The younger man is quite irritated by this: "Look
here, I asked you a perfectly civil question. Why don't you answer me?"
The older man says: "All right, I will tell you. If I tell you what time it is,
we will start a conversation. You will find out things about me. You will
find out that I am a rabbi in the town of X, that I have two daughters, one
of them unmarried. You will want to see pictures of my family. You will
find out that my unmarried daughter is very beautiful. You will come to
visit us. You will fall in love with my daughter. You will marry her . . . "
"Well, would this be so terrible? I am a perfectly respectable Jewish
man."
"Perhaps," says the older man. "But I don't want a son-in-law who
cannot afford a watch." 1 0

There is, finally, another feature of Judaism that may have had a part
in shaping Jewish comic culture—a distinctively Jewish conception of
the relation between God and man. More than people of any other
religious tradition, Jews have argued with God. There are already ad-
umbrations of this in the Hebrew Bible: Jacob wrestling with God, Job
questioning God's dealings with him. Later Jewish texts have much
94 Anatomy of the Comic

more of this, for example in the literature of Hasidism. It would be

another misinterpretation to see this as a lack of reverence. Rather, it is
more plausible to understand this as a profoundly religious conviction of
God's moral perfection: If God is morally perfect, He cannot be inferior
to man in His accessibility to moral argument. But be this as it may, this
curious proximity of the Jewish God raises the casuistic propensities of
the Talmudic mind to cosmic dimensions. The entire cosmos, as it were,
becomes the subject of argument. It would seem that this makes for a
surreal vision, a view of reality as full of immense incongruities reaching
all the way to the divine Throne—a vision that is very close to the
essential comic perspective. One final Jewish joke may be allowed here
to make this (admittedly questionable) point:

Three Hasidim are bragging about their respective rabbis. The first
says, "My rabbi is so pious that he thinks about God all the time, and so he
trembles all the time." The second says, "My rabbi is so pious that God
thinks about him all the time, and so God trembles all the time." The third
Hasid says, "My rabbi has been through both these stages. And so last
week he said to God: Is it really necessary that both of us should tremble
all the time?" 11

Notes

1. William Novak and Moshe Waldoks, eds., The Big Book of Jewish Humor
(New York: Harper Perennial, 1990), xx. This is a very fine book, mixing literary
texts with a rich selection of jokes and humorous dicta. When it comes to the
jokes, of course, anyone with a modicum of comic education will keep on meet-
ing old friends; like the new convict in the prison yard, he will be tempted to call
out the numbers. But, here as there, it is a question of how one tells the jokes;
Novak and Waldoks do it very well.
2. Cf. Constance Rourke, American Humor (Garden City, N.Y.: Doubleday-
Anchor, 1953), 17. In fidelity to the venerable tradition of joke-telling, I have
retold the episode in my own words.
3. This joke is recorded in Novak and Waldoks, Jewish Humor, 188. I have
told it here in my own version.
4. In the essay "The Intellectual Pre-Eminence of Jews in Modern Europe,"
in Max Lerner, ed., The Portable Vehlen (New York: Viking, 1948), 467ff. [the
essay was first published in 1919], Veblen knew what he was talking about when
it came to marginality. Raised in a Norwegian ethnic enclave in the Middle West,
he did not speak English until he went to school. In a very basic way he re-
mained both insider and outsider in American society all his life.
5. Kurt Wolff, transi./ed., The Sociology of Georg Simmel (Glencoe, 111.: Free
Press, 1950), 402ff.; Alfred Schutz, Collected Papers, vol. II (The Hague: Nijhoff,
1964), 91ff.
6. Alfred Schutz, Collected Papers, vol. II, 194. Simmel wrote long before
 Interlude: Brief Reflections on Jewish Humor 95

World War II. Schutz wrote on the stranger after having come to America as a
refugee from Nazism; the "bitter experience" was his own.
7. I have no idea when or where I heard this joke. Given its context, my
"joke-nose" suggests that it might be of Sephardic origin. Come to think of it,
the concept of joke-nose (Witznase?) merits further development. Not here,
not now . . .
8. Cf. Peter Berger, Brigitte Berger, and Hansfried Kellner, The Homeless
Mind: Modernization and Consciousness (New York: Random House, 1973), espe-
cially the discussion of abstraction and "componentiality." As modernization
proceeds and increasing numbers of people become "homeless" in their con-
sciousness, they become ipso facto more open to Jewish cultural sensibilities. In
that sense, one might paraphrase the statement of Pope Pius XI, "We have all
become Jews." This fact may go a long way toward explaining the ascendancy of
Jews and Jewish themes in contemporary American culture.
9. Adin Steinsaltz, The Essential Talmud (New York: Basic Books, 1976), 235.
One might also mention the problem that recently got an American professor
into trouble: If a man falls out of a window, lands on a woman, and has inter-
course with her—is he guilty of rape? The feminists who accused the professor
of sexual harassment for mentioning this problem in a lecture were definitely not
chuckling.
10. For reasons which I do not claim to understand, many European Jewish
jokes begin with the line "Two Jews meet on a train." Reportedly, when some-
one once started to tell a joke with this line, his interlocutor interrupted: "You
know, I'm really getting tired of these stories about two Jews meeting on a train.
Don't you know any other jokes?" "All right, all right," said the joke-teller. "So,
two Hungarians meet on a train . . . "
11. My Witznase tells me that the point may have been reached in this book
where a surfeit of jokes may begin to exhaust the comic receptivity of its readers
(vide the earlier discussion about the negative effect of repetition). I should make
a promise here to cut down on jokes from now on. However, I may also quote
once more the legendary Rabbi Meir of Vilna: "When a joke-teller tells you that
he is no longer joking—don't believe him!"
 II
Comic Forms of Expression
 7
The Comic as Diversion
Benign Humor

The first part of this book has been an attempt to outline the anatomy of
the comic with the help of different perspectives, such as those of phi-
losophy, psychology, and the social sciences. It goes without saying that
this attempt could only partially succeed. It is salutary to recall Bergson's
description of laughter as a foam that disappears as one tries to hold it
(salutary, one may add, both for the nervous author and the skeptical
reader). As stated at the outset of this arguably Quixotic enterprise, all
one can try to do is to keep walking around the phenomenon in the
hope of seeing it more clearly as a result. And that is all that this book
can continue to do. For most of the rest of it the topic will be different
forms of expression of the comic, most of them literary. There is a
particular problem here. The relevant material is overwhelmingly vast.
The literature of every human culture contains huge accumulations of
comic writings. Even the most cursory overview of these would daunt
the most unabashed megalomaniac, or alternatively would require the
establishment of a large number of scholarly committees with a work
schedule measured in decades. All that a solitary author bereft of delu-
sions of grandeur can do is to look at a few clear cases (to use a phrase of
Max Weber's)—that is, cases that help to bring into sharp focus these
different manifestations of the comic phenomenon. 1
Benign humor is most easily defined as what it is not. Unlike wit, it
does not make excessive intellectual demands, Unlike irony and satire, it
is not designed to attack. Unlike the extravagant creations of folly, it
does not present a counterworld. Rather, it is harmless, even innocent.
It is intended to evoke pleasure, relaxation, and good will. It enhances
rather than disrupts the flow of everyday life. It is, so to speak, at the far
end of the Dionysian ecstasies in which the comic experience was origi-
nally rooted. One might perhaps argue that this darker side is always
there, under the surface of the most innocuous jokes, but it is almost
completely hidden, present if at all as a mere soupçon.
100 Comic Forms of Expression

In this incarnation, then, the comic functions as a mild and thorough-

ly healthy diversion. It is in this form that "humor is the best medicine,"
as the Reader's Digest puts it.
Benign humor is the most common expression of the comic in every-
day life. It provides the mellow amusement that makes it easier to get
through the day and to manage the minor irritations. It is what is in-
tended when people are criticized for not having a sense of humor, a
character flaw (perhaps even a moral flaw) that makes them less capable
of coping and harder to live with. Suppose that there is an escalation of
minor mishaps in, say, a work situation. The boss has just come in
showing all the signs of a brooding bad temper, the computer system is
down, the coffee machine has also broken down, and—to top it off—it
turns out that the overnight cleaning staff has thrown out a pile of
important papers that had been prepared for the boss's perusal. The
very accumulation of these mishaps will induce laughter in those who
have the putative sense of humor and thus make is easier for them to
overcome the difficulties, while those lacking this redeeming quality will
stew in their frustration. Humor, the Reader's Digest could go on to say,
is the best management tool. (It may be observed in passing that just this
has been suggested seriously, and often very humorlessly, by business
experts.)
Benign humor in such instances manifests itself in momentary inter-
ruptions of the sober activities of living. It is a spontaneous reaction to
the incongruities of an ordinary situation. It is not planned or staged by
anyone. There may also be entire episodes, by design or happening
accidentally, that evoke a humorous response. Take a very common
episode of family life: A little girl is dressing up in her mother's clothes.
She puts on a dress or a blouse, far too big for her, so that she virtually
disappears in it. She slips on a pair of high-heeled shoes, perhaps tops
the costume with a hat that slips down to her nose. In this get-up she
stumbles around the room in a perfect parody of her mother. No matter
whether she has staged this performance before or whether this is the
first time, it may be safely assumed that the family (including the par-
odied mother) will find the entire episode hugely amusing. But even an
outsider, innocently trapped in this little comedy, may find it quite
funny and respond accordingly. The little girl may conclude her perfor-
mance to unanimous laughter and applause (which, one may further
assume, will encourage her to repeat it frequently and may even give
her the idea, held onto into adulthood, that she is a natural-born
comedian).
Unlike other forms of the comic, this kind of humor does not have to
be deliberately produced or explicitly articulated. It can just happen.
Also, it can be enjoyed by oneself, in a solitary chuckle as it were. By
 The Comic as Diversion 101

contrast, wit, jokes, or satire are always conscious products, and their
production depends on a social situation in which the comic producer
has an audience. Yet, obviously, benign humor can also be deliberately
produced or staged, be it by amateurs like the aforementioned little girl
or by people who make a profession out of this. Only when benign
humor is deliberately produced can it create a finite province of mean-
ing, though of a very distinctive sort. It is quite close to everyday life,
though it takes out of it whatever is painful or threatening. It brings into
transitory being a world of mellow lightness. Its effect is that of a brief,
refreshing vacation from the seriousness of existence. Almost any medi-
um of creativity can bring this about. World literature is obviously full of
examples, and even Shakespeare, who in other works confronts every
conceivable depth of human anguish, wrote comedies from which every
trace of pain or sorrow has been removed. The contemporary American
in quest of benign humor may find it in the poetry of Edward Lear or
Ogden Nash, in the stand-up performances of Bob Hope (still going
strong, indeed heroically, at age ninety), by watching an old movie of
the Marx Brothers, or by contemplating the pictures of Norman Rock-
well. This or that product of benign humor may, of course, be dismissed
by some people as too cute, too unsophisticated, or as expressing a
comic sensibility that is too foreign to enjoy. Be this as it may, nobody,
however sophisticated or ethnocentric, will have reason to complain of a
shortage of sources of benign humor to turn to in case of need.
In what follows, three clear cases will be looked at. They are very
different from each other, coming from different countries and working
in different media, though all three were contemporaries. What they
have in common is that each one, in his way, produced an opus of
unmistakably benign humor. The three cases are the English novelist
P. G. Wodehouse, the American comedian Will Rogers, and Franz
Lehár, the twentieth-century master of the Viennese operetta.
P. G. (Pelham Grenville—no kidding) Wodehouse (1881-1975) must
be one of the most prolific writers in the history of literature.2 Depend-
ing on how one counts anthologies, he published a little over or a little
under one hundred books in his lifetime. On his ninetieth birthday he
gave himself a present by finishing yet another novel. And writing is
what he did all his life, virtually all the time. The child of colonial civil
servants (not at all part of the aristocracy about which he was to write all
those novels), he turned to full-time writing early on, and the immense
success of his novels gave him a comfortable income. Despite the unam-
biguously English sensibility of his opus, Wodehouse has had a devoted
American readership from early on and he spent a large part of his life in
America, where he also played an important part in the development of
the Broadway musical and for a while did film scripts in Hollywood. He
102 Comic Forms of Expression

was happily married, lived in stable circumstances, worked hard and

painstakingly at his craft as a writer. By all accounts he was an amiable,
well-meaning, and easygoing individual. Indeed, his biography yields
just one very distressing episode, worth telling because it suggests an
innocence of character that seems to come right out of one of his own
novels. 3 Wodehouse and his wife were stranded in France at the time of
the German invasion in 1940. Wodehouse was interned as an enemy
alien. He was treated very well and did a lot of writing while in custody.
When he was visited by an American journalist (this was before the
United States entered the war) he agreed to do some broadcasts to his
American readers, telling some funny stories about his imprisonment. It
did not occur to him that the Germans, who allowed him to use their
radio facilities, could look on these broadcasts as a propaganda coup.
The broadcasts were naturally much resented in Britain and after the
liberation of France Wodehouse was briefly arrested and investigated on
suspicion of treason. He was lucky in that the first British intelligence
officer to interview him was no other than Malcolm Muggeridge, who
was completely captivated by Wodehouse and exonerated him in his
report of any fault other than political stupidity. 4
Though they constitute only a part of Wodehouse's entire opus, his
most famous and enduringly successful novels are those that deal with
the adventures of Bertie Wooster, an endearingly imbecile young aristo-
crat, and Jeeves, his omniscient "gentleman's gentleman" (the term but-
ler is somewhat below the latter's dignity). One may say that these two
figures have by now attained almost mythological status. Two stories
will have to suffice here to explicate the inspired idiocy surrounding
them.
The first is entitled "Jeeves in the Springtime." 5 Bertie feels the onset
of spring and the following dialogue ensues with Jeeves:

"In the spring, Jeeves, a livelier iris gleams upon the burnished dove."
"So I have been informed, sir."
"Right-o! Then bring me my whangee, my yellowest shoes, and the old
green Homburg. I'm going into the park to do pastoral dances."
"Very good, sir."

Never mind what a "burnished dove" may be, let alone a whangee. It
is hard to imagine a more idiotic exchange. It is typical of the interaction
between the two characters, Bertie charging ahead with mindless ener-
gy, Jeeves standing by with ironic detachment yet ever ready to get his
master out of the scrapes he invariably ends up in. The interaction
follows a more or less fixed formula. The amazing thing is that Wode-
house's comic genius makes it seem fresh every time around.
 The Comic as Diversion 103

Here is how Bertie experiences spring: "Kind of uplifted feeling. Ro-

mantic, if you know what I mean." But just in case anyone imagines an
eruption of vernal eroticism, he adds: "I'm not much of a ladies' man,
but on this particular morning it seemed to me that what I really wanted
was some charming girl to buzz up and ask me to save her from assas-
sins or something." This is again very typical of Bertie's relations with
the other sex. When it is not a matter of trying to escape from the
demands of terrifying aunts and marriage-minded viragos, Bertie's no-
tions of romance are romantic in a basically prepubescent style. Jeeves
indeed appears to have liaisons of one kind or another, usually with
female members of the domestic staffs of Bertie's circle of friends and
relatives, but no prurient details are ever revealed or even hinted at. A
not unimportant point: Wodehouse's world is singularly devoid of any
sort of sexuality, is thus innocent in the most literal sense. 6
What happens in the park is a bit of an anticlimax. Bertie runs into
young Bingo Little, a young gentleman of an intellect about equal to his.
Bingo drags him off to a somewhat seedy restaurant and introduces him
to Mabel, a waitress there and "the most wonderful girl you ever saw."
Bingo is in love with Mabel and wants to marry her. The problem is his
uncle, old Mortimer Little, on whom he is financially dependent and
who might cut off his allowance if he enters into this kind of més-
alliance. This financial circumstance is once again typical of Bertie's cir-
cle and indeed of Bertie himself (who is dependent on his ferocious
Aunt Agatha). These people have neither work nor money, but they
manage to support a lavish life-style on the basis of obscure and precar-
ious subsidizations. One is reminded here of the way someone once
described the characters in Dostoyevsky's novels, as unemployed and
unemployable. But none of Wodehouse's characters are greatly affected
by this economic situation beyond a peevish annoyance, and they are
certainly not driven by any remotely Dostoyevskyan passions.
The story unfolds in a sequence of events that could not ever be
plausible except in a Wodehouse novel. Bingo implores Bertie to ask
Jeeves's advice (who is "by way of being the brains of the family").
Jeeves, it turns out, is well-placed to be of help, since he is "on terms of
some intimacy," practically amounting to an engagement, with old Mor-
timer's cook, a Miss Watson. Jeeves knows that the frightful uncle is
suffering through a painful episode of gout and likes to be read to in bed
by his valet. Jeeves suggests that Bingo should volunteer to take over
this chore and to read from the works of one Rosie M. Banks, an author
who specializes in romances between individuals of divergent class
backgrounds. It is not long before Bertie is invited to lunch in the Little
household. He discovers, to his chagrin, that Bingo has told his uncle
that Bertie is the real author of the Banks novels. When Bertie brings up
104 Comic Forms of Expression

the matter of Bingo's class-defying marriage plans, old Mortimer is not

in the least disturbed. Indeed, inspired by the Banks ideology, he him-
self is about to take a similar step by marrying Miss Watson. When
Bertie recounts all this to Jeeves, the latter is also quite untroubled. He
had concluded some time ago that he and Miss Watson were not really
suited, and he now has a new understanding—with Mabel, the waitress
who so beguiled poor Bingo! Once again Jeeves stands revealed as a
mini-Macchia velli in the miniworld of Bertie Wooster.
The other story (picked more or less at random—almost any one
would do) is called "Without the Option." 7 The title refers to a sentence
of imprisonment without the option of paying a fine. Bertie and his
friend Sippy (Oliver Randolph Sipperley) have been arrested. They had
been in a state of advanced inebriation on the night of the Ox-
ford/Cambridge boat race, and Bertie had suggested that Sippy (who
was depressed because of demands made on him by his Aunt Vera—yes
indeed, a lady on whom he is financially dependent) cheer himself up
by snatching off a policeman's helmet. Bertie is only fined, but Sippy,
the actual assailant, is sentenced to thirty days "without the option."
This would not be so bad, except that Aunt Vera had ordered Sippy to
visit friends of hers, the family of one Professor Pringle in Cambridge. If
he does not go, she will find out about his shameful brush with the law,
and (yes indeed) she might cut off his allowance. As usual, Jeeves is
called upon for advice. He suggests the only possible solution: Bertie
must go to Cambridge, pretending to be Sippy. Bertie refuses, but when
he hears that Aunt Agatha had telephoned, evidently aware of his own
legal contretemps, he wants to leave as quickly as possible. As usual,
Jeeves has already anticipated this turn of events:

"Jeeves," I said, "this is a time for deeds, not words. Pack—and that
right speedily."
"I have packed, sir."
"Find out when there is a train for Cambridge."
"There is one in forty minutes, sir."
"Call a taxi."
"A taxi is at the door, sir."
"Good!" I said. "Then lead me to it."

The Maison Pringle is as forbidding as Bertie had feared. Professor

Pringle is "a thinnish, baldish, dyspeptic-looking cove with an eye like a
haddock," and Mrs. Pringle gives the appearance of "one who had had
bad news about the year 1900 and never really got over it." And then
there are "a couple of ancient females with shawls all over them," the
mother and an aunt of the professor. The latter remembers Bertie/Sippy
as a nasty boy who teased her cat many years ago. But worse is yet to
 The Comic as Diversion 105

come. Heloise Pringle, the professor's daughter, appears. She closely

resembles Honoria Glossop, to whom Battle had been disastrously en-
gaged for three weeks until thrown out by her terrible father, Sir
Roderick Glossop (the loony doctor). She even talks like Honoria. No
wonder because, as Jeeves knows, the two are cousins. Heloise fixes her
attention on Bertie and, with "the look of a tigress that has marked
down its prey," immediately decides that he is a promising matrimonial
prospect. Bertie, of course, is terrified. This time even Jeeves has no
solution. The possibility that Bertie might turn down the formidable
Heloise evidently occurs to neither himself nor Jeeves. But the two en-
gage in an almost philosophical exchange about the mystery of Bertie's
repeatedly attracting young women as "brainy" as Honoria and Heloise:

"Jeeves, it is a known scientific fact that there is a particular style of

female that does seem strangely attracted to the sort of fellow that I a m . "
"Very true, sir."
"I mean to say, I know perfectly well that I've got, roughly speaking,
half the amount of brain a normal bloke ought to possess. And when a girl
comes along who has about twice the regular allowance, she too often
makes a bee-line for me with the love light in her eyes. I don't know how
to account for it, but it is so."
"It may be Nature's provision for maintaining the balance of the spe-
cies, sir."

Bertie desperately tries to avoid the frightening Miss Pringle, stays

mostly in his room, only leaving it by climbing down the drainpipe (thus
reinforcing the aunt's opinion of him as both criminal and mad). The
situation is resolved by the appearance of none less than Sir Roderick,
who has been invited to dinner. He, of course, recognizes Bertie and,
upon being told that Bertie had pretended to be Sippy, confirms the
aunt's diagnosis of his being perfectly insane. Bertie escapes in extreme
distress, seeking refuge (of course) with Jeeves: "Hell's foundations are
quivering and the game is up." To which cri de coeur Jeeves can only
observe: "The contingency was one always to have been anticipated as a
possibility, sir." Only one course of action is possible—to go to Sippy's
Aunt Vera and tell her all. This is what Bertie does, precipitately. To his
surprise, Aunt Vera is delighted with the news about her nephew's
attack on a policeman. Jeeves knows why: She has had a number of
unpleasant encounters with the local constable, who has been serving
summons on her for speeding and for allowing her dog out without a
collar, and she is therefore angry at policemen as a class. How does
Jeeves know this? The constable is his cousin.
Throughout his work Wodehouse has moved in a distinctive world of
his own creation, both totally unreal if compared with the actual En-
106 Comic Forms of Expression

gland of the times and tangibly real to any reader willing to suspend
doubt in order to enter it. It is a frozen Edwardian world kept going by
Wodehouse long after Edwardian England had passed into history, an
almost mythical England that, among other things, corresponded to all
the stereotypes held in the minds of Americans. It is a world full of
carefully depicted individuals, very many of them—among others, fifty-
three named members of Bertie's Drones Club and sixty-three butlers
(not counting Jeeves). An enormous stylistic genius went into the cre-
ation of this (if one may put it paradoxically) profoundly trivial world.
Hillaire Belloc called Wodehouse the best living English writer and Au-
beron Waugh called him the most influential novelist of the time. His
biographer put it as follows. "Wodehouse made an infinite number of
amusing remarks in his lifetime, invented a teeming population of
clowns. The dream he dreamed of the England he preferred to the real
one is an amusing dream, a vividly conceived and tightly constructed
dream, but above all it is benign."6
Thus Wodehouse is an unusually clear case of benign humor. He
presents his readers with a world utterly without darkness, without real
pain, without any strong passions. One enters it as a sort of enchanted
kindergarten. The humor, of course, is in the characters and the plots,
but above all in the style (not so much in the dialogue as in the descrip-
tive passages). No one but Wodehouse could have written, for example,
of "Aunt calling to Aunt like mastodons bellowing across primeval
swamps," or could have summed up a situation by stating that "ice
formed on the butler's upper slopes." David Cecil, another admirer,
sums up Wodehouse's opus as follows: "We embark on his books as-
sured that we shall find nothing to make us shudder or reflect or shed
tears; but only to laugh. And with a laughter that is a laughter of pure
happiness." 9
On the face of it, no two authors could be more different than Will
Rogers and P. G. Wodehouse, embodying, respectively, a prototypically
American, homespun, folksy approach to life and the fastidious, man-
neristic understatements of an aristocratic culture in terminal decline.
Upon closer inspection, though, one recognizes kindred spirits across all
the differences of nationality, class, and creative style. It is not only that
both men were enormously productive, had very great success, and
lived essentially happy lives (though Rogers's was cut short by a fatal
airplane accident at age fifty-six). More relevant to the present consider-
ations, they exuded a compelling benevolence, an invincible innocence,
throughout their work and by all accounts in their personalities as well.
Will Rogers (1879-1935) was born in what is now Oklahoma, of par-
tially Cherokee descent, a fact of which he was very proud (as he told his
W A S P audience, w h e n their folks arrived or\ the Mayflower, his folks
 The Comic as Diversion 107

were there to greet them). 10 He learned all the skills of a cowboy on his
father's ranch and indeed worked as a cowboy in his early years. He was
particularly adept in the use of the lasso, and it was this that first led him
into the world of entertainment, or that segment of it where the audi-
ence was thrilled by a performer's ability to rein in almost anything by
means of the lasso. There is some disagreement as to the exact moment
when Rogers first began to speak to the audience in the course of these
athletic feats. At first he did so to gloss over incidents when one of his
tricks failed, and one of his first funny statements was to the effect that
the management would not allow him to utter the vulgarities that he felt
like uttering on such an occasion. He graduated from cowboy shows to
vaudeville, made a big jump in his career in entertainment when he was
employed by the Ziegfeld Follies in New York, and from there branched
out into radio, films, and eventually into the writing of a newspaper
column (which for a while even appeared in the New York Times).11
Rogers spoke with a western accent. His humor reflected the stereo-
typical "cracker-barrel" philosophy of the Old West—robust yet relaxed,
animated by common sense and healthy skepticism, yet never hurtful or
overly witty. There were individuals who doubted the authenticity of
this, but the great majority of witnesses testify that Rogers the man had
very much the same benign character as Rogers the performer. Be that
as it may, it is as the embodiment of benevolent wisdom that he was
loved by millions of Americans and mourned by them upon his prema-
ture death. He made no pretense of intellectual superiority ("All I know
is what I read in the papers") and he could thus be inspiring without
intimidating. His most famous statement, of course, was, "I never met a
man I didn't like," which he repeated frequently. It is noteworthy that
he first made it with reference to Leon Trotsky! 12 He rarely gave of-
fense, even when he was critical of people, and he was usually willing to
scratch an observation if someone claimed to be hurt by it: "I don't think
I ever hurt any man's feelings by my little gags. I know I never willfully
did it. When I have to do that to make a living I will quit." 13
Some extracts from Rogers's columns may serve by way of illustra-
tion. The first is from a piece entitled "Male Versus Female—Mosquito":

Just the other day, a fellow in Atlantic City, New Jersey, come through
with some statistics that really ought to set us thinking! . . . This guy is a
professor and chief "entomologist." That word will stop you ignorant
ones. But you got a fifty-fifty break, I don't know what it means either.
Well, this professor delivered this address at a convention of the New
Jersey Exterminators Association, duly assembled in the very heart of the
mosquito belt. So I gather from that, that an entomologist is a man that has
devoted his life to a study that must include this New Jersey product. He
has either given his life's work for, or against, the mosquito. It's a surprise
108 Comic Forms of Expression

that New Jersey had such an organization called "The New Jersey Mosqui-
to Exterminators, Inc." Anyone who has ever visited that state could not
possibly understand how there could be an organization devoted to the
annihilation of those comical little rascals. Or if they have got such a
society, where have they been exterminating, and when? But you see,
what they have been doing is holding dinners. All you do in America
nowadays, is get a name for some kind of organization, then you start
holding dinners. An organization without a dinner is just impossible.
Now the only mosquitoes exterminated was at the dinner. Well, during
the scratching and slapping and singing of the mosquitoes, this guy read
off the following authoritative statistics. "The normal productivity of one
lone female house mosquito in one year is 159,875,000,000 offsprings." 14

This opening is pure Rogeriana: slow, rambling, in no hurry to make

a point. An immediate disclaimer of superior knowledge—Rogers doe-
sn't know what the word entomologist means, has to figure it out from
the context ("All I know is what I read in the papers"). Then a series of
mild digs, at the state of New Jersey, at American organizations that
have no real purpose. And then a deft sketch of an absurd situation—an
assembly of mosquito fighters being helplessly bitten by hordes of mos-
quitos. There is some satire in this, of course, but it is so mild that it is
hard to imagine anyone being really offended by this, not even profes-
sional exterminators or citizens of New Jersey.
Having given the thought-provoking statistic, Rogers goes on to ram-
ble. He figures out that all these zeroes add up to billions of little mos-
quitos. Then he provides the information that only half this number
should really trouble us, because only the females bite human beings.
The males are quite harmless:

Now women, what have you got to say for yourselves? Get that, the
males are harmless. They don't bite, buzz or lay eggs! That's great. It
makes me proud I am a male. That fellow Kipling had it right when he
wrote (or maybe it was Shakespeare, or Lady Astor or somebody over
there), "The female of the species is more deadly than the male." Women
denied it then, and there was a great mess raised about it. But this New
Jersey entomologist has finally got the dope on 'em.

Would feminists be offended by this? Teachers of English literature?

Perhaps they would be if Rogers had developed these remarks into full-
blown satire. But he does no such thing. Despite the title of the piece,
this is no satirical take-off on male/female relations. (To emphasize this
point, just imagine what James Thurber might have made of this epi-
sode.) Rogers goes on to say what the learned professor failed to say in
Atlantic City: The exterminators should concentrate on the females only.
Or, alternatively, they should teach the females birth control: Perhaps
 The Comic as Diversion 109

they should be moved from New Jersey to Fifth Avenue in New York,
where they would learn that their exuberant fertility is definitely lower-
class. And this is how the piece ends:

Course the whole thing is kinder mysterious to me. I don't see how the
female can be the one that lays all the eggs, raises all the young, does all
the biting, and still has time to sing. Now when do they find time to raise
all these children? There must be times when they can't be singing or
biting. Now the way this entomologist has left us now, about the only way
we have left open to do, is to watch a mosquito till he bites you, and then
destroy him—I mean her. In other words, if he bites you, he is a her, and
if he sings, he is a her. Watch him and if he lays an egg, then it's a her. But
if he just sits there all day and don't do anything, why, about the only
conclusion we can come to is that it is a he. Don't kill him, he does no
harm, he just sits and revels in the accomplishments of his wife. So when
you find a male, the best thing to do is just to sit there and wait till his wife
comes between bites. How does the male live? That's what they are going
to take up at the next dinner?

What is, finally, the point of all this? It is safe to say that the question
is irrelevant. There is no deeper point here, no satirical intent. It is a play
on situations, on words, on absurd incongruities. The point is pure
entertainment.
Now, not all of Rogers's writings are that harmless. He commented
widely and with definite satirical intent on American mores and politics.
But here, too, the tone is mild, conciliatory. The evidence is that most of
the individuals actually named in some of these spoofs did not resent
this and enjoyed laughing at themselves as portrayed by Rogers (Calvin
Coolidge was apparently an exception, but then he was notorious for his
lack of humor). The following, from a piece entitled "Investigations,
Hearings and Cover-ups," is as timely as it was in Rogers's day. Here is
the beginning:

Say, did you read what this writer just dug up in George Washington's
diary? I was so ashamed, I sat up all night reading it. This should be a
lesson to presidents to either behave themselves, or not to keep a diary.
Can you imagine, 100 years hence, some future writer pouncing on Calvin
Coolidge's diary? What would that generation think of us? Calvin, burn
them papers!

There is another investigation going on in Congress into slush funds.

Rogers comments:

Imagine a Congress that squanders billions, trying to find out where

some candidate spent a few thousand! But these boys in Washington have
110 Comic Forms of Expression

had a lot of fun investigating. You see, a senator is never as happy as

when he is asking somebody a question without that party being able to
ask him one back. But the only trouble about suggesting that somebody,
or something, ought to be investigated is that they are liable to suggest
that you ought to be investigated. And from the record of all previous
investigations, it just looks like nobody can emerge with their noses entire-
ly clean. I don't care who you are, you just can't reach middle age without
having done and said a whole lot of foolish things. So I tell you, if I saw an
investigating committee heading my way, I would just plead guilty and
throw myself on the mercy of the court. 15

Rogers has some suggestions to make this investigating business

more efficient. There should be certain days for certain things—
Mondays for confessions, Tuesdays for accusations, the other weekdays
for denials. But what really troubles Rogers is how dumb people appear
on the witness stand: they mumble, they deny the obvious, they claim
not to remember anything. The more education people have, the dumb-
er they seem to be as witnesses. This has given Rogers a really good
idea: Since public figures in America spend over half their time testifying
before investigative committees, he is going to start a school that will
teach them how to testify (it will be located in Claremore, Oklahoma,
"the hub of everything"). The students will be taught how not to be
nervous, not to get rattled, but above all to keep records of everything.
Whatever they are asked, they will have a record giving the exact an-
swer. This will greatly expedite these proceedings. Also, the graduates
of Rogers's school will not only not fear but positively look forward to
being investigated. And here is Rogers's ultimate motive in suggesting
this innovation:

It's really patriotic reasons that make me want to do this, for I am afraid
that foreign nations will read some of our papers and find the testimony of
some of our men who are in the Cabinet and high in public office. And
they will judge them by that testimony. They will think they are no smart-
er than their testimony. Well, that will leave a bad impression, and if I can
change that and get them to make their testimony as smart as the men
really are, why, I will have performed a public service.

This is satire, a "modest proposal," if you will. But there is no Swift-

ian edge here. Rogers is making mild fun of the politicians and their
foibles. He is bantering. And all the time he includes himself in the
foibles he depicts.
While Wodehouse and Rogers share the benign quality of their
humor, their comic strategies are quite different. Wodehouse creates a
separate world, self-contained and remote from the empirical realities in
which his characters act out their systematic inanities. Rogers did not do
 The Comic as Diversion 111

this. His humor deals with the real world of America, but in doing so it
transforms that world, envelops it in a cloud of basically benevolent
commentary. Both authors gently debunk all authorities and all preten-
sions. If there is one virtue that both teach, it is the virtue of tolerance.
However, it is unlikely that either would have admitted such a didactic
purpose.
The final clear case of benign humor to be discussed here is of a very
different sort indeed from the two preceding cases: Franz Lehár (1870-
1947), the master of what has been called the silver age of the Viennese
operetta. 16 The operetta as a form of musical theater has a complex set of
antecedents, its origins probably in Italy's opera buffa, which in turn
began with comic insets within the action of opera seria. But the real
beginnings of the operetta are in the nineteenth century, centered in
Paris, Vienna, and London, dominated respectively by Jacques Offen-
bach, Johann Strauss the Second (that was the golden age of Viennese
operetta), and Gilbert and Sullivan. The operetta soon reached America,
where it eventually evolved into the Broadway musical. Lehár's opus in
general and his masterpiece The Merry Widow (first performed in 1905)
represent a late flowering of this tradition. It embodies more than any
other artistic creation the joie de vivre of the twilight period of Habsburg
Central Europe. The older tradition of the operetta had elements of
satire and parody in it, some of it quite political (one may recall here the
attempt of the Austrian censors in an earlier period to prohibit all impro-
visations on the popular stage). Also, there is a dark, melancholy under-
tone in all Strauss music. Lehár purged the operetta of both satirical and
tragic elements. He allowed a lot of emotion, but it tended always to-
ward sentimentality. At the same time, Lehár was a musical genius, and
the glory of his music regularly transcends the rather insipid actions on
the stage. Perhaps it is only in retrospect, in the knowledge of what
happened to the Habsburg order soon after The Merry Widow began its
triumphant career, that one detects a sense of resignation in the senti-
mental hedonism of the Viennese operetta of that period. Be that as it
may, to this day Lehár's music represents the spirit of the last great
flowering of a now disappeared empire.
Lehár as a person is also very representative of that empire, with its
cosmopolitan population. He was born in Hungary and was ethnically
Hungarian, but he was also the child of a military bandmaster and he
lived in a long list of garrison towns scattered throughout the vast
reaches of the Austro-Hungarian monarchy. He himself conducted a
military band for the few years of his army service. Like Wodehouse and
Rogers, Lehár was enormously successful in his lifetime, both finan-
cially and in terms of status. Various cultural critics despised what they
thought of as the superficial sentimentality of his work. Thus, for exam-
112 Comic Forms of Expression

pie, Karl Kraus, the great Viennese satirist, wrote that the first perfor-
mance of a Lehár operetta in the Turkish empire was a clear signal of the
coming end of civilization. The larger public, though, loved him.
Among his admirers, alas, was Adolf Hitler, as a result of which Lehár's
works continued to be performed in the Third Reich despite his Jewish
wife and the fact that his two favorite librettists were Jews.
In all operetta (and the same probably goes for opera) there is a
degree of tension between the music and the libretto. The comic effect of
operetta may well come out of that tension. The music in itself may be
light, but it can rarely be described as comic. The action on the stage, as
prescribed by the libretto, would most of the time be too insipid to be
funny if performed without music as a straight play or if read as a text.
Beaumarchais, the author of the play The Marriage of Figaro (which Of-
fenbach also turned into an operetta), once observed that one may sing
that which is too stupid to be spoken. In what follows, therefore, it will
help if one hears the music (inwardly if not actually) as the essential
accompaniment of the dramatic action. 1 7
The action of The Merry Widow takes place "today" (say, 1905) in Paris.
The center of the action is the embassy of Pontevedro, a vaguely Balkan
state. Originally, incidentally, Lehár named it the embassy of Mon-
tenegro, but at that time Montenegro was a real Balkan state (as it has
become again) and its embassy in Vienna protested. Thus Montenegro
became Pontevedro, and its capital of Cetinje became Letinje (though
that is mentioned only once). After the brisk, cheerful overture, the first
act opens with a reception in the Pontevedrin embassy in honor of the
ruler's birthday. Two plots interweave. Ambassador Mirko Zeta in-
structs his henchman Njegus (a sort of Leporello figure) to make sure
that Count Danilo Danilowitsch marries the rich Pontevedrin widow
Madame Glawari, since without her fortune the state is about to go
bankrupt. Meanwhile the charming Frenchman Camille Roussillon is
ardently wooing Valencienne, the ambassador's wife. Political and erot-
ic intrigue became elaborately mixed. The latter allows Valencienne to
sing one of the most melodious arias of the operetta: "I Am a Respect-
able Woman" (Ich bin eine anstaend'ge Frau), she sings, as she fends off
the amorous Frenchman. She warns him against the dangers of passion,
which must be domesticated—a warning, one may say, that all operetta
has always taken to heart. 1 8 Madame Hanna Glawari arrives, sur-
rounded by admirers. Valencienne would like Camille to become inter-
ested in the rich widow, to be rid of the temptation. As for Danilo, he is
a diplomat and always ready to do his duty, but he is also not very
happy with his matrimonial assignment. He sings yet another famous
aria, in which he praises the delights of the cabaret "Maxim" where he
intimately knows all the ladies (the easygoing grisettes of the Parisian
 The Comic as Diversion 113

démi-monáe), w h o help him to forget his dear fatherland. Yet it is clear

that Hanna and Danilo are quite attracted to each other. Danilo sings
another aria, quite different in tone, celebrating the stirrings of love, " a s
the flowers first bloom in spring." As the evening progresses, the time
has come for "ladies' choice" (Damenwahl) for the dance. Hanna chooses
Danilo, who, to spite her, offers to sell his dance to anyone paying ten
thousand francs. N o one offers to pay. Hanna, of course, is furious. As
everyone leaves, she is left alone with Danilo and they begin to dance.
Hanna: " Y o u horrible man! How wonderfully you dance!" Danilo: " O n e
does what one can!"
Without the music, it hardly needs repeating, this dramatic action is
about as stupid as Beaumarchais would have deemed it to be. The char-
acters are paper thin, the setting is as implausible as can be, and the
action follows a well-known sequence (which probably derives from the
commedia dell'arte if not earlier): In the first act boy meets girl; in the se-
cond act there are difficulties; in the third act boy gets girl. In other
words, a very vigorous suspension of doubt {epoche) is called for if one is
to be sucked into this little drama. To be sure, good acting and imagina-
tive stage settings can help, but it is above all Lehár's triumphantly
joyful music that has led generations of theatergoers to make this leap of
faith. Some will always refuse. Those who assent are rewarded by sev-
eral hours of perfectly mindless entertainment.
Everything becomes complicated in the second act, which takes place
at a garden party at Madame Glawari's, w h o is also Pontevedrin and
wishes to celebrate the royal birthday "as at home in Letinje." A vaguely
Slavic dance opens the proceedings. Then Hanna sings another famous
aria, "Vilja, O h Vilja," a romantic love song based on an alleged Pon-
tevedrin legend about an affair between a hunter and a forest nymph.
Danilo and Hanna engage in elaborate flirtations, and she berates him
(this time in a vaguely Hungarian aria) as a stupid cavalryman w h o
cannot see when a woman loves him. All the men join in a chorus
bemoaning the difficulty of knowing what w o m e n really want (did
Lehár read Freud? Did Freud attend Lehár operettas?): " W o m e n , w o m -
en, women, w o m e n ! " No theory explains how women will respond.
Meanwhile Camille is making headway with the seduction of Valen-
cienne, as the orchestra plays another famous Lehár waltz with the
refrain "I love y o u " (Ich hab' dich lieb). Camille sings the insinuating aria
" C o m e into the Small Garden-House, Come to the Sweet Assignation"
(Komm' in den kleinen Pavillon). Valencienne's respectability collapses and
she does indeed follow him into the small garden-house. Unfortunately
the ambassador has also made an appointment there, with Danilo, to
discuss the great matrimonial plot. He recognizes his wife, erupts into
jealous fury. Njegus (a sort of Balkan version of Jeeves, one is tempted
114 Comic Forms of Expression

to say) quickly acts to save the situation. He lets Valencienne out by the
back door, ushers Hanna in, who then emerges to announce her en-
gagement to Camille. The ambassador is reluctantly convinced that he
did not see his wife there after all, but he is desperate about the failure of
his plan to acquire Hanna's fortune for the Pontevedrin treasury. Da-
nilo, who does not understand that Hanna only acted to save Valen-
cienne's reputation, is deeply hurt but pretends indifference. He and
Hanna sing a duet, in which marriage is described as an obsolete point
of view, unless it is "in the Parisian manner" in which each spouse does
as he or she pleases.
Needless to say, all these complexities are resolved in Act III. The
scene is still Hanna Glawari's garden party, later in the evening. She has
rigged up a facsimile of the cabaret "Maxim" and all of Danilo's favorite
grisettes are there to perform, joined by Valencienne, who has disguised
herself as one of them (for reasons one is left to guess). The ambassador
insists that Danilo must marry Hanna, whatever his personal prefer-
ences. Hanna explains the garden-house incident to him, whereupon
they confess their mutual love in a duet that repeats the earlier love song
("Love Me!" "I Love You!"). The ambassador finds his wife's fan in the
garden-house, realizes that she has been deceiving him after all, de-
clares himself divorced as of this moment. He then proposes to Hanna
himself. Hanna explains that, alas, her late husband's will stipulates
that, if she remarries, she will have no money at all. The ambassador
retracts his proposal. But Danilo, fired by love, asks her to marry him
anyway, money or no money. Hanna then finishes her earlier sentence:
No money goes to her if she remarries—because her new husband will
now administer her fortune. General rejoicing: The state of Pontevedro
is saved from financial ruin, Danilo and Hanna get each other, and (one
may assume) Valencienne's respectability is restored. The grisettes are
left to go on with their lives of charming sin.

This chapter has looked at three instances of benign humor. The

argument has been that, despite the great differences between them,
they have in common an essentially similar expression of the comic.
They are far removed from the magic of Dionysian folly. They offer no
threat to the social order or to the paramount reality of ordinary life.
They provide a vacation from the latter's worries, a harmless diversion
from which one can return refreshed to the business of living. Yet there
is a kind of magic here too, especially when this form of the comic
creates an enchanted world of its own, as Wodehouse does with his
writing and Lehár with his music. This enchantment has its own value,
perhaps even its own moral status. The many people who have yielded
to it (because they were unsophisticated to begin with or because they
 The Comic as Diversion 115

temporarily put their sophistication away) have understood this. They

have been right. And those who have despised these vacations from
seriousness have been wrong—one may say, paradoxically, that they
have been profoundly wrong.

Notes

1. The legendary Rabbi Meir of Vilna, after reading this paragraph in his
heavenly study, is reputed to have said, "So, enough apologizing already. Go
make the knishes." I have given some thought to moving this great sage from
the notes to the main text.
2. Cf. Benny Green, P. G. Wodehouse: A Literary Biography (New York:
Rutledge, 1981).
3. Ibid., 181 ff.
4. Muggeridge wrote about this in Thelma Cazalet-Keir, ed., Homage to
P. G. Wodehouse (London: Barrie and Jenkins, 1973), 87ff. There was another,
truly Wodehousian twist to this story. German intelligence, singularly bereft of
an English sense of humor, read Wodehouse in the belief that he provided an
ethnographically accurate picture of life in his native country. They dropped an
agent in England wearing spats. He was immediately spotted and arrested.
5. P. G. Wodehouse, The World of Jeeves (New York: Harper and Row,
[1967] 1989), 22ff.
6. I understand that some critics have suggested that the relationship be-
tween Bertie and Jeeves is a homosexual one. This is about as plausible as a
theory interpreting Jeeves as a proletarian revolutionary. As he might have put
it: "A most injudicious suggestion, sir."
7. Wodehouse, World of Jeeves, 300ff.
8. Green, P. G. Wodehouse, 237. My italics.
9. Cazalet-Keir, Homage to P. G. Wodehouse, 6.
10. Cf. Ben Yagoda, Will Rogers (New York: Knopf, 1993).
11. Wodehouse, when he was writing for Broadway musicals, also had
dealings with Ziegfeld (reputedly a very humorless individual). I have not been
able to find out if Wodehouse and Rogers ever met in New York.
12. Actually, he didn't meet Trotsky. He was prevented from doing so on a
visit to the Soviet Union. He regretted this, commenting, "I bet you if I had met
him and had a chat with him, I would have found him a very interesting and
human fellow, for I have never yet met a man I didn't like" (Yagoda, Will Rogers,
234). It seems that Rogers was as perceptive of the Communist as Wodehouse
was of the Nazi version of totalitarianism. An intuition that there are hidden
connections between all things (Rabbi Meir understands) makes me add that
Trotsky also occurs in the aforementioned Wodehouse story "Without the Op-
tion": Sippy, upon being arrested, gives his name as Leon Trotsky. The magis-
trate, when he sentences him to jail, ventures the opinion that this is not his real
name.
13. Y a g o d a , Will Rogers, 190.
116 Comic Forms of Expression

14. Bryan Sterling, ed., The Will Rogers Scrapbook (New York: Grosset and
Dunlop, 1976), 71.
15. Will Rogers Scrapbook, 113f.
16. Cf. Richard Traubner, Operetta: A Theatrical History (Garden City, N.Y.:
Doubleday, 1983).
17. In my case that was a CD of a 1973 Deutsche Gramophon recording of
the Chor der Deutschen Oper Berlin. A libretto came with the CD, containing
the German text and a perfectly terrible English translation.
18. "Sehr gefaehrlich ist des Feuer's Macht
wenn man sie nicht bezaehmt, bewacht!
Wer das nicht kennt, sich leicht verbrennt.
Nimm vor dem Feuer dich in acht. "
 The Comic as Consolation
Tragicomedy

It was proposed earlier that the comic should be understood as a form of

magic. The comic, like magic, brings about a sudden and rationally
inexplicable shift in the sense of reality. But there are different forms of
magic. There is little magic and big magic: A rabbit jumping out of a top
hat, and a swarm of witches descending from the sky. There is white
magic, which miraculously heals, and black magic, which curses and
destroys. Benign humor, as discussed in the preceding chapter, usually
produces little results and is clearly a manifestation of white magic. But
the comic, as already indicated, also comes in more massive and much
darker versions. Tragicomedy is a curious in-between case. As such it
deserves some attention.
Tragicomedy can be described as that which provokes laughter
though tears. It is mellow, forgiving. It does not bring about a profound
catharsis, but it is moving nonetheless. Above all, it consoles. This con-
solation may or may not have religious overtones.
The discerning reader (and what other reader should this book be
addressed to?) will already have noted that the categories applied to the
experience of the comic will inevitably overlap to a certain extent. There
are few absolutely clear cases. Still, no phenomenon can be understood
without making some categorical distinctions. Tragicomedy differs from
benign humor, which, as far as possible, banishes the tragic from its
fragile constructions of an artificial reality (though the world of P. G.
Wodehouse demonstrates that some of these constructions can be quite
robust). So-called black humor defies the tragic, as its synonym, gallows
humor graphically suggests. Then there is grotesque humor, in which
the tragic is absorbed into an absurd universe, as in the danse macabre of
the late Middle Ages. In tragicomedy the tragic is not banished, not
defied, not absorbed. It is, as it were, momentarily suspended.
Tragicomedy, like benign humor, often inserts itself in small, fugitive
dosages into the flow of everyday life. It does not eradicate whatever
118 Comic Forms of Expression

sorrow or sadness has obtruded, but it makes these emotions more

bearable. Also like benign humor, it is often mediated by children. The
vibrant vitality of children is obviously incongruent with whatever may
be the tragic situation. The incongruence is comic, but it also reaffirms
the power of life in the face of all that darkens the human condition. This
was eloquently expressed by Meister Eckhart, the great medieval mystic:
"If I were alone and full of dread in a wilderness, and if I had a child
with me, all dread would leave me and I would be strengthened. This is
how noble and joyful is life." 1
In the preceding chapter the example was given of a little girl produc-
ing a comic effect by dressing up in her mother's clothes. Transpose this
performance to the scene of a funeral. It has to be modified, of course,
since little girls (if allowed to attend at all) would hardly show up in this
sort of disguise. But children do attend funerals and they will be dressed
in formal, quasi-adult attire. The tragicomic effect may be produced by
this incongruence all by itself. To imagine further such effects, it is not
necessary to assume that the children will misbehave. Let it be assumed
that they are well brought-up and make every effort to behave appro-
priately. Yet something could easily happen to interrupt their solemn
behavior: they start to giggle about something that strikes them funny in
the proceedings, they make faces at each other because they are getting
bored, or they make some mistake in the ritual they are supposed to
follow. The mourners may, of course, be annoyed by these childish
intrusions into the solemnity of the occasion. They may also be amused,
however, and the little tragicomic performance may make the occasion
less dreadful. Such a tragicomic consolation in the face of death is quite
different from other comic responses to the presence of death. Black
humor, of course, frequently revolves around death (though it would
generally be felt to be inappropriate at a funeral). And there are expres-
sions of the comic on such occasions that confront death in frequently
grotesque ways, as can easily happen at an Irish wake (perhaps describ-
able as a late version of the danse macabre). Tragicomedy offers much
gentler comforts.
There are limits to tragicomedy. If people at a funeral are entertained
and consoled by the antics of children, they are most likely to be those
not immediately bereaved. There is grief so profound that tragicomedy
is excluded. There are horrors before which even the best-intentioned
attempts at comic consolation must fail and indeed should not be under-
taken. There are occasions when no one either can or should laugh,
when the tears are too bitter. It would probably be pointless to try to
define or enumerate these occasions with the intention of establishing a
moral code for tragicomedy. This is a definition that must be left to the
 The Comic as Consolation 119

reason of the heart, or to whatever approximations of such of which an

individual is capable.
There are tragicomic roles in life as well as in art. Here one meets once
again with the role of the fool, though in his mellower incarnations. Sad
clowns and mimics reappear. Tragicomedy is also a form of drama; in
the history of the film, Charlie Chaplin is probably the paragon of this.
But it is in prose literature that tragicomedy in everyday life is best
caught. In European literature, Cervantes's Don Quixote is probably the
paradigmatic embodiment of the tragicomic hero. There are more recent
cases.
The case chosen for the present purpose is Sholem Aleichem (1859-
1916), widely considered to be the greatest figure in Yiddish literature.
Arguably, though, this entire literature, or much of it, could be used to
illustrate the category of the tragicomic. To American ears, a comic quali-
ty has come to be attached to certain Yiddish words and intonations that
have infiltrated American English, but this is very probably due to their
use by popular Jewish comedians and their imitators; there is nothing
intrinsically comic or tragicomic about the Yiddish language. The trag-
icomedy is rooted in the condition of the people who used this lan-
guage, the Jews of Eastern Europe and especially those living in
intolerable circumstances in Russia. Yiddish culture, in consequence,
developed a sense of comic incongruity possibly unparalleled anywhere
else. The incongruity was between the majestic destiny of the Jewish
people as proclaimed by Judaism and the miserable conditions under
which Jews lived in the real world of Eastern Europe. Both in everyday
speech and in literature (very much so in the case of Sholem Aleichem),
Yiddish was used as an ironic commentary on the grandiose pronounce-
ments of Hebrew. A common saying uses this Hebrew/Yiddish antiph-
ony to express a profoundly ironic view of the world: In Hebrew, "You
have chosen us from among the nations" (a recurring phrase from the
daily prayers), followed by the Yiddish counterpoint, "Why did you
have to pick on the Jews." 2 Many of Sholem Aleichem's characters use
this Hebrew/Yiddish antiphony to express their sardonic angle on
things. Take a concrete instance from the Jewish liturgical year, the Feast
of Tabernacles or Sukkot, celebrated in the autumn to commemorate the
Exodus from Egypt. 3 Imagine a group of Russian Jews observing this
ritual—a group of people barred from even owning land reading texts
that refer to a Middle Eastern agricultural festival—people sitting out-
side their houses in a flimsy hut, shivering, as the Russian winter is not
far off, people with barely enough to eat, if that, praising God for the
bounties bestowed on them. No wonder that they were moved to ask
why, of all nations, He had to pick on them to be His chosen people! But
120 Comic Forms of Expression

they were still too much embedded in their faith to utter such rebellious
thoughts in Hebrew; they were free to do so in Yiddish.
The very nature of Yiddish contains the history of the Jewish
diaspora—an underlying structure of medieval German, with overlays
of Hebrew and various Slavic languages. This is how another Yiddish
writer, I. L. Peretz, put it:

Yiddish, the language which will ever bear witness to the violence and
murder inflicted on us, bears the marks of our expulsions from land to
land, the language which absorbed the wails of the fathers, the laments of
the generations, the poison and bitterness of history, the language whose
precious jewels are . . . Jewish tears. 4

This notion of the language as a sedimentation of history is well

expressed in the Israeli joke of a woman who insists on speaking Yid-
dish instead of Hebrew with her son and, when asked why, says, "I
don't want him to forget that he is a Jew!" 5 Yet, amid all these tears,
there was also an irrepressible laughter.
There is another incongruity that should be mentioned here: that
between the world of men and the world of women, the former marked
by scholarship, the latter by the management of the family's practical
affairs. And, of course, the former mainly used Hebrew, the latter Yid-
dish. The term mother-tongue is used in English and in other Western
languages, but when Yiddish is referred to as the mother-tongue
(mameh-loshen), this has a specific sociological significance. Women were
usually not taught Hebrew, except the little needed to say certain pray-
ers. Yiddish was thus a women's language par excellence, the language in
which mothers spoke to their children—the same mothers who often
enough worked from morning till evening in some little store, making
enough money for the family to live on, so that their husbands could sit
in shul and carry on the highest vocation for Jewish men—the vocation
of study—in Hebrew. The Hebrew/Yiddish antiphony is thus ipso facto
an antiphony between otherworldly speculation and the hard, practical
business of making it in this world.
If one only looks at high literary expressions, the history of Yiddish
literature is heartbreakingly short. It only became a literary language in
the late nineteenth century, first in the writings of Mendele Moycher-
Sforim (1836-1917), whom Sholem Aleichem called the grandfather,
zeyde, of Yiddish letters. Before then it was used in written form for
biblical translations and prayer books, mainly for the use of women,
some folk tales and dramas, and some Hasidic writings. Sholem
Aleichem published his first stories in Yiddish in 1883 (when he also
adopted the pen name under which he is known today). In 1978 the
 The Comic as Consolation 121

Nobel Prize was awarded to Isaac Bashevis Singer (who died in 1991),
in all likelihood the last important Yiddish writer. From 1883 to 1978,
less than a century for a flowering literature, cut off, along with
most of those speaking its language, by the greatest tragedy of Jewish
history!
Sholem Aleichem was born as Sholem Rabinovitch in a Ukrainian
shtetl.6 Although he subsequently lived in Kiev and Odessa, both as a
writer and a businessman, the world of the shtetl, the small Jewish
village in the provinces, remained the locale of most of his work. He left
Russia in 1906 and moved to the United States via Geneva. He died in
Brooklyn. Toward the end of his life he was a revered figure and his
funeral was a major event.
Since so much of Sholem Aleichem is full of comic characters and
situations, it is important to keep in mind under what terrible conditions
Jews lived in the so-called Russian Pale of Settlement (the areas of the
country in which Jews were allowed to live), practically up to World War
I. They were restricted not only in terms of residence but of occupation,
officially classed as inferior subjects of the tsar, periodically attacked
physically by anti-Semitic mobs as well as government authorities. Most
of them lived in grinding poverty. In 1881 a series of bloody pogroms
were directly incited by the government under the notorious minister
K. P. Pobedonostsev, whose avowed aim was that one-third of Russia's
Jews should die, one-third convert to Christianity, and one-third emi-
grate. This aim was not reached, but not for want of trying on the part of
the tsarist government. In 1882 the so-called May Laws further restricted
the areas in which Jews were allowed to live, specifically forbidding
them to live in rural areas where they had been living for generations.
There were widespread expulsions. In 1905, after the failed revolution,
there were more pogroms. It was, of course, during this period that
there was massive Jewish emigration out of Russia, some of it to Austria-
Hungary and Germany, most of it to the United States. Sholem
Aleichem himself became part of this wave of migration.
Sholem Aleichem saw as his mission to give voice to what he called
an "orphaned people," to be their folks-shtimme. And he also expressed
his aim of creating laughter in a wretched world (a paskudneh velt—the
adjective derives from the Ukrainian and Polish words for dirt).
Sholem Aleichem's best known stories are those about Tevye the
Milkman (they were that long before the American musical Fiddler on the
Roof, which is based on them). They are told in Tevye's own voice, an
unforgettable blend of resignation, irony, and the determination to sur-
vive against all odds. They deal with an endless series of misfortunes,
mostly involving Tevye's daughters (whose number is sometimes given
as seven, sometimes as five). Any one of them would serve to illustrate
122 Comic Forms of Expression

Sholem Aleichem's unique expression of tragicomedy. Take the one

about Tevye's daughter, Hodl. 7
As in earlier stories, Tevye is telling this one to Sholem Aleichem
(whom he addresses with the Polish honorific Pani): "Whenever some-
thing goes wrong in this world, it's Tevye it goes wrong with." Hodl is
his second daughter, beautiful like Queen Esther and clever too, and she
can read and write in Yiddish and in Russian. Tevye was on his way
home from Boiberik, a nearby hamlet where he had been peddling his
dairy products. It had been a good day.

As usual I was thinking about the world's problems, such as why in

Yahupetz they had it so good, whether Tevye ever would, what my horse
would say if it could, and so on and so forth. It was summertime, the sun
was shining down; the flies were biting; and the whole world seemed such
a delicious place that it made me want to spout wings and fly off into it.

An offhand comment on Tevye's worldview: Even when things are as

delightful as they can be, one is bitten by flies! In any case, as Tevye
proceeds on this journey he sees a young man walking on the road and
gives him a ride. They engage in a bantering conversation. (Given what
happens as a result of Tevye's act of charity, one is vividly reminded of
the joke told in an earlier chapter about the Jewish traveler who refuses
to engage in conversation with a fellow-passenger on a train, because he
does not want a son-in-law who cannot afford a watch!) The young
man's name is Pertchik, but he is called Peppercorn, because that is
what he looks like. This individual of unprepossessing appearance is a
student and also, as it turns out, a revolutionary. Tevye invites the
young man into his home. One thing leads to another (just as the
reluctant traveler in the joke imagined). Peppercorn keeps on visiting
Tevye's family. He makes a living as a tutor, at eighteen kopecks an
hour. He begins to tutor Tevye's daughters (it is not clear in what he
tutors them, but at least in Hodl's case, it is not only in academic
subjects).
Some time later Tevye is told by a local matchmaker (a very important
profession in the shtetl culture) that a rich young bachelor in Boiberik is
interested in marrying Hodl. Tevye fantasizes about this:

I can't tell you what sweet dreams that gave me. I imagined Hodl trailing
smoke in a droshky, and the whole world burning up too, but with e n v y —
and not just for the droshky and the horses, but for all the good I would do
once I was the father of a rich woman. Why, I'd become a real philanthro-
pist, giving this beggar twenty-five rubles, that one fifty, that one over
there an even hundred; I'd let everyone know that a poor man is a human
being too.
 The Comic as Consolation 123

One is not in danger of being overly moved by Tevye's fantasized

virtue: if he became a rich man, he would engage in wildly generous
philanthropy, but this would be at least partly motivated by the desire to
arouse envy and finally be one-up on all those rich Jews who had shown
little respect for Tevye all those years. A saint Tevye is not! As he tells
this fantasy to his horse (in "Horsish"), again on his way home from one
of his trips, he comes on Peppercorn and Hodl slipping out of a forest.
They tell him that they will get married. Worse than that, they inform
him that they are "as good as married already" (there goes Hodl's image
as a virginal Queen Esther) and that they want to "make it official,"
because Peppercorn must leave on a "confidential" mission. Tevye's
droshky-driven fantasy goes up in smoke. He argues and argues against
this project, all in vain. Finally, since there is no alternative, he agrees to
a wedding ("a funeral would have been jollier"). But he does not dare to
tell the truth to his wife, Golde, who is made to believe that Peppercorn
is coming into a huge inheritance and must travel to manage these
financial affairs.
Soon after the wedding Tevye takes Peppercorn to the railroad sta-
tion, where he meets the latter's friends. They look more like Russians
than Jews, with long hair and shirts hanging out over their trousers.
Hodl stays behind, pining away. Then comes the news that Peppercorn
is in prison, then that he is being sent to Siberia. Hodl decides to join
him there. Again, Tevye tries to argue her out of this:

I answered as usual with a verse from Scripture. "I see, Hodl," I told
her, "that you take the Bible seriously when it says, al keyn ya'azoyv ish es
oviv ve'es imoy, therefore a child shall leave its father and its mother. . . . 8
For Peppercorn's sake you're throwing your papa and your mama to the
dogs and going God only knows where, to some far wilderness across the
trackless sea where even Alexander the Great nearly drowned the time he
was shipwrecked on a desert island inhabited by cannibals. . . . And don't
think I'm making that up either, because I read every word in a book."
You can see that I tried to make light of it, though my heart was weeping
inside me. But Tevye is no woman; Tevye kept a stiff upper lip.

Here indeed is the essence of Tevye as a tragicomic hero—making

light of things, even as his heart is weeping inside him. Of course, his
arguments are of no avail, not even with the scriptural quotations (this
one, ironically, actually undercuts his argument) and the learned refer-
ences to obscure classics. Hodl is determined to leave. Once again Tevye
lies to his wife, telling her that Hodl too must travel because of the
fictitious inheritance. At the station, bidding Hodl farewell, Tevye cries
after all, "like a woman." The story ends with an expression of sublime
irony:
124 Comic Forms of Expression

You know what, Pani Sholem Aleicheml Let's talk about something more
cheerful. Have you heard any news of the cholera in Odessa?

The last of the Tevye stories, "Lekh-Lekho" ("Go, Go Out"), deals with
the infamous May Laws, which, among other oppressive measures,
decreed that Jews must leave rural areas. 9 Tevye tells the story with
reference to the third chapter of Genesis, where God tells Abraham to go
out from his home to the country that God will show him. Again, the
scriptural reference is ironic: Abraham goes out to the Promised Land in
obedience to God's command; Tevye must go out to nowhere, in obe-
dience to the cruel and corrupt authorities of tsarist Russia. And this
occurs after all the other disasters: Hodl having married and gone off
with her mad revolutionary; Beilke's rich husband having to run away to
America after having experienced financial ruin; the death of Tsaytl's
virtuous but poor husband, forcing Tevye to forgo his intended move to
the Holy Land in order to take care of her and her children; worst of all,
Chava's conversion to Christianity. Once again Tevye is coming home
from a trip to Boiberik. He finds the entire village assembled in front of
his house. The village elder, Ivan Paparilo, tells him that they must have
a pogrom:

Look, Tevel, it's like this. We have nothing against you personally . . . A
pogrom is a pogrom, and if the village council has voted to have one, then
that's what must be. We'll have to smash your windows at least, because if
anyone passing through here sees there's been no pogrom yet, we'll be in
hot waters ourselves.

In the event, after having tea with Paparilo and discussing what sort
of pogrom seems viable, Tevye is allowed to smash his own windows:
"They're your windows . . . and you might as well smash them
yourself."
But worse is to come. Just as Tevye thinks of the Messiah coming on a
white horse to rescue the Jews from their oppressors, the village police-
man comes on horseback. He brings an order of expulsion. Tevye knows
well that, on this occasion, no argument could possibly prevail. He sells
his house to Paparilo for a song, but convinces himself that he has
outwitted the village elder. Yet, as the remnants of Tevye's family are
leaving the village where, as the only Jews, they have lived all their
lives, there is a great consolation. Chava, the convert, has decided to
return to Judaism and to leave with them:

I ask you, Pani Sholem Aleichem, you're a person who writes books—is
Tevye right or not when he says that there's a great God above and that a
man must never lose heart while he lives? And that's especially true of a
 The Comic as Consolation 125

Jew, and most especially of a Jew who knows a Hebrew letter when he
sees one . . . No, you can rock your brains and be as clever as you like—
there's no getting around the fact that we Jews are the best and smartest
people. Mi ke'amkilo yisro'eyl goy ekhod, as the Prophet says—how can you
even compare a goy and a Jew? Anyone can be a goy, but a Jew must be
born one.

Is this an expression of genuine religious faith in the face of adversity?

Or is this too ironic? Perhaps Sholem Aleichem himself was not sure.
Tevye declares that he is actually lucky to have been expelled. This, he
thinks, is the lesson of lekh-lekho, because Tevye can now move about
anywhere without being tied down to a permanent home. This is fine—
unless, of course, God finally decides to send Messiah: "I don't even
care if He does it just to spite us, as long as He's quick about it, that old
God of ours!"
Two more examples from outside the Tevye cycle of stories may serve
to round out a picture of Sholem Aleichem's distinctive version of tragi-
comedy. The first is from the so-called railroad stories. Railroads have
always played an important role in Russia, not only among Russian
Jews, and there is a whole genre of literature dealing with them. Proba-
bly their importance derives from the vastness of the country. Journeys
by rail took a long time, and passengers got to know each other quite
well, for better or for worse. Be that as it may, this one, called "Two
Anti-Semites," is unmistakably Sholem Aleichem. 10 Here is how it
begins:

Max Berlliant is a lost cause. He travels from Lodz to Moscow and from
Moscow to Lodz several times a year. He knows all the buffets, all the
stations along the way, is hand in glove with all the conductors, and has
visited all the remote provinces even the ones where Jews are only allowed
to stay twenty-four hours. He has sweated at all the border crossings, put
up with all kinds of humiliations, and more than once has been aggravated
has eaten his heart out, in fact—and all because of the Jews, not because
the Jews as a people exist, but because he himself—don't shout, whisper
it—is also a Jew. And not even so much because he's a Jew, as because—if
you'll forgive me for saying it—he looks so Jewish. That's what becomes
of creating man in God's image! And what an image! Max's eyes are dark
and shining, his hair the same. It's real Semitic hair. He speaks Russian
like a cripple, and, God help us, with a Yiddish singsong. And on top of
everything he's got a nose! A nose to end all noses.

Here once more, even if this time without the full Hebrew text, is a
bizarre, Tevye-like implication of a Biblical reference: The suggestion is
that God, in whose image Max Berlliant was created, has dark eyes and
hair, and a big Jewish nose! Perhaps he also speaks with a Yiddish
126 Comic Forms of Expression

singsong. Theological speculation aside, Max is a traveling salesman,

moves about all the time, even eats nonkosher food. On this occasion he
is traveling in Bessarabia. He has a long trip ahead of him and is think-
ing of how to assure for himself enough room to stretch out over several
seats. An explanation is called for here: Russian railways had three
classes. The Russian upper classes traveled first-class, the peasantry in
third-class; the second, "bourgeois" class was mostly frequented by
Jews. This explains Max's ingenious stratagem.
Just before the train enters the region, Max goes out at a station stop
and buys a copy of the Bessarabian, a fiercely anti-Semitic newspaper. He
goes back to his seat, stretches out, puts the paper over his face. He is
sure that this will keep away any Jews who might want to share the
compartment with him and thus prevent him from stretching out. Thus
decked out as a dangerous anti-Semite, Max goes to sleep. Unfor-
tunately, as he sleeps, the newspaper slips off his nose, freeing it to
display its full Semitic magnificence. Another Jewish passenger comes
into the compartment, one Patti Nyemchick, a man notorious for his
practical jokes. He quickly takes in the scene, smiles, and goes out to
buy another copy of the same newspaper. He too puts it over his face
and goes to sleep. For a while, the two putative anti-Semites sleep
peacefully, having the compartment to themselves. (One may assume
that any other Jew tempted to join them would have been quickly cured
of the temptation by the presence of not just one but two obvious anti-
Semites!)
Max wakes up first. He notices the other traveler:

He wonders: "Where did the fellow come from and why is he lying on the
seat opposite? And why is he covered with a copy of the Bessarabian?" . . .
He starts stirring, rattling his newspaper until he hears that the person on
the seat opposite is also stirring and rattling his newspaper. He keeps still
for a minute, then takes a quick look and sees the other fellow regarding
him with a half-smile. Our two Bessarabian customers are lying there across
from each other, staring but not talking. Although each anti-Semite is
dying to know who the other is, they hide their curiosity and keep mum.

Then, very quietly, Patti starts whistling a well-known Yiddish chil-

dren's song. Quietly at first, Max joins in:

Then, slowly, slowly both anti-Semites sit up, throw off the Bessara-
bians, and together burst into the familiar refrain. This time they don't
don't whistle it, but sing the words with loud abandon:
The rebbe sits
with little children and recites with them
the Hebrew alphabet.
 The Comic as Consolation 127

Classical Greek drama is famous for its great scenes of recognition, or

anagnorisis. In this story Sholem Aleichem has given a marvelously trag-
icomic twist to this tradition—indeed, an anagnorisis in Yiddish
singsong!
The final example of Sholem Aleichem's opus, a story entitled "Eter-
nal Life," is somewhere on the borderline of tragicomedy and the maca-
bre, indeed could be described as a sort of danse macabre.11 The central
character is a young man living on the support of his in-laws, "as the
custom was," engaged full-time in studies. He has to travel to the town
of his origins to obtain an exemption from military service and a pass-
port, and for this purpose hires a sleigh with a taciturn peasant driver.
He prepares for the trip: "prayer shawl and phylacteries, cakes made
with butter, and three pillows: one to sit on, one to lean on, and one for
my feet. " Thus equipped, he takes off quite happily. Some time into the
journey he decides to stop at a country tavern. Here the story turns.
A desperate scene awaits the young man. A corpse is lying on the
floor, the wife of the tavernkeeper, surrounded by crying children. The
tavernkeeper is desperate: How can he take his dead wife into town for
burial and leave the children unattended? The young man (who is the
narrator) takes pity on the bereaved tavernkeeper, offers to take the
corpse on his sleigh. The widower is deeply grateful:

He threw his arms around me and almost kissed me. "Oh, long life to
you for this good deed! You'll gain Eternal Life! As I am a Jew, Eternal
Life!"

They take off again. The narrator has memorized the name of the
dead woman: Chava Nechama, daughter of Raphael Michael. He keeps
repeating the name, but in the process he forgets the name of the hus-
band. It grows darker and a snowstorm begins. They lose their way. The
peasant starts to curse. After some time they come to a village. Everyone
is sleeping. The narrator knocks at the door of the inn, but the innkeeper
refuses to let them in with the corpse. The scene is macabre indeed: The
narrator spends the night outside, shivering in a snowstorm, with a
raging peasant and a corpse for company. As dawn breaks, the inn-
keeper directs them to the officers of the burial society. Again they have
to wait in the cold, until these pious gentlemen are finished with their
prayers. Finally, the narrator gets to talk to the chief officer, one Reb
Shepsel, who demands payment. The narrator instead offers him Eter-
nal Life, which provokes a diatribe:

Is that so! You are a young man representing Eternal Life? Go and make
a little inspection of our town. See to it that people are prevented from
dying of hunger and you will win Eternal Life. Eternal Life indeed! A
128 Comic Forms of Expression

young man who trades in Eternal Life! Go, take your goods to the shiftless
and the unbelievers, and peddle your Eternal Life to them.

Other officers of the burial society take a more positive view of the
matter, arguing with Reb Shepsel, quoting the Bible and discussing legal
arguments as to whether the poor of one's own town must always take
precedence over the needs of outsiders. Finally it is agreed that they will
take the corpse, though only with payment and proper documentation.
After all, the dead woman could be the narrator's own wife, w h o m he
might have murdered. The narrator, desperate, offers them all his mon-
ey, seventy rubles, just to take the corpse and let him go. They come to
an agreement and a splendid funeral ensues. N o w a rumor spreads
through the shtetl to the effect that the narrator is a wealthy man, w h o is
burying his mother-in-law. A huge swarm of beggars is now besieging
him. This draws the attention of the local police inspector. With this,
things take another turn for the worse.
As this fearful representative of tsarist authority interrogates the nar-
rator, an officer of the burial society advises him to stick to the story
about his mother-in-law. He invents various names, but falters when
asked what the woman died of. He says what comes into his mind
first—she died of fright. " W h a t sort of fright?" asks the policeman.

I decided that, since I had begun with lies, I might as well continue with
lies, and I made up a long tale about my mother-in-law sitting alone,
knitting a sock, forgetting that her son Ephraim was there, a boy of thir-
teen, overgrown and a complete fool. He was playing with his shadow.
He stole up to her, waved his hands over her head, and uttered a goat cry,
Mehhl He was making a shadow goat on the wall. And at this sound my
mother-in-law fell from her stool and died.

This story is too much even for the goyishe kopp of a Russian police-
man. He lets the funeral proceed, but detains the narrator for further
inquiries. After a stint in prison, he is put on trial, on suspicion of
murder. He is acquitted on the testimony of the bereaved tavernkeeper
and his in-laws. They too are furious, especially his mother-in-law:
" W h a t did you have against me that you wanted to bury me while I was
still alive?" The narrator concludes the story: "From then on, when
anyone mentions Eternal Life, I r u n . "
There is no need to repeat here what was said on Jewish humor
earlier in this book. It has taken different forms in Europe and North
America, though its distinctive comic sensibility very probably origi-
nated in the Yiddish-speaking culture of Eastern Europe. Jewish humor
presumably ranges across all the categories of the comic, but its central
tragicomic motif faithfully represents the appalling conditions of Jewish
 The Comic as Consolation 129

life in Russia and elsewhere in that part of the world. If it evoked laugh-
ter amid tears, there was certainly enough reason for tears. But, as
remarked before, there are limits to tragicomedy and its consolations.
There are sorrows before which no form of laughter is possible and
where even language breaks down. It is impossible today to read an
author like Sholem Aleichem and his descriptions of Jewish life in East-
ern Europe without thinking about the horror that was to engulf Eu-
ropean Jewry not long afterward. Is any laughter still possible after this
horror? Does it not mark the end of this particular comic sensibility? It is
one of the several triumphs of Jewish survival that, apparently, the
answers to these questions are, respectively, yes and no. In this connec-
tion it is interesting to look at the work of Isaac Bashevis Singer, who
may well have been the last Yiddish writer of any importance. 12 In
fairness one should point out that Singer himself would not have agreed
with this characterization. Once, when asked why he continued to write
in a language that soon would have no more speakers let alone readers,
he replied that on the Day of Resurrection tens of thousands of individu-
als would wake up and immediately ask what new books are available in
Yiddish.
Singer (1904-1991) was born in Russian Poland, grew up and lived in
Warsaw, where his father was a Hasidic rabbi, and in Bilgoroy, his
mother's shtetl. He worked as a Hebrew teacher, translator, and proof-
reader, and started to write in the 1920s. He was strongly influenced by
his brother, Israel Joshua, who also became a widely read author. Isaac
Bashevis Singer became well-known through his novel Satan in Goray,
which was first serialized in a Yiddish newspaper, then published as a
book in 1935. Throughout his career, Singer continued this practice of
first publishing his work in newspaper serials. In 1935, he followed his
brother to America, where he first found it very difficult to adjust. There
came a period of literary inactivity, broken in the 1940s. Singer's work
was now published in the Yiddish daily Forward. In 1953 Saul Bellow
translated his story "Gimpel the Fool," which appeared in Partisan Re-
view. With this, Singer became an important figure in American litera-
ture, in translation after translation. The Nobel Prize awarded him in
1978 was a bitter-sweet recognition not only of him as an outstanding
writer but of the entire vanished culture whose principal voice he had
become. He died in Miami, suffering from Alzheimer's disease.
If one compares Singer with Sholem Aleichem, a number of differ-
ences come into view. There are, of course, the American and Israeli
settings of many of the later works. There is also a strong preoccupation
with sexuality (one can think of Singer as John Updike in a yarmulke in
that portion of his work), a preoccupation almost completely absent in
Sholem Aleichem. There is also a more overt rebellion against God. But
130 Comic Forms of Expression

above all there is a deepening darkness—the overwhelming shadow of

the Holocaust. This, needless to say, is most dominant in works actually
dealing with Holocaust survivors. What is remarkable is that, even
there, one finds eruptions of a tragicomic sense very much in line with
earlier Yiddish literature. Tevye's voice has become more strangled, but
it has not been completely stilled!
The novel Enemies, A Love Story is a good example of this. 13 It is the
story of one Herman Broder and his women: his wife, Yadwiga, a Polish
peasant girl and former family servant, who saved his life during the
German occupation by hiding him in a hayloft; Masha, another Holo-
caust survivor, his volatile mistress; and finally Tamara, his first wife
and mother of his murdered children, whom he had believed to be dead
and who suddenly reappeared. Even before Tamara's reappearance,
Broder's life was one of hectic deceptions. He is constantly on the move
across the expanse of Greater New York: from Coney Island, where he
lives with Yadwiga, to the Bronx, where Masha lives with her mother, to
Manhattan, where Broder works for a fashionable and basically fraudu-
lent rabbi.
The novel is full of absurd scenes. Broder lives in a tangle of compli-
cated lies. He tells Yadwiga that he has to travel as a book salesman,
calls her from Masha's apartment pretending to be out of town. His lies
explode at a party in Manhattan where his bigamy (if not polygamy) is
exposed. There are the pathetic steps by which Yadwiga tries to become
Jewish. There is a surreal rendezvous with Masha's former husband.
Taken at face value, this would make a perfect bedroom farce. But the
farce is overcome by an escalation of tragic events: the death of Masha's
mother, followed by the suicide of Masha herself (who is pregnant with
Broder's child); the pregnancy of Yadwiga (Broder's fertility is absurd in
itself), an innocent trapped in two equally alien worlds, that of Judaism
and that of America, with which she is trying to cope with courage and
dignity; Broder's flight from all these amorous entanglements and his
disappearance, leaving Yadwiga and Tamara to raise his sole surviving
child. Over these contemporary tragedies is the all-pervasive tragedy of
the Holocaust, which leads to reiterated repudiations of God by several
of the characters. Yet the bedroom farce remains just that, despite these
somber undertones, and the novel can also be read as a defiant affirma-
tion of the validity of sexual passion. The ending is absurd as well as
benign, as Tamara decides to move in with Yadwiga to help take care of
the baby.
There are very similar themes in the posthumously published novel
Meshugah,14 This is the story of another survivor, Aaron Greidinger,
who lives with his mistress Miriam in a maenage-à-trois with Max Aber-
dam, an aged speculator. Again, the novel is full of absurd scenes, many
 The Comic as Consolation 131

of them in a sexual context, the most absurd being an episode in which

Miriam's husband breaks in on the couple with a revolver and forces
them to engage in a prolonged conversation during which they remain
naked. Another bedroom farce, with the same tragic undertones. But a
short story, "Brother Beetle," may serve to illustrate Singer's tragicomic
sensibility very succinctly. 15
The locale this time is not New York but Tel Aviv. The narrator, who
normally lives in Brooklyn, is aged fifty, and is also a Holocaust survivor,
visits Israel for the first time. He meets old friends and acquaintances
from Warsaw, and he does all the things he expected to do in Israel. But
"after a week of seeing everything a tourist must see in the Holy Land, I
had my fill of holiness and went out to look for some unholy adventure."
He did not have far to look. In a café he runs into Dosha, an old mistress of
his from Warsaw. Both feel the old attraction. Dosha complains about her
present lover (she also has a husband, her third, who lives in Paris). This
lover, an engineer, is very intense and insanely jealous. At the moment,
as luck would have it, he is not in town.
After having dinner together, the narrator and Dosha walk toward
her home. This allows Dosha to complain about Israel and the narrator
to make some sardonic observations about it:

This climate sickens me. The men here become impotent; the women
are consumed with passion. Why did God pick out this land for the Jews?
When the Khamsin begins, my brains rattle.

Here is a nice Israeli version of the Yiddish question as to why God, of

all the peoples in the world He could have chosen, decided to pick on
the Jews. And why this country? Dosha's complaint reminds one of the
Israeli joke that God, who had good reason to be annoyed at the Jews,
gave them the only country in the Middle East without oil. And here are
some thoughts of the narrator on the Tel Aviv urban scenery:

We walked through dim streets, each bearing the name of a Hebrew

writer and scholar. I read the signs over women's clothing stores. The
commission for modernizing Hebrew has created a terminology for bras-
sieres, nylons, corsets, ladies' coiffures, and cosmetics. They had found
the sources for such worldly terms in the Bible, the Babylonian Talmud,
the Jerusalem Talmud, the Midrash, and even the Zohar.

But now another bedroom farce is about to begin. During the evening
the narrator has to go to the toilet. It turns out that the toilet is on the roof.
The narrator climbs up there, still naked (Singer seems to have a penchant
for trapping his characters in a state of embarrassing nudity). It is a
primitive affair. There is no light and, instead of toilet paper, torn pieces
132 Comic Forms of Expression

of newspapers hang from a hook. Then the narrator sees the silhouette of
a man in Dosha's room. Evidently the mad lover is back! The narrator is
trapped on the roof—naked, cold, feeling utterly ridiculous. A large
beetle crawls by. It too seems to have lost its way on the roof.

I had never felt so close to a crawling creature as in those minutes. I

shared its fate. Neither of us knew why he had been born and why he
must die. "Brother Beetle," I muttered, "what do they want of u s ? "

Did Singer intend a Franciscan allusion with this "Brother Beetle"

business, a Jewish Francis of Assisi, addressing all the creatures of
this world as brothers and sisters? One is also reminded of Sholem
Aleichem's Tevye talking "Horsish." In any case, soon after the appear-
ance of the philosophically pregnant beetle, the narrator has a sort of
religious experience:

I was overcome by a kind of religious fervor. I was standing on a roof in a

land which God had given back to that half of his people that had not been
annihilated. I found myself in infinite space, amid myriads of galaxies,
between two eternities, one already past and one still to come. Or perhaps
nothing had passed, and all that was or ever will be was unrolled across
the universe like one vast scroll . . . I asked God's forgiveness.

Forgiveness for what? It is not made clear. But before the narrator can
have any more mystical ecstasies, Dosha comes up on the roof with his
clothes. She opens a trapdoor to the stairs.
The narrator dresses hastily (Dosha's potentially homicidal lover
might wake up at any moment). He finds his American passport and his
money, climbs down the stairs. He walks through unknown streets.
When he asks an elderly man, in English, how to get to his hotel, he
only gets the rude reply, "Speak Hebrew!" He stands on the street, lost
once more. Then he feels something moving in the cuff of his trousers.
A big beetle crawls out and runs off:

Was it the same beetle I had seen in the roof? Entrapped in my clothes,
it had managed to free itself. W e had both been granted another chance by
the powers that rule the universe.

Notes

1. Meister Eckhart: Ein Breviarium aus seinen Schriften (Wiesbaden: Insel,

1951), 60. My translation.
2. Cited in Ruth Wisse, The Schlemiel as Modern Hero (Chicago: University of
Chicago Press, 1972), 47.
 The Comic as Consolation 133

3. I owe. this illustration to Ruth Wisse (who teaches Yiddish language and
literature at Harvard).
4. Cited in Leo Rosten, The Joys of Yiddish (New York: Pocket Books, 1970),
xxif.
5. Also told by Rosten, Joys of Yiddish.
6. Cf. Joseph Butwin and Frances Butwin, Sholom Aleichem (Boston:
Twayne, 1977). The first part of the writer's pen name is sometimes rendered by
the Butwins, as Sholem, sometimes as Scholem. Since Yiddish is written with
Hebrew characters, the forms of transliteration are rather a matter of taste.
7. Hilliel Halkin, ed./trans., Sholem Aleichem: Tevye the Dairyman and the
Railroad Stories (New York: Schocken, 1987), 53ff.
8. Tevye, of course, uses the Ashkenazi pronunciation, not the Sephardic
one used in Israel today.
9. Halkin, Sholem Aleichem, 116ff.
10. Irving Howe and Ruth Wisse, eds., The Best of Sholom Aleichem (Wash-
ington: New Republic Books, 1978), 115ff. See note 6 above on the variant
spellings of the author's first name.
11. Ibid., 43ff. The translator was Saul Bellow.
12. Cf. Paul Kresh, Isaac Bashevis Singer: The Magician of West 86th Street (New
York: Dial, 1979); Lawrence Friedman, Understanding Isaac Bashevis Singer (Co-
lumbia: University of South Carolina Press, 1988); Israel Zamir, fourney to my
Father (New York: Arcade, 1995).
13. Isaac Bashevis Singer, Enemies, A Love Story (New York: Farrar, Straus
and Giroux, 1972).
14. Isaac Bashevis Singer, Meshugah (New York: Farrar, Straus and Giroux,
1994).
15. In The Collected Stories of Isaac Bashevis Singer (New York: Farrar, Straus
and Giroux, 1982), 497ff.
 9
The Comic as Game of Intellect
Wit

As an argument is developed over a period of time, insights emerge, at

first seem very clear, then show themselves to be in need of modifica-
tion. This is especially the case here, when the argument concerns a
phenomenon as elusive as that of the comic. Again and again one finds
oneself on Bergson's beach, so to speak, trying to hold in one's hands a
bundle of foam. But the exercise is not futile. Not everything escapes
one's grasp. Some kernels of insight remain reasonably solid. And, of
course, there is intrinsic pleasure to the journey of exploration, quite
apart from the results to be expected at the destination.
In an earlier part of this argument the point was made that there is an
important cognitive dimension to the comic. That is, the comic perspec-
tive discloses aspects of reality over and beyond the subjectivity of the
individual holding the perspective. More specifically, the comic perspec-
tive discloses incongruences that are not perceived in the serious atti-
tude. It is important to add to this the further statement that not all
perceptions resulting from the comic attitude are equally valid. Put sim-
ply, laughter can be an opening for truth, but there are instances when
this opening is deceptive.
The intellect is always involved in perceptions of the comic. If wit is
simply understood as intellectually informed humor, then a measure of
it will be present in all experiences of the comic. It is naturally most
evident in highly sophisticated humor, but intelligence is involved even
in quite primitive humor. Take the following joke, which, it will be
readily agreed, deserves the label "primitive":

It seems that this man owned a parrot that kept using obscene lan-
guage. When all efforts to change this failed, the man put the parrot in his
refrigerator and told it, "You will stay in here until you learn how to speak
decent." After an hour or so the man opens the refrigerator door. The
parrot sits there, shivering, obviously unhappy. "Well," says the man,
136 Comic Forms of Expression

"will you speak decent from now on?" "Yes, yes, I promise," replies the
parrot. "But what bad thing did this chicken do?"

This joke was told to two five-year old children. One understood it
and laughed, the other was puzzled. The first child was the more intel-
ligent one, and was by the same token ready for wit of a kind.
The interest in this chapter is in more or less pure wit—that is, wit as
a game of intellect and language, possibly also of behavior. Wit in this
form has no interest beyond itself, is dispassionate, detached from any
practical agenda. This type of wit can be distinguished from witty satire,
which always springs from a practical motive—that of injuring an indi-
vidual, a group, or an institution. In satire the comic is employed as a
weapon, in disinterested wit as a toy. Wit always employs paradox and
irony. It paradoxically conjoins aspects of reality that are understood to
be separate in the serious attitude. It ironically hides its meanings, say-
ing one thing but meaning another. Paradox and irony need not be
comic, but they are inevitably involved in the comic experience, ever
more so as this experience becomes intellectually sophisticated. 1
Freud, as was seen earlier, correctly emphasized the importance of
economy in expressions of wit. The most effective wit employs sparse
means to achieve a rich result. Wit is sharp, pithy, pointed—all the
adjectives suggest economy. This is true of the most casual witticism, of
good jokes, and most especially of the epigram—by definition, a brief
comment that pretends to encapsulate a startling insight. Witticisms, in
the sense of witty observations made in the course of everyday conver-
sation, are the most common expressions of wit. There have been virtu-
osi of this art form, some of whom achieved fame far beyond their own
lifetime. Samuel Johnson and Winston Churchill are two cases of this.
(In the case of Churchill, if all the witticisms ascribed to him had actually
been spoken by him, he would hardly have had the time to engage in
any other activity.) But less awe-inspiring producers of witticisms can be
found in almost everyone's circle of acquaintances. Depending on the
degree of malice accompanying their wit, these individuals may be ea-
gerly sought out and invited to gatherings for the entertainment of all,
or alternatively shunned as threats to any kind of Gemuetlichkeit. In other
words, depending on circumstances, an accomplished wit may be either
the boon or the nightmare of a hostess planning invitations to a party.
The joke is one of the most common expressions of wit, at least in
Western cultures. 2 Jokes can be described as very short stories that end
with a comically startling statement. In English, the term "punch line,"
denoting this concluding statement, graphically indicates the comic
strategy involved here; so does the German term die Pointe, "the point,"
which even suggests the sharp end of a dagger. Economy here is of the
essence. To be sure, there is a cognitive intentionality in jokes. The
 The Comic as a Game of Intellect 137

punch line pretends to deliver some sort of insight. Is the insight neces-
sarily valid? Clearly, it is not. One only has to recall the all too many
jokes that seek to denigrate this or that ethnic, racial, or religious group,
ascribing to it patently false and misleading characteristics. Put simply,
it is just as possible to wittily tell a lie as it is to reveal a truth by means of
wit. Put differently, the capacity of a statement to arouse a comic re-
sponse cannot settle the question of its validity. Having voiced this
caveat, though, it remains the case that jokes can summarize an often
complex situation in wondrously economical ways, simplifying and illu-
minating and definitely providing some cognitive benefit. A good way
of illustrating this cognitive function is by looking at jokes that people in
a group tell about themselves. This was done earlier in this book in
looking at Jewish humor. The following bevy of jokes may provide
further illustrations from different parts of the world:

The point: The much aspired-to "stiff upper lip" of the English
In the days of the British Raj in India this patrol was ambushed by fierce
tribesmen on the Northwest Frontier. A young English officer is lying
wounded on the ground, an enormous spear sticking out of his chest. As
he is being lifted onto a stretcher, one of the stretcher-bearers leans over
him: "Does it hurt, lieutenant?"
"Only when I laugh."

The point: The tragic incongruence of the African-American experience

This black man is talking with God: "Lord, why's I got dark skin?"
"This is because of the hot sun in Africa. With your dark skin you don't
get sunburned. The white man, with his light skin gets sunburned all the
time."
"Lord, why's I got long legs?"
"In Africa, in the jungle, when wild animals are charging after you,
your long legs let you get away. The white man, with his short, stubby
legs gets caught and eaten."
"Lord, why's I got curly hair ?"
"Same reason. In the African jungle, when these wild animals are after
you, you get away. The white man's long hair gets caught in the trees and
the animals catch him."
"Lord, why's I in Cleveland?"

The point: The feelings of Québécois, on their French island in the midst
of an English-speaking ocean
In a village in Quebec a little girl goes out to collect mushrooms when
the Virgin Mary appears to her. The little girl sinks to her knees and says:
"Ah, vous êtes Notre Dame! Vous êtes si belle. Vous êtes magnifique. Je vous
adore. Je vous aime."
And the Virgin Mary replies: "I'm sorry. I don't speak French."
138 Comic Forms of Expression

The point: The craving of the Swiss for an orderly world

The phone rings at midnight in a pharmacy in the town of Chur. A
man's voice asks: "Is this the Amann pharmacy?"
"Yes, pharmacist Amann speaking."
"Do you carry baby pacifiers?"
"Yes,"
"Do you carry red baby pacifiers?"
"Yes."
"Good. Take one and stick it up your behind."
The next day, at eight in the morning, the phone rings again. A differ-
ent man asks: "Is this the Amann pharmacy?"
"Yes, pharmacist Amann speaking."
"This is the cantonal police. Did you get a call last night to ask whether
you carried red baby pacifiers?"
"Yes."
"And was it then suggested to you that you should insert a red baby
pacifier in your posterior?"
"Yes."
"You may take it out again. We have determined that the call was a
boys' prank."

The point: The resentment of Catalans about their situation in Spain

On a train out of Barcelona there are four people in a compartment: an
older Catalan woman with her very attractive daughter, a Catalan man not
related to them, and a Spaniard. As the train goes through a tunnel, the
compartment is in complete darkness for a few moments. Then a resound-
ing slap is heard. What does each of the passenger think after this?
The older woman: "Well, I have raised my daughter to take care of
herself very satisfactorily."
The daughter: "This is a little annoying. If a pass was made, why at
mother and not at me?"
The Spaniard: "These Catalan women are completely crazy. You only
look at them and they start hitting you."
The Catalan man: "Four more tunnels to Madrid!"

Even more than the joke, the epigram delivers a highly economical
kernel of alleged insight. Oscar Wilde and H. L. Mencken were masters
of this, in English and American letters respectively. Wilde's famous
novella, The Picture of Dorian Gray, begins with a preface containing a list
of epigrams. 3 Here are two of these:

The nineteenth century dislike of Realism is the rage of Caliban seeing

his own face in a glass. The nineteenth century dislike of Romanticism is
the rage of Caliban not seeing his own face in a glass.
We can forgive a man for making a useful thing as long as he does not
 The Comic as a Game of Intellect 139

admire it. The only excuse for making a useless thing is that one admires it
intensely. All art is quite useless.

Wilde's plays are full of witticisms, some actually in the form of

epigrams, others that could easily be converted into such. Following are
some exchanges between characters in one of Wilde's best-known plays,
Lady Windermere's Fan.4 A comment by the Duchess of Berwick, one of
those formidable upper-class dowagers who haunt modern English liter-
ature (P. G. Wodehouse created an army of them):

I'm afraid it's the old, old story, dear. Love—well, not love at first
sight, but love at the end of the season, which is so much more satisfying.

A comment by another character, Mrs. Erlynne, on her accepting the

proposal of marriage by Lord Augustus, the brother of the Duchess:

There is a great deal of good in Lord Augustus. Fortunately it is all on

the surface. Just where good qualities should be.

An exchange between Graham and Dumby, two dandies who carry

on with their witty observations throughout the play:

Graham: Gossip is charming. History is merely gossip. But scandal is gossip

made tedious by morality. Now, I never moralize. A man who
moralizes is usually a hypocrite, and a woman who moralizes is
invariably plain. There is nothing in the whole world so unbecoming
to a woman as a Nonconformist conscience.

And a little later:

Dumby: How marriage ruins a man It's as demoralizing as cigarettes, and far
more expensive.

The following are by Mencken: 5

Conscience is the inner voice which warns us that someone may be

looking.
Alimony—The ransom that the happy pay to the devil.
Adultery is the application of democracy to love.
Puritanism—The haunting fear that someone somewhere may be
happy.
To believe that Russia has got rid of the evils of capitalism takes a
special kind of mind. It is the same kind that believes that a Holy
Roller has got rid of sin.
140 Comic Forms of Expression

Any reader of these passages will readily agree that they are witty.
Readers will undoubtedly differ on the question as to whether the
punch lines of these witticisms convey correct insights into reality, that
is, whether they convey witty truths or witty lies.
The two aforementioned authors are helpful in exploring the nature
of pure or disinterested wit. Despite great differences in temperament,
style, and, of course, historical context, there are significant similarities
between them. Both took a posture antagonistic to their own society (or
perhaps more accurately, to what they perceived that society to be).
Witty detachment was a central component of this posture. Both care-
fully cultivated a persona to go with the posture: in Wilde's case, the
persona of the dandy, legitimated by a rather nebulous philosophy of
estheticism: in Mencken's case, the persona of the thoroughgoing skep-
tic, a marginal man in bourgeois America (he used the term Tory to
describe his dissent from American democracy), legitimated by a dubi-
ous claim on the philosophy of Nietzsche. There are strong satirical
strands in the work of both authors, but both lack an element of satire—
moral passion motivating the satirical attack. Both Wilde and Mencken
took pride in being without any sense of moral outrage and both de-
spised moralists of any stripe. The question of whether either or both of
these authors could be characterized as moral nihilists is beyond the
scope of the present argument. But the very absence of a moral agenda
makes Wilde and Mencken appropriate examples of disinterested wit, of
the comic as a pure game of the intellect. 6
Oscar Wilde (1854-1900), perhaps more than anyone else in modern
English literature, represents the cultivation of wit for its own sake. In
this, there is great symmetry between his work and his life. Coming
from a Protestant middle-class background in Ireland, he moved to Lon-
don, where he became a literary celebrity. His fame spread to America,
which he visited as a wildly popular lecturer. His writings—essays,
fiction, and above all plays—were elegant and deliberately provocative
of all the values of Victorian society. So was his life. It is actually evi-
dence of the considerable tolerance of that society that it not only al-
lowed these provocations but celebrated their author and rewarded him
richly. His tragic downfall was not so much due to his homosexuality,
which Victorian England would also have tolerated if practiced dis-
creetly, but by his forcing that issue into the open with his ill-advised
libel suit against the Marquess of Queensberry, the father of his lover
Lord Alfred Douglas. The Marquess had publicly denounced him as a
"sodomite" and, when Wilde sued him for this allegation, the inexorable
machinery of English justice had to go into action and was able to dem-
onstrate that the allegation was all too accurate. Prosecution and convic-
tion followed inevitably, under the laws of that time. Wilde was
imprisoned, at first under barbarous conditions, and upon his release he
 The Comic as a Game of Intellect 141

went abroad, never to return to England. Except for the eloquent "Ballad
of Reading Goal," a cri de coeur against the brutality of capital punish-
ment, Wilde was never able to write anything of note after his imprison-
ment. He died in France, a sick and broken man, in dire poverty. Very
rightly so, Wilde's case has become a prime example of the persecution
of homosexuals in Western societies. But this topic is beyond the scope
of the present argument, as is the rather sophomoric philosophy of
estheticism, which Wilde presented in essays and lectures as a revolu-
tionary view of the world. The concern here must be the character of his
wit, most notably expressed in his plays.
A commentator of Wilde's opus has summed this up very succinctly:

It is neither characterization nor plot construction that endows Wildean

comedy with its unique flavor, which is derived above all from the lan-
guage and the dialogue. . . . This observation applies first and foremost to
the conversations conducted by the dandies. Instead of communicating
ideas by elucidating viewpoints, exchanging opinions or discussing prob-
lems, they formulate for the sake of formulating. Their reluctance to be
pinned to content or to any sort of commitment is both result and evidence
of their use of language as an intellectual game. 8

The characters of the plays are flat and the plots are thoroughly im-
plausible. The fluffiness of these productions strongly remind of the
most mindless Viennese operettas. But where the triviality of the latter is
transcended by the music, Wilde's plays are redeemed by the glittering
dialogue, especially as carried on by (if a neologism be permitted) an
ever-present flurry of dandies. The critics at the time were both annoyed
and seduced by this. George Bernard Shaw commented as follows on
the critics' reactions to one of Wilde's premieres in the London theater:

They laugh angrily at his epigrams, like a child who is coaxed into being
amused in the very act of setting up a yell of rage and agony. 9

Wilde himself stated his dramatic credo in these words:

No artist desires to prove anything. . . . No artist has ethical sympa-

thies. . . . All art is quite useless. 1 0

To illustrate Wilde's wit at work, it makes sense to look at his most

successful play, still staged today all over the English-speaking world,
The Importance of Being Earnest.n The play opened at St. James's Theatre
in February 1895 and was an instant triumph. Its opening also coin-
cided, poignantly, with the beginning of Wilde's catastrophic legal duel
with the Marquess of Queensberry (who had to be prevented from
142 Comic Forms of Expression

entering the theater, where he had intended to make a scene). The title
was ironic: The very last thing that this play, or any other by Wilde,
sought to convey was earnestness. Rather, the title refers to the name
Ernest, which has an important part in the play. One critic observed that
any serious review of this play would be like investigating the ingre-
dients of a soufflé after dinner. The plot is at the same time very complex
and unspeakably trivial. It revolves around the amorous adventures of
two ineffably silly dandies, John Worthing and Algernon Moncrieff,
both of whom are wooing two equally silly young ladies whose mind
has been set on the idea that they only want to marry a man by the name
of Ernest. Little purpose would be served in elaborating on the plot any
further. As always with Wilde, the dialogue does all the work—le ton qui
fait la musique. A few samples will do here. The following is an exchange
between Moncrieff and his manservant Lane, at the very beginning of
Act One:

Moncrieff: Why is it that at a bachelor's establishment, the servants invari-

ably drink the champagne ? I ask merely for information.
Lane: 1 attribute it to the superior quality of the wine, sir. I have often
observed that in married households the champagne is rarely of a
first-rate brand.
Moncrieff: Good heavens! Is marriage so demoralizing as that?
Lane: I believe it is a very pleasant state, sir. I have had very little ex-
perience of it myself up to the present. I have only been married
once. That was in consequence of a misunderstanding between
myself and a young person.
Moncrieff: 1 don't know that I am much interested in your family life,
Lane.
Lane: No sir; it is not a very interesting subject. I never think of it
myself.

When Lane goes out after this agreement between master and servant
that the quality of wine is an appropriate measure to evaluate the institu-
tion of marriage, Moncrieff observes to himself:

Lane's views on marriage seem somewhat lax. Really, if the lower orders
don't set us a good example, what on earth is the use of them? They seem,
as a class, to have absolutely no sense of moral responsibility.

Somewhat later, another kernel of wisdom from Moncrieff about the

nature of marriage; he explains to Worthing why he does not wish to
dine with his Aunt Augusta:

I know perfectly well whom she will place me next to, tonight. She will
 The Comic as a Game of Intellect 143

place me next to Mary Farquhar, who always flirts with her own husband
across the dinner-table. That is not very pleasant. Indeed, it is not even
decent . . . and that sort of thing is enormously on the increase. The
amount of women in London who flirt with their own husbands is perfect-
ly scandalous. It looks so bad. it is simply washing one's clean linen in
public.

Moncrieff has invented an ailing friend, whom he calls Bunbury, who

supposedly must be visited whenever Moncrieff wants to avoid this or
that engagement. This is a comment on a relapse by Bunbury on the part
of Lady Bracknell, another one of those intimidating upper-class ladies
of the aristocracy:

I think it is high time that Mr. Bunbury made up his mind whether he was
going to live or to die. This shilly-shallying with the question is absurd.
Nor do I in any way approve of the modern sympathy with invalids. I
consider it morbid. Illness of any kind is hardly a thing to be encouraged in
others. Health is the primary duty of life. I am always telling that to your
poor uncle, but he never seems to take much notice . . . as far as any
improvement in his ailment goes. I should be much obliged if you would
ask Mr. Bunbury, from me, to be kind enough not to have a relapse on
Saturday, for I rely on you to arrange my music for me.

Some of Lady Bracknell's most trenchant views on life come out in

her interrogation of Worthing, after she finds out that he intends to
marry her daughter Gwendolyn. When he admits that he smokes,

I am glad to hear it. A man should always have an occupation of some

kind. There are far too many idle men in London as it is.

She then opines that a man who marries should either know every-
thing or nothing. Which, she wants to know, is Worthing's case? After
some hesitation, he admits that he knows nothing. Lady Bracknell:

I am pleased to hear it. I do not approve of anything that tampers with

natural ignorance. Ignorance is like a delicate exotic fruit; touch it and the
bloom is gone. The whole theory of modern education is radically un-
sound. Fortunately in England, at any rate, education produces no effect
whatever.

All of Worthing's other answers are equally satisfactory—about his

income, his property both in town and in the country, his Tory politics.
The difficulty arises when asked about his parents. He admits that he
has lost them (Lady Bracknell: "Both? . . . That seems like careless-
ness."), or rather was lost by them. He was raised by the late Thomas
144 Comic Forms of Expression

Cardew, who gave him the name of Worthing because he was found in a
leather handbag at Victoria Station when Cardew was on a trip to
Worthing. Lady Bracknell:

I confess I feel somewhat bewildered by what you have just told me. To be
born, or at any rate bred, in a hand-bag, whether it had handles or not,
seems to me to display a contempt for the ordinary decencies of family life
that reminds one of the worst excesses of the French Revolution. And I
presume you know what that unfortunate movement led to?

Under these circumstances, she cannot allow her daughter, "a girl
brought up with the utmost care," "to marry into a cloak-room, and
form an alliance with a parcel."
Moncrieff, pretending to be Worthing's brother Ernest (like Bunbury,
an invention), calls upon Cecily (who is Worthing's ward). Worthing
has let it be known that his brother is a very disreputable character,
which leads Cecily to say the following when his arrival is announced:

I have never met any really wicked person before. I feel rather frightened.
I am so afraid that he will look just like every one else.

When she greets Moncrieff as "my wicked cousin Ernest," he demurs

that he is really not wicked at all, which makes Cecily say:

If you are not, then you have certainly been deceiving us all in a very
inexcusable manner. I hope that you have not been leading a double life,
pretending to be wicked and being really good all the time. That would be
hypocrisy.

Later on, when Moncrieff must admit his deception, Cecily asks him
why he undertook it. He answers, truthfully, that he wanted to meet
her. Gwendolyn (the young lady being wooed by Worthing) asks her
whether she believes this explanation:

Cecily: I don't. But that does not affect the wonderful beauty of his
answer.
Gwendolyn: True. In matters of grave importance, style, not sincerity, is
the vital thing.

Perhaps a little more of Lady Bracknell's pithy comments may serve to

round out the picture. Close to the climactic scene, when it turns out
that one Miss Prism, Cecily's governess, is the individual who long ago
lost baby Worthing at Victoria Station, Lady Bracknell is interrogating
the local vicar, one Reverend Chasuble, about Miss Prism:
 The Comic as a Game of Intellect 145

Lady Bracknell: Is this Miss Prism a female of repellent aspect, remotely

connected with education?
Chasuble: She is the most cultivated of ladies, and the very picture of
respectability.
Lady Bracknell: It is obviously the same person.

As it becomes increasingly clear that Worthing is the son of Lady Brack-

nell's sister, who had been lost in the aforementioned circumstances, he
wants to know his name. Lady Bracknell assumes that he was named
after his father, a general, but cannot at the moment remember it:

Lady Bracknell: I cannot at the present moment recall what the General's
Christian name was. But I have no doubt he had one. He
was eccentric, I admit. But only in later years. And that was
the result of the Indian climate, and marriage, and indiges-
tion, and other things of that kind.

A military directory is consulted and, lo and behold, the general's

name was Ernest John. This, of course, removes the last barrier to mar-
riage with Gwendolyn (Cecily's longing for a husband named Ernest as
well is left unresolved at the end of the play): Worthing's name really
was Ernest:

Worthing: Gwendolyn, it is a terrible thing for a man to find out that all
his life he has been speaking nothing but the truth. Can you
forgive me?
Gwendolyn: I can. For I feel that you are sure to change.

A soufflé indeed! 12
H. L. Mencken (1880-1956) at first glance would seem to be a very
different case than Wilde. 13 Yet, as maintained earlier, their comic
stance (if this phrase be permitted) was rather similar—in its detach-
ment from the society targeted by their wit, in its lack of moral passion,
and, last not least, in its malice. Mencken's literary output far exceeded
Wilde's, largely explained by the facts that he was primarily a journalist
and that he had more years of productive work. Although he did not
write plays, he produced volumes of straight journalistic pieces, essays,
book reviews, and full-blown books ranging in topic from the nature of
religious belief to that of his periodically revised masterpiece, The Ameri-
can Language. He was also a prodigious letter-writer and diarist, and he
made sure in his will that the products of the latter two activities were to
be released seriatim on several carefully spaced dates after his death,
with the effect of timed poison capsules. A recent release of diary mate-
146 Comic Forms of Expression

rials led to an extensive controversy as to whether Mencken really was

as anti-Semitic as some of the entries would lead one to believe, but his
catalog of dislikes was truly ecumenical. He had nasty observations not
only about Jews but about every other ethnic group in America, with the
possible exception of German-Americans (of which he was one). He had
utter contempt for the South (exempting only its alleged aristocracy) and
the Middle West, and he disliked every American city except Baltimore
(his own) and San Francisco. He detested England. He cultivated the
image of a philosophical skeptic and political iconoclast. In the words of
a biographer, although in his private life he was led by a code of honor,
applying rather exclusively to family and close associates, Mencken
played a "role of public immoralist, the heaver of dead cats into the
sanctuaries of America." 1 4 In his own words:

Having lived all my life in a country swarming with messiahs, I have

been mistaken, perhaps quite naturally, for one myself, especially by the
others. It would be hard to imagine anything more preposterous. I am, in
fact, the complete anti-Messiah, and detest converts almost as much as I
detest missionaries. My writings, such as they are, have had only one
purpose: to attain for H. L. Mencken that feeling of tension relieved and
function achieved which a cow enjoys in giving milk. Further than that, I
have had no interest in the matter whatsoever. 1 5

Perusal of Mencken's writings provides no grounds to challenge this

self-assessment. While Wilde's wit primarily expressed itself in the dia-
logue between his imagined characters, Mencken was at his best in
descriptions, be it of individuals, groups, or of situations. The following
is from a book review:

Dr. Henrik Willem van Loon, in his acute and entertaining history, The Fall
of the Dutch Republic, more than once describes (sometimes, alas, with a
scarcely concealed sniff) the salient trait of his fellow Netherlanders. It is
an abnormal capacity for respecting respectability. Their ideal, it appears,
is not the dashing military gent, gallantly leaping for glory down red-hot
lines of fire, nor is it the lofty and ineffable artist, drunk with beauty. No,
the man they most admire is the virtuous citizen and householder, sound
in politics and theology, happily devoid of all orgiastic tendencies, and
with money in the bank. In other words, the ideal of Holland is the ideal of
Kansas. . . . O n e thinks of that identity on reading The Americanization of
Edward Bok, an autobiographical monograph by the late editor of the
Ladies' Home Journal. Edward was born in Holland and his parents did not
bring him to America until he was already in breeches, but he had not
been here a year before he was an absolutely typical American boy of the
'70s. Nay, he was more: he was the typical American boy of the Sunday-
school books of the '70s. By day, he labored with inconceivable diligence at
 The Comic as a Game of Intellect 147

ten or twenty diverse jobs. By night he cultivated the acquaintance of all

the moral magníficos of the time, from Ralph Waldo Emerson to Henry
Ward Beecher, laboring with what remained of his steam to penetrate to
the secret of their high and singular excellence, that he, too, might some
day shine as they shined and be pointed out to good little boys on their
way to the catechetical class and to bad little boys on their way to the
gallows. Well, he got both wishes. At thirty he was sound in theology and
politics, happily free from all orgiastic tendencies, and with money in the
bank. At forty he was a millionaire and the foremost American soothsayer.
At fifty he was a national institute. 16

The passage s h o w s Mencken's rhetorical artillery going full blast. In

one paragraph, he manages to put d o w n the entire culture of the Dutch
and to let loose o n e of his innumerable barrages against American mor-
alism (it is Mencken w h o made the term "Puritan" permanently pejora-
tive) before he starts to d o a job on the unfortunate Mister Bok. In the
rest of the review he disparages the magazine edited by Bok and then
praises the latter for what he terms his one un-American characteristic,
namely his passion for artistic excellence. One is reminded here of the
question habitually asked by the comedian Mort Sahl during his perfor-
mances in the 1950s and 1960s: "Is there any group that I have not
offended yet?" But it w o u l d be difficult to d e n y the wit of Mencken's
multiple demolition job.
Here is Mencken's description of the teaching profession:

There was a time when teaching school was a relatively simple and easy
job, and any young woman who has no talent for housework was deemed
fit for it. But that time is no more. The pedagogue of today, whether male
or female, must not only undergo a long and arduous course of prelimi-
nary training; he (or she) must also keep on studying after getting an
appointment. The science of pedagogy has become enormously compli-
cated, and it changes constantly. Its principles of today are never its princi-
ples of tomorrow: they are incessantly modified, improved, revised,
adorned. They borrow from psychology, metaphysics, sociology, pathol-
ogy, physical culture, chemistry, meteorology, political economy, psychia-
try and sex hygiene. And through them, day and night, blows the hot
wind of moral endeavor. Thus the poor gogue (or goguess) has to sweat
incessantly. In Summer, when the rest of us are lolling in the cool speak-
easies, he suffers a living death in Summer school, trying to puzzle out the
latest arcana from Columbia University. . . . It is a dreadful life. 17

For Mencken to say that any activity is b l o w n u p o n by moral endeav-

or, of course, is to c o n d e m n it utterly. This piece w a s written in 1931 and
the cool speakeasies that Mencken contrasts with the sweaty torments of
summer school were, of course, the illicit refuges from that ultimate
148 Comic Forms of Expression

moral endeavor known as Prohibition, an exercise in Puritanism for

which Mencken reserved particular venom. (It is interesting to reflect
what Mencken, who rarely went anywhere without his cigar, would
have said about his beloved state of Maryland when in 1995 it enacted
the most stringent antismoking regulations in the country).
The "gogues" and "goguesses" in the preceding passage, ridiculous
though they are, must still be seen as victims rather than villains.
Mencken, who never went to college, had nothing but contempt for
higher education. The true villains are the professors, those who pro-
duce the arcana, at Columbia and elsewhere, which are then promul-
gated as the latest wisdom to the practitioners of the lower education.
One of Mencken's loving comments on this breed:

Ever and anon another so-called radical professor is heaved out of a state
university, always to the tune of bitter protests in the liberal weeklies. The
usual defense of the trustees is that the doctrines he teaches are dangerous
to the young. This puts him on all fours with Socrates—surely a somewhat
large order. The real objection to his ideas, nine times out of ten, is that
only idiots believe such things. But that objection has to be kept quiet, for
it is saying nothing apposite against a professor in the average State uni-
versity to prove that he is an idiot. 1 8

This too was written in the early 1930s. Now, some sixty years later,
radical professors are not thrown out of American universities; they
often run them. It is unlikely that Mencken would have thought more
highly of their doctrines.
Probably Mencken's most famous piece of journalism is his account of
the so-called monkey trial in Dayton, Tennessee, where in 1925 one of
those "gogues," by the name of Scopes, was prosecuted for teaching
evolution, contrary to state law. Mencken made a rather brief visit to the
place as a reporter for the Baltimore Sun. The trial, of course, reached
dramatic heights in the confrontation between William Jennings Bryan
and Clarence Darrow, who appeared, respectively, for the prosecution
and the defense. In his dispatch Mencken expressed surprise that Day-
ton was not as fervently Puritanical as he had expected:

On the courthouse green a score of sweating theologians debated the

darker passages of Holy Writ day and night, but I soon found that they
were all volunteers, and that the local faithful, while interested in their
exegesis as an intellectual exercise, did not permit it to impede the indige-
nous debaucheries. Exactly twelve minutes after I reached the village I was
taken in tow by a Christian man and introduced to the favorite tipple of
the Cumberland Range: half corn liquor and half Coca-Cola. It seemed a
dreadful dose to me, but I found that the Dayton illuminati got it down
with gusto, rubbing their tummies and rolling their eyes. I include among
 The Comic as a Game of Intellect 149

them the chief local proponents of the Mosaic cosmogony. They were all
hot for Genesis, but their faces were far too florid to belong to teetotalers,
and when a pretty girl came tripping down the main street, which was
very often, they reached for the places where their neckties should have
been with all the amorous enterprise of movie actors. 19

Mencken went South with the mind-set of an old-style anthropologist

studying a tribe of savages, but, unlike most anthropologists, he had
little empathy with the ways of the natives. In any event, a journalist
from Chattanooga explained to him that he must not take Dayton as
typical of the local culture. Dayton was "a great capital like any other,"
"it was to Rhea county what Atlanta was to Georgia or Paris to France,"
hedonistic and sinful:

A country girl from some remote village of the county, coming into town
for her semi-annual bottle of Lydia Pinkham's Vegetable Compound, shiv-
ered on approaching Robinson's drug-store quite as a country-girl from
upstate New York might shiver on approaching the Metropolitan Opera
House. In every village lout she saw a potential white-slaver. The hard
sidewalks hurt her feet. Temptations of the flesh bristled to all sides of her,
luring her to Hell.

Mencken was then invited to go up into the hills, where the old-time
religion still flourished in pristine form. He was taken out of Dayton
to a wooded area where a genuine nocturnal revival was taking place.
Mencken described it in ethnographic detail: The preacher, "an im-
mensely tall and thin mountaineer in blue-jeans, his collarless shirt open
at the neck and his hair a tousled mop"; the congregation, with the older
people sitting on benches, the younger folk in front, a young mother
suckling her baby, two scared little girls hugging each other, a dozen
babies sleeping on a bed. After the sermon and some hymn-singing,
individuals from the congregation got up to testify. Then individuals
came forward asking to be prayed over; both the preacher and some
others began speaking in tongues:

From the squirming and jabbering mass a young woman gradually de-
tached herself—a woman not uncomely, with a pathetic homemade cap
on her head. Her head jerked back, the veins of her neck swelled, and her
fists went to her throat as if she were fighting for breath. She bent back-
ward until she was like half a hoop. Then she suddenly snapped forward.
We caught a flash of the whites of her eyes. Presently her whole body
began to be convulsed—great throes that began at the shoulders and
ended at the hips. She would leap to her feet, thrust her arms in air, and
then hurl herself upon the heap. Her praying flattened out into a mere
delirious caterwauling. I describe the thing discreetly, and as a strict be-
150 Comic Forms of Expression

haviorist. The lady's subjective sensations I leave to infidel pathologists,

privy to the works of Ellis, Freud and Moll.

And it goes on in the same vein. Here Mencken had finally come
upon authentic southern religion, which "began at the bridge over the
town creek, where the road makes off for the hills." He did not leave the
reader in doubt as to what he thought of it.
Inevitably, the portion of this book seeking to delineate different
expressions of the comic had to contain a good many texts and com-
ments on these. Yet it is important not to lose sight of the main purpose,
which is to bring into sharper focus the overall phenomenon of the
comic. Have the explications des textes of this chapter, apart from defining
the category of wit, added anything to the general argument of the
book? The reader will have to judge. The author proposes that two not
inconsiderable insights have been added, one pertaining to the cognitive
dimension of the comic, the other to its moral dimension.
As was already pointed out at the beginning of this chapter, the
earlier proposition that the comic has a cognitive dimension must be
modified inasmuch as decidedly witty statements about the world
can be distortive or outright false. The cases of Oscar Wilde and H. L.
Mencken should make this point rather clearly. To be sure, one could
have discussed cases of wit less permeated by malicious guffaws. Wit
does not necessarily rest on malice. For example, the aforementioned
comedian Mort Sahl, while he enthusiastically lampooned every aspect
of contemporary American society, did so without taking a stance of
supercilious contempt; in that, he is probably closer to Will Rogers than
to Mencken. This does not mean that Sahl's shtick provides an accurate
picture of America under the Eisenhower and Kennedy administrations,
any more than Mencken's commentaries on the America of his time.
And someone reading Wilde as a historically accurate account of late
nineteenth-century England would put himself in the position of the
German intelligence agency that, during World War II, dropped a spy
into England dressed according to the descriptions by P. G. Wodehouse
of the costume of English gentry (as mentioned earlier, this unfortunate
individual was promptly arrested).
More specifically, when wit uses irony (which is much of the time), it
seeks to debunk, to unmask. It seeks to show up the pretensions (if one
prefers, the false consciousness or the bad faith) of society. But this
procedure does not necessarily lead to a more valid view of things than
the one that has just been debunked. The same observation, of course,
applies to noncomic, serious exercises of debunking. One term just
used, false consciousness, comes from the vocabulary of Marxism. One
can read Marx and many of his disciples, quite usefully, as being on
 The Comic as a Game of Intellect 151

target in debunking the pretensions of bourgeois society. Yet, as history

has made amply clear, the allegedly more valid picture of the world that
Marxists have proposed in lieu of the debunked one was at least as
distorted as the latter. If there has been bourgeois false consciousness,
there certainly has also been Marxist false consciousness, beginning
with Marx's own propositions about the dynamics of capitalism, vir-
tually every one of which has been massively falsified by the empirical
evidence.
H. L. Mencken savagely debunked William Jennings Bryan. 20 By con-
trast, he did not make Clarence Darrow an object of ironic deconstruc-
tion. The reason, of course, is that Mencken agreed with Darrow's view
of the issues raised in the Scopes trial and had nothing but contempt for
Bryan's. In this, Mencken is very much a predecessor of the American
intelligentsia today, with his/its near-total incomprehension of the be-
liefs and values of Evangelical Protestantism. The present author is cer-
tainly not an Evangelical, but neither does he share Darrow's (and
Mencken's) shallow rationalistic worldview. It would not be difficult
to draw an ironic portrait of Darrow as mercilessly debunking as
Mencken's of Bryan. A good scene to start would be Darrow's defense in
the Leopold-Loeb trial, where he spent much time in his summation to
the jury arguing that life is nothing but a Darwinian struggle for survival
of the fittest and then concluded with a passionate attack on capital
punishment. This magnificent non sequitur would illustrate the comic
incongruence between Darrow's shallow philosophy and his admirable
sense of compassion. As to the Scopes trial itself, leaving aside all ques-
tions of biological science, seventy years later it is not so easy to mock
Bryan's belief that there are moral costs to the view that man is nothing
but a subspecies of monkey and therefore nothing very special.
Witty definitions of reality, then, do not in themselves have a higher
epistemological status than nonwitty ones. Both the witty commentator
and the serious analyst must be subjected to the same tests of validity
(whatever these may be in different instances). And the wit who does
not care whether he proposes truth or untruth is, both cognitively and
morally, a nihilist (Wilde came very close to advocating a philosophy to
this effect). Nevertheless, it would be a mistake to throw out completely
the notion that the comic has a cognitive dimension. That dimension,
though, must now be defined more narrowly.
If the alleged insight mediated by way of wit is indeed valid, then this
mediation can convey it succinctly and persuasively. The economy that
Freud emphasized in his analysis of wit is essential to this capacity of
comic perception. Beyond this, however, an additional point can be
made about the cognitive dimension of wit. While wit (or any other
expression of the comic) does not necessarily transmit valid information
152 Comic Forms of Expression

about specific areas of experience, it does provide an insight into reality as

a whole. At its simplest, this is the insight that things are not as they
seem, which further implies that things could be quite different from
what is commonly thought. The comic in general, and wit as its most
cerebral expression in particular, establish distance from the world and
its official legitimations. The intellectual game of wit is best played from
a social margin, be it ascribed (as in the case of Jewish humor) or
achieved (as in the case of the dandy qua sardonic observer). The mar-
ginalization, though, is strangely dialectical. The marginal individual,
through the magic of his wit, in turn marginalizes the world that he
targets. It is now no longer the world, but a world—and a ridiculous one
at that. This marginalization—or, one could also say, relativization—of
the world is what makes wit dangerous, potentially subversive, even if
the individual practicing it has no such thing in mind. The comic in
general, and wit in a very intellectual manner in particular, disclose the
Doppelboedigkeit of the world—its multiple realities, its dichotomy of
facade and that which lies behind the facade, indeed the fragile nature of
what appears to be its reality.
Wit debunks. Most of the time this is, as it were, a sociological exer-
cise. That is, it is directed against the pretensions of particular social
institutions, conventions, or customs. As has become clear, what results
from this may be good or bad sociology; if it is the former, there is
certainly a cognitive gain from it being expressed in a witty form. (One
could put it this way: other things being equal—that is, criteria of validi-
ty having been satisfied—one would rather hear about 1950s America
from Mort Sahl than, say, from Talcott Parsons.) But, be that as it may,
the debunking action of wit goes beyond the concretely sociological into
the realm of...—what should one call it?—let it be called the realm of
metaphysics. Society is not what it seems. And the whole world is not
what it seems. In its sociological aspect, the comic may lead to an ironic
worldview. In its metaphysical aspect, the irony moves, at least in a
preliminary way, toward religious experience. Kierkegaard, as was
pointed out in an earlier chapter, understood this very well. For him,
irony was a stepping-stone to faith. These considerations will have to be
pursued further in a later chapter.
It follows from all of this that humorlessness is a cognitive handicap:
It shuts off the possibility of certain insights, perhaps prevents access to
an entire sphere of reality. For this reason, the humorless person is to be
pitied. Could it also be a moral fault? If humorlessness is a character
trait, it is presumably congenital. In that case, an individual can no more
be blamed for humorlessness than for being color-blind, unmusical, or
bereft of mathematical ability. Conversely, the ability to see things in
comic terms is not necessarily a morally admirable quality. The comic
 The Comic as a Game of Intellect 153

ability may be employed for any number of morally reprehensible pur-

poses. Indeed, as this chapter should have illustrated, wit may be exer-
cised in malice and it can be linked to an attitude of moral nihilism.
On the other hand, an individual who does have the comic ability and
refuses to employ it in his perception of certain aspects of his existence
may indeed be morally culpable. There is the egomaniac who refuses to
laugh at his delusions of grandeur, the fanatic who cannot stand the
comic relativization of his precariously achieved dogmas, the tyrant who
must suppress anyone who dares to be witty about his regime. In these
cases, and in others one could think of, humorlessness is not a fate but a
choice, and this choice is part and parcel of the self-serving bad faith
sustaining this particular existence. Egomania, fanaticism, and tyranny
are morally reprehensible; so will be the deliberate humorlessness de-
ployed in their defense. In English (and in German) certain individuals
are described as deadly serious (toternst). Some of them, perhaps, were
born that way; these are the ones to be pitied. But others have made
themselves such; they can be condemned for it.
Like other forms of cognition, comic perception is in itself morally
neutral. In this, as a number of philosophers have recognized, it is
similar to esthetic perception. 21 The beautiful is not necessarily good;
the good is not necessarily beautiful. But the manner in which comic
perception is used in the lives of individuals, groups, or societies may
have significant moral implications. Sometimes it may actually be mor-
ally neutral—"good, clean fun"—and nothing else. At other times it
may be morally reprehensible, as when it is used cruelly or in the service
of evil. At other times yet it may be morally admirable, as when wit is
directed against the injustice and hypocrisy of a particular social order.
As we walk around and around the comic, it becomes a little clearer.
It also becomes more complex. Who said that this journey would be
easy?

Notes

1. Irony has sometimes been interpreted as a subcategory of the comic.

This is probably a misinterpretation. One can be ironic without being comic,
though it is difficult to imagine the comic without some elements of irony. Cf.
Uwe Japp, Theorie der Ironie (Frankfurt: Klostermann, 1983).
2. If there is one thing that is clear from the historical and social-scientific
explorations of the comic, it is that it is universal: comic laughter can be found in
every human culture. As has been argued earlier, the comic is an anthropologi-
cal constant; homo sapiens is always also homo ridens. But the joke, as defined
here, is probably not universal. Thus it is my impression that East Asian cul-
tures, though they are full of the comic, have not cultivated the joke as has been
154 Comic Forms of Expression

the case in Europe and the Middle East. (Some time ago I was given a book by
one Lu Yunzhong, entitled 100 Chinese Jokes through the Ages. Some of the brief
episodes in the book certainly have the form of the joke, but it is unclear whether
they originally circulated in this form or were parts of longer narratives.) Are
there jokes in traditional African cultures? Or in Mesoamerica? The cultural
diffusion of the joke would be a worthy topic for historians and ethnographers.
This form of the comic must have originated somewhere. I have no real knowl-
edge, but if I were asked to guess, I would opt for the Middle East or India. My
colleague Ali Banuazizi suggests Iran. I would wish this footnote to launch a
stampede of doctoral dissertations
3. The Complete Oscar Wilde (New York: Crescent, 1995), 11.
4. Ibid., 364ff.
5. Alistair Cooke, ed., The Vintage Mencken (New York: Vintage, 1956),
231f.
6. I may as well admit that I dislike both authors. Both, I think, proudly
displayed a cynical Weltanschauung that I find offensive. Wilde, it appears, was
personally the kinder of the two. As far as I am concerned, each had a redeem-
ing feature that mitigates the offensiveness. Not, let me quickly say, their un-
questionable wit; as I have argued, that is a morally neutral quality. Wilde's
sardonic detachment, the pose of the invulnerable dandy, was all along put in
jeopardy by the double life imposed by his sexual urges. I find this very much
humanizing. Mencken's equally sardonic detachment and his much-paraded
disdain for the common people of America was punctured by his passion for the
American language. Here, if nowhere else, the pseudo-Nietzschean anti-
democrat comes close to being a sentimental populist. That too is humanizing.
At the risk of offending this or that group (Mort Sahl, where are you when
we need you?) I would say that Wilde is redeemed by his homosexuality and
Mencken by his love of the language of America.
7. Cf. Richard Elman, Oscar Wilde (New York: Knopf, 1988); Norbert Kohl,
Oscar Wilde: The Works of a Conformist Rebel ( C a m b r i d g e : C a m b r i d g e U n i v e r s i t y
Press, 1989).
8. Kohl, Oscar Wilde, 227.
9. Ibid., 245.
10. Also from the preface to "The Picture of Dorian Gray," in Complete Oscar
Wilde, 11.
11. Ibid., 315ff.
12. The question has been raised whether there is an intrinsic connection
between Wilde's comic style and his homosexuality, it is correct that, at least for
a while and at least in English-speaking societies, there has been a linkage
between homosexuality, a certain dandylike estheticism, and a clever, sardonic
wit. It seems to me, however, that this linkage is accidental rather than intrinsic.
Dandyism in England is considerably older than Wilde. The term dandy was
applied to elegant young men in London in the early nineteenth century; Beau
Brummel was an early prototype; as far as I know, there was no necessary
implication of homosexuality at that time. Conversely, there have been homo-
sexual subcultures since then and in other places that had none of these estheti-
 The Comic as a Game of Intellect 155

cist features. The dandy style has a historical connection with the English upper
class (at any rate its urban life-style), to which Wilde did not belong though he
aspired to it. A commentator on Wilde's work has argued, persuasively, that
Wilde was important in the construction of a cultural type of "queerness," which
did influence the homosexual subculture in England and America for much of
this century. In other words, au contraire, it is not the Wildean style that came out
of the homosexual subculture, but a particular version of the latter was at least
partially shaped by the influence of Wilde. The same commentator argued that
this version of "being in the world homosexually" (my phrase, not his) has
increasingly disappeared with the more recent (post-Stonewall) appearance of
g a y n e s s . Cf. A l a n Sinfield, The Wilde Century: Effeminacy, Oscar Wilde and the
Queer Moment (New York: Columbia University Press, 1994).
13. Cf. Fred Hobson, Mencken: A Life (New York: Random House, 1994).
14. Ibid., 478.
15. Terry Teachout, ed., A Second Mencken Chrestomathy (New York: Knopf,
1995), 490f.
16. Ibid., 439f.
17. Ibid., 378f.
18. Ibid., 392.
19. The dispatch was entitled "The Hills of Zion." Cf. Huntington Cairns,
ed., H. L. Mencken: The American Scene (New York: Knopf, 1969), 259ff.
20. Mencken wrote a savagely debunking obituary on the day after Bryant's
death. Cf. Cairns, H. L. Mencken, 227ff. Among the many moral maxims that
Mencken evidently did not accept was de mortuis nil nisi bonum.
21. There is the further question whether morality is not in itself a form of
perception or cognition. This question, alas, cannot be pursued here. But in any
event, even if moral judgment is based on a certain perception, it is a different
perception from either the comic or the esthetic one.
 The Comic as Weapon
Satire

Broadly put, satire is the deliberate use of the comic for purposes of
attack. If it is thus broadly defined, satire is present in almost all forms of
comic expression. It can weave in and out of comic communication, and
it can be at least momentarily present even in the most innocuous forms
of the comic. Thus satirical elements can be found in P. G. Wodehouse,
Will Rogers, or Sholem Aleichem, most certainly in Oscar Wilde and
H. L. Mencken. In view of this, it would seem plausible to define satire
somewhat more narrowly, namely, as the comic used in attacks that are
part of an agenda on the part of the satirist. Put differently, in satire, the
aggressive intent becomes the central motif of comic expression. All
elements of the comic are then, as it were, welded together into the
shaping of a weapon. Most often the attack is directed against institu-
tions and their representatives, notably political or religious ones. It may
also be directed against entire social groups and their cultures—say,
against the bourgeoisie and its mores. Or it may be used against individ-
uals, or against theories or literary modes. Its emotional tone is typically
malicious, even if the motive for the attack is this or that high principle.
In this, it differs rather clearly from wit. It is possible to be both witty
and benevolent, perhaps even innocent. Benevolent satire is an
oxymoron.
There is a variety of critical theories about satire.1 There would be
little point discussing these here. For the present purpose it should
suffice to follow the conceptualization of satire made by Northrop Frye,
which has gained wide acceptance by literary scholars. 2 Frye character-
izes satire as "militant irony." This is very close to the definition sug-
gested just now. Militancy is a term derived from war, it is an attitude of
attack that is part of a campaign against someone or something. Irony,
understood as saying one thing when one means another, need not be
militant, can be quite gentle. One can certainly differentiate between
cases of satire in terms of their degree of ferocity, but satire that is overly
158 Comic Forms of Expression

gentle liquidates itself. Frye lists a number of essential elements in satire:

fantasy (often grotesque); a standpoint based on moral norms; and an
object of attack. He also emphasizes that satire is always dependent on a
particular audience, in a particular social context: the satirist and his
audience must agree on the undesirability of the object of attack. This
assertion by Frye may be questioned. To be sure, there must be a com-
monality of social context between satirist and audience. A satirical at-
tack on, say, some intricacies of American politics will not be
understood by an audience of foreigners who know none of the refer-
ences. But it is not necessary that the audience agree with the satirist to
begin with. Satire can also be educational: it may be a result of the
satirist's labors that the audience comes to understand the undesirability
of what is attacked.
All the same, satire, more than other expressions of the comic, is
bound by its social context, and this fact gives it a distinctly fugitive
character. A great effort, indeed an exercise in scholarly exegesis, is
required if a modern reader is to understand the satire of Aristophanes
or of Rabelais. But an American listening in the 1990s to a 1950s record-
ing of Mort Sahl, even if he is old enough to have been an adult at the
time, will miss a good many cues. If satire, then, is time-bound, at its
best it leads beyond the immediate object of attack and gives a sense of
liberation beyond the particular historical moment. Frye makes this
point in discussing the satirical aspect of Dante's depiction of Satan as
standing upside down when the poet moves out of Inferno and once
more sees the stars:

Tragedy and tragic irony take us into a hell of narrowing circles and
culminate in some such vision of the source of all evil in a personal form.
Tragedy can take us no further, but if w e persevere with the mythos of
irony and satire, w e shall pass a dead center and finally see the gen-
tlemanly Prince of Darkness bottom side u p . 3

There is some scholarly disagreement over the etymology of the term

satire. 4 The conventional view has been that the term is derived from the
satyrs, those half-human/half-animal beings that played an important
part in the Dionysian myth. That derivation is attractive, since it links
satire with the magical folly that, at least in the Western tradition, has its
origins in the Bacchanalian orgy. There is another possible etymology,
deriving the term from the Latin satura, which refers to a dish with many
components. It is this etymology that allowed Roman writers to claim
that satire was a Roman rather than a Greek invention. One may point
out that the two etymologies are not necessarily contradictory. After all,
the Roman Bacchus stood in a sort of apostolic succession from the
 The Comic as Weapon 159

Greek Dionysus, as did his cult. Be this as it may, satire has an ancient
lineage, both in Western civilization and elsewhere. Folly almost always
has a satirical element, and the discussion of that phenomenon in an
earlier chapter has already touched upon the near-universality of this
manifestation of the comic. Thus, for instance, the tricksters described
by Paul Radin in his work on American Indians were genuine satirists in
their own right, as were court jesters and fools in Asia.
The earliest Greek satirist on record was Archilochus, who lived on
the island of Paros in the seventh century B.C.E.5 He was betrothed to
the daughter of Lycambes, a nobleman. When it became known that
Archilochus was the son of a slave mother, Lycambes forbade the mar-
riage. Archilochus thereupon composed satirical poems against Ly-
cambes and kept reciting them in public. Lycambes was so shamed by
this that he and his daughter committed suicide. Robert Elliott has taken
this story as paradigmatic in his interpretation of satire. At its birth,
satire was invective intensified to the quality of a curse—that is, invec-
tive with magical power. The object of the invective is ridiculed, but the
effect of this went far beyond social embarrassment, attaining the de-
structive power of black magic. Elliott claims wide cross-cultural diffu-
sion of this phenomenon, including the interesting fact that very
frequently there are set rituals within which these curses are uttered. A
case he discusses at some length is that of the ancient Irish bards known
as filid, who pronounced both praise and blame. Both the blessings and
the curses had magical potency, and, not surprisingly, these individuals
were greatly feared. It seems that they had something like a professional
code of ethics, regulating at least in theory how they were to exercise
their power. Like professionals in all ages, they did not always live up to
their code. Thus one of the most renowned ßlid, aptly named Aithirne
the Importunate, traveled around Ireland threatening kings and other
notables with shaming verses unless they met his demands. These were
not exactly ethical at all times. On one occasion Aithirne demanded to
sleep with a king's wife; the king, terrified of the alternative, agreed. In
the end Aithirne got his comeuppance: He and his entire family were
murdered by outraged victims of his satire.
According to Elliott, satire in the Western tradition became pro-
gressively divorced from its magical and ritual origins. One might call
this a kind of secularization. In this process, satire becomes an art form.
Yet it has never lost some of its original qualities. In a sense, satire is
always a curse, and its effects on the targeted individuals can be very
destructive indeed. Dictators have very good reasons to suppress satire
directed against them. As an art form, satire can use very different
means. 6 It is not necessarily verbal. Satire can be behavioral, as in the
mimicry practiced by clowns, and not only by professional ones (envis-
160 Comic Forms of Expression

age a group of disgruntled employees miming the pompous gait and

gestures of their boss). Satire can be expressed in visual art. The carica-
ture is a pure case of this, which, in modern times, has become an
effective instrument of political attack. Most commonly, of course, satire
manifests itself verbally and as a form of literature. As observed earlier,
it always involves irony. Like the martial arts, it always uses the adver-
sary's strengths against himself and thus turns them into weaknesses. A
particularly effective version of this is parody, in which the adversary's
own words are used against him.
A survey of satirical literature, even if limited to Western cultures,
would necessitate a book many times the length of this one. Suffice it to
say that literary satire can take many different forms. A classical form is
that of drama, possibly originating with Aristophanes and having such
latter-day masters as George Bernard Shaw. It can take the form of fable,
using animals to satirize their human counterparts, in a line of works
stretching from Aesop to George Orwell's Animal Farm . Perhaps there
never was a more trenchant criticism of socialist egalitarianism than
Orwell's satirical sentence to the effect that some animals are more equal
than others. There is the satirical novel, from Cervantes to Evelyn
Waugh, more recently in Tom Wolfe's masterpiece The Bonßre of the
Vanities. Wolfe, of course, perfected his satirical style in many essays
long before he wrote that novel. Some would argue that late-sixties
radicalism never recovered from Wolfe's essay "Radical Chic," in which
he satirized a party given by Leonard Bernstein for the Black Panthers;
indeed, the title of this essay has become a category used effectively to
discredit an entire political and cultural movement. (The fact that politi-
cal and cultural movements survive despite being discredited need not
concern us here.) Essays and pamphlets have long been vehicles of
satire. Jonathan Swift's "Modest Proposal," in which he suggested the
export of Irish children for the purpose of cannibalism as a solution to
the problem of Irish famine, is probably the most famous case of this in
English literature. But satire can even be shorter than the essay. There is
the aphorism or epigram, as practiced by such masters as Samuel John-
son, as in his famous statement, "Second marriages represent the tri-
umph of hope over experience." Perhaps the briefest use of satire is one
frequently employed by Englishmen to deflate a pompous interlocutor:
After the latter has divested himself of a particularly objectionable senti-
ment, uttered at great length, one leaves a longish pause and then only
says the one word—"Quite."
For the rest of this chapter the focus will be on one author who
embodies satire in a total way, both in his work and his life. This is the
Austrian writer Karl Kraus (1874-1936), a man who would certainly
have deserved the title "the Importunate." The social context within
 The Comic as Weapon 161

which Kraus lived and worked is by now somewhat distant (even for an
Austrian reader, let alone an American one), but this very distance also
permits a more objective view of the satirist as an ideal type.
Karl Kraus was born in Jicin, Bohemia, the son of a prosperous Jewish
businessman. In view of Kraus's later career, it is somewhat ironical that
his father's business was a paper factory. As was normal among upper-
middle-class Jews in that region of the Austro-Hungarian monarchy, the
language of the family was German. When Kraus was three years old
the family moved to Vienna, a city in which he lived all his life and to
which he was bound in a (for Viennese) not atypical love-hate relation-
ship. He developed an early passion for the theater. There is a charming
episode from Kraus's childhood. W h e n the family first moved to Vienna
he and his brother were taken to play in public parks. Both little boys
were afraid that they might be lost in the big city and would have
difficulty finding their way home. To prepare for such a contingency,
Kraus's brother always took along a provision of sandwiches; little Karl
clutched his most prized possession, a miniature puppet theater.
Kraus studied for a while at the university, though he spent most of
his time in theaters and literary cafés. He acted briefly, then decided to
become a journalist. For a period he worked as the correspondent of the
Neue Freie Presse, the leading liberal newspaper, in the fashionable spa
Bad Ischl. In 1898 the editor, Moritz Benedikt, offered Kraus a position
as chief satirical writer for the newspaper. In the decisive act of his life,
Kraus declined what was a most attractive offer, and instead, a year
later, started his own periodical, Die Fackel (the Torch). He continued to
put out this periodical from 1899 until his death in 1936. After 1911, he
was its only author. He also started a practice of public readings, both
from his own works and from the (rather limited) number of other
authors he admired. Needless to say, it was a most unusual career,
possibly a unique one. Satire was at its core.
Equally unusual was Kraus's periodical. Die Fackel appeared irregu-
larly, whenever Kraus felt that he had enough material for an issue. Its
appearances, in dark-red booklets, had the character of exploding time
bombs. Contemporaries report riding on streetcars just after an issue
had appeared, with seemingly every other passenger eagerly reading
his copy and exclaiming either with pleasure or in anger. Die Fackel did
not make for light reading, but it had a large public from the beginning:
the intelligentsia both in Vienna and in other centers of the Dual Mon-
archy, as well as a large segment of the educated bourgeoisie. Among
young intellectuals Kraus soon became a cult figure, and his public
readings had a virtually ritual character. Most of Kraus's writings first
appeared in his own periodical. A major portion of his opus consists of
polemic and satire, though he also published favorable reviews of the
162 Comic Forms of Expression

works of other authors. He was instrumental in the revival of the plays

of Johann Nestroy, the nineteenth-century Viennese writer, and of the
operettas of Jacques Offenbach. There is also a sizable body of lyrical
poetry by Kraus, surprisingly gentle, at times sentimental, in an author
whose prose frequently dripped with venom.
Kraus's polemics seem to go in two different directions—one lin-
guistic, the other sociological. He attacked the corruption of language,
and he attacked the corruption in all the major institutions of his society.
It was his passionately held belief that the two corruptions were inti-
mately related, indeed were essentially the same. Both, he believed,
were symptoms of a profound dehumanization. On the, as it were,
sociological level he targeted both cultural and social institutions. Liter-
ary figures were attacked and satirized both for their sins of language—
mistakes in grammar, even in punctuation, sloppy formulations, gener-
ally bad German—and for their political sins—such as the glorification
of war and mindless patriotism. Kraus reserved a particular animosity
against the press, which he regarded as epitomizing both the corruption
of language and the corruption of public life. He carried on a lifelong
feud with the Neue Freie Presse, its editor, and major writers, who retali-
ated by never mentioning him in the pages of the newspaper. Other
newspapers followed this practice as well, with the notable exception of
the Arbeiterzeitung, the organ of the new Social Democratic party (which
was only founded in 1890). He also attacked commercial corruption and
the inhumanities of the criminal justice system. He had a special dislike
for psychoanalysis, which was becoming fashionable in the Vienna of
his time, defining it as "that mental disease of which it believes itself to
be the cure."
Kraus carefully cultivated a persona of himself as the implacable po-
lemicist, almost as a prophet. He claimed to sleep through most of the
day, working only by night (which was close to the truth, but not alto-
gether true). He claimed to disdain both criticisms and flattery (again,
not altogether true). Essentially, this persona was that of a marginal
man, friendless and not in need of friends, totally devoted to his work in
defense of civilization. He also claimed to be totally antagonistic to the
Viennese culture in which he lived. There is some truth in this, yet his
life-style was not all that peculiar by Viennese standards, and it is diffi-
cult to imagine Kraus apart from that most Viennese of institutions, the
coffeehouse. Just like other Viennese literary luminaries, Kraus held
court in the coffeehouses he favored, and everybody who was anybody
knew when to find him there. Those who knew Kraus well (and he did
have close, lifelong friends) describe an individual very different indeed
from the cold, sardonic persona of Kraus the polemicist: a warm, consid-
erate individual, who was deeply moved by people in distress and who
 The Comic as Weapon 163

would go to great lengths to help them. He did indeed fiercely defend

his privacy and never wrote about his personal life. He had a number of
intense love affairs, the longest with a Bohemian aristocrat, Sidonie von
Nadherny, for whom he wrote some of his most moving poems and
whose family estate was a place of refuge for him.
Kraus had a complicated and changing relationship both to religion
and politics. As a young man he officially resigned from the Jewish
community, was later baptized as a Catholic, but left the Catholic church
after World War I, basically because he was repelled by its passive sup-
port for the murderous patriotism of both sides in the war (though,
characteristically, the immediate cause was the support given by the
church to the Salzburg Festival, which Kraus despised as a debasement
of culture). He wrote a satirical piece on Zionism, whose founder, Theo-
dor Herzl, was unforgivably a correspondent for the Neue Freie Presse.
Jews were very often the targets of Kraus's polemics and satires, as were
the lapses in German language that were characteristic of Austrian Jews.
Understandably this gave rise to the charge of Jewish self-hate against
Kraus, and it is correct that some of his writings border uncomfortably
on anti-Semitism (some of them were actually used by the anti-Semitic
press). However, Kraus always denounced every form of anti-Semitism,
and he wrote with deep respect for Judaism as a religion and of the
Yiddish culture of Eastern European Jewry (which assimilated Jews in
Austria generally looked down upon). He said in his own defense that it
was not his fault that Jews played a prominent role in the institutions he
felt necessary to attack, especially the press. Defining his relationship to
Judaism, he wrote that he was willing to go along with the journey into
the wilderness but not with the dance around the golden calf. His gener-
al relation to religion is best caught in another statement of his, that the
true believers are those who miss the divine.
Prior to World War I, Kraus's work was largely apolitical. This
changed with the outbreak of the war. Kraus was passionately opposed
to the war, profoundly shocked by its brutalities, and he particularly
despised the intellectuals (the overwhelming majority on both sides of
the conflict) who defended and glorified it in their writings. He became a
consistent, lifelong pacifist. During the war he played a cat-and-mouse
game with the military censorship, but both in his writings and his
public readings he left little doubt as to where he stood. He was proba-
bly saved from prison by the collapse of the Central Powers. After the
war, he published the gigantic play, The Last Days of Mankind, which has
been called one of the greatest antiwar manifestos of the century. In 1918
he wrote with enthusiasm about the departure of the Habsburgs, whom
he held responsible for the war, and he welcomed the new republic. He
supported the Social Democrats, who formed the first republican gov-
164 Comic Forms of Expression

ernment, but was soon disillusioned by their failure to achieve the deep
changes he desired. In the 1930s, much to the chagrin of his friends on
the left, he supported the authoritarian Dollfuss-Schuschnigg regime,
which he saw as the only bulwark left against the Nazis. Hitler's advent
to power in Germany shocked Kraus to such an extent that for a time he
wrote nothing about it. He then published a long, curious essay on
Nazism, " T h e Third Witches' Sabbath" ("Die dritte Walpurgisnacht").
Very characteristically, it mainly dealt with the Nazis' language, which,
with a good deal of justification, he understood as a perfect mirror of the
underlying barbarism.
Kraus embodies satire as the organizing principle of both a life and a
life's work. If he resembles any other figure in European literary history,
it would be Soren Kierkegaard, whose work he knew well and greatly
admired. Both men had an agenda that inspired everything they wrote
and did. In Kierkegaard's case, of course, it was a religious agenda, and
his principal target was the Danish Lutheran church and the debased
Christianity he believed it to represent. Kraus's agenda was not reli-
gious, at least not overtly. The agenda was twofold: the defense of
language and the defense of suffering humanity. As remarked before, in
Kraus's mind this was really one single concern. Much has been written
about Kraus's so-called language mysticism. Suffice it to say here that it
is very difficult to agree with Kraus on this linkage of language and
morality, and in any case his understanding of language is well-nigh
irreproducible other than in German (a fact that in itself throws doubt on
Kraus's peculiar view of language). Some of the most admirable individ-
uals w h o lived in Central Europe in Kraus's times spoke and wrote in
abominable German; some Nazis, alas, had a perfect command of the
German language. In any case, in what follows the focus will be on
Kraus's use of satire to defend suffering humanity, specifically in his
great antiwar drama. If one asks what party Kraus stood for in this
agenda, one could best reply in a phrase used by Edward Timms, an
English biographer of Kraus: the party of human dignity.
To illustrate the nature of Krausian satire, the focus in what follows will
be on the great antiwar drama, The Last Days of Mankind (Die letzten Tage
der Menschheit). Portions of it had been published or read publicly during
the war, but most of it could not have been published as long as military
censorship was in force. The entire play was first published in 1922;
suppressed during the Nazi period, it was republished immediately after
the end of World War II. 8 The work is huge, filling over seven hundred
pages in the standard German edition. It has never been and could not
possibly be performed in its entirety; only selected scenes have been
performed in various theaters of the German-speaking countries. The
scenes move from the home front to the different battle lines of the war,
with hundreds of characters, some of them appearing only once. The
 The Comic as Weapon 165

dramatic scenes are interspersed with direct quotations from newspaper

stories and with Kraus's own poetry. The horrors portrayed escalate as
the drama proceeds, culminating in apocalyptic scenes depicting the final
destruction of the world. In a short preface Kraus observes that the play,
which would take some ten evenings to perform as a whole, is intended
for a theater on Mars presumably after mankind has destroyed itself. No
human audience could stand it. But the author must bear witness to those
years, preserved in blood-soaked dreams, "when figures out of operettas
played out the human tragedy." In the first edition of the play, the
frontispiece was the reproduction of a picture postcard actually sold
during the war. It was a photograph of the execution of Cesare Battisti, an
Austrian citizen of Italian ethnicity who deserted, joined the Italian army,
and was captured and hanged as a traitor. The photograph showed the
corpse of Battisti hanging from a gibbet, surrounded by smiling Austro-
Hungarian officers, with the hangman standing over the gibbet, grinning
jovially from ear to ear. The picture has the subtitle, "The Austrian Face."
The scene recurs in the final pages of the play, with a poem by Kraus
suggesting that it discloses the true nature of that Gemuetlichkeit of which
Austrians have always been proud.
The Battisti photograph represents Krausian satire at its most fero-
cious and prophetic, in almost unbearable protest against inhumanity.
But the play contains examples of every form of satire: direct satire, in
scenes that only slightly but all the more tellingly distort what could
have been actual events; parody; simple citation of actual texts; contrast-
ing citations, side by side; the invention of satirical prototypes; and
finally, especially at the end of the play, satire that takes on the quality
of apocalypse. Quite apart from its contents, the play thus serves as a
kind of lexicon of satirical forms.
The play opens with a scene on the famous Sirk Ecke in Vienna, a
street corner across from the opera house that was favored by boulevar-
diers out to have a good time. A newspaper vendor calls out the news
that Archduke Franz Ferdinand, the heir to the throne, has been assassi-
nated. Three idiotic army officers meet and engage in their usual
conversation—where to go for a good dinner, the merits of various
ladies of the night walking by—with some passing references to the
event in Sarajevo that simply repeat, though incoherently, the official
government line. The scene on the Sirk Ecke recurs regularly through-
out the play, with the same three officers—named Nowotny, Pokorny,
and Powolny—repeating their mindless conversation as the world
slides ever more into the abyss. Different characters appear and reap-
pear on the street. With unerring exactness, Kraus reproduces every
dialect and nuance of language spoken by different social and ethnic
groups. The same ethnographic precision characterizes another early
scene, the arrival at the railway station of the coffins containing the
166 Comic Forms of Expression

murdered archduke and his wife, with the representatives of different

groups and interests carrying on conversations grotesquely at odds with
the occasion. A religious ceremony begins. The assembled crowd kneels
down to pray. The three children of the murdered couple can be heard
crying over the voice of the priest. Newspaper correspondents are con-
versing loudly. An editor (presumably Moritz Benedikt of the Neue Freie
Presse) deplores the absence of one journalist, who is good with emo-
tional scenes. In a moment of silent prayer, when one only hears the
sobbing of the children, the editor tells one of his correspondents: "Be
sure to write how they pray!"
In the preface Kraus claims that every line in the play was actually
spoken or printed somewhere. This claim is not credible, but it is often
difficult to know which texts are parody and which are actual quota-
tions. In one early scene, a text that is almost certainly a quotation is
inserted into a fictional dialogue. It is another street scene soon after the
outbreak of war. A mob is vandalizing a barber shop whose owner has a
name that sounds Serbian. The historians Friedjung and Brockhausen
(real names) appear. As the mob in the background attacks the barber
and demolishes his store, Brockhausen holds forth:

Just today I read in the Presse some telling observations on this theme.
With compelling logic every comparison between our people and the
mobs in France and England is rejected. Perhaps, dear colleague, you
could use this text in your o w n work. Let m e read it to you: Every person
educated in history is comforted and inspired by the knowledge that bar-
barism never achieves a final victory. The great m a s s of our people instinc-
tively shares in this knowledge. The streets of Vienna have accordingly
been free of the shrill howling of cheap patriotism. Here there has been no
sign of short-lived hysteria. This old German state has, from the beginning
of the war, manifested the most noble German virtues—steadfast self-
confidence and deep faith in the victory of our just c a u s e . 9

Many scenes deal with the activities of newspaper correspondents

during the war. Kraus reserved particular venom in his depictions of the
activities of Alice Schalek (again a real person), who was greatly admired
as the first woman journalist to visit the frontlines. Again actual quota-
tions from Schalek's dispatches are woven into the text. In one scene,
Schalek appears on the Italian front. She insists on going right up on the
line. 10 As enemy fire comes in, she engages a reluctant officer in
conversation:

Just tell me, lieutenant, whether even the most able artist could reproduce
the passionate drama unfolding here. Those w h o stay back h o m e m a y call
this w a r a mark of s h a m e on the century. I too did that w h e n I w a s in the
hinterland. But those w h o are here are gripped by the fever of experience.
 The Comic as Weapon 167

Is it not true, lieutenant? You are in the midst of war. Admit it: Many of
you would like the war never to end!

The officer denies this, says everyone wants the war to end. Enemy
shells keep coming in, then stop. Schalek apologizes for not yet being
able to distinguish the sounds made by different types of artillery, then
expresses regret that the shelling has ended. The officer asks: "Are you
satisfied now?"

Schalek: What do you mean, "satisfied"? Satisfaction does not come close
to expressing what I have learned here. You idealists may call it
love of country, you nationalists hatred of the enemy, you modern-
ists a sport, you romantics an adventure. You psychologists may
call it the lust for power. I call it liberated humanity!
Officer: What do you call it?
Schalek: Liberated humanity.
Officer: Ah yes. If one could only get a vacation once in a while.
Schalek: But then you are compensated by the hourly danger. That is a real
experience! Do you know what I would be most interested in now?
What are you thinking now? What are your feelings? . . .

An orderly enters and reports:

Orderly: Lieutenant, Corporal Hofer is dead.

Schalek: How simply this simple man reports this! He is pale like a white
cloth. Call it love of country, hatred of the enemy, sport, adven-
ture, lust for power—I call it liberated humanity. I am gripped by
the fever of experience! Well, lieutenant. What do you say? What
are you thinking now? What are your feelings?

In a similar scene a military chaplain visits the front: 11

Officer: Look, our good chaplain is coming to visit us. That is really nice
of him.
Chaplain: God bless you, my brave ones! God bless your weapons And are
you shooting busily at the enemy?
Officer: We are proud to have a fearless chaplain who visits us despite
the dangers of enemy fire.
Chaplain: Come on, let me do some shooting!
Officer: We are all happy to have such a brave chaplain.

The officer gives a rifle to the chaplain, who fires it several times:

Chaplain: Boom! Boom!

Soldiers: Bravo! What a noble priest! Long live our dear chaplain!
168 Comic Forms of Expression

Even when Kraus is not directly quoting texts from the press, he pro-
duces texts that could easily have been published. Parody becomes diffi-
cult when the reality exceeds the most inventive satirical imagination. In
the repeated conversations between two satirical prototypes, the Sub-
scriber and the Patriot, they mostly quote press reports to each other;
sometimes they converse only in headlines:

Subscriber: Defeatism in France.

Patriot: Discouragement in England.
Subscriber: Despair in Russia.
Patriot: Regrets in Italy.
Subscriber: Generally, what a climate in the enemy countries.
Patriot: The walls are shaking.
Subscriber: Poincaré is consumed by anxiety.
Patriot: Grey is disgruntled.
Subscriber: The Czar tosses on his bed.
Patriot: Troubled Belgium.
Subscriber: What a relief! Demoralization in Serbia.
Patriot: What good feeling! Despair in Montenegro.12

Two other prototypes, whose lengthy conversations continue through-

out the play, are the Optimist and the Complainer; the latter is the
persona of Kraus himself. In one of these conversations the Complainer
produces a number of press reports so tasteless that the Optimist keeps
on exclaiming that they could not possibly be true. 13 First is the report of
a theatrical performance in Vienna to commemorate a battle on the
eastern front at a place called Uszieczko. It is to honor all those who
were killed in this battle. The performers were actual members of the
regiment who had fought the battle, many of them wearing decorations
earned there. Part of the audience consisted of widows and orphans of
those who died at Uszieczko. The battle is reenacted on stage, where the
landscape of the region has been carefully reconstructed. At the conclu-
sion of the performance the soldiers on stage kneel in prayer and then
sing the national anthem, joined in this by the audience, which included
high military and civilian officials as well as representatives of the best
social circles. Another text is an advertisement from Germany. For the
price of one mark one may purchase a memorial plate with the inscrip-
tion, He Died a Heroic Death for the Fatherland. A photograph of the
deceased can be affixed to the plate, which is suitable for hanging on the
wall. Surrounding the photograph are scenes of battle, a replication of
the Iron Cross (the highest German decoration), and pictures of the
German emperor as well as founding figures of the Second Reich. The
Optimist again exclaims that this could not be true and begs the Com-
 The Comic as Weapon 169

plainer to admit that he invented it. The Complainer so admits, but the
reader is left in doubt: the advertisement could well be real; there were
many very similar ones.
There is also the technique of contrasting citations (real or invented),
which Kraus often employed in Die Fackel. In one scene of the play two
Benedicts appear: first Pope Benedict praying, then Moritz Benedikt,
editor of the Neue Freie Presse, dictating:

The praying Benedict: In the holy name of God, our heavenly father,
and for the sake of the blessed blood of Jesus shed for the redemption of
men, I implore you whom divine providence has put in charge of the
warring nations to put an end to the terrible slaughter. It is the blood of
brothers that is being spilled on land and on the sea. The most beautiful
regions of Europe, that garden of the world, are full of corpses and ruins.
Listen to the voice of the vicar of the eternal judge, for you will have to
stand before the final judgment.
The dictating Benedict: The fish in the Adria have never had such good
times as now. In the southern Adria they have been able to dine on almost
the entire crew of the "Leon Cambetta," sunk by our fleet. The fish of the
middle Adria have been fed by those Italians that we could not save from
the sinking "Turbine," while the fish of the northern Adria have been
having a regular feast, having been able to dine on the crews of the
submarine "Medusa," two torpedo boats and now also the cruiser
"Amalfi." 1 4

In a subsequent conversation between the Subscriber and the Patriot

the above editorial is cited to show the Austrian humanitarian spirit,
which even in times of war shows concern for the welfare of Adriatic
fish life.
The major satirical prototypes (reminiscent, incidentally, of the stock
characters of the commedia dell'arte) have already been mentioned: the
Complainer and the Optimist, the Subscriber and the Patriot, the mili-
tary imbeciles of the Sirk Ecke. Another such figure is Old Biach, intro-
duced as the oldest subscriber of the Neue Freie Presse and representative
of the enlightened Jewish bourgeoisie. Biach says nothing except cita-
tions from his newspaper. His last appearance is on the esplanade in
Bad Ischl, together with the Subscriber and the Patriot. 15 Biach joins the
latter, very upset because he has found a discrepancy between the daily
military bulletins from Vienna and Berlin, both reporting on a meeting
of the Austrian and German emperors. The Vienna bulletin states that
the two monarchs "reaffirmed" their alliance, while the Berlin bulletin
had them "noting the same faithful interpretation of the alliance." Could
this imply a divergence of views? Biach, more and more agitated, quotes
various newspaper texts to reassure himself that there is no discrepancy.
170 Comic Forms of Expression

He collapses. With great difficulty he pronounces a number of famous

headlines. His last words are, "This is the end of the editorial." He dies,
surrounded by a group of deeply moved fellow subscribers.
As the play goes on, the scenes become more and more brutal, finally
macabre. Scene: In a police station. 16 A prostitute is brought in. She has
lice, is syphilitic, has a record of theft and vagrancy. She is seventeen.
The inspector asks her contemptuously about her family. Her father is in
the army, her mother has died. How long has she been on the streets?
Since 1914. Scene: A military court in Austrian-occupied Serbia. 17 An
officer attached to the court asks the clerk whether the three death
sentences have been written up, sentences imposed on boys found to
own rifles:

Clerk (hesitatingly): Yes . . . but there is one little problem that I have
just discovered. They are only eighteen years old.
Officer: Well, so what ?
Clerk: Yes .. . well, according to military law they cannot
be executed, the sentence would have to be changed to
imprisonment.
Officer: Let me see. Aha. What we will do is change the age,
not the sentence. Anyway, they are sturdy boys.
Here, I'm writing—twenty-one instead of eighteen.
So. Now we can go ahead and hang them.

Kraus wrote a number of scenes ridiculing the megalomania and the

stupidity of the German emperor, others portraying members of the
house of Habsburg as hopelessly idiotic. He spared the old emperor,
Franz Joseph I, although after the war he blamed him as well as the
entire dynasty for the war. Also, Kraus did not imply that the brutalities
of the war were limited to the side of the Central Powers. In two succes-
sive scenes, a German officer named Niedermacher (Killer) orders the
killing of wounded prisoners of war, followed by a French officer named
de Massacre, who reports how he made his men bayonet 180 captured
enemy soldiers. 18
The play ends with a banquet in an officers' club. 19 German and
Austrian officers are celebrating, popular music is being played, while
artillery fire is heard in the distance. The officers exchange trivial gossip,
sentimental assurances of mutual esteem, and insouciant stories of
atrocities they have committed. Various messengers appear with reports
of military disasters, none of which stop the festivity. The artillery fire
stops. In the silence a series of pictures appears on the wall, every one
filled with the horror of war—refugees fleeing in the snow, a military
 The Comic as Weapon 171

court sentencing teenage soldiers to death, the execution itself, massa-

cres of prisoners of war, and so on. A number of characters appear and
recite poetry—a chorus of gas masks, a song of soldiers who froze to
death, the last words of a Serbian peasant whose children have been
murdered, and so on. Here satire stops to give way to relentless lamen-
tation. Arguably the best of Kraus's poems in this series is one entitled
"The Dead Forest," an accusation by nature itself against the human
beings who have destroyed it. The pictures end with the entire horizon
being filled with flames. There is yet another escalation in the apocalyp-
tic prophecy, in an epilogue entitled "The Last Night." 2 0 There are more
scenes of horror, more poems depicting outraged humanity. Hyenas
with human faces appear and dance, singing, around piles of corpses.
Mysterious signs appear in the sky, crosses and swords.
As a sea of flames envelops the world, there still are voices repeating
the banalities of wartime editorials. The world ends with cosmic
thunder. A voice from heaven announces that God's image has been
destroyed. There is a great silence. Then God's own voice is heard: "I
did not will it." And that too is a final irony: these are the words that
Emperor Franz Joseph is supposed to have spoken at the outbreak of the
war.
Kraus's play is in itself a clear illustration of the thesis mentioned
earlier, to the effect that all satire is at its core an act of cursing. The play
illustrates the grandeur and near-prophetic power of which satire is
capable when it is motivated by moral passion. Nor is one likely to
quarrel with the target of Kraus's moral condemnation: the bestiality of
which human beings are capable. This was already an object of Kraus's
polemics in peacetime, as in his attacks on the criminal justice system,
but war is of necessity an enormous amplification of all the cruelties
already present in a society. Yet the play, and indeed Kraus's entire
opus, also shows the limitations of satire. These limitations also serve to
explain Kraus's political uncertainties after the war, and in a curious way
lend credibility to the objections made by the Optimist against the Kraus
persona in the play. For what was Kraus's curse mainly directed
against? One would have to say: Against the Austrian society of his time
as a whole, and in particular against the political system of the final
years of the Habsburg monarchy. The Optimist's objections can be
summed up in one sentence: Come now, you are exaggerating! Did
Kraus exaggerate?
A fair answer would be both no and yes. On the one hand, no, Kraus
did not exaggerate. The horrors he depicted really occurred, there were
many individuals in the ruling classes of both Austria-Hungary and
Germany as stupid and as inhuman as he depicted them, and the press
172 Comic Forms of Expression

did play the despicable role he described. But also, yes, he did
exaggerate—or at least his satirical attacks were based on an absolute
morality that had no room for the ambiguities and the relativity of histo-
ry. One may leave aside here the moral absurdities into which his mysti-
cism of language led him—as in the notorious case when, after the
Nazis had already come to power in Germany, he sued an emigré paper
published in Czechoslovakia for quoting him with an omitted comma.
We may also leave aside the rather grandiose and humorless vision
Kraus had of his own mission in the world. The more general issue here
is what perhaps one might call the moral precision of satire.
In retrospect, the regime of Austria-Hungary was more decent than
most of the successor regimes in Central Europe. In retrospect, the
group that was most frequently satirized by Kraus, the liberal Jewish
bourgeoisie and its press (emphatically including the Neue Freie Presse),
was one of the pillars of this decency. One cannot blame an author for
not anticipating the retrospective insights of a later period, but Kraus
did not fundamentally change his views as late as the 1930s. There is a
more basic issue, though. Every human society has its share of horrors,
even the most decent one in times of peace. There is always that line
which, in the words of The Threepenny Opera of Bertolt Brecht, divides
those who walk in darkness from those who walk in the light. Morally
inspired satire must necessarily focus on those regions of darkness. In
that sense Kraus's attacks on the criminal justice system, from the very
beginnings of Die Fackel, were well chosen: The law and its enforcement
agencies are the mechanisms by which society administers its regions of
darkness—or, more precisely, processes those who are forced to inhabit
it. The incongruence of the sentimentality of Viennese operetta and the
cruelties of the Viennese police has its counterparts in every society,
always with the modifications made by the genius of the local culture.
Yet satire, if it is to be morally precise, must weigh these dark spots
against the moral status of the society as a whole. To be sure, this is not
an easy task, but not an impossible one.
These considerations lead back to an observation made in the preced-
ing chapter about wit. Satire too is, so to speak, epistemologically neutral.
Its rhetorical power does not necessarily mean that its portrayal of reality
is accurate. Satire, like wit, can distort reality, can even lie. In this case,
one can appreciate the eloquence and the moral fervor with which Kraus
attacked the liberal press of his time, one can even concede the validity of
some of his moral condemnations (as those made of the journalists who
lent themselves to the bloodthirsty propaganda of the war). And, nev-
ertheless, one can conclude that, in the final analysis, Kraus's attack was
unjust.
 The Comic as Weapon 173

Notes

1. Cf. Brian Connery and Kirk Combe, eds., Theorizing Satire (New York:
St. Martin's, 1995).
2. Northrop Frye, Anatomy of Criticism (Princeton, N.J., Princeton Univer-
sity Press, 1957), 223ff.
3. Ibid., 239.
4. Cf. Gab Sibley, "Satura from Quintillion to Joe Bob Briggs," in Connery
and Combe, Theorizing Satire, 58ff.
5. Cf. Robert Elliott, The Power of Satire: Magic, Ritual, Art (Princeton, N.J.,
Princeton University Press, 1960), 3ff.
6. Cf. Matthew Hodgart, Satire (New York: World University Library,
1969).
7. On Kraus's life and work, cf. Caroline Kohn, Karl Kraus (Stuttgart:
Metzlerscbe Verlagsbuchhandlung, 1966); Frank Field, The Last Days of Mankind:
Karl Kraus and His Vienna (London: Macmillan, 1967); Edward Timms, Karl Kraus:
Apocalyptic Satirist (New Haven: Yale University Press, 1986).
8. Karl Kraus, Die letzten Tage der Menschheit (Zurich: Pegasus, 1945).
9. Ibid., 76f. All translations from the play are my own.
10. Ibid., 174ff.
11. Ibid., 230f.
12. Ibid., 105.
13. Ibid., 644ff.
14. Ibid., 177ff.
15. Ibid., 565ff.
16. Ibid., 520.
17. Ibid., 518.
18. Ibid., 574ff.
19. Ibid., 678ff.
20. Ibid., 725ff.
 11
Interlude
The Eternal Return of Folly

It is time to take another look at Lady Folly, whose demise has often
been announced. Anton Zijderveld, one of the very few sociologists to
pay sustained attention to the phenomenon of the comic, quotes a
French poem dating from around 1513, which denies the demise. Freely
translated: "You tell me that Lady Folly is dead? By my faith, you lie.
Never has she been as great, and as powerful, as she is now!" 1 But
Zijderveld too thought that she had died, only a couple of centuries
later. One can state with some confidence that he was mistaken as well.
He could, of course, show how particular social roles, like that of the
court jester, came to disappear. But folly itself returns again and again,
in ever-new incarnations. If there is any merit to the present argument,
this could not be otherwise, for the perceptions that lead to the upside-
down view of reality that folly represents spring from the human condi-
tion as such. Put differently, folly is anthropologically necessary.
A powerful example of this recurrence of folly is the so-called theater
of the absurd, which exploded (the word applies) in Paris in the years
following World War II with the plays of Samuel Beckett, Eugène Io-
nesco, Jean Genet, and others. But Martin Esslin, who wrote the defini-
tive work on this episode, also speaks of "the tradition of the absurd." 2
More of this in a moment. But just what does the term absurd refer to?
Etymology is not always useful in clarifying a concept. In this case it
is. The Latin, absurdum, literally means out of deafness. A possible ex-
planation is that the absurd is what people say who are deaf to reason.
The term would in that case be more or less synonymous with the
irrational. But a more interesting interpretation suggests itself: The ab-
surd is a view of reality that comes out of deafness itself—that is, an
observation of actions that are no longer accompanied by language.
Such actions are, precisely, meaningless. Individuals with normal hear-
ing can easily replicate this experience by turning off the sound on
television: The actors on the screen now go on busily as before, but
176 Comic Forms of Expression

much of the time it is impossible to say what their actions mean. The
effect usually is comic. By the same token, actions that had self-evident
meaning when accompanied by language suddenly appear to be prob-
lematic. Deafness problematizes. Some psychologists have suggested that
deaf people tend to be suspicious. They learn willy-nilly what Nietzsche
recommended as a philosophical discipline: the "art of mistrust." If
Nietzsche was right, one might conclude that deafness, because of its
problematization of ordinary reality, carries with it a certain cognitive
gain (which, of course, would not make the condition any less
unfortunate).
The absurd is an outlandish, a grotesque representation of reality. It
posits a counterworld—just what Zijderveld intended when he de-
scribed folly as "reality in a looking-glass." Not so incidentally, the
etymology of the word grotesque is of some interest too. The word comes
from the Italian, grottesca, and refers to strange paintings that appeared
on the walls of grottoes. This etymology suggests a picture: One leaves
the ordinary world of sun-lit reality and enters a dark grotto, and then,
suddenly, one is confronted with startlingly strange visions. If this expe-
rience is of sufficient intensity, one is enveloped in this other reality and,
at least temporarily, the ordinary world outside loses its accent of real-
ity. The picture of a grotto graphically conveys what Alfred Schutz
called a finite province of meaning.
Most of the links mentioned by Esslin as part of the tradition have
been encountered earlier in this book. There is the, as it were, apostolic
succession going from the Dionysian orgy through the medieval celebra-
tions of folly to the court jesters and clowns of more recent times, and
that is just within Western civilization. If the tradition is taken more
narrowly as referring to the stage, there is a chain going back to classical
Greek comedy through the commedia dell'arte and vaudeville to such
heroic clowns of motion pictures as Charlie Chaplin (whose absurdity,
true to the aforementioned etymology, comes through more clearly in
silent films—that is, under the aspect of deafness).
There is one important feature that recurs in the long history of the
absurd: an assault on language. The experience of the absurd beats
against the limits of taken-for-granted language, which is simply not
made for expressing it. In this, once again, the absurd as a manifestation
of the comic resembles both religion and magic. Ordinary language
cannot convey the reality of religious experience and, again and again in
the history of religion, special languages (such as the glossolalia of Pen-
tecostalism) are invented to overcome this difficulty. These special lan-
guages, like the language of magic, typically strike the uninitiated as
plain nonsense. Thus Esslin includes in the tradition of the absurd such
phenomena as the distorted Latin of the goliards, the peculiar language
 Interlude 177

of Rabelais and Villon, but also such modern creations as the looking-
glass logic of Lewis Carroll's Alice in Wonderland, the nonsense verse of
Edward Lear in English and Christian Morgenstern in German, and
some parts of Franz Kafka's novels. As immediate precursors of the
theater of the absurd in France one must count the literary and artistic
products of surrealism (the term was coined by Guillaume Apollinaire)
and dadaism. Over and beyond the movement that gave itself that
name, all expressions of the absurd are surreal—that is, they literally
transcend what is taken for granted as real in normal, everyday life.
An important precursor of the theater of the absurd in France was
Alfred Jarry (1873-1907), an eccentric bohemian, whose varied works
attracted a good deal of attention during his short and unhappy life, but
who also underwent a posthumous renascence in the immediate post-
World War II period. He was notorious for his penchant for elaborate
practical jokes; his entire opus could well be described as a gigantic
practical joke, buttressed by an impressive erudition. Jarry is best
known for a cycle of plays featuring the character of Ubu, former king of
Poland, a grotesque figure surrounded by equally grotesque compan-
ions. Arguably, though, Jarry's later work is more interesting, notably
the presentation of the supposedly revolutionary new science of
"pataphysics."
It is almost impossible to convey the effect of Jarry's plays through
their written texts. Everything depends on the actual dramatic perfor-
mance. As in the later theater of the absurd, the effect lies in the deadly
serious enactment of perfectly preposterous actions and dialogues (not
so incidentally, the same effect as is achieved by successful clowns and
stand-up comedians). This is the case, for example, in the perfectly
absurd dialogues between Ubu and his conscience, a tall thin fellow,
who is dressed in nothing but a shirt and lives in a suitcase. It is signifi-
cant that the figure of Ubu was based an a play composed as a parody of
a teacher at the lycée attended by Jarry; he was fifteen years old at the
time. An American commentary on Jarry's work refers to his "free-
wheeling and adolescent nihilism." 4 His nondramatic writings, many of
them published in newspapers as what he called "speculative journal-
ism," contain such pieces as an application by Ubu for patents on his
alleged invention of the umbrella, the carpet slipper, and the glove (each
carefully and accurately described), detailed instructions for building a
time machine, and the proposal by a priest to transform all statues of the
Virgin and Child into machines, designed to imitate the famous Brussels
depiction of Manneken-Pis, whereby the infant Jesus would urinate
holy water. But Jarry's magnum opus was what he called a "neo-scientific
novel," Exploits and Opinions of Doctor Faustroll Pataphysician . The work is
best described as a sort of encyclopedia of nonsense, much of it ex-
178 Comic Forms of Expression

tremely difficult to understand. After Jarry's death a College of Pa-

taphysics was founded, in whose publication some of France's most
illustrious writers continued to interpret the new science, only half
tongue-in-cheek.
This is how the protagonist of the neoscientific novel is introduced:

Doctor Faustroll was sixty-three years old when he was born in Circassia
in 1898 (the 20th century was ( - 2 ) years old). At this age, which he
retained all his life, Doctor Faustroll was a man of medium height. . . with
a golden-yellow skin, his face clean-shaven, apart from a sea-green mus-
tachio, as worn by King Saleh; the hairs of his head alternately platinum
blonde and jet black, an auburn ambiguity changing according to the sun's
position; his eyes, two capsules of ordinary writing-ink flecked with gold-
en spermatozoa like Danzig schnapps. 5

And this is how Doctor Faustroll's new science is defined:

An epiphenomenon is that which is superinduced upon a phenomenon.

Pataphysics . . . is the science of that which is superinduced upon meta-
physics, whether within or beyond the latter's limitations, extending as far
beyond metaphysics as the latter extends beyond physics. Ex: an epi-
phenomenon being often accidental, pataphysics will be, above all, the
science of the particular, despite the common opinion that the only science
is that of the general. Pataphysics will examine the laws governing excep-
tions, and will explain the universe supplementary to this one; or, less
ambitiously, will describe a universe which can be—and perhaps should
be—envisaged in the place of the traditional one, since the laws that are
supposed to have been discovered in the traditional universe are also
correlations of exceptions, albeit more frequent ones, but in any case acci-
dental data which, reduced to the status of unexceptional exceptions,
possess no longer even the virtue of originality.

DEFINITION: Pataphysics is the science of imaginary solutions, which symbol-

ically attributes the properties of objects, described by their virtuality, to their
Lineaments.6

Is this purely a spoof? Perhaps. Yet it is understandable that some

very intelligent commentators tried to find interesting insights in the
midst of what at first seems to be an accumulation of witty nonsense.
After all, Doctor Faustroll is not the first great thinker to go out in search
of a "universe supplementary to this one"! In any case, the possibilities
of pataphysical thought are endless. Thus Dr. Faustroll is accompanied
on his journeys (in a boat which is a sieve) by a baboon named Bosse-de-
Nage, whose only linguistic expression is the exclamation "ha h a . "
There is a detailed analysis of this phrase, trying to reconstruct from it
the baboon's view of the world:
 Interlude 179

Pronounced quickly enough, until the letters become confounded, [ha

ha] is the idea of unity. Pronounced slowly, it is the idea of duality, of
echo, of distance, of symmetry, of greatness and duration, of the two
principles of good and evil. But this duality proves also that the perception
of Bosse-de-Nage was notoriously discontinuous, not to say discontinuous
and analytical, unsuited to all syntheses and to all adéquations. One may
confidently assume that he could only perceive space in two dimensions,
and was refractory to the idea of progress, implying, as it does, a spiral
figure.
It would be a complicated problem to study, in addition, whether the
first A was the efficient cause of the second. Let us content ourselves with
noting that since Bosse-de-Nage usually uttered only AA and nothing
more (AAA would be the medical formula Amalgamate), he had evidently
no notion of the Holy Trinity, nor of all things triple, nor of the indetermi-
nate, nor of the Universe, which may be defined as the Several. 7

There is even a pataphysical theology. A passage entitled "Concern-

ing the Surface of God" begins as follows:

God is, by definition, without dimension; it is permissible, however,

for the clarity of our exposition, and though he possesses no dimensions,
to endow him with any number of them greater than zero, if these dimen-
sions vanish on both sides of our identities. We shall content ourselves
with two dimensions so that these flat geometrical signs may easily be
written down on a sheet of paper.

Based on the vision of a mystic, Anne-Catherine Emmerich, of the

cross in the shape of a Y, it is then postulated that God has the shape of
three equal straight lines of length A, emanating from the same point
and having between them angles of 120 degrees. There follows an im-
penetrable sequence of algebraic formulas, culminating in the definition
that "God is the shortest distance between zero and infinity," or alter-
natively "the tangential point between zero and infinity." 8
Put simply, Jarry's pataphysics is the construction of a counterworld
by means of a counterlanguage and a counterlogic. In this, it is a faithful
replication of the key features of classic folly. And this, precisely, is what
the theater of the absurd sought to accomplish a half-century later.
Eugène Ionesco (1912-1994) not only produced some of the best-
known plays in this genre, but also explained repeatedly how he came
to do this and how his intentions are to be understood. The world of
folly, or the world of the absurd, is entered as the ordinary world is
relativized by means of some sort of shock (one may recall here once
more what Alfred Schutz had to say about the entry into finite provinces
of meaning). A sudden loss of confidence in the reliability of language is
one such shock. In 1948, Ionesco set out to learn English. At the hand of
180 Comic Forms of Expression

the textbook he was learning from, he "discovered" such startling in-

sights as that there are seven days in a week, or that the floor is down
and the ceiling up. He experienced, by his own account, a sudden shift
in the sense of reality: What previously was taken for granted is now,
through the medium of a foreign language, made problematic. He then
wrote his first play about the "tragedy of language," The Bald Soprano (a
title that has nothing to do with the contents of the play). The entire play
consists of a number of absurd conversations between two couples, the
Smiths and the Martins, their maid Mary, and a visiting fire chief. After
a long conversation between the Smiths (a middle-class English couple,
sitting on English chairs on an English evening) they are visited by the
Martins, who are left alone while the Smiths go to change. For a while
they sit quietly, smiling timidly at each other. Then their dialogue
begins:

Mr. Martin: Excuse me, madam, but it seems to me, unless I'm mistaken,
that I've met you somewhere before.
Mrs. Martin: I, too, sir. It seems to me that I've met you somewhere be-
fore.
Mr. Martin: Was it, by any chance, at Manchester that I caught a glimpse
of you, madam?
Mrs. Martin: That is very possible. I am originally from the city of Man-
chester. But I do not have a good memory, sir. I cannot say
whether it was there that I caught a glimpse of you or not!
Mr. Martin: Good God, that's curious! I, too, am originally from the city
of Manchester, madam!
Mrs. Martin: That is curious
Mr. Martin: Isn't that curious! Only, I, madam, I left the city of Man-
chester about five weeks ago.
Mrs. Martin: That is curious! What a bizarre coincidence! I, too, sir, I left
the city of Manchester about five weeks ago.
Mr. Martin: Madam, I took the 8:30 morning train which arrives in Lon-
don at 4:45.
Mrs. Martin: That is curious! How very bizarre! And what a coincidence! I
took the same train, sir, I, too.

They then discover that they traveled in the same compartment, that
they are residing at the same address in London, in the same flat, and
that they both have a little daughter named Alice, who is two years old
and has one white eye and one red eye. At the end of this long conversa-
tion, after a period of reflection, Mr. Martin gets up slowly and an-
nounces ("in the same flat, monotonous voice"):
 Interlude 181

Mr. Martin: Then, dear lady, I believe that there can be no doubt about it, we
have seen each other before and you are my own wife . . . Eliz-
abeth, I have found you again! 9

What is at work here is a kind of demented Cartesian logic, elab-

orately demonstrating what was obvious to begin with. This, of course,
is comic. Yet at the same time a doubt is introduced as to whether the
obvious is all that obvious after all. Indeed, as the Martins happily
embrace after this rediscovery of their being married to each other, Mary
the maid declares that they are quite mistaken, that they are really
different people, and that her own real name is Sherlock Holmes. One is
reminded of the exercises assigned to his students by Harold Garfinkel,
the founder of the ethnomethodology school in American sociology. For
example, a student would be instructed to go home and ask his parents
or his wife for directions to the bathroom, for instructions on how to use
the refrigerator, or the like. This would naturally upset the student's
interlocutors, but that was not the purpose of the exercise. Rather, it was
to disclose the web of taken-for-granted assumptions underlying normal
social interaction. Be it in ethnomethodology or in the theater of the
absurd, the basic proposition here is quite simple: the obvious becomes
less obvious as it is repeatedly asserted (especially if that is done in a
"flat, monotonous voice").
Ionesco has eloquently expressed this experience:

All my plays have their origin in two fundamental states of consciousness:

now the one, now the other is predominant, and sometimes they are
combined. These basic states of consciousness are an awareness of evanes-
cence and of solidity, of emptiness and of too much presence, of the unreal
transparency of the world and its opacity, of light and of thick darkness.
Each of us has surely felt at moments that the substance of the world is
dream-like, that the walls are no longer solid, that we seem to be able to see
through everything into a spaceless universe made up of pure light and
color; at such a moment the whole of life, the whole history of the world,
becomes useless, senseless and impossible. When you fail to go beyond this
first stage of depaysement—for you really do have the impression you are
waking to a world unknown—the sensation of evanescence gives you a
feeling of anguish, a form of giddiness. But all this may equally well lead to
euphoria: the anguish suddenly turns into release; nothing counts now
except the wonder of being, that new and amazing consciousness of life in
the glow of a fresh dawn, when we have found our freedom again. 1 0

He goes on to say that, in this new freedom, it is possible to laugh at

the world. And in another passage Ionesco formulates the relation of the
182 Comic Forms of Expression

comic to this experience of emigration (depaysement) from ordinary

reality:

To feel the absurdity of the commonplace, and of language—its falseness

is already to have gone beyond it. To go beyond it we must first of all bury
ourselves in it. What is comical is the unusual in its pure state; nothing
seems more surprising to me than that which is banal; the surreal is here,
within grasp of our hands, in our everyday conversation. 11

The experiences of the absurd and of the comic are not coterminous.
Rather, they overlap. But where they do overlap they reveal the most
profound aspect of the comic—namely, a magical transformation of real-
ity. In order to achieve this, ordinary reality must first be problematized—
if one prefers, deconstructed. Just as language constructs the order of
reality, so it can be used to tear down this construction, or minimally to
breach it. Non-sense actions and non-sense language are thus vehicles to
induce a different perception of the world. This is a methodology very
familiar to anyone who has studied mysticism. Perhaps the closest reli-
gious analogy to the theater of the absurd is the way in which Zen
techniques of meditation break down the ordinary, "normal" mode of
attending to the world.
Absurd comedy releases a curious dialectic. It puts before one a real-
ity that is both strange and familiar, and that evokes the response that it
is impossible. But as one exclaims, "That is absurd!"—that being the
magical counterworld one has just entered—another exclamation imme-
diately suggests itself, "This is absurd!"—and this, of course, is the
world of ordinary, everyday experience. It is this dialectic that is implied
in Anton Zijderveld's characterization of folly as reality in a looking-
glass. The Vedan ta used the phrase neti, ned (not this, not that) to
indicate the impossibility of describing the ultimate reality. One could
say that absurd comedy applies the same phrase to ordinary reality—
not this, not that—and thereby, however tentatively, adumbrates the
possibility that there may be a reality beyond the ordinary. This does not
as yet make it a religious phenomenon. But it comes dangerously close
(and the adverb here is quite appropriate). Martin Esslin, in the conclud-
ing chapter of his book on the theater of the absurd, makes an argument
about its relation to religion that at first seems self-contradictory. 12 On
the one hand, he puts the experience it sought to convey in the context
of the decline of religion: A world bereft of any divine presence must
appear absurd, meaningless. But on the other hand, Esslin suggests, the
experience of the absurd also opens up the possibility of transcendence
that is, of a reality beyond the absurd realities of this life.
The Latin church father Tertullian is famous for his statement, "Credo
 Interlude 183

quia absurdum" (I believe because it is absurd). Much has been made of

this both by advocates and by critics of Christianity, to show the power
of faith or, alternatively, its irrationality. The correct interpretation of
Tertullian must be left to experts in patristics. But a most nonexpert—
perhaps a pataphysical—exegesis may be ventured here: Perhaps Ter-
tullian said more than he intended. For it is not so much that one should
believe because something is absurd, but rather that one is led toward
faith by the perception of absurdity. Needless to say, there is nothing
inevitable about this progression. It remains as an intriguing possibility.
In other words (and never mind what Tertullian actually meant): it is not
the object of faith that is absurd. The world is absurd. And, therefore,
faith is possible.

Notes

1. Anton Zijderveld, Reality, 70:

Me di toi que dame Folie
Est mort? Ma foy, tu as menty;
jamais si grande tie la vy,
Ny si puissante comme elle est.

2. Martin Esslin, The Theater of the Absurd (Garden City, N . Y . : Anchor,

1961), 229ff.
3. Cf. Roger Shattuck and Simon Taylor, eds., Selected Works of Alfred Jarry
(New York: Grove, 1965); Keith Beaumont, Alfred farry (New York: St. Martin's,
1984).
4. Shattuck and Taylor, Alfred farry, 13.
5. Ibid., 182f.
6. Ibid., 192f.
7. Ibid., 228f.
8. Ibid., 254ff.
9. Eugène Ionesco, Four Plays (New York: Grove, 1958), 15ff.
10. Eugène Ionesco, Notes and Counter-Notes (London: Calder, 1964), 169.
11. Cited by Esslin, Theater of the Absurd, 93.
12. Ibid., 291ff.
 III
Toward a Theology of the Comic
 12
The Folly of Redemption

In many parts of the world madness has been viewed as a sign of

holiness. Folly, as has been seen, is a widely diffused if not universal
phenomenon. So are holy fools. And, as with (so to speak) mundane
fools, the holy fools have been both real madmen (what today would be
called cases of mental illness or retardation) and individuals feigning
madness (who could be called holy fools ex ofßcio). There are important
elements of religiously privileged folly in Taoism and Zen Buddhism,
among the wandering sanyasin of India, and in primal religions in Africa
and the Americas. Holy fools have appeared in Judaism, Christianity,
and Islam, often exhibiting very similar behavior, even if the religious
rationale of this behavior varied in accordance with the several
traditions.
There are examples of holy folly in the Hebrew Bible. A prototypical
example is that of King David, in an episode recounted in the Second
Book of Samuel (2 Sam. 6): As the ark of the covenant was brought to
Jerusalem, David went into a kind of frenzy and started to dance in front
of the ark, apparently in a state of nakedness. His wife, Michal (daugh-
ter of King Saul), was embarrassed by this very unkingly behavior and
rebuked him for it, saying that he was bringing shame on himself even
in the eyes of the servant maids present. David replied, "I will make
myself yet more contemptible than this, and I will be abased in your
eyes; but by the maids of whom you have spoken, by them I shall be
held in honor." The text does not tell what further embarrassing acts
David undertook, though it informs that, as punishment for her criti-
cism of David, "Michal was afflicted with infertility for the rest of her
life" (a severe penalty, one might think, for lacking a sense of humor). A
number of important themes in holy folly (at least in Judaism and Chris-
tianity) are already explicit in this story: the frenzied absurdity in behav-
ior (including the nakedness), the deliberate surrender of dignity, and
the ability of very humble people (here the servant girls) to understand
more than the mighty and the wise (here represented by Michal).
188 Toward a Theology of the Comic

The prophetic literature has a number of cases that can properly be

described as holy folly. In the Book of Isaiah, the prophet is reported to
have walked naked and barefoot for three years (Is. 20). The prophet
Jeremiah put on a wooden yoke around his neck (Jer. 27). And Ezekiel
was commanded to eat excrement (Ezek. 4). In each instance the seem-
ingly mad behavior was intended to symbolize specific prophecies, but
it is safe to assume that such behavior was not limited to these instances.
This should not surprise, in view of what is known about the origins of
Israelite prophecy—almost certainly to be sought in the phenomenon of
wandering ecstatics, whose activities always contained bizarre and
seemingly absurd characteristics.
As was observed in an earlier chapter, folly, absurdity, and gro-
tesqueness are closely related. The history of religion, again in many
parts of the world, is full of grotesque figures: gods, demons, and oth-
ers. One may think here of the grotesque divinities abounding in Hindu-
ism or in Tibetan Buddhism, perhaps epitomized in the figure of Kali
Durga, the goddess of destruction, depicted as a woman of monstrous
appearance dancing on a mountain of skulls. The religious aspect of
grotesqueness can be explained. As Rudolf Otto has classically formu-
lated (The Idea of the Holy), religious experience involves an encounter
with realities and beings that are "totally other" (totaliter aliter). This
otherness cannot be grasped in ordinary language and imagery, at best
can only be adumbrated. It shatters the assumptions of ordinary, every-
day experience. This is precisely what the grotesque symbolizes very
effectively. Human beings trying to perceive this other are like people
submerged underwater looking up at what is above the water: The
latter, inevitably, will be perceived in a grossly distorted form. The
grotesque expresses such distortion. Holy folly, in its grotesqueness,
makes explicit the otherness breaking into ordinary reality, but also the
impossibility of containing this otherness in the categories of ordinary
reality.
In the teaching of Jesus, as reported in the Gospels, there are no
direct references to anything that might be called holy folly. But Jesus'
repeated statement that one should try to be like a child and his pro-
nouncement of blessing on those who are poor in spirit convey the
similar idea that there is a simplicity that is superior to worldly wisdom.
The closest approach to holy folly in the Gospels comes in two events at
the very end of Jesus' life: the entry into Jerusalem (Matt. 21) and the
events following Jesus' appearance before Pontius Pilate (Matt. 27). Je-
sus chooses to enter Jerusalem mounted on a donkey. To be sure, the
rationale given to this by the evangelist is the fulfillment of a prophecy
from the Book of Isaiah to the effect that Zion's king will come riding on
an ass (though here too this act is described as being humble). Neverthe-
 The Folly of Redemption 189

less there is the ancient association of the donkey with folly. There is no
way of knowing whether Jesus, or for that matter the author of Mat-
thew, knew of this association (Greco-Roman rather than Israelite). It
would certainly be known to many who received the Gospels in the
Greek language. To them, one must suppose, there came the image of
Jesus entering the city of his Passion in a manner suggesting the behav-
ior of a fool. Even more telling is the second episode. After the Roman
governor had disclaimed responsibility for the fate of Jesus and just
before the latter was taken out to be crucified, the Roman soldiers took
him and subjected him to a mock coronation. He was dressed in a scarlet
robe, a crown of thorns was placed on his head and a reed in his right
hand, and he was hailed as king of the Jews. Here Jesus is mocked by
being treated as if he were a bogus royalty of the Bacchanalia, the prede-
cessor of the medieval feast of fools. Indeed, one might say that, just
before his crucifixion, Jesus was crowned as a king of folly.
The classical passages in the New Testament that refer to folly,
though, are in the Pauline literature, notably the Letters to the Corinthi-
ans. The apostle repeatedly states that he speaks "as a fool," and he
announces that this is indeed the calling for Christians: "We are fools for
Christ's sake" (1 Cor. 4:10). This phrase, "fools for Christ's sake," has
been the self-description of holy fools in Christian history ever since.
Here are two passages in which Paul explains the meaning of this folly:
"For the word of the cross is folly to those who are perishing, but to us
who are being saved it is the power of God." And then this description
of the one whom the apostle preaches: "Christ crucified, a stumbling-
block to Jews and folly to Gentiles." Finally, the climactic theological
explanation: "God chose what is foolish in the world to shame the wise,
God chose what is weak in the world to shame the strong, God chose
what is low and despised in the world, even things that are not, to bring
to nothing things that are, so that no human being might boast in the
presence of God" (1 Cor. 1:27-28).
There are many layers of meaning in these passages. There is, for
one, the explicit relation to Paul's own weakness, described merely as
his "thorn in the flesh," which God told him to accept rather than fight
against. The Corinthians are asked also to accept the apostle's weakness
and to understand that the power of his message comes from God, not
from his own strength. There have been different theories (all unproved
and unprovable) that Paul's affliction was epilepsy. If so, this would
make Paul himself into a figure of holy folly, of which epilepsy has been
seen as a manifestation in classical antiquity. Beyond this, however,
Paul points to the same mystery of the Incarnation that is suggested in
the aforementioned episodes from the Gospels. This mystery is the self-
humiliation of God, the kenosis, who descends from the infinite majesty
190 Toward a Theology of the Comic

of the divinity, not only to take on the form of a human being but of one
despised, mocked, and finally killed under the most degrading circum-
stances. Yet this humiliated Jesus is the same as the triumphant victor of
the Resurrection. The central paradox of the Christian message, as
preached by Paul, is the immense tension between the kenotic Christ of
the Passion and the Christus Victor of Easter morning.
To proclaim this paradox is to engage in an act of folly, as perceived
by the wise of this world. In speaking as a fool, the apostle does at least
two things: He is faithful to the extraordinary character of the message
that has been trusted to him, without making concessions to the false
wisdom of the worldly. And, in his own weakness, he also imitates the
weakness assumed by the kenotic savior, who was crowned and cruci-
fied as a royal fool (or, more precisely, as a fool w h o thought himself a
king). From that time on, every fool for Christ's sake both participates in
and symbolizes the kenosis of God that brings about the redemption of
the world. 1
It is not necessary to be Russian in order to appreciate holy fools.
However, it seems to help.
There is a long tradition of fools for Christ's sake in both Western and
Eastern Christendom, containing both real fools and fools ex officio.2 In
the West, for example, St. Francis of Assisi exhibited some of the charac-
teristics of holy folly, as did the order he founded. But it is Eastern
Orthodoxy, especially in Russia, that has produced the richest collection
of holy fools. 3 In the case of Russia, the argument could actually be
made that holy folly became a major theme in the national culture, both
on the popular and literary levels (Dostoyevsky's novel The Idiot being
the undisputed literary climax of the tradition).
Holy folly in the Eastern church may go back to the early days of the
desert saints of Egypt, but the phenomenon became prominent in the
sixth century. Famous cases are those of Theophilus and Maria of Anti-
och, and of St. Symeon of Emesa. Theophilus and Maria came from
aristocratic families. They were engaged to be married, instead decided
to become fools for Christ's sake. They roamed the streets of the Syrian
metropolis, he dressed as a jester, she as a prostitute, outraging the
populace with bizarre and often obscene behavior. Gradually, it was
recognized that this behavior was an expression of unusual piety. St.
Symeon was an anchorite in the lands east of the river Jordan. He too
began to roam through the towns and villages of this area. He would
throw walnuts at people in church, overthrow the stalls of street ven-
dors, dance with prostitutes in the street, burst into w o m e n ' s bath-
houses, and conspicuously eat on fast days. At first, of course, the
reaction to this behavior was outrage. Then it came to be accepted that
the behavior symbolized great religious mysteries arid Symeon was re-
 The Folly of Redemption 191

vered as a saintly individual. This greatly disturbed him, as a reputation

for saintliness would undermine the whole (let it be called) kenotic
program, which was to be an ongoing exercise in humility and humilia-
tion. To prove that he was not a saint, Symeon pretended to make an
effort to seduce the wife of the shopkeeper for whom he occasionally
worked. The shopkeeper raised an alarm, and Symeon was beaten and
chased away, thoroughly humiliated and discredited. Paradoxically, this
only enhanced his reputation as a holy fool later on. It is presumably
impossible to determine whether Symeon was really mad or only pre-
tended to be—or, for that matter, whether he was a genuine adulterer or
only a make-believe one. The significant fact is that by consensus he was
deemed to be a fool for Christ's sake, and as such he was canonized by
the Orthodox church.
An important figure in the development of the tradition was St. An-
drew the Fool, who lived in Constantinople from the end of the ninth to
the early tenth century. Born in Scythia, reputedly of Slavic ethnicity, he
was brought to the imperial capital as a slave. He too engaged in the by
now standardized fool's behavior, adding the personal enhancements of
walking around naked and sleeping with stray dogs. He too was can-
onized. The stories about him were taken to Russia in the course of its
Christianization and he was particularly revered there as a fellow Slav.
The first important Russian case, in the eleventh century, was that of
St. Isaac Zatvornik, a hermit of the famous Monastery of the Caves in
Kiev. The greatest flourishing of holy fools occurred in the sixteenth
century. Holy folly was especially associated with the city of Novgorod.
Many travelers to Russia noticed the prevalence of the phenomenon.
This is how the English traveler Giles Fletcher described what he saw:

They have certain hermits, whom they call holy men, that are like gym-
nosophists for their life and behavior, though far unlike for their knowl-
edge and learning. They use to go stark naked save a clout about their
middle, with their hair hanging long and wildly about their shoulders, and
many of them with an iron collar or chain about their necks or midst, even
in the very extremity of winter. These they take as prophets and men of
great holiness, giving them a liberty to speak what they list without any
controlment, though it be of the very highest himself. . . . If any of them
take some piece of salesware from any man's shop as he passeth by, to
give where he list, he thinketh himself much beloved of God and much
beholden to the holy man for taking it in that sort. Of this kind there are
not many, because it is a very hard and cold profession to go naked in
Russia, especially in winter. Among other at this time they have one at
Moscow that walketh naked about the streets and inveyeth commonly
against the state and government, especially against the Godunovs, that
are thought at this time to be great oppressors of that commonwealth. 4
192 Toward a Theology of the Comic

One of the most famous practitioners of this "very hard and cold
profession" was St. Basil the Innocent, who died around 1550. 5 He is
also known as St. Basil the Blessed; significantly, the Russian word
blazhenny can mean both innocent (in the sense also of childlike or imbe-
cile) and blessed. He has been associated with Ivan the Terrible. Al-
though he died before that bloody ruler unleashed a reign of terror in
the rebellious city of Novgorod, legend puts St. Basil there at the time.
Supposedly he lived in a cave under the Volkhov Bridge. He summoned
Ivan to come there and, when strangely enough the tsar obeyed the
summons, Basil offered him fresh blood and meat. Ivan refused the
disgusting gift, whereupon Basil put his arm around him and pointed to
the sky, where the souls of Ivan's innocent victims were ascending to
heaven. The tsar was terrified and ordered the executions to stop, where-
upon the blood and meat turned into wine and sweet watermelon.
The combination of holy folly and political criticism may not have
been very common, but even its occasional occurrence explains why the
authorities in Moscow became increasingly suspicious of holy fools.
Suppressed in Moscow and other urban centers, the institution survived
in remoter areas. But the Russian church stopped the canonization of
any additional fools for Christ's sake.
A number of themes recur in this Orthodox tradition. Central, of
course, is the theme of utter humiliation—first self-humiliation, then
humiliation on *he part of others that is deliberately provoked. In this
the fools for Christ's sake imitate the humiliation of Christ. The worst
sin is pride; everything must be done to avoid this. The association with
blatant sinners and, a step further, the pretense of actually sinning are
intended to make pride impossible. It is not difficult to see that there
could be one additional step: really sinning, in which case pride would
become completely impossible. And there developed indeed an under-
ground current of Russian spirituality in which self-abasing sin, espe-
cially of a sexual nature, was understood as an exercise in Christian
humility. This underground tradition reached a late and historically im-
portant embodiment in the sinister figure of Rasputin, who haunted the
court of the last Romanovs.
The recurrent theme of nakedness is also important. Nakedness, in
addition to violating normal notions of decency, symbolizes the rejec-
tion of all social roles and artificial childlikeness. Also, of course, it
invites disgust and vilification—exactly the outcome sought by the holy
fools. Religiously motivated nakedness can be found in a number of
cultures (prominently, for example, in India), but here it has a specific
kenotic meaning.
The fools for Christ's sake were, for the most part, wanderers, pil-
grims. This holy vagabondage is also significant. It symbolizes the rejec-
 The Folly of Redemption 193

tion of worldly ties and security. The holy fool is a perpetual stranger, a
man without a home or fixed abode—in this too imitating Jesus. Finally,
the holy fool, though typically an individual without formal learning (or
one who had such learning but deliberately rejected it), is the repository
of superior wisdom. To him are revealed mysteries that remain hidden
to the wise men of this world. This theme is nicely illustrated by the
following legend: Somewhere in the vastness of Russia lived three her-
mits, renowned for their saintliness but utterly devoid of the knowledge
of religious doctrine and ritual. When the local bishop discovered that
the hermits did not even know a single prayer of the church, he sought
them out and taught them to say the Lord's Prayer. They memorized the
prayer and gratefully said goodbye to the bishop, who returned to his
residence by crossing a lake on a ferry. As the ferry was halfway across
the lake in the early evening, the bishop was amazed to see the three
hermits walking across the water in great haste in order to catch up with
him. They told him that they had forgotten one line of the prayer and
asked him to repeat it. The bishop, overcome with awe, told them that
they need not bother.
In an earlier discussion of folly the point was made that it constitutes
a magical transformation of the world, or more precisely, an act of magic
by which a counterworld is made to appear. This counterworld serves to
illuminate the realities of the ordinary world, typically in a debunking or
critical manner. This is why Anton Zijderveld, as previously cited,
spoke of folly as reality in a looking-glass. If folly is, as it were, baptized
as holy folly, then what occurs is what could be called an epistemological
reversal: The status of the counterworld comes to be radically redefined.
To stay within Zijderveld's image the looking glass becomes a win-
dowpane. That is, instead of the foolish counterworld being understood
as a distorted reflection of this world, it can now be viewed as a distorted
glimpse of another world. The apostle Paul actually uses the image of the
looking glass in this latter sense, when he says in the Revised Standard
Version that in the present aeon "we see in a mirror dimly" (1 Cor.
13:12); the King James Version puts it more poetically: "through a glass,
darkly," and only in the aeon to come will we see "face to face."
If we take these images literally—mirror versus window—they are
contradictory. But, rightly understood, there is here a metaphor that
resolves the seeming contradiction. For one can look at the world con-
secutively in two ways, providing two perspectives that are not neces-
sarily irreconcilable. The first perspective emerges from an attitude that,
at least provisionally, puts aside or brackets the religious possibility that
there is indeed a world other than this one. This attitude involves a
method aptly described by the scholastics' phrase etsi Deus non daretur
(as if God is not assumed). In that event, it is perfectly plausible to look
194 Toward a Theology of the Comic

at folly as a reflection of ordinary social reality and nothing else, and this
perspective does indeed yield useful insights. If one then takes on the
attitude of faith, which does indeed assume the existence of God, folly is
also something else—namely, an uncertain reflection of what lies beyond
or behind this world, a shadow play of the divine reality.
Kierkegaard has used the phrase "knight of faith" to describe an
individual who dares to have faith. There is here a deliberate allusion to
Don Quixote, who is arguably the most magnificent fool in world litera-
ture. The further implication is that, in the perspective of faith, Don
Quixote is finally justified: He is more right about the nature of reality
than the empiricist Sancho Panza or all those others who mock his folly.
Commenting on Don Quixote from a Christian point of view, the Ger-
man Protestant theologian Helmut Thielicke summed up: "The fool is
always right; only the fool is right in this world." 6 Cervantes's "knight of
sad appearance" and Kierkegaard's "knight of faith" have in common a
rejection of ordinary reality, a refusal to accept its rules and limitations.
Etsi Deus non daretur, this refusal, however heroic, must end in defeat (as
did Cervantes's hero, who on his deathbed renounced his previous
ideas of noble chivalry). However, if God is assumed, the refusal is fully
justified; it represents a truth greatly superior to all mundane knowl-
edge. Folly is now seen as a prelude to the overcoming of the empirical
world. As Miguel de Unamuno put it in his discussion of Don Quixote:
"It was by making himself ridiculous that Don Quixote achieved his
immortality." 7 One could put it more strongly: Don Quixote is a witness
to immortality.
From the standpoint of faith, folly results in the intersection between
absolute and contingent reality, between the world beyond and this
world. This is how Thielicke puts this:

Don Quixote, although also victorious, is the victim of a law of life: The
absolute is always on the edge of ridiculousness when it collides with the contin-
gent. Therefore he w h o represents the absolute does not belong in this
world, at least not fully. While he is struggling against it, he also stands
outside it; he can never be absorbed by it. Because of this standing outside
this world, because of his failure to adjust, he appears in this world in the
costume of the fool, the disguise of the c l o w n . 8

This phenomenon can also be described in Schutzian terms. The act

of faith brings with it a shift in the accent of reality. The paramount
reality of everyday life is relativized; conversely, the specific finite prov-
ince of meaning to which faith pertains is absolutized. Needless to say, it
is finite only in the perspective of the paramount reality. As the epis-
temologica! reversal occurs, it is, on the contrary, the threshold of infin-
 The Folly of Redemption 195

ity; conversely, the empirical world, far from being paramount, is dis-
closed as being very finite indeed. The madness of the fool is now seen
to be the infinitely more profound truth. In his analysis of Don Quixote,
Alfred Schutz was interested in the way in which the two realities—
Quixote's fantasy world and the ordinary world of all the others—
related to each other. 9 Schutz proposed that the two realities were con-
nected by a sort of switching system—the "enchanters," as Quixote
called them, powerful magicians who made the reality of his world
appear as something quite different to his fellowmen. In other words,
the enchanters made sure that the reality perceived by Quixote was
perceived as fantasy by others. In the Quixotic universe, of course, what
the others see is fantasy; the true reality is his own world of chivalry.
Schutz was uninterested in religious matters, but this alternation of the
real and the fantastic in, respectively, the perceptions of mundaneness
and faith accurately applies to any religious perspective on the world:
What to faith is the most real (ens realissimum) is to the nonbelieving
mind a fantasy; conversely, the hard reality of a mundane worldview is,
in the eyes of faith, a fleeting fantasy.
Don Quixote believes that the knights-errant are "God's ministers on
earth." But at times he too has his doubts and wonders whether he
might not be mad after all. In this he is very similar to Kierkegaard's
knight, who must again and again repeat his leap of faith. More gener-
ally, the epistemological status of the world of folly can only be resolved
by the decision to leap or not to leap into the attitude of faith. In the
absence of faith, etsi Deus non daretur, the fool is finally a tragic figure, as
Quixote was on his deathbed: "He finds himself at the end a home
comer to a world to which he does not belong, enclosed in everyday
reality as in a prison, and tortured by the most cruel jailer: the common-
sense reason which is conscious of its own limits." 10 The intrusion of the
transcendental into this world of everyday life is either denied or dissim-
ulated by common reason. In the perspective of faith, things look very
different. There is no tragedy here. On the contrary, the fool is glori-
ously vindicated. This was the insight with which Enid Welsford con-
cluded her history of the fool:

To those who do not repudiate the religious insight of the race, the human
spirit is uneasy in this world because it is at home elsewhere, and escape
from the prison house is possible not only in fancy but in fact. The theist
believes in possible beatitude, because he disbelieves in the dignified isola-
tion of humanity. To him, therefore, romantic comedy is serious literature
because it is a foretaste of the truth: the Fool is wiser than the Humanist,
and clownage is less frivolous than the deification of humanity. 1 1
196 Toward a Theology of the Comic

Notes
1. There are non-Christian analogs to the idea of kenosis. A notable one can
be found in Jewish mysticism, in the school of Isaac Luria, which flourished in
the wake of the expulsion of the Jews from Spain. Cf. Gershom Sholem, Major
Trends in Jewish Mysticism (New York: Schocken, 1946), 265ff. Its doctrine of the
"breaking of the vessels" (which had roots in earlier gnostic speculations) main-
tained that fragments of the divine glory descended into the lower realms of
reality in which evil dwells. The redemption of the world, its repair (tikkun),
consists of rescuing these broken fragments of glory and restoring them to their
proper place. The coming of the Messiah will complete the process of "repair,"
redeeming not only Israel but all of reality. This doctrine is many-layered. It
certainly contains an interpretation of the meaning of exile, which had recently
been suffered by Spanish Jewry. But far beyond this the doctrine is cosmic in
scope, suggesting the self-exile of the divinity: in other words, its kenosis. It
received a bizarre transmutation in the heresy of Sabbatianism. Cf. pp. 287ff.;
also Sholem, Sabbatai Sevi (Princeton, N.J.: Princeton University Press, 1973).
This had its origins in the career of the "false Messiah" Sabattai Sevi, who led a
tumultuous mass movement, was imprisoned by the Turkish authorities, and
then underwent a forced conversion to Islam. This conversion, a contemptible
act of apostasy in the perception of orthodox Judaism, was interpreted as the
clue to the Messianic mystery by some Sabbatians: The Messianic light must
descend into the lowest darkness for the work of redemption to be completed.
This paradoxical kenosis became the rationale not only for conversions to Islam
and Christianity, but for gross violations of every moral and ritual precept of
Judaism. Isaac Bashevis Singer has given a vivid picture of what this involved in
his novel, Satan in Goray. This is a Jewish analog to the antinomianism repre-
sented by various "fools for Christ's sake" in Russian Christianity, dramatically
by the case of the "mad monk" Rasputin.
2. Cf. John Saward, Perfect Fools: Folly for Christ's Sake in Catholic and Ortho-
dox Spirituality (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1980).
3. Cf. Christos Yannaras, The Freedom of Morality (Crestwood, N.Y.: St.
Vladimir's Seminary Press, 1984), 65ff.; G. P. Fedotov, The Russian Religious Mind
(Cambridge, Mass.: Harvard University Press, 1966), vol. II, 316ff.
4. Cited in Saward, Perfect Fools, 22f.
5. Cf. Fedotov, Russian Religious Mind, 338.
6. Helmut Thielicke, Das Lachen der Heiligen und Narren (Stuttgart: Quell,
[1974] 1988), 167. My translation.
7. Miguel de Unamuno, The Tragic Sense of Life (New York: Dover, 1954),
306. In this work, written in 1912, Unamuno presented Don Quixote as the
quintessence of a "Spanish soul" opposed to the rationalism of Europe. This
ideological exercise is of no interest here.
8. Thielicke, Des Lachen, 168f. My translation.
9. Alfred Schutz, "Don Quixote and the Problem of Reality," in Schutz,
Collected Papers, vol. II, 135ff.
10. Ibid., 157.
11. Enid Welsford, The Fool (Garden City, N.Y.: Anchor, 1956), 326f.
 13
Interlude
On Grim Theologians

Some religions are more humorous than others. Some gods laugh more
than others. In East Asia in particular: Zen monks and Taoist sages seem
to be helplessly in the grip of mirth much of the time, and every souve-
nir store in Hong Kong or Taipei offers a variegated line of laughing
Buddhas. The Greek gods laughed a lot, mostly unpleasantly. The so-
called Abrahamic religions that emerged from the monotheistic experi-
ences of western Asia—Judaism, Christianity, and Islam—are compara-
tively underprivileged in the department of mirth. Nietzsche made the
renowned quip that he would find Christianity more believable if only
the Christians looked more redeemed. He had the same observation in
mind, no doubt, when he called his anti-Christian philosophy "the
cheerful science." There is in all this an agenda for comparative religion
that is clearly beyond the scope of this book. However, the apparent
absence of humor in the sacred texts and in the theology of Christianity
create an inconvenient problem for a Christian writer who wants to
argue for the religious implications of the comic. The problem ought to
be faced, at least briefly.
Anyone surfing through the Bible (Old and New Testament alike) or
the history of Christian theology in search of the comic is bound to be
disappointed. 1 The God of the Hebrew Bible is indeed mentioned as
laughing a number of times, but it is virtually always a laughter of
derision over the vain ambitions of human beings (as in Psalms 2 and
59). The most strategic occurrence of laughter in the Hebrew Bible is
when God informs the aged Abraham and Sarah that they will be
blessed with a child. Both Abraham and Sarah greet this announcement
with laughter (respectively, in Gen. 17:15-21 and 18:1-15). The idea
strikes them as ludicrous, as it would anybody. Their laughter expresses
a lack of faith, though God is not reported as having held this against
them. When the child was indeed born, they named him Isaac (Yizchak,
"he laughed" in Hebrew), thus commemorating their doubting laughter
198 Toward a Theology of the Comic

(unless the implication was that God laughed at their laughter—certainly

the Israelite God always had the last laugh). One could perhaps, with
some effort, find a biblical legitimation of humor in the fact that laughter
is in the name of the second of the three great patriarchs of the Jewish
tradition. One does not fare much better with the New Testament. The
Greek church Father John Chrysostom stated that Jesus never laughed.
This may be doubted. Surely, for instance, there must have been laugh-
ter at the wedding in Cana. But there is definitely no account of Jesus'
laughing anywhere in the Gospels. Laughter is mentioned in Jesus'
reported sayings, but it is to berate those who laugh now in godless
sinfulness and to announce that they will weep in the fullness of time (as
in Luke 6:25). Jesus was, of course, repeatedly the object of sinful mock-
ery, even while suffering on the cross (Luke 23:35). However, as was
argued in the preceding chapter, it is by way of folly that the comic
makes its most persuasive appearance in the New Testament: Jesus as
the ultimate holy fool, from the entrance into Jerusalem to the mock
coronation by the Roman soldiers. It is, of course, in the same way—via
the metaphor of folly—that the comic appears in the Pauline Epistles.
What one does find repeatedly throughout the New Testament is an
affirmation of joy as a blessing of redemption. One may safely assume
that the joy of the blessed includes laughter. But, as was made clear
earlier, specifically comic laughter is not the same as laughter that sim-
ply expresses joyfulness. By and large, one can fairly say that the search
for comic laughter in the biblical literature succeeds only if one engages
in rather labored interpretations. At best, it is implicit rather than
explicit.
The negative attitude toward laughter continues in the patristic and
medieval periods of Christian thought. There is a long line of grim
theologians. Repeatedly there are negative comments on laughter,
which is understood as expressing worldliness, sinful insouciance, and
lack of faith. Conversely, weeping over the wretchedness of this world
is praised as a Christian virtue. Christian saints rarely laugh—except, it
seems, in defiance of imminent martyrdom. Monastic rules proscribed
laughter. One does not have to be a Nietzschean to look upon the
history of Christian theology as a depressingly lachrymose affair.
The picture becomes brighter if one looks at Christian behavior rather
than Christian theorizing. Mention was made earlier in this book of
Mikhail Bakhtin's view of the laughing culture (better, comic culture) of
the Middle Ages. Some of Bakhtin's particular interpretations of this
have been questioned, but there can be no doubt that there flourished a
rich comic culture in medieval Europe and that this culture, while often
frowned upon by the ecclesiastical authorities, was emphatically Chris-
tian in content. 2 One of the most intriguing manifestations of this was
 Interlude 199

liturgical. This was the so-called Easter laughter (risus paschalis). In the
course of the Easter mass the congregation was encouraged to engage in
loud and prolonged laughter, to celebrate the joy of the Resurrection. To
achieve this end, preachers would tell jokes and funny stories, often
with quite obscene elements. In some localities this practice continued
into modern times.
If one looks at great figures in church history, arguably the one with
the most visible sense of humor was Luther. 3 Humor permeates Lu-
ther's correspondence and table talk. When he was asked how God
occupied himself in eternity, he replied that God sat under a tree cutting
branches into rods to use on people who ask stupid questions. When a
young pastor asked for advice on how to overcome his stage fright when
facing his congregation, Luther suggested that he should imagine them
sitting there naked. Sometimes Luther's sense of humor is sufficiently
Rabelaisian—that is, rooted in the medieval comic culture—to be a bit
hard to take for a modern reader. Thus, in explaining the doctrine of
Christ's descent into hell, Luther describes the devil as a monster sitting
in hell and devouring all the sinners who arrive there. When Christ
arrives in hell, the devil devours him too. But Christ, the only arrival
without sin, tastes different and causes the devil to have severe stomach
cramps. The devil vomits Christ out again. But the, as it were, purgative
power of Christ's purity was so great that with him the devil also spits
out all the other sinners he had previously eaten. 4 When Luther at-
tacked the Archbishop of Mainz, who announced that he would exhibit
annually his collection of relics, Luther said that a few new ones had just
been added—such as three flames from the burning bush of Moses, a
piece of the flag carried by Christ into hell, half a wing of the archangel
Gabriel, and five strings of David's harp. 5 The same robust sense of
humor can even be detected in one of Luther's most famous statements,
containing as it does the doctrine of justification by faith in a comic
nutshell, when he advised the overscrupulous Melanchthon "to sin
forcefully, but to believe even more forcefully" (pecca fortiter sed crede
fortius)—a sentence that humorless Catholic critics have often used to
discredit Lutheranism and that equally humorless Lutherans have rein-
terpreted to make it inoffensive.
Of important modern theologians, Kierkegaard, as was mentioned
previously, had most to say about the comic. His views of irony and
humor as marking the boundaries of the esthetic, ethical, and religious
perspectives are complicated and need not be developed further here.
His basic insight into the religious dimension of the comic is contained
in the most lapidary form in one of his journal entries: "But humor is
also the joy which has overcome the world." 6 Similar statements can be
found in the writings of several other theologians, though typically in
200 Toward a Theology of the Comic

the form of asides rather than sustained treatments. Karl Barth, shortly
before his death, said that good theology should always be done cheer-
fully and with a sense of humor. Dietrich Bonhoeffer, the Protestant
theologian executed by the Nazis for his involvement in the attempt to
assassinate Hitler, wrote from prison how humor sustains Christian
faith in adversity. Alfred Delp, a Catholic priest who was another victim
of Nazism, joked in the best tradition of Christian martyrdom when he
was actually walking toward his execution. He asked the chaplain ac-
companying him about the latest news from the front, then said "In a
half hour I will know more than you!" 7
Helmut Thielicke, one of the few recent theologians to devote an
entire book to the comic, has summed up these insights as follows: "The
message, which resides in humor and from which it lives, is the kerygma
[the proclamation] of the overcoming of the world." 8 Reinhold Niebuhr,
the best-known American Protestant theologian in this century, wrote
an essay on "Humor and Faith." The following sums up his view:

The intimate relation between humor and faith is derived from the fact
that both deal with the incongruities of our existence. Humor is concerned
with the immediate incongruities of life and faith with the ultimate ones.
Both humor and faith are expressions of the freedom of the human spirit,
of its capacity to stand outside of life, and itself, and view the whole scene.
But any view of the whole immediately creates the problem of how the
incongruities of life are to be dealt with; for the effort to understand life,
and our place in it, confronts us with inconsistencies and incongruities
which do not fit into any neat picture of the whole. Laughter is our reac-
tion to immediate incongruities and those which do not affect us essen-
tially. Faith is the only possible response to the ultimate incongruities of
existence which threaten the very meaning of our life. . . .
Faith is the final triumph over incongruity, the final assertion of the
meaningfulness of existence. There is no other triumph and will be none,
no matter how much human knowledge is enlarged. Faith is the final
assertion of the freedom of the human spirit, but also the final acceptance
of the weakness of man and the final solution for the problem of life
through the disavowal of any final solution in the power of man. 9

The comic as a phenomenon must be distinguished from that of play.

Yet the two are related. The Catholic theologian Hugo Rahner wrote a
delightful little book on the religious significance of play. What he says
there is also relevant for the religious significance of the comic:

To play is to yield oneself to a kind of magic, to enact to oneself the

absolutely other, to pre-empt the future, to give the lie to the inconvenient
world of fact. In play earthly realities become, of a sudden, things of the
transient moment, presently left behind, then disposed of and buried in
 Interlude 201

the past; the mind is prepared to accept the unimagined and incredible, to
enter a world where different laws apply, to be relieved of all the weights
that bear it down, to be free, kingly, unfettered and divine. Man at play is
reaching o u t . . . for that superlative ease, in which even the body, freed
from its earthly burden, moves to the effortless measures of a heavenly
dance. 1 0

If, then, one is to make an argument for the religious implications of

the comic from a Christian vantage point, one will find some support in
the tradition. Still, the scarcity of this support provokes reflection.
As far as the absence or near absence of explicit humor in the biblical
sources is concerned, it is useful to recall the nature of this literature. In
a traditional Jewish or Christian understanding, it is through these texts
that God revealed Himself. One can put this understanding in more
secular terms by saying (using here a term of Mircea Eliade) that the
biblical sources report on various hierophanies—that is, powerful mani-
festations of sacred reality and their human consequences (for instance,
moral consequences). What is more, many biblical texts were used in
worship—that is, in actions intended to reiterate or even replicate these
hierophanies. When the sacred is experienced at such close range (or
when there is, at least, the intention of mediating such an experience),
all reflection must cease. That is certainly the case with theoretical reflec-
tion. There is hardly any theology in the Hebrew Bible, as Jews are
prone to point out repeatedly, and modern constructions of a theology
of the Old Testament are ex post facto theoretical exercises, usually
produced by Christians. The New Testament can more plausibly be said
to contain theology, especially in its Pauline and Johannine texts. But
here too there is no theoretical interest as such; the interest is always
kerygmatic—in the authoritative proclamation of the Gospel message. In
other words, to engage in the systematic intellectual activity known as
theology requires a certain distance from the cataclysmic presence of the
sacred. A theologically informed sense of humor—that is, a perception
of the comic as a religiously meaningful aspect of reality—also requires a
measure of distance.
Al-Ghazali, the great Muslim theologian who made a place for mysti-
cism within the "divine sciences" of Islam, was convinced that reason
had no place within the mystical experience itself. That is, an individual
cannot simultaneously experience religious ecstasy and engage in sys-
tematic intellectual activity. But no one can remain in a state of ecstasy
indefinitely. Reason can reassert itself in the wake of ecstasy, when the
individual can and, as far as Al-Ghazali was concerned, should ask
himself what the experience means in the total order of things. In this
context Al-Ghazali coined the wonderful sentence, "Reason is God's
202 Toward a Theology of the Comic

scale on earth." Perhaps something very similar can be said about the
perception of the comic.
This reflection, of course, does not get one off the hook as far as the
lachrymose history of Christian theology is concerned. There, if not in
the canonical texts, one would expect more friendly attention to the
comic. One may derive some consolation from the fact that, as has been
seen, the philosophers, at least in Western culture, have not been much
better than the theologians, certainly not before the onset of the modern
era. The philosophers of classical antiquity, from Plato to Cicero, tended
toward a sour view of laughter. It is plausible to assume that their
Christian successors simply took over this attitude, only deepening it by
linking it with a religious deprecation of this world and of the human
condition. It was only in the "underground" of popular comic culture
that a different sensibility, comic and Christian, maintained itself. Occa-
sionally, as in the practice of Easter laughter, it erupted into the liturgy
of the church.
Very tentatively, a further hypothesis might be ventured. As was
seen earlier, the turn in philosophy from a negative to a positive assess-
ment of the comic only came in modern times. Erasmus, with his Praise
of Folly, marks this turning point (at the same time serving as a bridge
between the comic culture of the Middle Ages and modern understand-
ings of the comic). Then, especially in the seventeenth and eighteenth
centuries, came a period of intense and generally positive interest in the
comic by philosophers. It is possible that modern consciousness, both in
its pretheoretical form and then as it is theoretically explicated, produces
a comic sensibility all its own. Modernity pluralizes the world. It throws
together people with different values and worldviews; it undermines
taken-for-granted traditions; it accelerates all processes of change. 11 This
brings about a multiplicity of incongruencies—and it is the perception of
incongruence that is at the core of the comic experience. Sociologists
have used the phrase "role distance" to describe the detached, reflective
attitude of modern individuals toward their actions in society. This also
implies cognitive distance—Helmut Schelsky, a German sociologist, has
called this "permanent reflectiveness" (Dauerreflektion). The same dis-
tance may well be the basis of a specifically modern sense of humor. If
so, modern theology, despite its frequently frenetic efforts to keep up
with the times, has not really caught up yet.
All the same, the comic, like the sacred, has a way of breaking into
the most unlikely situations. Helmut Thielicke tells the delightful story
of an experience he had toward the end of World War II, when he was
preaching in a village church near Stuttgart. Suddenly there was an air
raid, without warning, with the most frightening noises of attacking
airplanes, machine-gun fire and countering flak. Thielicke shouted from
 Interlude 203

the pulpit: "Everyone flat on the ground! We sing 'Jesus, my J o y ' "
("Jesu, meine Freude," a well-known German hymn). The organist and
the congregation followed this instruction. Thielicke could no longer see
them from the pulpit, as everyone was crouched under the pews, sing-
ing. Despite the horrible noise all around the church, and despite the
great danger, the situation impressed Thielicke as acutely funny. He
started to laugh wholeheartedly. In retrospect, he thought that this was
indeed laughter that pleased God.

Notes

1. There does not seem to be any overall history of humor in Christian

history. I must confess that I didn't look very hard, since I had reason to be
confident what the result would be. In any case, if this book aspired to complete-
ness, I would need the life expectancy of one of those unpleasantly laughing
Greek gods (as Homer put it so well: "He who outlives his reviewers laughs
last"). I have found the following books moderately helpful: Werner Thiede, Das
verheissende Lachen: Humor in theologischer Perspektive (Goettingen: Vandenhoeck
& Ruprecht), 1966); Helmut Thielicke, Das Lachen der Heiligen und der Narren
(Stuttgart: Quell, [1974] 1988); and Franz-Josef Kuschel, Laughter: A Theological
Essai/ (New York: Continuum, 1994 [orig. in German also 1994]). I suppose that I
should mention Harvey Cox, Feast of Fools (Cambridge, Mass.: Harvard Univer-
sity Press, 1969). It makes a number of interesting observations on the relation of
Christian hope and the life of fantasy, but its main thrust is a theological legit-
imation of the countercultural sensibility of the late 1960s—a less than exciting
exercise a generation later. A more recent book by an American Protestant
theologian—A. Roy Eckardt, How to Tell God from the Devil: On the Way to Comedy
(New Brunswick, N.J.: Transaction, 1994)—also contains some acute insights,
but it is marked by an idiosyncratic approach that is often hard to follow.
2. Cf. Gerhard Schmitz, "Ein Narr, der da lacht," in Thomas Vogel, ed., Vom
Lachen (Tuebingen: Attempto, 1992), 129ff.
3. This comes through in all Luther biographies, recently in Heiko Ober-
man's masterful Luther (New Haven: Yale University Press, 1989). One biogra-
phy, by Eric Gritsch, is actually entitled Martin—God's Court fester (Philadelphia:
Fortress, 1983), but not much is made of this title in the text. An authoritative
work on Luther's humor appears to be Fritz Blanks, Luthers Humor (1954, in
German); I was unable to put my hands on this work.
4. Cf. Thielicke, Das Lachen, 98.
5. Cf. Thiede, Das verheissende Lachen, 120.
6. Howard Hong and Edna Hong, eds., Seren Kierkegaard's Journals and
Papers (Bloomington: Indiana University Press), vol. 2, 262.
7. Cf. Thiede, Das verheissende Lachen, 127 ff.
8. Thielicke, Das Lachen, 96. My translation.
9. Reinhold Niebuhr, Discerning the Signs of the Times (New York: Scribner,
1946), Illff. Niebuhr thought that humor led into the "vestibule of the temple,"
204 Toward a Theology of the Comic

but that laughter must: cease in the "holy of holies." This, probably not coinci-
dentally, was also Kierkegaard's view. I'm inclined to think that in this both
were mistaken.
10. Hugo Rahner, Man at Play (London: Burns & Oates, 1965), 65f.
11. Cf. my book with Brigitte Berger and Hansfried Kellner, The Homeless
Mind: Modernization and Consciousness (New York, Random House, 1973). We did
not, alas, consider humor at the time.
 14
The Comic as a Signal of Transcendence

The term transcendence carries a heavy freight of diverse meanings in

philosophical and theological discourse, and no useful purpose would
be served by untangling all these meanings here. However, the notion
of transcendence has appeared at several points in the ruminations of
this book, most loudly in the preceding two chapters. It is useful, there-
fore, to clarify at least two meanings of the term relevant to the phenom-
enon of the comic: First, the comic transcends the reality of ordinary,
everyday existence; it posits, however temporarily, a different reality in
which the assumptions and rules of ordinary life are suspended. This is,
as it were, transcendence in a lower key; it does not in itself have any
necessary religious implications. But second, at least certain manifesta-
tions of the comic suggest that this other reality has redeeming qualities
that are not temporary at all, but rather that point to that other world
that has always been the object of the religious attitude. In ordinary
parlance one speaks of "redeeming laughter." Any joke can provoke
such laughter, and it can be redeeming in the sense of making life easier
to bear, at least briefly. In the perspective of religious faith, though,
there is in this transitory experience an intuition, a signal of true re-
demption, that is, of a world that has been made whole and in which the
miseries of the human condition have been abolished. This implies tran-
scendence in a higher key; it is religious in the full, proper sense of the
word. There is no inevitable passage from the first to the second kind of
transcendence. Of course there is not; otherwise every stand-up come-
dian would be a minister of God (which is what Don Quixote thought
himself to be). There is a secular and a religious mode of comic experi-
ence, and the passage from one to the other requires an act of faith.
When we first tried to circumscribe the phenomenon of the comic, we
described it as an intrusion. In the terminology of Alfred Schutz, the
comic breaks into the consciousness of the paramount reality, which is
that ordinary, everyday world in which we exist most of the time, which
we share with most of our fellowmen, and which therefore appears to us
206 Toward a Theology of the Comic

as massively real. This reality is dense, heavy, compelling. By compari-

son, the reality of the comic is thin, effervescent, often shared with only
a few other people, and sometimes shared with no one at all. As long as
it lasts, the comic posits another reality that is inserted like an island into
the ocean of everyday experience. It is then what Schutz called a finite
province of meaning. As such it is by no means unique. A whole range
of human experiences can produce such islands—the worlds of dreams,
of intense sexual or esthetic experience, of self-contained theoretical
speculation (pure mathematics is an ideal case of this), or, in a very
different vein, of physical pain. But religious experience, viewed from
the vantage point of everyday life, is yet another such finite province of
meaning. The comparison with comic experience is instructive. The two
phenomena share certain basic characteristics with all other finite prov-
inces of meaning—discrete structures of reality, discrete categories of
space and time, "threshold" sensations as one passes into and again out
of these island worlds, discrete experiences of other people and of one-
self. Thus, for example, in the world of comedy one senses that one is in
a different order of things, one is transported to other places and other
times, there is a kind of jolt (here marked by laughter or its anticipation)
as one moves into the world of the comedy and a reverse jolt (one stops
laughing) as one moves out of it, other people are experienced differ-
ently (the threatening tyrant, say, becomes a pathetic figure) and so is
one's own self (the victim becomes a victor over circumstance). Mutatis
mutandis, these characteristics apply to all finite provinces of meaning,
including that of religious experience. The latter, however, has some
characteristics that are more or less unique. Specifically, these are the
qualities of the sacred—the "tremendous mystery," as Rudolf Otto
called it, the experience of an otherness that is total, an ambiguity of
terror and attraction (the "numinous," in Otto's terminology), and the
attitude of awe or reverence that is provoked by the experience. These
characteristics are adumbrated in some manifestations of the comic, no-
tably those belonging to the category of folly, but there are large areas of
comic experience that show none of these characteristics.
As the preceding pages have documented, the range of the comic is
vast—from the howling madness of Dionysus to the subdued irony of
Jeeves. Yet it is the former that shows most clearly the full potential of
the comic, and thus its proximity to the religious sphere. At least in
Western history (and very likely elsewhere as well) the origins of the
comic experience are found to be very close to the encounter with the
numinous. Both phenomena bring about the perception of a magically
transformed world and, for this reason, both are dangerous when they
reach a certain degree of intensity. Dangerous to what? Dangerous,
precisely, to the maintenance of ordinary, everyday reality or, if you
 The Comic as a Signal of Transcendence 207

will, to the business of living. Both phenomena produce ecstasies—

literally, experiences of standing outside ordinary reality. Such ecstasies
are tolerable, indeed useful both psychologically and sociologically, if
they are temporary and carefully controlled. The danger is that they
might escape the efforts at control and thus undermine the social order.
Robert Musil, in his great novel The Man without Qualities, gives much
attention to what he calls the "other condition"—a sort of mystical expe-
rience, presented without a theological interpretation. Taken in small
doses (such as encountering a whiff of it as one is deeply moved by a
theatrical performance), this experience is like going on a vacation from
life. The danger is that someone might decide to go on vacation per-
manently (which is what Ulrich, the protagonist of the novel, would like
to do).
To mitigate this danger, both religion and the comic have been con-
fined to specific places or times. In terms of the sociology of religion, one
could actually say that one of the primary social functions of religious
institutions is the domestication of religious experience. Thus a preacher
may say the most outlandish things in church on Sunday morning,
suggesting, for instance, that one might actually live every day in accor-
dance with the maxims of the Sermon on the Mount. For a few moments
his comfortable bourgeois congregation may be disturbed by this pre-
posterous suggestion. But as they leave church a little later, and move
back into the familiar world of everyday living, they can breathe a sigh
of relief and say to themselves (if not in just these words), "Well, that
was only in church," and then resume their usual habits. There is a close
analogy here to the formula "Well, that was only a joke"; after the joke
has been duly appreciated and laughed at, one can, "And now, seri-
ously," return to the nonjocular world. The magic, once again, has been
left behind.
The comic, however temporarily, brings about what we just called
transcendence in a lower key, that is, it relativizes the paramount real-
ity. Suddenly, the familiar is seen in a new light, becomes strangely
unfamiliar. In the language of the theater, this is what Eugène Ionesco
called depaysement (literally, losing one's country): Temporarily, one
loses one's citizenship in the ordinary world, one becomes de-
naturalized. Put differently, what was taken for granted as natural now
appears as unnatural. Bertolt Brecht has meant more or less the same
thing when he called his own theatrical technique Verfremdung (literally,
making strange). Now, clearly, this process is not, or not yet, religious
in quality. But it is a step in that direction, minimally toward the possi-
bility of a religious view of the world.
The comic at its most intense, as in folly, presents a counterworld, an
upside-down world. This counterworld is disclosed as lurking behind
208 Toward a Theology of the Comic

or beneath the world as we commonly know it (we have previously

used another theatrical metaphor to describe this experience, that of
Doppelboedigkeit—the perception of multiple levels). While the experi-
ence lasts, of course, it has the accent of reality. Indeed, its counterworld
seems to be more real than the ordinary, empirical world. On the morn-
ing after, so to speak, one must reflect about the epistemological status
of this counterworld. The presence or absence of religious faith will
determine the outcome of the reflection.
Given the fugitive character of the comic phenomenon, we have
avoided confining definitions in this book. However, broadly speaking,
we have implied a differentiation between the subjective and objective
aspects of the phenomenon. The subjective aspect is intended by what is
commonly called a sense of humor, or just humor for short. This is the
capacity to perceive something as comical or funny. But there is also a
putative objectivity in this perception. That is, there is the assumption
that there is something out there, something outside one's own mind, that
is comical. This putative objectivity allows one to speak of the phenome-
non of the comic. Now, as we have seen, philosophers and others have
pondered over just what this something out there may be. Of course, no
agreement has been reached (philosophers never reach agreement; if
they ever did, the business of philosophy would come to an end). But
we have given credence to the view, propounded by Henri Bergson and
Marie Collins Swabey among others, that there are real cognitive gains
to humor. Put differently, the sense of humor is not simply an expres-
sion of subjective feelings (akin to, say, the statement that one is de-
pressed), but rather is an act of perception pertaining to the reality of the
world outside one's own consciousness. It is amply clear that this per-
ception is greatly influenced by history and social location: we find it
difficult to laugh at Cicero's examples of humor, and we know that our
jokes will fall flat if told in social milieus greatly different from our own.
Despite these relativities of time and space, there is widespread agree-
ment that the sense of humor leads above all to a perception of incon-
gruence, or incongruity.
One may then ask: Incongruence between what and what? In principle, any
incongruence may be perceived as comical—between what is alive and
what is mechanical (as Bergson proposed), between the demands of
censorious morality and the blind urges of our libidinal nature (the
Freudian angle), between the pretensions of political authority and its
underlying fallibility (the fodder for much satire), and so on. Again,
what is perceived as incongruent in one situation may not be so per-
ceived in another situation.
Still, it is possible to ask whether there are some underlying incon-
gruences that can be perceived over and beyond all relativizations. Two
answers are possible. One is anthropological, having to do with the
 The Comic as a Signal of Transcendence 209

nature of man; the other is ontological, having to do with man's place in

the overall nature of the universe. The anthropological answer is the one
that was brilliantly proposed by Helmuth Plessner: Man is incongruent
within himself. Human existence is an ongoing balancing act between
being a body and having a body. Man is the only animal capable of
somehow standing outside himself (Plessner calls this his "ex-centric"
nature). Put differently, man is the only animal capable of action and not
just behavior. When this ongoing balancing act collapses, the body takes
over. Both laughter and weeping manifest this collapse. This is both a
physical and a psychological process. But it is also possible that the
sense of humor repeatedly perceives the built-in incongruence of being
human. It is in this sense that one cognitive gain of humor is anthro-
pological: as one engages in comic laughter, one has a valid insight into
a core aspect of human nature. Although Plessner, for reasons of his
own, disclaims the notion that he is referring to the traditional distinc-
tion between the body and the mind, the incongruence he analyzes is
very close to what many philosophers have discussed as the mind/body
problem. Be this as it may, we are all familiar with the comic conse-
quences of this incongruence erupting in everyday life: The statesman,
in the midst of a solemn patriotic ceremony, has to throw up. The great
intellectual, as he is expounding on the meaning of virtue, has an erec-
tion. Or, conversely, the seducer on the way to erotic success is arrested
by thoughts of mortality. It could even be that, in the midst of seduction,
he loses his erection because he finds the solution to a puzzling philo-
sophical problem. None of these things could happen to a dog or even a
chimpanzee. Each incongruence is unmistakably, and perhaps endear-
ingly, human.
There is another incongruence, rooted not in man's nature but in his
location in the universe. Pascal formulated this incongruence by locating
man between the nothing and the infinite. Modern science has given us
the technical means to experience this incongruence quite easily: We
peer into the world revealed by the microscope and we feel ourselves to
be immense; then we look through a telescope and we perceive our-
selves as specks of nothingness in the vastness of the galaxies. The
comic experience points to this ontological incongruence: Man as a con-
scious being, suspended in this ridiculous position between the micro-
bes and the stars. All human pretensions to wisdom and power are
comically debunked as this fundamental incongruence is perceived.
Despite the aforementioned similarities with a specifically religious
finite province of meaning, what has been said here on the comic bring-
ing about a transcendence in a lower key does not necessarily lead to a
religious interpretation of this experience. It all can be said etsi Deus non
daretur—that is, without assuming God (or, for that matter, any gods or
supernatural entities). After all, the ecstasies of intense esthetic or sexual
210 Toward a Theology of the Comic

experience also evince some of these similarities; they too transcend the
taken-for-granted reality of ordinary life, but this transcendence need
not be understood in religious terms. To pass from the lower to the
higher key requires an act of faith, which will be a kind of leap (to use
Kierkegaard's term). Leave aside for the moment the question as to why
one should make such a leap. The point here is that, once it has been
made, the comic takes on a very different aspect. To use the phrase
suggested earlier, an epistemological reversal takes place. With it, some
of the key features of the comic experience take on new meaning.
Specifically, the experience of the comic presents a world without
pain. A number of analysts discussed earlier in this book have pointed
out the peculiar abstraction that is presupposed in comic perception. It
is, above all, an abstraction from the tragic dimension of human exis-
tence. There are exceptions to this, for example in so-called black
humor, though even there the painful realities dealt with are somehow
neutralized as they are translated into comic terms. By and large, from
the worlds of benign humor to the counterworlds of folly there is a
suspension of tragic facts. This fact can be compactly illustrated by the
figure of the clown, who is beaten, knocked down, trampled upon, and
generally tormented. Yet the assumption is that he does not really feel
the pain. Indeed, the clown's laughing performance through all these
tribulations is only possible because of this imputed painlessness. As
soon as the assumption of painlessness is left behind, the comedy turns
into tragedy: the clown may still pretend to laugh, but we know that he
is really weeping, and his performance is no longer funny. Generally,
any comedy turns into tragedy as soon as real suffering, real pain is
allowed to enter it.
Etsi Deus non daretur, every instance of the comic is an escape from
reality—healthy physically, psychologically, and sociologically, but an
escape all the same. The real world of empirical existence must in the
end reassert itself; the counterempirical world of the comic must be seen
as an illusion. Comedy is fundamentally counterfactual; tragedy reveals
the hard facticity of the human condition. But as soon as all of this is
perceived in the light of faith—etsi Deus daretur—the assertions of reality
and illusion are reversed. It is the hard facts of the empirical world that
are now seen as, if not illusion, a temporary reality that will eventually
be superseded. Conversely, the painless worlds of the comic can now be
seen as an adumbration of a world beyond this world. The promise of
redemption, in one form or another, is always of a world without pain.
Empirically, the comic is a finite and temporary game within the serious
world that is marked by our pain and that inexorably leads to our death.
Faith, however, puts the empirical in question and denies its ultimate
seriousness. In this it is, strictly speaking, metaempirical. It presents,
 The Comic as a Signal of Transcendence 211

not an illusion, but a vision of a world infinitely more real than all the
realities of this world.
The character of this epistemological reversal can be illustrated by
looking at some of the primal experiences of the comic, the ones that
psychologists have found even among very young children—the prat-
fall, the jack-in-the-box, and (probably the most primal of all) the game
of peekaboo. The pratfall expresses most clearly the incongruence be-
tween human pretensions and human reality. Thaïes of Miletus thought
that he understood the stars, but he fell into a ditch, and the Thracian
maid's laughter implied an insight into the human condition that went
far beyond this particular philosopher's momentary embarrassment.
The pratfall represents an anthropological paradigm with that wonder-
ful economy that (as Freud discovered) jokes have in common with
dreams. The jack-in-the-box is the reverse figure. He is a mechanical
replication of the same denial of the pratfall enacted and reenacted by
every clown who keeps jumping back up no matter how often he has
been made to fall. Another toy doing this is what in German is nicely
called the Stehaufmaennchen (the little man who keeps standing up). This
is a doll with a rounded bottom into which some weights have been put,
so that, however much the doll is pressed down, it will always revert to
the upright position. If the pratfall is an anthropological paradigm, the
jack-in-the-box is a soteriological one—that is, it is a symbol of redemp-
tion. If one understands redemption in Christian terms (and it is always
important to remember that there are other notions of redemption), a
slightly reckless formulation suggests itself: The jack-in-the-box and the
Stehaufmaennchen are apt symbolizations of the Resurrection. In this im-
agery, Christ was the first little man who stood up and, as the Apostle
Paul explained, this is the basis of our own hope to put the primal
pratfall behind us for ever.
But it is the game of peekaboo that takes on an even more surprising
meaning in the wake of the epistemological reversal brought on by the
act of faith. Let us recall what this game is all about: The child sees the
mother; then the mother disappears, causing the child to be anxious;
when the mother reappears after a brief absence, the child smiles or
laughs; this laughter expresses a great relief (or, as German psycholo-
gists have put it, an Entlastung, an "unburdening"). Here, in a
wondrous nutshell, is the drama of redemption as seen in the light of
faith. Etsi Deus daretur, God's dealings with mankind can be seen as a
cosmic game of hide-and-seek. We catch a glimpse of Him and then He
promptly disappears. His absence is a central feature of our existence,
and the ultimate source of all our anxieties. Religious faith is the hope
that He will eventually reappear, providing that ultimate relief, which,
precisely, is redemption. There is actually a liturgy in Eastern Ortho-
212 Toward a Theology of the Comic

doxy that visually represents the cosmic game of peekaboo. Every Or-
thodox church contains the ikonostasis, the icon screen that separates the
altar from the rest of the sanctuary. The icon screen has several doors,
through which the clergy and their assistants come and go in the course
of the service. In that particular liturgy, as the officiating priest goes in
and out through the icon screen, a deacon intones, "Now you see him,
now you don't see him."
Someone once observed that every new mother is in a morally privi-
leged position: She knows exactly what God wants her to do. That is, of
course, to take care of her child. A universally understood human icon is
the image of a mother protectively cradling her infant. There is further
the primal scene of a mother comforting a crying child. The child, let us
suppose, wakes up from a terrifying dream and starts crying. The moth-
er cradles him and says soothingly, "Don't cry: Everything is alright,
everything is all right." Now, while this scene evokes universal human
empathy, it can finally be interpreted in contradictory terms depending
on the presence or absence of religious faith. In the absence of faith, the
mother is lying to the child. Not, of course, in that particular moment.
Nor is there any implication that what the mother is doing is morally
wrong. However, as modern child psychology has amply demon-
strated, these reassuring gestures and words experienced in early child-
hood build in the child a fundamental trust in the world. Yet, speaking
empirically, this trust is misplaced, is an illusion. The world is not at all
trustworthy. It is a world in which the child will experience every sort of
pain, and it is a world that in the end will kill him. Everything is not all
right; on the contrary. The mother's reassurance is thus, in the final
analysis, an act of false consciousness. In the presence of faith, the scene
has a sharply different meaning. Now the mother plays what could
actually be called a priestly role. Her words of reassurance reiterate the
divine promise of redemption: In the end, everything will be all right.
False consciousness or promise of redemption: Depending on one's an-
gle of vision, either interpretation is valid. We are faced with the option
of leaping either way.
Of course, it is not being suggested here that mothers know this, not
even subconsciously. And, of course, there is no suggestion that chil-
dren laugh at a clown or a jack-in-the-box in the capacity of kindergarten
theologians. Rather, we have been asking what these events can mean
to us, as observers, who have or do not have faith. Perhaps, though,
Jesus' sayings to the effect that we ought to become like children are
relevant here. The happy child, the one who has known sufficient reas-
surances of the kind just described, does indeed trust the world. If we
have faith, we can again trust the world. Luther described faith (fides) as
precisely trust (fiducia). Childish faith trusts that the clown will always
 The Comic as a Signal of Transcendence 213

jump up again, that the mother will always reappear, and that therefore
one is free to laugh. Adults are capable of being born again into a
childlike faith in which the world becomes trustworthy once more. Such
faith cannot be based on rational proofs, but it is not contrary to reason
either. What is more, it can and must be reflected upon. One result of
such reflection is the intuition that comedy is more profound than
tragedy.
Throughout most of the nineteenth century and all of the twentieth
century thus far, modern thought has been heavily influenced by the
idea of projection in its treatment of religion. The idea goes back to
Ludwig Feuerbach, whose program of (as he put it) transforming theolo-
gy into anthropology was based on the idea that the worlds posited by
religion are simply reflections, or projections, of the empirical world of
ordinary human life. This idea has found its most powerful ramifications
in the works of Marx (religion as part of the superstructure, which
reflects the underlying social realities), Nietzsche (religion, especially
Christianity, as the projection of the resentments of the losers in the
power game), and Freud (religion as the great illusion that serves to
"sublimate" the censored desires of the libido). But many other modern
thinkers, including considerable numbers of theologians, have also op-
erated with the concept of projection. Taken as the only possible de-
scription of religion, the idea of projection is based upon and in turn
reinforces the atheist hypothesis: the gods are symbolizations of human
affairs and, apart from that, they do not exist. This, however, is not the
only way in which this concept can be understood. One can also take it
as a statement about religion within the parameters of the empirical sciences
of man—such as history, psychology, the social sciences, perhaps even
certain versions of philosophical anthropology. If one stays within these
parameters, much of what has been said about projection is perfectly
valid. Of course, this by no means implies that one must agree with,
say, the full-blown Marxist or Freudian theories of religion (these, inci-
dentally, are very dubious on purely empirical grounds). But, empiri-
cally speaking, it is perfectly valid to look upon religious experiences
and tradition in their historical, social, and psychological settings. When
one does that, one invariably finds that these religious phenomena do
indeed symbolize—if you will, reflect or project—various human real-
ities. It is futile for theologians to dispute these insights in principle.
Once more, the act of faith introduces a new perspective. It is not, in
this case, a complete epistemological reversal, because the insights into
religion as a projection remain valid within the limits of the empirical.
But faith opens up the possibility of a different, metaempirical way of
looking at this phenomenon. In that perspective, man is only capable of
projecting the gods because he himself is related to the gods in the first
214 Toward a Theology of the Comic

place. In monotheistic terms, God created man in His own image—

which, minimally, means that man is capable of conceiving of God. In
the acts of projection, man reaches out toward the infinite. But he is only
capable of doing this because the infinite reached out to him first. Put
succinctly, man is the projector because ultimately it is he himself who is
a projectile. The symbolizer is himself the symbol. The empirical disci-
plines will legitimately look for projections of mundane realities in what-
ever purports to be transcendence. A theological discipline (by which is
meant here no more than a systematic reflection about the implications
of faith) will, conversely, look for intimations of transcendence within
the mundane realities. Once faith has opened up this particular angle of
vision, a number of such intimations disclose themselves. It should be
emphasized that these are not "proofs" for the existence of God or any
other supernatural realities. There are no such proofs that would make
superfluous the act of faith. What we are speaking about here are not
proofs but signals of transcendence or, if you will, glimpses of Him who
is playing the cosmic game of hide-and-seek with us.
Why should one look for such signals? This is not the place to make
an argument for religious faith in general or for Christian faith in partic-
ular. But this much should be said here: There are people who claim, on
whatever basis, to be absolutely certain in their religious beliefs. Perhaps
some of them have indeed been chosen for such self-disclosures of the
divine that are self-certifying in their reality and durably so. If one has
drunk of the bitter wine of modern thought, one will incline toward
skepticism concerning most such claims. The capacity of human beings
to invent dubious certitudes is awesome, and by no means only when it
comes to religion. Be this as it may, those of us who have not been
blessed with experiences that substitute certainty for faith have no
choice, if we are honest, except to do the best with the uncertainties that
we are stuck with. Not knowing, we only have the choice to believe. The
possessors of alleged certitude have no need to go in search of signals of
transcendence. The rest of us do, unless we are prepared to resign
ourselves with stoic fortitude to the ultimate hopelessness of the world.
The present argument is to the effect that the experience of the comic
is one such signal of transcendence, and an important one at that. In
Christian terms this means that the comic is one manifestation of a
sacramental universe—a universe that, paraphrasing the Book of Com-
mon Prayer, contains visible signs of invisible grace. Sacraments are not
magic. They do not transform the world in its empirical reality, which
continues to be full of all the afflictions to which human beings are
prone. Also, sacraments are not logically compelling: The grace that
they convey cannot be empirically or rationally demonstrated, but is
only perceived in an act of faith. In this case, the experience of the comic
 The Comic as a Signal of Transcendence 215

does not miraculously remove suffering and evil in this world, nor does
it provide self-evident proof that God is active in the world and intends
to redeem it. However, perceived in faith, the comic becomes a great
consolation and a witness to the redemption that is yet to come. There
are different ways in which this proposition could be elaborated theo-
logically. The German Protestant theologian Helmut Thielicke has sug-
gested that, if the comic were to be given a place in Christian theology, it
would be under the heading of eschatology—that is, the doctrine of the
last things, of the final and fully visible establishment of the Kingdom of
God in this world. Another German Protestant theologian, Wolfhart
Pannenberg, has used the term "proleptic" (taking ahead) to describe
the nature of faith in this world, that is, faith anticipates the culmination
that is yet to come, and in this anticipation acts now as if the culmination
had already occurred. We would contend that the comic is proleptic in
just this sense. The so-called Easter laughter of the medieval church was
a powerful liturgical expression of this view.
Finally, we would return to some very hypothetical remarks made
earlier about a distinctively modern comic sensibility. It could be de-
scribed as witty, sardonic, very much detached. If so, it is possible to
relate it to other characteristics of modernity—notably its intellectualism
(a propensity to reflect constantly about everything) and its emotional
control (the psychological correlate of role distance). In the history of
Western thought it is interesting in this connection to recall two points
in time: the time when medieval folly began to wane and the time when
philosophers began to take a more positive view of the comic. Both
moments of time cannot be dated precisely, but they coincide roughly
with the advent of modernity in Europe. Erasmus is a pivotal figure
here: He praised folly just as its more exuberant expressions were disap-
pearing from the streets, to be domesticated in the institutions of the
court jester and of formal comedy. And his book that praised folly is the
first important work of a Western thinker that takes a benign view of
the comic. Is this coincidental? Perhaps it is. But it is also possible that
the two events are related. Modernity did away with much of the en-
chantment that medieval man still lived with. The counterworld of folly
began to recede and, along with much else, it was secularized, adapted
to an age that increasingly considered itself superior to previous ages
because of its alleged rationality. But the disenchanted, overly rational
world of modernity generated its own incongruences. Modern humor
may be one consequence of this development, both an expression of and
a reaction against it. As long as modern man can still laugh at himself,
his alienation from the enchanted gardens of earlier times will not be
complete. The new comic sensibility may be both the Achilles' heel of
modernity and its possible salvation.
 Epilogue

The Donkey

When fishes flew and forests walked

And figs grew upon thorn,
Some moment when the moon was blood
Then surely I was born.
With monstrous head and sickening cry
And ears like errant wings,
The devil's walking parody
On all four-footed things.
The tattered outlaw of the earth,
Of ancient crooked will;
Starve, scourge, deride me: I am dumb,
I keep my secret still.
Fools! For I also had in my hour;
One far fierce hour and sweet:
There was a shout about my, ears,
And palms before my feet.

G. K. Chesterton in The Wild Knight, from Robert Knille, ed., As J Was Saying: A
Chesterton Reader (Grand Rapids, Mich., Eerdmans, 1985).