The Mind's Sky: Human Intelligence in a Cosmic Context by Timothy Ferris

Author:Timothy Ferris [Ferris, Timothy]
Language: eng
Format: mobi, epub
Publisher: Random House Publishing Group
Published: 2009-12-15T16:00:00+00:00

But violence is a catalyst of wit, not its final product. A joke that arouses anger but then dispels it is very different from a cruel joke that leaves the anger unassuaged; as Cervantes said, “Jests which slap the face are not good jests.” A really good joke creates tension not merely to dispel it, but to reveal something to us as well. As Kant remarked, “Laughter is an affection arising from the sudden transformation of a strained expectation into nothing.” The expectation must be strained, or we would not be close enough to seeing through the paradigm to get the joke. The paradigm is transformed into nothing in the sense that it is exposed for what it is, a thin and tattered tissue hung between our tender sensibilities and the cold reality of an uncaring universe.

The chemistry of stress and revelation makes it possible for a profound insight to produce a laugh even if it’s not at all funny. I have often laughed out loud at first hearing a composer’s masterful turn of phrase in a symphony, or watching a superlative gymnast perform on the parallel bars, not because I found them incongruous but because I hadn’t previously imagined that such a thing could be done; the deed called attention to a ludicrous disparity between the splendor of the human performance and the poverty of my preconceptions about its limits. (Freud became interested in the psychology of wit after his friend and pupil Theodor Reik noticed that Freud’s students responded with a delighted laugh when the meaning of a dream was revealed to them.) This phenomenon is the mirror image of low comedy, in which the level of stress is high and that of insight low. Here stress is at a minimum, insight at a maximum. A great joke can cover the whole spectrum: Harold Lloyd dangling from the hands of a clock high above a city street can be laughed at anywhere from the low comedy perspective that he’s in danger to the high comedy perspective that he, like the rest of us, is a prisoner of time, and is doomed to die anyway.

Bergson to the contrary, the incongruity that sparks a laugh need not be purely intellectual. It can be mostly emotional. We laugh at dirty jokes because sex is a profoundly troubling subject, even if we learn nothing from the jokes except that we have company in our incomprehension. But we also disparage dirty jokes, as we do puns, because their intellectual content is usually so meager. The most rewarding jokes, again, are the most enlightening.

We take pleasure in laughter, then, both because we enjoy the release of the anxiety it provides, and (if the joke rises to any higher than a purely emotional level) because the brain delights in discovering incongruities between perception and reality. Schopenhauer came close to what I am trying to say when he identified humor as arising from the perceived distinction between abstract rational knowledge and the raw material of perception.

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