2.5: My, How Clever
Phlebitis. Not the word you expected this essay to begin with, is it? What is phlebitis? It’s a medical condition in which a vein, usually in the leg, becomes inflamed. It is very painful and what I am suffering from right now. Bet you are glad you’re not me. Nah, I’m just playing. I don’t have phlebitis, but you probably do. It affects about 90% of students because of the hard-surfaced school chairs you are forced to sit in for hours at a time, but you won’t feel the pain until later in life. Just kidding. You won’t get phlebitis.
What a weird paragraph, huh? Was it funny? Funny-strange maybe, but not funny-ha-ha. And that is exactly what is so philosophically interesting about it. You did not expect to find a paragraph about phlebitis in a philosophy book – that’s counter to all your expectations. It’s incongruous. At one point you thought I had a painfully debilitating condition that you did not have. That made you sudden realize you were superior to me. But then I told you I was just playing, only to then lie and tell you that you would get it. But then I let you off the hook. What a relief. The weird, but not funny first paragraph of this essay contains every single mechanism that the other humor theories claim is the active ingredient in humor. Every single one. Yet, it was not funny.
My claim is not that there are not incongruity-based jokes – there are LOTS of them. My claim is not that there are not humorous put-downs and insults that make you feel superior to the person getting picked on. Some comedians made careers on such jokes. My claim is not that humor never involves play. Of course, it does. My claim is not that there is no build up and release in well-constructed jokes. Lots of them work in exactly that way. But not all of them. There are plenty of examples of all of the cited mechanisms that do generate humor, but also lots more that don’t. But if not every incongruity, not every instance of superiority, not every bit of playfulness, not every instance of relief causes humor, which ones do?
THAT is what I contend I have the answer to. It is the ones that are clever. My humor theory is called the cleverness account and it contends that humor is any and all intentional, conspicuous acts of playful cleverness. There are four components that, 54 when you put them together, give you acts of humor. Let’s work through them one-by-one.
To understand the importance of the intentional requirement, we need to begin by distinguishing humorousness from funniness. These seem like synonyms, but they aren’t. Something is funny if it gets a certain comically amused reaction from someone. Good humor is usually funny, but not all funny things are humorous. The Russian leader Mikhail Gorbachev had a discolored patch on his bald head. Suppose the patch had been accidentally, but exactly in the shape of a human hand with an extended middle finger. That would have been epically funny. But it would not have been humor because it just happened. If it had been a tattoo – that would be humor. We may find a sunset over a lake to be beautiful, but it is not a work of art. Art requires intentional creation and humor is a form of art. Hence, it is not sufficient that something is found funny, it needs to be intentionally constructed to be funny to be humor.
The second condition is conspicuousness. Conspicuous means obvious. By this, I don’t mean that jokes don’t have an element of surprise or tension. Telegraphing a punch line (having your audience see the funny part of where you are going before you get there) can destroy a joke. The sense of conspicuous used here is that it is an act that is seen or heard – or, in the case of some disgusting jokes, smelled. Jokes are artistic acts and art requires an artist and an audience. A joke that is not recognized as a joke is said not to “land,” that is, it goes over the audience’s head. The point of a joke or any other humorous act is to land, is to be recognized as the humor act it is. Jokes are told to be gotten.
The third element is that the act of humor is playful. By this, I mean something different from the play theorists. I don’t mean jolly or lighthearted. I am using the term “play” in the same sense that we do when we tell a child not to play with her food. To play with your food is to use something for a purpose other than its intended purpose. Eating a banana is not playing with it, but holding it up to your ear and pretending it is a telephone is. (I guess for kids these days, you need to use a pop tart and not a banana for that gag.) Humor requires manipulating something – an object, words, a situation – in a way that makes them do something they don’t usually.
The final element is the most important. Humor is a display of cleverness. No cleverness, no humor. What do we mean by the word “clever”? Clearly, it has something 55 to do with thinking well or being smart or coming up with something new or seeing things a different way or solving a problem. Being clever is a positive attribute that has to do with using your brain. But there are lots of different ways to do that, so we need our account of cleverness to be broad enough to contain them all. If you limit what it is to be clever, then a clever person will show you how clever they are by being clever in a way not accounted for by your account of “clever,” no matter how clever the limitation is.
The inclusive notion we will use to account for our notion of cleverness rigorously is that it demonstrates a cognitive virtue, in other words, it takes a way of thinking that is helpful and desirable in real world situations – being well-read, being able to see things from multiple perspectives, being a good problem-solver – and creates an artistic context where it is not used for some helpful goal, but simply to be put on display in the work of art that is the joke.
Put all four of those together and you get humor. Humor is an art form, meaning that it is intentionally created and meant to be seen. But it is the art form where we take something and playfully manipulate it in a fashion that displays cleverness, some cognitive virtue that would be useful in real life, but just for laughs in the work of art that is the joke, the pun, the visual gag, or whatever other humorous medium employed.
Does it work? Better than the others ones, I claim. Consider two examples, two jokes.
Two old men are sitting on a park bench feeding the birds when one turns to the other and says, “I know the name of every bird in this area.” The other one says, “You know all of them?” “Yup,” the first guy says, “all of them.” “How about that one?” the second man says pointing to a bird in a tree. “The black one with red and yellow on the wing?” “That’s the one. What is it called?” With great confidence, the first man replied, “Ralph.”
This is a joke that is based on an incongruity. When the first man says he knows the name of every bird, we naturally think he means the scientific name of the species. What he really means is the name which he uses to refer to them individually.
Let’s change the joke a bit.
Two old men are sitting on a park bench feeding the birds when one turns to the other and says, “I know the name of every bird in this area.” The other one says, “You know all of them?” “Yup,” the first guy says, “all of them.” “How about that one?” the second man says pointing to a bird in a tree. “The black one with red and yellow on the wing?” “That’s the one. What is it called?” With great confidence, the first man replied, “That’s a washing machine.”
Notice what happened in the change. We took out the name Ralph and substituted a noun phrase that is not a name. This makes the first guy’s response even more incongruous, even more unexpected, even more contrary to what we think is coming. We increased the incongruity, but we didn’t increase the funniness. In fact, you are probably thinking, “that’s not even a joke anymore.” Right. We removed the clever part for something more incongruous. We increased what they say is the basis for jokes and removed what I say is the basis for jokes. Look what happened. It stopped being a joke. That seems to indicate that it is the cleverness and not the incongruity that is responsible for the humor even in a joke where the cleverness turns on an incongruity. Let’s do it again with a different mechanism.
My friend’s cooking is so bad, the flies pitched in to have the screen on the kitchen window fixed.
That is a joke that is based on superiority. It is an insult joke based on a clever put down.
Now, let’s take out the cleverness, but ramp up the superiority.
My friend’s cooking is so bad that no one in the house will eat it, especially after three people got food poisoning from it, vomited all night, and one of them even had to go to the hospital to have his stomach pumped.
The second version clearly explains how bad the friend’s cooking is in a way that is worse than the first. That means that he is even more inferior and thus you are even more superior. But, again, more superiority does not translate into more humor. Quite the opposite. Take out the cleverness and increase the superiority and what you are left with isn’t even a joke.
So, what does that tell us? It is certainly true that superiority, relief, and incongruity are mechanisms on which jokes are constructed, but it is the clever use of superiority, relief, and incongruity that make them acts of humor, not the superiority, relief, and incongruity in themselves. Hence, when we are looking for the essential property that makes an act into an act of humor, look for the cleverness. That is where it resides.
Bibliography
Gimbel, Steven. Isn’t that Clever: A Philosophy of Humor and Comedy. New York: Routledge, 2017.