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davidgoldfarbOn rec.arts.sf.composition, the topic of humor came up. I mentioned a theory I have, that there are at least four different pathways in the brain that trigger the same reward mechanism (i.e., laughter). zeborahnz asked me to expand on this, and I wound up writing a fairly long essay (someone on rasfc said "This isn't your Ph.D thesis?")...which I want to post here so that I have access to it at will. (And who knows, perhaps even someone will read it and find it edifying.)
As I said, it's long...so a cut.
I think of them as puzzle-solving, recognition, social bonding, and social domination. (I'm actually not completely sure that recognition should be counted as a separate category; there was a time when I would have said "three" instead of "four". But on the whole, I think it is.)
"Puzzle-solving" involves a logical juxtaposition of opposites, a setting-up of seemingly-contradictory world views that must be reconciled. It's an evolutionary outgrowth of world-modeling as survival behavior.
"Recognition" is also such an outgrowth; it involves identifying something outside of what might be its normal context, or noticing a pattern. Sometimes the pattern can be completely artificially constructed, as when some lame gag or catchphrase becomes funnier through repetition. It's the in-joke, the reference, the running gag.
Here's an example of recognition humor: there's a story (it might be Joanna Russ's "Useful Phrases for the Tourist", but it might not) that is a phrasebook for an alien language. This language has a word for "being torn between wanting to stay in your nice warm bed and having to get up and pee." The humor there comes, I think, mainly from
recognizing the situation described, at having it isolated as a word-worthy concept.
Here's an example of a joke that I think combines puzzle-solving and recognition:
How many surrealists does it take to change a light bulb? A fish.
For that one, you need to recognize the form of the joke, and remember facts about surrealists, in order to figure out why a non sequitur was deployed right there. If you've never heard a light bulb joke before, or aren't familiar with the surrealist movement, the joke will fall flat.
This may be the place to note that I've had the experience of struggling with a difficult puzzle and, on solving it, being moved to laughter.
"Social bonding" is laughter used as an expression of solidarity. Steven Pinker, in How the Mind Works, notes that it's a great pleasure to go out with a group of friends and talk with them and laugh with them; but, he notes, some researchers have taken transcripts of what some such groups have actually said, and most of it just really isn't funny when seen by itself. ("You had to be there.") Laughing with someone is a way of bonding with them. It's the principle behind the TV laugh track.
"Social domination" is easy to understand: it's ridicule, the putdown, slapstick, embarrassment humor. Laughing at rather than with.
Now, elements of social domination work their way at least a little bit into nearly all comedy. When Abbott and Costello do "Who's on First?" the humor is mainly the puzzle-solving of figuring out how all the violations of the use-mention distinction are working -- but there's also just a bit of looking down on Costello for not understanding what's going on, when you do.
Thinking about all this almost makes me want to go into cognitive science. I would *love* to see brain imaging done on people viewing different kinds of comedy -- e.g., Bedazzled vs. the Three Stooges. If I'm right, then there should be different but overlapping parts of the brain active for each.
(It's entirely possible that something like this has already been done. If anyone knows about it, please tell me! It's also possible that the differences are finer-grained than current imaging techniques can pick up, or that there's just too much variation in how individual brains are "wired".)
The above also, I think, sheds light on the perennial question of why so much SF is so serious. To have a really SFnal joke, you need to build up *two* different alien worldviews, and get them ingrained in the reader's brain to the point where they can be juxtaposed and then resolved at a level of unconscious processing. But building up even one alien
worldview is a difficult and lengthy task.
Lois Bujold could do _A Civil Campaign_ late in the Vorkosigan series, because she was drawing on a lot of previously-built worldbuilding. A lot of other SF and fantasy humor is based on parody and spoof, in
effect parasitizing other peoples' worldbuilding (and also drawing on the recognition pathway); still other examples juxtapose an SF or fantasy setting with intrusions from mainstream reality.
Sources: My foundation for a lot of this was the aforementioned _How the Mind Works_; its chapter on humor was enlightening reading for me, and I recommend the book. I do think that in his conclusion to the chapter, Steven Pinker incorrectly conflates puzzle-solving with social domination. (My terms, btw, not his.) I was also influenced by the discussion in a panel on SF humor at the 2006 Worldcon, and by conversations with Katie Schwarz and Teresa Nielsen Hayden.
(Whew!)
zeborahnz asked me to expand on this, and I wound up writing a fairly long essay (someone on rasfc said "This isn't your Ph.D thesis?")...which I want to post here so that I have access to it at will. (And who knows, perhaps even someone will read it and find it edifying.)As I said, it's long...so a cut.
I think of them as puzzle-solving, recognition, social bonding, and social domination. (I'm actually not completely sure that recognition should be counted as a separate category; there was a time when I would have said "three" instead of "four". But on the whole, I think it is.)
"Puzzle-solving" involves a logical juxtaposition of opposites, a setting-up of seemingly-contradictory world views that must be reconciled. It's an evolutionary outgrowth of world-modeling as survival behavior.
"Recognition" is also such an outgrowth; it involves identifying something outside of what might be its normal context, or noticing a pattern. Sometimes the pattern can be completely artificially constructed, as when some lame gag or catchphrase becomes funnier through repetition. It's the in-joke, the reference, the running gag.
Here's an example of recognition humor: there's a story (it might be Joanna Russ's "Useful Phrases for the Tourist", but it might not) that is a phrasebook for an alien language. This language has a word for "being torn between wanting to stay in your nice warm bed and having to get up and pee." The humor there comes, I think, mainly from
recognizing the situation described, at having it isolated as a word-worthy concept.
Here's an example of a joke that I think combines puzzle-solving and recognition:
How many surrealists does it take to change a light bulb? A fish.
For that one, you need to recognize the form of the joke, and remember facts about surrealists, in order to figure out why a non sequitur was deployed right there. If you've never heard a light bulb joke before, or aren't familiar with the surrealist movement, the joke will fall flat.
This may be the place to note that I've had the experience of struggling with a difficult puzzle and, on solving it, being moved to laughter.
"Social bonding" is laughter used as an expression of solidarity. Steven Pinker, in How the Mind Works, notes that it's a great pleasure to go out with a group of friends and talk with them and laugh with them; but, he notes, some researchers have taken transcripts of what some such groups have actually said, and most of it just really isn't funny when seen by itself. ("You had to be there.") Laughing with someone is a way of bonding with them. It's the principle behind the TV laugh track.
"Social domination" is easy to understand: it's ridicule, the putdown, slapstick, embarrassment humor. Laughing at rather than with.
Now, elements of social domination work their way at least a little bit into nearly all comedy. When Abbott and Costello do "Who's on First?" the humor is mainly the puzzle-solving of figuring out how all the violations of the use-mention distinction are working -- but there's also just a bit of looking down on Costello for not understanding what's going on, when you do.
Thinking about all this almost makes me want to go into cognitive science. I would *love* to see brain imaging done on people viewing different kinds of comedy -- e.g., Bedazzled vs. the Three Stooges. If I'm right, then there should be different but overlapping parts of the brain active for each.
(It's entirely possible that something like this has already been done. If anyone knows about it, please tell me! It's also possible that the differences are finer-grained than current imaging techniques can pick up, or that there's just too much variation in how individual brains are "wired".)
The above also, I think, sheds light on the perennial question of why so much SF is so serious. To have a really SFnal joke, you need to build up *two* different alien worldviews, and get them ingrained in the reader's brain to the point where they can be juxtaposed and then resolved at a level of unconscious processing. But building up even one alien
worldview is a difficult and lengthy task.
Lois Bujold could do _A Civil Campaign_ late in the Vorkosigan series, because she was drawing on a lot of previously-built worldbuilding. A lot of other SF and fantasy humor is based on parody and spoof, in
effect parasitizing other peoples' worldbuilding (and also drawing on the recognition pathway); still other examples juxtapose an SF or fantasy setting with intrusions from mainstream reality.
Sources: My foundation for a lot of this was the aforementioned _How the Mind Works_; its chapter on humor was enlightening reading for me, and I recommend the book. I do think that in his conclusion to the chapter, Steven Pinker incorrectly conflates puzzle-solving with social domination. (My terms, btw, not his.) I was also influenced by the discussion in a panel on SF humor at the 2006 Worldcon, and by conversations with Katie Schwarz and Teresa Nielsen Hayden.
(Whew!)
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no subject
Date: 2008-12-31 02:46 pm (UTC)I'm looking forward to watching the process of her "getting it," as I've done with other more abstract language concepts.
no subject
Date: 2008-12-31 03:45 pm (UTC)Example of pure, or relatively pure, puzzle-solving humor?
no subject
Date: 2008-12-31 06:56 pm (UTC)David, have you read Cherryh's Foreigner series? There's an in-joke about salads that semi-works for me. As in, I find it amusing, but I don't remember for sure whether I have laughed out loud.
no subject
Date: 2009-01-01 12:17 am (UTC)no subject
Date: 2009-01-01 03:33 am (UTC)Also, the opening of Cyteen was such hard going, it made me worried about whether I would be able to finish the book.
But I found the Foreigner series to be pretty accessible and a lot of fun.
no subject
Date: 2009-01-01 12:16 am (UTC)There's some other things going on there (e.g., recognition of the stereotype of the shrewish wife) but the main source of humor is how that last word "too" forces us to revise our estimate of the situation. The wife has read out that list of good qualities without argument, and our initial estimation is that she probably agrees with them, since she's made no initial protest, and wives often think well of their husbands. The little pause between her statements gives us time to let this expectation get settled into our brains. Then at the very end that expectation is thwarted.
Two aspects you missed...
Date: 2008-12-31 06:29 pm (UTC)Also, in transactional psychology, laughter can be merely a "stroke" in various games or scripts.
Re: Two aspects you missed...
Date: 2009-01-01 12:19 am (UTC)The "mock threat" is an interesting concept, and certainly the response to tickling doesn't fit well into what I've said.
I don't know what you mean by "stroke" in this context, so I find it hard to respond to that.
Remus Shepherd, on rec.arts.sf.composition, comments that he doesn't think "social bonding" merits its own category; he feels that being in a group is simply a disinhibitor, that strengthens the responses to the other pathways. I think he has a point.
Re: Two aspects you missed...
Date: 2009-01-01 03:29 am (UTC)Re: Two aspects you missed...
Date: 2009-01-03 12:14 am (UTC)no subject
Date: 2009-01-02 10:52 pm (UTC)I think the three or four "pathways" aren't as separate as all that -- that the types blesh so well, and that it's hard to find a "pure" example of any of them, suggests this to me. They may be accidental characteristics of humor rather than its essence, so to speak.
no subject
Date: 2009-01-03 12:13 am (UTC)Have you read Scott McCloud's book Making Comics? He puts forward a set of basic facial expressions (tied to movement of specific facial muscles) and says that all facial expressions are combinations of these. Similarly, in four-color printing you can get millions of different hues, but nonetheless the primary colors exist. The art of comedy is no less subtle, but I think the primary colors exist there too; and I speculate that they correspond to different things happening in the brain.
no subject
Date: 2009-12-18 07:07 pm (UTC)