|
If you are trying to write humour, you had better take it very seriously.
Robert Benchley, a great humourist of the early 20th century, explains why.
|
|
Extracts from a lecture by ROBERT BENCHLEY
(published in The New Yorker in 1937)
WHY WE LAUGH - OR
DO WE?
In order to laugh
at something, it is necessary
(1) to know what you
laughing at,
(2) to know why you
are laughing,
(3) to ask some else
why they think you are laughing,
(4) to jot down a few
notes,
(5) to laugh.
Even then, the
thing may not be cleared up for days.
All laughter is merely a compensatory reflex to take the place of
sneezing. What we really want to do is sneeze, but as that is not always
possible, we laugh instead. Sometimes we underestimate our powers and laugh and
sneeze at the same time. This raises hell all around.
The old phrase
"That is nothing to sneeze at" proves my point. What is obviously
meant is "That is nothing to laugh at." The wonder is that
nobody ever thought of this explanation of laughter before, with the
evidence staring him in the face like that.
[Footnote:
Welthwanzleben, in his work "Humor Mit Death," hits on this point
indirectly when he says, laughter is a muscular rigidity spasmodically relieved
by involuntary twitching. It can be instigated by the application of
electricity as well as by a so-called 'joke.' ]
We sneeze because
we are thwarted, discouraged, or devil-may-care. Failing a sneeze, we laugh, faute
de mieux. Analyze any funny story or comic situation at which we
"laugh" and it will be seen that this theory is correct.
Incidentally, by the time you have the "humor" analyzed, it will be
found that the necessity for laughing has been relieved.
Let us take the
well-known joke about the man who put the horse in the bathroom. Here we have a
perfect example of the thought-sneeze process, or, if you will, the
sneeze-thought process. The man, obviously an introvert, was motivated by a
will-to-dominate-the-bathroom, combined with a desire to be superior to the
other boarders. The humor of the situation may seem to us to lie in the
tag line "1 want to be able to say ‘Yes, I know’,
[Footnote:
A man who lived in a boarding house brought a horse home with him one night,
led it upstairs, and put it in the bathroom. The landlady, aroused by the
commotion, protested, pointed to the broken balustrade, the tom stair carpet,
and the obvious maladjustment of the whole thing, and asked the man,
confidentially, just why he had seen fit to shut a horse in the common
bathroom. To which the man replied, "In the morning, the boarders, one by
one, will go into the bathroom, and will come out exclaiming, 'There's a horse
in the bathroom!' I want to be able to say, 'Yes, I know.' ]
But we laugh at the joke subconsciously long before this
line comes in. In fact, what we are really laughing (or sneezing) at is the
idea of someone's telling us a joke that we have heard before.
Let us suppose that
the story was reversed, and that a horse had put a man into the
bathroom. Then our laughter would have been induced by the idea of a landlady's
asking a horse a question and the horse is answering an entirely different form
of joke.The man would then
have been left in the bathroom with nothing to do with the story. Likewise, if
the man had put the landlady into the bathroom, the horse would
obviously have been hors de combat (still another form of joke,
playing on the similarity in sound between the word "horse´and the French
word hors, meaning out
of. Give up?)
Any joke, besides making us want to sneeze,
must have five cardinal points, and we must check up on these first before giving
in:
(1) The joke must be in a language we can understand.
(2) It must be spoken loudly enough for us to hear it, or printed
clearly enough for us to read it.
(3) It must be
about something. You can't just say, "Here's a good joke" and let it
go at that. (You can, but don't wait for the laugh.)
(4) It must deal
with either frustration or accomplishment, inferiority or superiority, sense
or nonsense, pleasantness or unpleasantness, or, at any rate, with some emotion
that can be analyzed, otherwise how do we
know when to laugh?
(5) It must begin with the letter "W."
[Footnote: 'Gunty,
in his "Laughter Considered as a Joint Disease," holds that the
letter "W" is not essential to the beginning of a joke; so long as
it comes in somewhere before the joke is over. However, tests made on five
hundred subjects in the Harvard School of Applied Laughter, using the
Mergenthaler Laugh Detector, have shown that, unless a joke begins with the
letter "W," the laughter is forced, almost unpleasant at times.
Now let us see how our joke
about the horse in the bathroom fulfills these specifications. Using the Gestalt,
or Rotary-Frictional, method of taking the skin off a joke, we can best
illustrate by making a diagram of it. We have seen that every joke must be in a
language that we can understand and spoken (or written) so clearly that we can
hear it (or see it). Otherwise we have this:
Fig. 1.
Joke which we cannot hear, see, or understand the words cif.
You will see in
Figure 2 [absurd Fig. 2 of ‘horse-in-bathroom story under ideal
conditions’not produced here. Mainly because it’s beyond my
computerizing abilities- Ed] that we go upstairs with the man and the horse
as far as the bathroom. Here we become conscious that it is not a true story,
something we may have suspected all along but didn't want to say anything
about. This sudden revelation of absurdity (from the Latin ab and surdus,
meaning "out of deafness") is represented in the diagram by an
old-fashioned whirl.
Following the shock
of realization that the story is not real, we progress in the diagram to the
point where the landlady protests. Here we come to an actual fact, or
factual act. Any landlady in her right mind would protest against
a horse being shut in her bathroom. So we have, in the diagram, a return to
normal ratiocination, or Crowther's Disease, represented by the wavy line.
(Whoo-hoo!)
From then on, it is
anybody's joke. The whole thing becomes just ludicrous. This we can show in
the diagram by the egg-and-dart design, making it clear that something has
definitely gone askew. Personally, I think that what the man meant to
say was "That's no horse –t hat's my wife," but that he was
inhibited. (Some of these jokes even I can't seem to get through my
head.)
[Footnote: A. E. Bassinette,
in his pamphlet "What Is Humor - A Joke?," claims to have discovered
a
small tropical fly which
causes laughter. This fly, according to this authority, was carried from
Central America back to Spain
by Columbus's men, and spread from there to the rest of Europe,
returning to America, on a
visit, in 1667, on a man named George Altschuh.]
[Endnote: The lecture, with its tables, footnotes, asides, and
myriad diagrams, goes on and on, as The New Yorker still
does. In 1937, however, Benchley’s article was not taken seriously. – HWT]]
|
