Mathematics and Humor: A Study of the Logic of Humor by Paulos John Allen

Author:Paulos, John Allen [Paulos, John Allen]
Language: eng
Format: mobi
Publisher: University of Chicago Press
Published: 2008-08-04T04:00:00+00:00

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Humor, Grammar, and Philosophy

Reversal or permutation of the grammar of a sentence often results in humor. I will call this sometimes tiresome type of humor grammatical (or combinatorial) humor for lack of a better term. It is generally not very deep. Language being the flexible and plastic tool it is, there are indefinitely many varieties of combinatorial humor. After a discussion of some of them (spoonerisms, puns, transformations, etc.), in which I leave unanswered the question why some people groan upon hearing a pun, I will turn to a deeper sort of humor. This latter type, misunderstandings deriving from the confusion of the logic of a given statement or situation for that of another, I will refer to as philosophical humor. It is probably the type the Austrian philosopher Ludwig Wittgenstein had in mind (1953, 1958) when he remarked that a serious work in philosophy could be written that consisted entirely of jokes. One “gets” the joke if and only if one understands the relevant philosophical point.

To start, let us consider the simplest combinatorial transformation, the spoonerism. A spoonerism occurs when the sounds of two or more words in a phrase or sentence are interchanged. Examples are “I’ve had tea many martoonis,” “Time wounds all heels,” and “tons of soil” (for “sons of toil”). The anthropologist G. B. Milner (1972), using notions of the famous linguist Saussure6 has considerably extended the notion of a spoonerism (as well as that of a pun). Thus an interchange of whole words is in a sense a generalized spoonerism. “A hangover: the wrath of grapes” and “alimony: bounty from the mutiny” are examples.

If we stretch things a bit, a relational reversal, the interchange of two objects or people standing in a certain relation to each other, may also count as a kind of generalized nonlinguistic spoonerism. Thus, for example, a greyhound dog with a bus tattooed on its side (fig. 17) is a relational reversal, as is a group of convicts in striped clothing patrolling a prison block in which all the prisoners are wearing business suits. An old joke cited by Freud is another good example. A marquis at the court of Louis XIV enters his wife’s bedroom and finds her in the arms of the bishop. He sees them, then walks calmly to the window and goes through the motions of blessing the people in the street. “What are you doing?” cries the perplexed wife. “Monseigneur is performing my function,” replies the marquis, “so I am performing his.” Relational reversal is of course a very common gambit in comedies, humorous newspaper columns, nightclub routines, and so forth.

Reversals of this kind are often humorous because they force us to perceive in quick succession the familiar relation and an unfamiliar (and therefore incongruous) one. This notion of a relational reversal leads naturally to Gestalt psychology, which stresses the holistic nature of perception. Situations, problems, sentences are perceived as whole figures, while their background is more or less screened out. Certain well-known illustrations show, however,

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