2.3: A Spoonful of Sugar Makes the Misery Go Down- The Relief Theory of Humor
Who loves the game Cards Against Humanity? I think I’m going to play a few rounds right now. I will be playing alone since Covid-19 is currently destroying my city.1 I draw a black card and a white card from the box. Black set-up card: “What brought the orgy to a grinding halt?” I draw a few white cards from the deck and decide on this answer: “Intimacy problems.” I draw another set of cards and do the same. “What left this stain on my couch?” Answer? “A low standard of living.”
I laugh with delight. I then look at my old couch: it is broken, stained, old, and worn. I’d like to buy a new couch, but I don’t have the kind of income that allows a person to buy a new couch every 20 years. I also reflect on the fact that I live alone due to my severe problems with intimacy. Normally, my empty bank account and my fear of Match.com brings tears of sadness, not tears from laughter. What could possibly be going on here?
In this chapter, we will explore just what could be going on here by taking a tour through the Relief Theory of Humor . First, I will present and explain the Relief Theory of Humor. Then, the main criticisms of the theory will be examined.
The Relief Theory Explained
The first thorough formulation of the Relief Theory of Humor was put forth by the philosopher and sociologist, Herbert Spencer, in his essay “The Physiology of Humor.” Spencer was inspired to create a better explanation of humor after reading Alexander Bain’s criticism of the Incongruity Theory of Humor in Emotions and the Will. For Spencer, though, his interests landed predominately on the physical act of laughing itself; he desired a more physiological explanation of laughter. While he did not leave out the content-based aspects of humor, his main focus was on the bodily aspects of it.2 Spencer’s idea, which he called the Relief Theory, held that laughter, when occurring in a humorous setting, was a release of the tension of emotion, or the release of energy created by that tension. Spencer linked the action of laughing and the behaviors accompanying laughter (for example, the contortion of the face, the movement of the body) with his “hydraulic” theory of nervous energy. The “hydraulic” theory is a physiological model that describes the human body like a system under pressure, using the analogy of fluid, in which the fluid builds up pressure in the body. The “fluid”, in the case of laughter, is the built-up nervous energy releasing. Like water behind a dam, some of it needs to be released in order to save ourselves (or the dam). This is what the act of laughing can do; it can release a healthy amount of nervous energy to avoid disaster. This is also why The Relief Theory of Humor is also sometimes called the Release Theory. Spencer says that when some mental disturbance or agitation occurs, that energy “must discharge itself” in some way or another to bring your physiological system to harmonize once more (Spencer, 461).
What could be the cause of this agitation or disturbance? To illustrate what he means, Spencer gives the (humorous) example of a goat walking onto a theater stage during a love scene. Picture it: you are watching a play about a pair of tragic lovers, say, Heloise and Abelard. In this scene, the lovers, who have not seen each other for many years, have a chance meeting in Paris. We, the audience, have such strong feelings at the sight of their reunion.3 Perhaps we already know that this chance meeting will be their last meeting, so we feel sorrow for them, but joy for them since they have this one moment together. As these emotions overwhelm us, Spencer encourages us to imagine that at this same time of great passion on the stage, a young goat struts out unexpectedly. While on the stage, the goat trots up to Abelard and sniffs him, perhaps in the crotch or on his behind. Spencer points out that a large “mass of emotions” has been created in us, the audience, during this play, and that our “nervous system was in a state of tension” while we anticipated the fate of the poor lovers. But now, through this little butt-sniffing goat, a new “channel” of expression is open where the other is closed (the channel of crying, wailing, lamenting). This new channel must expel the nervous energy, but in this particular way: “half-convulsive actions we term laughter (Spencer, 461).”
The father of modern psychology, Sigmund Freud, went on to more fully develop the Relief Theory of humor. The starting point for any theory involving a Freudian explanation of a phenomenon must start with a discussion of his theory of the unconscious.4 First, we must familiarize ourselves with what the unconscious mind is. Freud defines the unconscious in his work, New Introductory Lectures on Psychoanalysis, as “any mental process the existence of which we are obliged to assume- because, for instance, we infer it in some way from its effects- but of which we are not directly aware (194).” There are many things that bombard our daily lives: too much information, fears, sex, insecurities, death: all the basic building blocks of modern society. The conscious mind either cannot hold or cannot bear all the information and stress, so through the act of repression, drains itself of the traumatic and difficult materials. Freud defines “the essence of repression” as “the function of rejecting and keeping something out of consciousness,” as it is too much for the conscious mind to attend to and contend with (Freud, 158). This is a process that is happening behind the scenes; the conscious mind is not aware when repression is taking place.5 Much like Spencer thought the body could fill with “nervous energy” and need to be drained, Freud argued that the content of everyday life filled up our mind with too much material and needed a dumping ground. Repression is the garbage truck and the unconscious mind is the landfill. Beep beep.
Why does this process need to occur? This links to Freud’s notion of the Pleasure Principle. The Pleasure Principle is not as sexy as it sounds. It can be thought of as the motivation for avoidance of pain or for the purposes of pain reduction. Freud writes, “[t]he Pleasure-Pain Principle is brought into action in response to the danger signal and plays a part in repression (Freud, 144).” Many jokes, being of a hostile, sexual, or related to highly-emotionally charged issues, act as a way to find pleasure in things we are not supposed to find joyful, such as a broken heart, death, sexual deviance, or violence. Freud gives examples of this in his writing, but in this chapter, I will provide my own example drawn from the Hollywood comedy canon. Here is an example of a moment that should lead to heart-break (and thus, our empathy) for the character Lloyd Christmas in the film Dumb and Dumber. Lloyd has driven across the country to win over the love of his life, Mary Swanson. When he finally has the opportunity near the end of the film to express his love to her, this exchange occurs:
Lloyd: I want to ask you a question, straight out, flat out, and I want you to give me the honest answer. What do you think the chances are of a guy like you and a girl like me ending up together?
Mary: Well Lloyd, that's difficult to say. We really don't...
Lloyd: Hit me with it! Just give it to me straight! I came a long way just to see you
Mary, just... The least you can do is level with me. What are my chances?
Mary: Not good.
Lloyd: [he gulps, his mouth twitching] You mean, not good like one out of a hundred?
Mary: I'd say more like one out of a million.
Lloyd: [long pause while he processes what he's heard] So you're telling me there's a chance. YEAH!
The whole film has been leading up to this grand romantic moment. Sure, the character of Lloyd (and his equally thick-headed friend, Harry) has shown us he lacks any common sense or wisdom, and the film gives no indication that Lloyd might win Mary over, but when Lloyd starts to profess his love, we go along with his hope for reciprocation and feel the suspense of her possibly saying yes to him.6 When Mary says there is basically no chance of her and Lloyd being together, the audience should expect the feeling of disappointment and pity for Lloyd. For all his faults, he has tried his best to win her over, and this is disheartening: when love is not reciprocated, we feel sadness.
But the tragedy will be turned into comedy, since Freud reasoned that we have a motivation to avoid pain, one way can avoid it is through discharging the negative pain through humor. When Lloyd’s response to Mary is one of hope and optimism (and riddled with a complete misunderstanding of basic probability), we are given a chance to release the painful feelings through laughter. We don’t have to pity Lloyd: instead we can laugh at his stupidity7 and, perhaps, be elated that he is still happy regardless of the bad news. While the Pleasure-Principle at once can repress painful materials that the conscious mind can’t handle, it can also play a part in creating laughter in the face of pain. Consider, also, how many times we have laughed when injuring ourselves.8
Popular Criticisms of the Relief Theory
The Relief Theory has many faults. In this section I will be focusing on three of the major ones: its failure to account for differences in tensions and releases, its seeming to fall back into the incongruity theory, and our updated science of psychology.
The Relief Theory does not give an adequate distinction between the comic release and other releases of built up tension. One might build up physiological tension during an intense, close-scoring Indiana vs Kentucky basketball game.9 When the buzzer sounds, the tension will be released via tears and screaming of pain or tears and screaming of joy. The score, much like the punchline, was uncertain and could be an unexpected twist, such as when a 3-pointer is made at the end of the game. But the response is not laughter. One might watch (with high emotion) a couple taking their wedding vows. We expect to hear both say, “I do.” But our hopes might suddenly be dashed when the groom says, “I’m sorry, I can’t,” and leaves the chapel. We gasp, and perhaps, we cry.
In both instances, the release of certain tension happens, and it is from some unexpected occurrence or event, much like a punchline. But we do not respond with laughter. The Relief Theory has a difficult time clearly demarcating what causes laughter and what causes something else, such as shock, sadness, cheer, etc. And when the Relief Theory explains what that demarcation is, it tends to sound as if it is in support of the Incongruity Theory of Humor. Freud does try to categorize comic and humorous phenomena and distinguish various responses to events, but in the end, Freud either does not make a case for all comedic materials being releases of repressed nervous energy or falls back on some sort of explanation via incongruity. Now isn’t that unexpected?
The Relief Theory of Humor falls back on the very theory it was attempting to over-throw when it tries to show the difference in unexpected events and our responses to them, from demarcating the comic from the tragic (and others). Spencer spoke of laughter arising from “descending incongruity” in which something elevated is replaced by something trivial (such as a sincere romance replaced by a stray goat). This is the difference in a tragedy and a comedy, for a tragedy could be said to be an “ascending incongruity,” much in line with Aristotle’s idea of a noble person falling from their elevated rank. But the fact that the Relief Theory relies on this incongruity to distinguish the comic from other responses is a flaw in the theory itself. Though one might defend the theory by saying that this theory only shows how laughter comes forth and why it needs to be produced, but the theory does not intend to show how it is summoned from the content of the world. At best, it is an incomplete theory at this point.
This leads us into the final criticism we will cover in this chapter, as the final criticism has to do with the concern about how and why the laughter is produced: the hydraulic model and ultimately Freud’s theory of the unconscious itself. There is no model of emotions and the body that is seriously used in the medical and psychological fields today that are in line with the hydraulic model. It has been replaced by updated and scientifically validated systems. Spencer and Freud’s models of physiology and psychology have been replaced with medical explanations that are backed with empirical evidence. In writing on the Relief Theory of Humor, John Morell writes,
…we can note that today almost no scholar in philosophy or psychology explains laughter or humor as a process of releasing pent-up nervous energy. There is, of course, a connection between laughter and the expenditure of energy. Hearty laughter involves many muscle groups and several areas of the nervous system. Laughing hard gives our lungs a workout, too, as we take in far more oxygen than usual. But few contemporary scholars defend the claims of Spencer and Freud that the energy expended in laughter is the energy of feeling emotions, the energy of repressing emotions, or the energy of thinking, which have built up and require venting.
Freud’s theory of the functions of the conscious and unconscious mind is now famously unscientific and lacking in credible evidence. In the same way that today we do not read Marxism as a scientific theory, psychoanalysis as Freud saw it is no longer considered to be backed by truly testable and, therefore, falsifiable evidence.10 The Relief Theory fails because it’s foundation on the hydraulic model has failed.
Conclusion
The Relief Theory of Humor has appeal in a theory that can address why taboo subjects tend to make the best subjects for humor and why we laugh sometimes when we are nervous or feel pain: there is energy to discharge. But the flaws in the theory are serious and hard to overcome due to the poor models it is based on.
Perhaps the Relief Theory of Humor can re-invent itself as a theory by attaching itself to an evolutionary explanation of humor.11 For the Relief Theory to be a viable model of humor, it must first update the base of its claims with one based by modern day scientific research, and this is something evolutionary explanations of humor may be able to offer. But, if it continues to cling to the hydraulic model of the body or Freud’s theory of the unconscious, it is doomed to failure. Much like my finances and love life.
Bibliography
Bain, Alexander. Emotions and the Will. London: Longmans, Green, 1865.
Freud, S. Freud: Dictionary of Psychoanalysis. New York, NY: Philosophical library, 1950.
Hantoot, Ben, et al. Cards Against Humanity. Cards Against Humanity LLC, 2011.
Hurley, Matthew, Daniel Dennett, Reginald Adams. Inside Jokes: Using Humor to Reverse Engineer the Mind. Cambridge: MIT Press, 2011.
Morreall, John, “Philosophy of Humor”. The Stanford Encyclopedia of Philosophy, Winter 2016. Edward N. Zalta (ed.) https://plato.stanford.edu/archives/win2016/ entries/humor/ Accessed 08/12/2020.
Politzer, Heinz. Freud and Tragedy. Riverside: Ariadne, 2007. Spencer, Herbert. The Physiology of Humor. Macmillion’s Magazine, 1860. 452-466.
Wessler, Charles B. & Peter Farrelly. Dumb and Dumber. New Line Cinema, 1994.