Humour is serious business. Humour scholar Marcin Napiórkowski tells Jan Pelczar about the evolution and nature of humour, and explains how we know when it’s appropriate to laugh.
I interviewed Marcin Napiórkowski, a semiotician of culture and an expert on contemporary mythology, over the phone. Given the ongoing coronavirus pandemic, we both took the stay-at-home orders seriously. We didn’t know if this interview would ultimately be published in a more familiar world of in-person meetings, stand-up comedy nights and jokes over the barbecue, or during a continued period of lockdown and memes and jokes sent via instant messengers, but we agreed that in any event humour would certainly survive – after all, it can be quite contagious.
Jan Pelczar: I’m aware of the changing canons of beauty, but what about humour and its cultural canons? Do they change?
Marcin Napiórkowski: How much time do we have? If less than 60 lecture hours, then my short answer is: “Yes and no.” For that matter, the same response could be used to answer virtually any question about humour. On the one hand, if we look back at the ancient Greek comedies, such as those written by Aristophanes, we really have to strain ourselves and have an amazing sense of humour and a vast knowledge of the reality of ancient Athens to laugh even once. On the other hand, if we break such a comedy down into its basic parts, we’ll see that what made people laugh in those days were the same things as today. There are satires on celebrities such as Socrates. There are jokes about people who eat too much and pass wind. Someone is flying on the back of a huge dung beetle, without worrying that the beetle might get hungry, because there’ll always be something to feed the beetle with. So, on the one hand, nothing changes as fast as comedy, and jokes are like supermarket bread – always a little stale the next day…
So jokes that are no longer funny are aptly called stale jokes.
Yes, the phrase sounds reasonable. But I’d like to get back to my previous thought. On the other hand, nothing is as durable as comedy, and I suspect that jokes have been put together in the same ways ever since the bonfires in the Old Stone Age.
What do you mean by that?
What lies at the root of comedy is always the uncovering of invisible principles. Where there are no rules, there’s hardly any humour. Anytime we find or create a rule (repetitiveness, changeability, similarity, differences, and so on), we will create room for laughter by exploiting or breaking this rule. Here’s one infallible method. All speakers, especially those who are rhetorically less skilled and less prepared, use certain fillers, such as um, er or uh. So for all those who get bored listening to university lectures: every lecturer belongs to one group: an um-man, an er-man, or an uh-man. Once we start hearing these fillers, the lecture is already blown. Why? Because we’ve spotted a certain idiotic repetitiveness that’s unrelated to the content of the lectures and inadequate. An even funnier thing would be to inform the lecturer about it. They would find themselves unable to say one sentence, because the more we try to control ourselves, the stronger the need for an um or an er. And that’s what laughter is all about. Comedy is born when the relationship between people and rules is re-established in a new and unexpected way.
Is humour a marker of class differences?
It’s always been one. The rich laugh at different things than the poor. These days, the most striking example is probably the division of humour along political lines. Liberals laugh at different things that conservatives. In her book Irony and Outrage, Dannagal Goldthwaite Young, one of the most prominent researchers of political humour, asks one fundamental question: “Why aren’t conservative comedians funny?” Such satires as late night shows are a privilege enjoyed only by liberals. On the other hand, there’s the question: “Why aren’t there any good liberal radio show hosts?” In the very American format of such shows, which is hard to transplant into the Polish reality, angry tirades only sound right in the mouths of conservative commentators. Liberals have also failed to copy the FOX network’s recipe for success. Based on some very interesting empirical research, Young shows how our perceptions of what is funny differ. If we sit viewers with different political leanings in front of a TV set, the liberals and the conservatives will see and hear completely different things in the same show, and they will regard completely different elements as funny.
Satire is dominated by liberals, but conservatives are not completely humourless.
No, but that’s what liberals usually think. And this also works the other way around. Liberals are more likely to use the strategy of laughing at themselves, ironizing, and saying one thing and thinking another, which often confuses conservative viewers. Not for reasons related to differences in intelligence – because no studies have confirmed that there are any – but due to differences in assumptions. Liberals say: “We’re cool, we don’t take ourselves so seriously, and we don’t resort to such cheap methods as humour based on contempt or the depreciation of the weak.” However, closer studies show that this attitude could also be regarded as an attitude of superiority, because it conveys the message: “We’re better than you, not only because we are richer, smarter and in the right, but also we’re very modest, and we can laugh at ourselves.”
Is it possible to be in the right or in the wrong when it comes to humour?
It’s possible to seek things that are morally right. Let’s get back to the relationship between comedy and rules. Should humour perpetuate existing social relations, should it render unto Caesar the things that are Caesar’s? Or maybe it should be revolutionary and challenge the status quo? Depending on the approach, either we’re forbidden from laughing at Caesar or we should above all laugh at rulers.
Such satires become part of the public debate, but a debate that’s held as a joke. Dannagal Goldthwaite Young certainly had considerable material to analyse, because comedians in the United States have moved into the space previously reserved for political commentators and reporters.
Young often cites such TV show hosts as Stephen Colbert and John Oliver. She shows how the political value and capital of comedians have increased. Comedians, at least the liberal ones, are on the one hand more and more distanced, and on the other hand treated increasingly as authorities on serious issues. They make us laugh, but they also give us food for thought.
Has humour ever brought people together above divisions?
The classical theory of humour as a safety valve holds that it reduces the potential for aggression, because when we laugh, we don’t fight. Hence the suggestion that humour reduces polarization. Back when psychologists were free to do the kind of thing they like most, namely administer electric shocks to people as part of experiments, Robert A. Baron wanted to show with an entire series of studies how humour relieves tension. Students were invited into a waiting room where the experimenter’s assistant was waiting for them. His task was to irritate the subjects. Psychologists are essentially not very ingenious in their choice of tools, so irritating meant administering electric shocks. The assistant administered a series of undeserved shocks to the unfortunate subjects, who were then exposed to several pictures that were either funny or not funny. Finally, the subjects were told that they could administer shocks to the assistant as part of a new experiment. The study showed, first of all, that psychologists are not very creative and do indeed like to administer electric shocks to people and, second, that the students who were shown funny pictures were less likely to retaliate. It appeared that we had very strong psychological proof of the very old theory of humour as a safety valve. Fun relieves actual pressure. When we laugh, we don’t fight. But then social media arrived, and it turned out that the world was not as simple as psychologists thought.
How did social media influence changes in humour?
In an amazing way. What lies at the root of the internet counterculture is the simple concept of funny pictures or funny stories. This has been shown perfectly well by such Polish researchers of memes as Magdalena Kamińska. But the internet has also given us completely new tools to measure political polarization and the dissemination of different messages. People have always liked to surround themselves with others like them, individuals who have said ‘yes’ to them and told them how cool they are. But today we can launch algorithms online and measure this with much greater accuracy.
What do these measurements show?
Although the humour mechanisms that mitigate aggression still work, the difference in what makes voters of opposite orientations laugh turns humour into one of the most important factors behind the emergence of internet bubbles. We laugh together either at one thing or at another. There’s practically no possibility of finding both funny. Here, we can again invoke Young, who argues that political divisions are created by different forms of aesthetics, including different senses of humour. Essentially, it is not exactly right to say that conservatives simply have a different sense of humour than liberals. Rather, the conservative identity is itself built around a specific sense of humour. They’re inseparable.
In Woody Allen’s musical Everyone Says I Love You, such determinism reaches the level of physiology. In a liberal family, there is one conservative. He is diagnosed with a tumour that presses on his brain. When the tumour is removed, the protagonist turns from a Republican into a Democrat.
Apparently I’m not a liberal, because I don’t watch Woody Allen comedies.
Even liberals are now saying that they don’t watch them.
That’s another nice thing that has happened in recent years – I’m relieved to admit to others that I’ve never found Woody Allen’s comedies funny. I didn’t find them funny even before it became fashionable.
So humour is also subject to fads. Something changes, and things that were considered funny 10 or 20 years ago are now seen as out-of-date.
Simply put, some joke formats have become exhausted. An even better example than Allen is Bill Cosby’s family humour. But there are also the merciless laws of nature related to comedy going stale. Even Henri Bergson claimed that the comic was based on the overcoming of automation and the appearance of something unexpected in a situation in which we expected the expected. This means that comedy always piggybacks on what is obvious at a given moment in time. If everyone is talking about the coronavirus this year, it becomes a starting point for jokes. One year from now, if we’re still alive, these jokes will no longer be funny. In order to appreciate them, we would have to recall the state of mind at the time when everyone was thinking about something. For example, about being locked up for a month with your entire family, a whole crate of pasta, and 80 rolls of toilet paper.
But there are comedies that can withstand the test of time, like Monty Python. Is this because of their absurdity?
Of course, such extreme, absurd jokes get stale at the slowest rate, because they defy our expectations to the strongest degree. Consequently, there’s a chance that they will also defy what we expect decades later. Monty Python’s humour is magical, because it’s considered a gauge of intelligence. In polite society, it’s inappropriate not to laugh at “The Spanish Inquisition”. But I wouldn’t ignore another very important element, namely the slapstick component, which we often forget about when we describe the Pythons. They may not be Benny Hill, but the type of comedy that involves walking in silly ways, pulling faces, or tripping up and falling when least expected ages pretty well. Maces withstand the test of time better than iPhones. In the long run, crude jokes prove a better investment than subtle ones. If there’s anything that doesn’t change for thousands of years, this is the fact that people hiccup, burp and poop, but are not very willing to admit that they do all these things.
The Pythons were not afraid of anything that was human, and they weren’t afraid to joke at different groups – the clergy, liberals and even philosophers. Today, the honour of the egalitarian British comedian is still being defended by Ricky Gervais. When explaining his strategy for the Golden Globes, he said that employees in England laughed at their bosses during company integration events, and that was the origin of his role as a clown mocking the privileged.
Ricky, a reputable comedian laughing at film stars is one thing, but actual English office workers are quite another. The latter may not have the courage to laugh at their boss. The tradition in which the weak laugh at the strong comes from the European carnival. In the good old times, hierarchies were very clear. It was cool to laugh at the king, but when the king was done laughing, he would cut off your head, and the fun was over. In the eras with strong hierarchies, people allowed themselves to do a lot. One great example is the mediaeval text entitled Feast of Cyprian, which shows that one could laugh at absolutely anything: the Virgin Mary, apostles, and prophets… Rabelais made some really crude jokes in Gargantua and Pantagruel. What does this have to do with Ricky Gervais and his courage to laugh at the high and mighty? In British society, hierarchy is very important. Social status and wealth are passed down from generation to generation for many generations. The Pythons could create sketches not only about silly walks but also about philosophy, because they themselves had their roots in the world of the coterie that had its origins in Cambridge and Oxford and ruled the British Isles for centuries. This is the flip side of the coin. It’s easy to be a magnanimous boss who allows his workers to laugh at him if he owes his position to 20 generations of well-born ancestors who consolidated their power by oppressing and colonizing 20 generations of the great-grandmothers and great-grandfathers of today’s ordinary workers.
In Poland, we didn’t have this continuity, but might we nevertheless say something about the history of our humour?
I’m not a historian of Polish culture, so it’s difficult for me to say something on this issue. I’d hazard the guess that the period of the strictest censorship in the Polish People’s Republic [the period of communist rule that existed from 1947 to 1989 – ed. note] was an especially interesting point in the most recent history of Polish humour. Back then, we could observe different strategies of joking, which were linked to different attitudes to the communist-era authorities and different forms of courage. But we know from documents that the authorities were also divided on the issue of humour. Some of them believed in the theory of humour as a safety valve according to the rule: “We must let people have fun, so as to defuse hostile trends.” But some high-ranking functionaries were also eager to investigate and penalize jokes, because they saw humour as a drawbridge across which the political fortress could be attacked. So there is again the fundamental question of the relationship between humour and rules. Does humour serve to topple dictators or does it make them stronger by making our life in captivity more bearable?
The question “Is it appropriate to laugh?” has survived until the present day, and it is still asked.
There have always been people like Plato, who wrote in the Republic that it was unacceptable to depict respectable people as laughing hard, and an even worse crime to picture the gods as laughing and doing silly things. Plato loved to stress taboos and say that we shouldn’t laugh at this, we shouldn’t laugh at that, and as a matter of fact we shouldn’t laugh at anything. For that matter, there’s nothing funnier than jokes aimed at such figures as Plato, who was absolutely the favourite butt of jokes for his contemporaries. In those days, Athenians described utmost gluttony as “eating olives like Plato” and utmost boredom as “talking in private to Plato”. Diogenes the Cynic plucked a chicken and brought it into Plato’s Academy saying, “Here’s the featherless biped, or Plato’s man.” Those who tell others what they shouldn’t laugh at may be almost certain that people will soon start laughing at them.
I take it that you believe that we are free to laugh. But who do you find funny?
Unfortunately, I have no sense of humour. I try where possible to observe the reactions of others and laugh more or less at the same time as everyone else. For that matter, I think I’m not alone in this respect. I know a lot of Polish people who watch American comedians passionately. After each joke, they pause to consult Wikipedia about what was funny in that joke, rewind 10 seconds, and start laughing. The next day, they brag to everyone that they are just waiting for the next episode, to have a good chuckle together with their liberal American friends.
Before our conversation, you referred me to Aristotle’s Poetics.
Book Two.
Why is this source so important?
Anyone who reads it will have no doubt it’s an absolutely fundamental work in this respect. Interested readers should go to the nearest library where they can find and borrow Book Two of Aristotle’s Poetics. And please remember to give my regards to the librarians.
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