Verbal humor

The foregoing discussion was intended to provide the tools for dissecting and analyzing any specimen of humor. The procedure is to determine the nature of the two (or more) frames of reference whose collision gives rise to the comic effect—to discover the type of logic or “rules of the game” that govern each. In the more sophisticated type of joke, the logic is implied and hidden, and the moment it is stated in explicit form, the joke is dead. Unavoidably, the section that follows will be strewn with cadavers.

Max Eastman, in Enjoyment of Laughter (1936), remarked of a labored pun by Ogden Nash: “It is not a pun but a punitive expedition.” That applies to most puns, including Milton’s famous lines about the Prophet Elijah’s ravens, which were “though ravenous taught to abstain from what they brought,” or the character mentioned by Freud, who calls the Christmas season the “alcoholidays.” Most puns strike one as atrocious, perhaps because they represent the most primitive form of humor; two disparate strings of thought tied together by an acoustic knot. But the very primitiveness of such association based on pure sound (“hol”) may account for the pun’s immense popularity with children and its prevalence in certain types of mental disorder (“punning mania”).

From the play on sounds—puns and Spoonerisms—an ascending series leads to the play on words and so to the play on ideas. When Groucho Marx says of a safari in Africa, “We shot two bucks, but that was all the money we had,” the joke hinges on the two meanings of the word buck. It would be less funny without the reference to Groucho, which evokes a visual image instantly arousing high expectations. The story about the marquis above may be considered of a superior type of humor because it plays not on mere words but on ideas.

It would be quite easy—and equally boring—to draw up a list in which jokes and witticisms are classified according to the nature of the frames of reference whose collision creates the comic effect. A few have already been mentioned: metaphorical versus literal meaning (the daughter’s “hand”); professional versus common sense logic (the doctor); incompatible codes of behavior (the marquis); confrontations of the trivial and the exalted (“eternal bliss”); trains of reasoning travelling, happily joined together, in opposite directions (the sadist who is kind to the masochist). The list could be extended indefinitely; in fact any two frames of reference can be made to yield a comic effect of sorts by hooking them together and infusing a drop of malice into the concoction. The frames may even be defined by such abstract concepts as “time” and “weather”: the absent-minded professor who tries to read the temperature from his watch or to tell the time from the thermometer is comic in the same way as a game of table tennis played with a soccer ball or a game of rugby played with a table tennis ball. The variations are infinite, the formula remains the same.

Jokes and anecdotes have a single point of culmination. The literary forms of sustained humor, such as the picaresque novel, do not rely on a single effect but on a series of minor climaxes. The narrative moves along the line of intersection of contrasted planes, such as the fantasy world of Don Quixote and the cunning horse sense of Sancho Panza, or is made to oscillate between them. As a result, tension is continuously generated and discharged in mild amusement.

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Comic verse thrives on the melodious union of incongruities, such as the “cabbages and kings” in Lewis Carroll’s “The Walrus and the Carpenter,” and particularly on the contrast between lofty form and flat-footed content. Certain metric forms associated with heroic poetry, such as the hexameter or Alexandrine, arouse expectations of pathos, of the exalted; to pour into these epic molds some homely, trivial content—“beautiful soup, so rich and green/ waiting in a hot tureen”—is an almost infallible comic device. The rolling rhythms of the first lines of a limerick that carry, instead of a mythical hero such as Hector or Achilles, a young lady from Ohio for a ride make her ridiculous even before the expected calamities befall her. Instead of a heroic mold, a soft lyrical one may also pay off:

. . . And what could be moister
Than tears of an oyster?

Another type of incongruity between form and content yields the bogus proverb: “The rule is: jam tomorrow and jam yesterday—but never jam today.” Two contradictory statements have been telescoped into a line whose homely, admonitory sound conveys the impression of a popular adage. In a similar way, nonsense verse achieves its effect by pretending to make sense, by forcing the reader to project meaning into the phonetic pattern of the jabberwocky, as one interprets the ink blots in a Rorschach test.

The satire is a verbal caricature that shows a deliberately distorted image of a person, institution, or society. The traditional method of the caricaturist is to exaggerate those features he considers to be characteristic of his victim’s personality and to simplify by leaving out everything that is not relevant for his purpose. The satirist uses the same technique, and the features of society he selects for magnification are, of course, those of which he disapproves. The result is a juxtaposition, in the reader’s mind, of his habitual image of the world in which he moves and its absurd reflection in the satirist’s distorting mirror. He is made to recognize familiar features in the absurd and absurdity in the familiar. Without this double vision the satire would be humorless. If the human Yahoos were really such evil-smelling monsters as Gulliver’s Houyhnhnm hosts claim, then Jonathan Swift’s Gulliver’s Travels (1726) would not be a satire but the statement of a deplorable truth. Straight invective is not satire; satire must deliberately overshoot its mark.

A similar effect is achieved if, instead of exaggerating the objectionable features, the satirist projects them by means of the allegory onto a different background, such as an animal society. A succession of writers, from the ancient Greek dramatist Aristophanes through Swift to such 20th-century satirists as Anatole France and George Orwell, have used this technique to focus attention on deformities of society that, blunted by habit, are taken for granted.