3.4: Stop Saying Things are Funny Because They’re True
Time travel with me, for a moment, back to the year 2018. It was a year marked by political factionalism and Keto dieting, among other cultural pillars, but according to a Vox article from January 2018 one trend outshone them all: “there is perhaps no single item that has moved the dangerous desires of the human spirit as much as the brightly hued laundry detergent capsules known as Tide Pods” (Abed-Santos, 2018, 1). These colorful blobs of cleanliness owed their prominence at the time to the viral Tide Pod Challenge, which involved people filming themselves putting liquid laundry detergent pods in their mouths (sometimes chewing them or even cooking them first) in defiance of warnings on the products’ packaging. At around the time the Vox article was published there had been thirty-seven cases of Tide Pod ingestion during the first month of 2018 in the US, half of which were intentional (Bever, 2018). Remarkably, what far outpaced the actual consumption of Tide Pods was the massive number of funny memes that popped up to lampoon the challenge, like this one:
Abed-Santos observed that these memes mocked the silliness of the trend and the strange reality that a few people were actually participating in it. That is, they were based in real-world events, but they made that reality seem ridiculous and, hopefully, undesirable. Since the frequency of meme-ing the Tide Pod Challenge far outpaced the frequency of actually participating in it, we can assume that people found the spoofs far preferable to the trend on which they were based.
Tide Pod memes tell us a lot about society and the ways it reflects on itself through funniness. And in doing so they are especially illuminating in one respect: Funniness does not deal in hard, fast, capital-T Truth. It takes our perceptions of reality, scrambles them around in our heads, and leaves them even more open to interpretation than they already were. The cliché that a joke is “funny because it’s true” needs some revising: it would be more accurate to say that things are funny because they make us question truth. They drag us into a fictional realm where our assumptions about reality might not be so reliable. And we, addicted to the happy hormones that come with mirth, open ourselves cheerfully to that truth-bending questioning.
Pack Your Bags for a Truth-Vacation
Philosopher Henri Bergson tells us that experiencing comedy, humor, and other attempts at provoking laughter leaves people in a state of unreasoning “absentmindedness” as they passively process “facts and fancies” (14). Abandoning rational thought like this allows the (non-) thinker to change perspective during a brief sensation of utter chaos. A thinking person, for example, knows that the sky is blue, and does not find that fact in any way amusing. But tweaking deadpan knowledge in a funny way asks us to take a quick vacation from the world of fact and do some (thoughtless) reevaluating. The next time a small child asks you why the chicken crossed the road, for example, they are counting on you to come at the joke from the realm of reason (chickens exist, crossing the road is generally a goal-oriented activity with an obvious objective, reality is mundane). But you will only be able to join the child in their absentminded glee at a form of explosive anti-humor if you’re willing imagine ridiculous alternatives, then return to the banality of the real world and laugh at it.
Funny things are, of course, grounded in things we would consider really, truly true: Chickens, Tide Pods, etc. If they weren’t, they wouldn’t contain enough common ground for multiple people to understand a joke. But the act of finding something funny takes us away from epistemological certainty. In fact, things wouldn’t be funny unless they took us (at least temporarily) into the realm of fiction.
Funniness dances a complicated tango with knowledge. It is, of course, possible to learn things from funniness – but the things we learn often change our conception of what’s true rather than reaffirming it. It’s a form of inquiry that way. In fact, funniness 81 leaves us more in the real of the ideal than that of the real. It blends experience and reason in a weird cognitive zigzag that leaves us understanding the world differently after the punchline than we did after the setup. And whatever species of knowledge we embrace after we’ve laughed is certainly not a priori or unitary. It differs from person to person, varying widely based on whatever cognitive junk we have stored away in our spacious mental closets. Now let’s spend some time making sense (but not Truth!) out of all that. 17
If Your Professor Remembers the Year 2005 Ask Them What “Truthiness” Is Kenneth Burke, a philosopher of rhetoric famous for both his studies of the proclivities of human nature and his explorations of it in his personal life, says that the comic frame of understanding the world is useful for “making a man the student of himself” (171). We do indeed learn through funniness – in fact, Burke says we use funniness to interpret knowledge. That knowledge is of a particular kind, though: knowledge of human relations with emphasis on human power and decision-making. He does not think that the comic helps us piece apart great Platonic, super-human truths about the universe. Rather we laugh at things because of their humanity, and that amusement helps us understand each other and ourselves and culpable, fallible agents of our own destiny.
Laughing at ourselves and others can have a variety of rhetorical functions. It can unify people when we all laugh at our common weirdness. It can also divide people when we laugh at others and act like they’re the only weird people in the entire world. Either way we’re learning – we learn understanding or we learn judgment. It’s important to remember, though, that the study of humans is a subjective field and is at the mercy of our own subjective human perception, particularly because of that power of individual decision-making that the comic frame brings to our attention. We’re not learning any a priori truths as we laugh. In fact, I challenge you as a reader to come up with a juicy joke about an ontological proof that doesn’t involve any kind of human snafu. Go on. I’ll wait.
Want to Change the World? There’s Nothing to It
Not only does funniness make us contemplate humanity, it does so in new ways that make us question the rightful order of the world. When we experience mirth we are snatched from our everyday lives and deposited, at least briefly, into an ideal world. (By the way, when I say “ideal” I don’t necessarily mean “good” – not a world of perfect justice, courage, and armpits that smell like a spring day in rural Ireland. “Ideal” here means “existing in the realm of ideas.”) Let me explain what I mean.
Consider parody. It’s a form of funniness where you mimic something, sometimes something more powerful than you, in order to make it seem silly. If you were to stand in front of the room and hilariously imitate your professor before they arrive to teach, that would be parody. If you were to rewrite the course syllabus in order to make fun of the class, that would be parody. (Feel free to do so and show your professor – odds are they’ll just be very happy you’re paying such close attention to the document.) Even the Tide Pod Hot Pockets box at the beginning of this chapter is an example of parody. Think about this, though: When you’re mimicking something, you’re thinking about it and re-imagining it in a way that it doesn’t exist. Your new conception of it might even disrupt the way it originally worked – like parody that’s designed to take down power structures (also known as satire).
This process happens with funniness of all kinds. Even if you’re laughing because your best friend fell down some stairs, or because a toddler made an awkward pun, you’re still reimaging how things work. No! you’re thinking, stairs are for walking down, not for sliding down! Or no! you’re thinking, that’s not what words are supposed to do! Thus, you have arrived in the realm of pure ideas, of pure imagination, because you’re questioning your reality. That questioning process means that finding something funny doubles as a form of inquiry: Rather than seeing the thing as part of a hard and fixed reality, you’re seeing it as something moveable, malleable, and worth asking questions about. Of course, the original reality stays in your mind: You will still eventually have a crisis of conscience and stifle your laughter enough to ask your friend at the bottom of the stairs if they’re ok. But your return to reality is preceded by a trip into a realm of thought that will, perhaps, defy real-world explanation. More importantly, when you 83 return from your mental adventure you will probably be somewhat changed for the experience.
Ziggedy-Zag
Funny things blend experience with reason. Isn’t that provocative? We often think of those two constructs as separate things. There’s the realm of experience in which I am taking a bite of ice cream and adoring the flavor, and there’s the realm of reason in which I am (maybe too late) thinking about the pros and cons of eating ice cream and deciding whether I should do it or not. Experience and reason can even disagree with each other. I might, for example, know from experience that my Aunt Karen hates ice cream, but I also might keep fantasizing that if only I could discover the perfect flavor I could change her mind. But the neat thing about funniness is that even when experience and reason seem to be at odds with each other, laughing can swirl them around together in our heads and leave each kind of understanding a little bit changed for the experience.
Discourse that makes us laugh is often based on the Aristotelian notion of an enthymeme. An enthymeme is a rhetorical syllogism that has, as its major premises, facts that are so commonly understood by the audience that they don’t need to be said. When stand-up comedian Mae Martin quips “My stomach just fell out through my vagina” after a surprising interaction with an audience member (Just for Laughs, 2018), she is counting on her audience to understand 1) figurative language, and 2) the basic physical sensation of surprise, both without her having to explain them. Otherwise she wouldn’t be able to make jokes like that without worrying about audiences rushing her to the nearest emergency room, in which case she certainly wouldn’t have time to stop and enumerate her major premises and their connection to her conclusion.
Enthymemes give audiences a collective starting point. We all understand “gutwrenching shock,” for example, thanks to our own experiences with it, and without having it explained to us we can move on into more interesting parts of the joke. But funniness works by taking that common starting point and twisting it, tearing it away from our common lived experiences by juxtaposing it with absurd things that make us think about it in a different way, thanks to our ability to reason. Laughing thus involves a cognitive zigzag where the audience starts thinking about the unstated premises of a 84 particular joke, shatters that usual conception, and then lands a little far afield from where it started that thought process. Importantly, the audience is still thinking about the same enthymemes. They’re just doing it in a different way. After the Mae Martin quip, for example, people are still thinking that she’s surprised (zig), but now they’re considering surprise as a function of the human vagina (zag) – probably a new way of viewing the subject for many people in the crowd. In short, if you want to make someone look at a familiar object in an unfamiliar way, make a joke about it. If the joke is good enough, they’ll apply reason to experience in a way that might not otherwise have occurred to them. Funniness creates novelty that makes us abandon previously understood knowledge.
The Junk in Your Cognitive Trunk
Inasmuch as we assume we’re all beautiful and unique individuals, we each follow our own beautiful and unique zigzags when we hear something funny. We all arrive at our own new ideas by fluctuating between experience and reason. Does that make funniness a form of inquiry? Sure. And doesn’t inquiry get us all closer to the truth? Absolutely not. Thanks to a wonderful and maddening concept called polysemy, each person who hears the same joke – even if they all are somehow understanding it through the exact same enthymeme – will get something slightly different out of it because we all have different brains with different things stored in them. The knowledge we gain through laughing therefore cannot be unitary, and therefore-therefore cannot be considered absolute Truth.
Imagine your brain as a basement filled with storage bins. Psychologists Robert S. Wyer and James E. Collins argue that when you’re trying to make sense of something (something like an enthymeme that’s been twisted in an unfamiliar way by a joke), you start unconsciously rummaging through those bins looking for relevant stored material. Of course, when you’re processing a joke you don’t have time for a thorough search – your brain just opens the nearest likely-looking bin and finds the most relevant thing it can. In Wyer and Collins’s theory of humor elicitation, you would hear “restaurant” in the setup for a joke, wrench open the bin in your head-basement labeled “restaurant,” and hope that something in there meshes with the joke you’re about to hear. (This process is the reason that jokes about outdated material don’t work well. Material about 85 frosted lip gloss and bedazzling is going to make people dig deeper into their cognitive storage bins than they’re willing to go on short notice, even if they really bought into those fashion trends in the early 2000s.)
The thing about those bins, though, is that each of us has different things stored in our bins, even if the labels on them are the same. Try this experiment with your friends: Say the word “dog,” and then have everyone describe the image that popped into their head when you said it. Some people might visualize their own pet. Others might be fans of Paw Patrol and get a more cartoonish image. One person might be remembering that they meant to fill out an application to volunteer at the Humane Society. Everyone has a storage bin labeled “dog,” but the contents are all different.
That variation is the root of polysemy, the idea that any cognitive prompt has “determinate but non-singular” (Ceccarelli, 399) meanings. That is, every person who hears something will process it in a slightly different way and end up at a slightly different final destination, even if everyone started out in relatively the same place with the same enthymeme. If I tell a joke designed to shatter common conceptions of penguins, each person who hears it might be duly shattered but might also walk away from their zigzag process with an entirely different new conception. There’s no telling the directions people will go when you untether them from the concrete realm of experience.
If our cognitive storage bins are all so different, and if our funny zigzag journeys are all so different as a result, funniness cannot result in epistemic certainty. We cannot leave a joke with the confidence that we have learned The Truth and Nothing But the Truth. Our reasoning processes are too individualized. We land in similarity at best – but not in absolutes.
Funny Hot Pockets are Neither True Nor False
Scroll back up to the beginning of this essay and give that Tide Pod Challenge meme another gander. Consider this: We learn things from it, but we’re not learning about Tide Pods or even about Hot Pockets. We’re learning things about the curious and unpredictable people who confuse the two, and about the population of individuals who find that ludicrous enough to lampoon. It’s a parody of a common product image, meaning that it invites us to think about that product in a new way rather than just 86 solidifying its current perceived reality. We each appreciate that parody by starting with our lived realities of Tide Pods and of Hot Pockets and putting them together in a new, weird way that we find happily nonthreatening but that also makes us reimagine how the world works – or at least how people eating food works. But each of our reimaginings is slightly different. Some people might see this image and actually decide to try putting laundry detergent into food. (Please don’t. That’s too much of a TruthVacation.) Some people might condemn participants in the Challenge. Still others might want to experiment with food dye and see if they can make their own colorful Hot Pockets. Whatever your reaction, though, and however differently you’re looking at the world because of that meme, you have not landed on Absolute-Knowledge that can be proven true or false. Your results are epistemically agnostic.
Foot Notes
17 For a more complicated explanation of all of these ideas than the one you’re about to read, please see my longer, more academic version of this train of thought entitled “The Epistemology of the Funny,” which was published in 2016 in Empedocles: European Journal for the Philosophy of Communication, 7:3.
Bibliography
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Bever, Lindsey. Teens are daring each other to eat Tide Pods. We don’t need to tell you that’s a bad idea. The Washington Post. 2018. Retrieved from http://washingtonpost.com
Burke, Kenneth. Attitudes Toward History, 3rd Edition. Berkeley: University of California Press, 1937.
Ceccarelli, Leah. Polysemy: Multiple Meanings in Rhetorical Criticism. Quarterly Journal of Speech, 84:4, 1998. 394-414.
Mae Martin – Why Are You Gay? [Video File.] Just for Laughs. 2018. Retrieved from http:// https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Y0UP6eIpU_U
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