5.4: Form and Funny- Formalism in Humor Aesthetics
Aristotle argued that everything is a combination of both matter and form. Consider Michelangelo’s famous statue of David. What makes it the statue it is? Aristotle says that there are two answers. On the one hand, there’s the marble out of which he carved it. Take away the marble of a marble statue and what is left? Nothing. So, the material from which it is made is one of its causes. On the other hand, what makes it a statue of David, King of the Jews and not a statue of Davie, the weird guy who catches squid with his bare hands and then celebrates by making farting noises with his underarms? It is the form, the shape of the marble, is what makes it the statue it is. Combine the stuff and the shape and you get the statue.
But the question here is aesthetic value. Michelangelo’s statue is one of the great works in the history of art. Why?
The answer is not the material. I am not a sculptor. I have never even held a chisel. Give me a piece of marble the same size and quality and let me at it. The result? Not a great work of art. Same material, not the same aesthetic outcome.
Now, suppose scientists decide to bring a mass spectrometer into the Galleria dell’Accademia and discover that David is not actually made of marble, but rather alabaster, paper mâché, or some other substance. The world would marvel. “It just shows Michelangelo’s genius that he could take such a humble substance and make it so resemble marble in the creation of this masterwork.” What makes the statue such an incredible work is the detail, the grandeur, the feeling of awe it creates in the viewer. All of this is the result of its shape. The beauty, the aesthetic value is a matter of form, not content.
The same is true, I claim, with respect to jokes. Humor is an art form just as much as sculpture. As a largely linguistic art form, the content is language and the ideas and concepts the language represents. (Sure, there is slapstick and the like which are not linguistic, but we can make similar arguments for them.) Comic moralists argue that funniness is decreased because of immoral content. Comic immoralists argue that funniness is increased because of immoral content. They are both wrong. The funniness of a joke is completely a function of its form. The moral content of the joke is irrelevant to its funniness, that is, to its aesthetic quality. The content is only relevant in as far as it is a functional formal element. We appreciate the joke for its tightness, its cleverness, its rhythm – the formal elements – not because of its content, moral or otherwise. The content is just there to allow for the formal elements to appear.
If comic moralism or immoralism were true, then changing the content of an effective joke in such a way as to make it more or less immoral should have an effect on the joke’s quality. If comic moralism were true, dialing up the ethically problematic content should decrease its funniness; whereas if the comic immoralist is right, then the result should be a funnier joke. Similarly, decreasing the ethically concerning aspects should increase the funniness if the comic moralist is correct, and decrease it if the comic immoralist is correct. Either way, it is an empirical result. That means that we can do some experiments. It’s time to step into the philosophical laboratory.
We need a subject to operate upon. Let’s take a joke with moderately ethically problematic content, an ethnic joke that makes use of a stereotype, but not that bad of one.
(1) How many Jewish mothers does it take to change a light bulb? None. It’s fine. I’ll just sit here in the dark. Don’t worry about me. You should be happy, that all I care about.
This joke plays upon the stereotype of the Jewish mother as someone who is willing to suffer as long as it means that she can make her children feel guilty. She will make it seem as if she is the martyr, but really it is a passive-aggressive attack camouflaged as other-directed care. The joke is not difficult to analyze, although the children may be in analysis for years.
So, we have our baseline with this joke. Funny? Meh, a bit. A legit joke. Now, let’s work on it, increasing and decreasing the offensive content and see if it gets more or less funny.
Start by making it less offensive. Clearly, the element of the content that contains the moral concern is the use of the stereotype of the Jewish mother. We can change that in two ways. Let’s start by stripping out the content of the stereotype.
(2) How many Jewish mothers does it take to change a light bulb? The same number it would take mothers of any other ethnicity, creed, or religious background.
Did that increase or decrease the funniness? Clearly, decrease. In fact, now it isn’t even a joke. What made (1) a joke is that it gave a response to an ordinary question in a way that is unusual, yet makes sense in terms of a specific element in the set up. In other words, when you get asked how many of something, we usually answer with a number. When we are asked how many people it takes to do a simple task, the expected answer is one. (1) is a joke because it gives an answer that is simultaneously unexpected and expected. In (2), by removing the stereotype, we also removed the expected part. We no longer have the contrast that makes (1) a joke at all.
So, let’s try to decrease the immoral content of (1) while maintaining its status as a joke. We need to neutralize the stereotype, but keep the mechanism in place that gives the punchline the expected/unexpected dichotomy. We can do this by replacing the stereotype with the personality trait the stereotype employs. There are people who are both mothers and passive-aggressive. Some are Jewish, some are not. What was operative in the joke was the association of passive-aggressiveness with Jewish mothers, so we can simply replace the stereotype in the set up with the operative content of the stereotype. That should give us a morally less objectionable version that is still a joke.
(3) How many passive-aggressive people does it take to change a light bulb? None. It’s fine. I’ll just sit here in the dark. Don’t worry about me. You should be happy, that all I care about.
So, now we have a joke that plays on the same mechanism, but without the stereotype. More or less funny? Again, less funny. It is still a joke. In important ways, it is still the same joke. Yet, it does not seem to be as funny.
The comic immoralist at this point claims victory. “See,” the immoralist will argue, “the stereotype did comedic work. The immoral element is responsible for the funniness.” At first glance, this seems to be correct. But if it is, then we ought to see a commensurate change when we ramp up the immoral content, instead of down.
So, let’s do that. Let’s dial up the immorality of the joke.
(4) How many Jewish mothers does it take to change a light bulb? It wouldn’t take any if Hitler had succeeded.
Whoa. O.k., that elevated quickly. Is it a joke? Yes, it plays on the same unexpected/expected type of mechanism. Structurally, it is a joke. But certainly not as good of a joke as (1).
It may have gotten a shock laugh. We laugh for a whole range of reasons. When we suffer cognitive overload, a common reaction is laughter. If you laughed at (4), it does not mean you harbor anti-Semitic, pro-Nazi sympathies. (It also doesn’t mean you don’t – I’m watching you.) It was an unexpected punchline, so creates a common sort of incongruity.
But our question is aesthetic value. Compare (1) and (4). Which is the better joke? Which is the more artistically successful humorous utterance? For a range of reasons we will discuss below, the answer is (8). See what I did there? Unexpected/expected. The answer, of course, is (1).
Let’s dial the increase back some. Let’s increase the immoral content, but not quite so much.
(5) How many Jewish mothers does it take to change a light bulb? None. Jews are too weak to do it themselves and too cheap to hire someone else to do it for them.
Twice the antisemitism. Twice the funny? Twice as good of a joke? No. But maybe that changed the joke to a different joke and that accounts for it. Let’s ratchet up the ethical problem while maintaining the same stereotypical element.
(6) How many Jewish mothers does it take to change a light bulb? None. I’ll just sit here in the dark thinking of how much I wish you had become a doctor. A real doctor, not a philosophy doctor. You remember Mildred Himmelfarb, down at the club? Her son is a real doctor. A cardiologist. He’s the one with the skinny wife with the fake blonde hair and the BMW. You met them at Sophie’s bat mitzvah last October. They were two tables over. She was the one with the red dress…like that was an appropriate dress with children in the room. So, anyway, I was playing mahjong with Mildred and with Rachel and Susan. Susan’s son David just got out of the hospital. He’s fine…baruch hashem. Did I tell you he was in the hospital? Gall stone. He’s young for a gall stone, but what do I know? Anyway, so Mildred says to Rachel that her son, the cardiologist, just traded in his BMW for a 178 Mercedes. A Mercedes? After what they did during the war. Oy. I could have plotzed. But did I say anything? Of course, not. I’m never one to say anything. But what could I say? My son is a philosophy doctor, not a real doctor, driving around in that old Toyota that’s twenty years old and falling apart. It makes me nervous to have you driving that thing. Like a tin can. If you get into an accident. It keeps me up nights worrying that you’ll get in an accident with that old car of yours.
So, we have an even more stereotypical treatment. Again, let’s compare the artistic quality of (1) and (6). For a little while, (6) was rolling. It was funny. But it got to be too much. In comic terms, extending a joke to get more laughs off a single punchline is called “milking” a joke. If you try to get to much milk, it runs dry.
So, now we have increased the immoral content of (1) and whether we dialed it up a lot or a little, the joke still becomes lower quality. The comic moralist seems to feel vindicated. By making the joke more immoral, you did not increase the funniness. So, the comic immoralist must be wrong.
What these cases show is that both the comic moralist and the comic immoralist are wrong. Tampering with the joke in either direction undermines the artistic quality. The moral content of the joke is not important except in as far as it creates the expectations in the mind of the listener that can then be manipulated by the punchline. But that expectation is completely independent of the moral content of the joke.
None of this, of course, is to say that we cannot judge the artistic quality of a joke. We can – indeed, we have been. The question is on what basis? Just like with Michelangelo’s sculptures, it is based on the artistry of the form.
All jokes have a form, that is, an internal structure that makes it a joke. There are a range of these structures. One joke form is exaggeration.
(7) When I was a kid I was so skinny that when the doctor wanted x-rays, he just held me up in front of the window.
Another joke form is the false contrast. In this form, you take two things that are different and show that they have something unexpected in common. Possibly the greatest joke of this form comes from the comedian Gallagher:
(8) Why do we drive on a parkway and park on a driveway?
On a car’s gear shift, “park” makes the car stop and “drive” makes the car go. These are opposites. Yet, when we add the same suffix to each, the suffix “way,” it turns the gears into a place where we do the opposite of that particular gear. On a driveway we stop, not drive. On a parkway we go, not park. If just half of this joke were true, it would be an amazingly strong joke, but having it work in both directions makes it truly epic.
This joke possesses the virtues of “sharpness” and “tightness.” A false contrast joke is “sharp” if the two things contrasted are closely related and truly opposites of each other. “Park” and “drive” are both. A joke is “tight” if it is worded very economically. Timing is crucial in humor and a joke is loosely constructed if there is a lot of extra, unnecessary linguistic muddling around. A tight joke is worded so crisply that it pops. This joke is a model of both sharpness and tightness.
Now, compare (8) to the following false contrast joke from Demetri Martin.
(9) I love the living room. The name is so positive. Whenever I go into it, I feel so alive. “What are you doing in there?” “I’m living, dude; c’mon in here and stop dining.”
In delivering the joke, Martin stresses the first syllable in “dining,” creating the false contrast between living and dying. Alive and dead are closely-related and opposites, so it is sharp, but Martin has to do some work to pull out the contrast (getting “dying” from “dining”…eh….) making it not as sharp as (8). It is also not nearly as tight. The joke is forced to wander a bit to get to its ultimate punchline. (9) is a fine joke, but it is not of the quality of (8).
Notice how we judge the quality of the joke – purely on form. This goes as well for off-color jokes. Consider the following false contrast joke:
(10) Knock, knock.
Who’s there?
Fornication.
Fornication, who?
For an occasion like this, black tie is optional.
The false contrast here is sexual/non-sexual. It is a clean, dirty joke. The set up leads you to think it is going to be a dirty joke because the set up explicitly references a term related to sexuality, but it turns out not to be. (10) is a good joke, but it is good because it works structurally. That part of the contrast may be morally suspect is irrelevant in terms of the quality of the joke.
And that is the point. The content of the joke is irrelevant to the quality of the joke. The content of the joke only functions to allow the form to work. 1 The joke needs for the listener to think one thing and then realize another. The joke is about the switch, not the thing that causes the switch. Both the comic moralist and the comic immoralist require the content to do the humorous work that is actually done completely by the form. But it doesn’t. The content does not amplify or decrease the effectiveness. The content, immoral or otherwise, is irrelevant to the artistic quality of the joke. Hence, comic amoralism, the view that unethical content makes no difference to the ultimate funniness of the joke must be the case.
footnotes
1 There is one type of joke that does depend solely on the content, an inside joke. An inside joke is when someone makes a reference that she knows only a small group will understand. Inside jokes lack structure, depending entirely on exclusive group membership to do the humorous work. As such, they lay outside the scope of this argument.
Bibliography
Aristotle. Physics. Lincoln: University of Nebraska Press, 1972.