Redeeming Laughter

Peter L. Berger

• Publisher: De Gruyter
• Year: 2014
• ISBN:
  9783110387667
• Edition: 2
• Topic: Social Sciences
• Subtopic: Sociology
• Index: Social Sciences

Amid the variety of human experiences, the comic occupies a distinctive place. It is simultaneously ubiquitous, relative, and fragile. In this book, Peter L. Berger reflects on the nature of the comic and its relationship to other human experiences. Berger contends that the comic is an integral aspect of human life, yet one that must be approached and analyzed circumspectly and circuitously. Beginning with an exploration of the anatomy of the comic, Berger addresses humor in philosophy, physiology, psychology, and the social sciences before turning to a discussion of different types of comedy and finally suggesting a theology of the comic in terms of its relationship to folly, redemption, and transcendence. Along the way, the reader is treated to a variety of jokes on a variety of topics, with particular emphasis on humor and its relationship to religion. Originally published in 1997, the second edition includes a new preface reflecting on Berger's work in the intervening years, particularly on the relationship between humor and modernity.

Part I: Anatomy of the Comic

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1 The Comic Intrusion

As we begin our circling around the phenomenon of the comic, a number 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 rigorously 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 Canterbury Tales, one hopes at any rate to get an idea of current usage from the OED. Here, then, are some relevant definitions. Under comic: “Calculated 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 B definition: “The faculty of perceiving what is ludicrous or amusing, or of expressing it in speech, writing, or other composition; jocose imagination or treatment of subject.” Added to these wonderfully imprecise 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 between a quality of certain human realities and the faculty of perceiving that quality. Phenomenologists get at the same distinction by talking about the noematic and the noetic aspects of a phenomenon. The distinction 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, raillery; also, something that causes amusement, a ridiculous circumstance.” 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 publisher. 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. Inevitably, 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, Molière, etc.), but great jesters and clowns and stand-up comedians, or the great joke-tellers such as once inhabited the coffeehouses of Central 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 visualize 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 morning. 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 subordinate 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 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 probably 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 recognizing 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 perception, 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, momentary, 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 meeting 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 because 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 reality. These other sectors are colloquially referred to as serious. By implication, then, the comic is unserious. We will later on have reason to question this interpretation of the ontological status of the comic; indeed, 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 conventional distinction stand: The comic is posited as an antithesis to serious concerns. This perception of an antithesis is commonly expressed when people are trying to take the edge off a humorous observation that might offend, when the joke has “gone too far.” The conventional 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 intended 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 concerned 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–“subuni-verses.” In any case, finite provinces of meaning or subuniverses are experienced as the individual temporarily “emigrates” from the paramount reality of everyday life. The latter is perceived, 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 experience 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 meaning 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 intellectual pursuit. And, indeed, Schutz gives an additional example (not elaborated 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 suspension 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).

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These characteristics may at first seem overly abstract. Let us concretize by applying them to what is perhaps the most universal finite province 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 whic...

Table of contents

• Title Page
• Copyright Page
• Table of Contents
• Preface
• Prefatory Remarks, Self-Serving Explanations, and Unsolicited Compliments
• Prologue
• Part I: Anatomy of the Comic
• Part II: Comic Forms of Expression
• Part III: Toward a Theology of the Comic
• Epilogue