Consciousness, Literature and the Arts

Archive

Volume 2 Number 3, December 2001

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Humor, Sublimity and Incongruity

 By

John Marmysz

Introduction

            In Critique of Judgment, Immanuel Kant classifies laughter as a sub-species of the beautiful.  Yet despite this classification, he goes on to locate the pleasure of laughter not in a harmony of the faculties, but in a “bodily quickening” that promotes health by “...the furtherance of the vital processes of the body.”[i] Kant’s account of laughter here actually recalls Edmund Burke’s theory of the sublime.

            In fact, when we look closely at the mechanism involved in humorous laughter, we see that far from exhibiting the natural ease found in the contemplation of beautiful objects, it involves a jarring confrontation with incongruities.  Humorous laughter is made possible by a disposition to interpret these incongruities in a pleasurable manner.  By integrating unexpected conflicts into the understanding in accordance with the pleasure principle, the humorist transforms a potentially distasteful circumstance into an occasion for laughter.

            Humorous laughter, then, is related to the sublime experience in that it involves the transformation of a potentially unpleasant perception into a pleasurable experience.  However, whereas sublimity is associated with feelings of awe and respect, humorous laughter is associated with feelings of superiority and contempt.  This difference is a result of the fact that sublimity is an affective response involving an individual’s perception of vulnerability while humorous laughter is a response involving perceived invulnerability.

The Beautiful, the Sublime and Humorous Laughter

            The aesthetic categories of the “beautiful” and the “sublime” have long been contrasted with one another.  On the one hand, beautiful objects produce in humans a kind of pleasure that we associate with feelings of liking or love.  It seems natural that humans should feel compelled to linger on such objects of contemplation.  The easy pleasure that beauty produces in us is its own justification.  On the other hand, sublime objects are associated with feelings of fear, danger and terror, and so the pleasure that we take in their contemplation seems much more mysterious.  Why is it that humans feel compelled to linger in reflection on objects of overwhelming power and terrifying destructive force?  What possible pleasure can we take from these experiences?

            In answering these last two questions, theorists such as Burke and Kant have provided us with accounts that help to make sense of the sublime and its relation to the beautiful.  For Burke, beautiful objects are those things which, in our perception of them, have “a natural tendency to relax the fibres,” ultimately “relaxing the solids of the whole system.”[ii]  This physical state of the body produces a feeling of love in us, and we judge objects capable of affecting us in this way “beautiful.”  Smoothness, sweetness and gentle variation are the sorts of qualities capable of bringing about this effect.

            Sublime pleasure, while also rooted in humankind’s physiological constitution, is associated with a feeling of terror rather than love.  For Burke, sublime experiences are the result of moderated encounters with vast, dark and overwhelming objects.  These qualities produce painful vibrations in the “finer organs” of the body which, like the “grosser organs,” require stimulation and exercise in order to remain healthy.  When not carried to violence or to the destruction of the body, these vibrations produce delight and health as they “...clear the parts...of a dangerous and troublesome incumbrance...”[iii]  Objects of sublime delight serve to stimulate our senses, thereby alleviating the unhealthy physiological consequences of inactivity.

            Kant’s treatment of the beautiful and the sublime links beauty to a feeling of pleasure and the sublime to a feeling of respect.  In the case of the beautiful, the presentation of an object’s form to our mind initiates an interplay between the imagination and the understanding.  The mind attempts to understand the perceived form in nature by way of imagining its purpose and aim, thereby becoming actively involved in a search for its meaning.  However, nature’s patterns have no intrinsic purpose or meaning.  It is the mind itself that imparts a kind of “subjective purposiveness” to nature, and in the process of so doing, the mind comes to recognize its own ability to endow with purpose that which is without any intrinsic purpose of its own.  This recognition is associated with pleasure, claims Kant, because it provides an opportunity for the faculties of imagination and understanding to resonate with one another, creating an inner feeling of harmony and congruity. A natural object that motivates the mind to engage in this sort of activity is judged to be beautiful, but it is so only insofar as it provides a motivation for the human mind to create within itself a state of order and consonance.  Ultimately, the beautiful is “the facilitated play of the two mental powers (imagination and understanding) quickened by their reciprocal harmony.”[iv]  As such, it is really not the object in nature that is beautiful at all, but rather the harmony between the faculties of imagination and understanding, triggered by the form of an object and associated with a feeling of pleasure.

            Whereas the beautiful involves a positive and harmonious sort of pleasure, the sublime involves a negative and incongruous sort of pleasure.  The sublime is a feeling of “liking” for that which is “absolutely large.”  The absolutely large is that “beyond which no larger is subjectively possible.”[v]  Though we can’t actually perceive or imagine any particular thing that is absolutely large, we can, through the powers of our reason, conceive of such an idea.  Though this superlative exists nowhere in the world of our phenomenal experience, we still have a notion of what the concept means.  The experience of the sublime, thus, entails thinking beyond the world of phenomena.  It involves an attempted encounter with the supersensible realm of the “Ding an Sich.”  The sublime feeling is the feeling of awe and respect that is experienced when we attempt to touch the absolute reality of the noumenal realm.

            According to Kant, the sublime experience often is triggered by encounters with overwhelmingly large physical objects found in nature.  Whereas beautiful feelings are triggered by our encounter with the forms of nature, sublime feelings are characteristic of our encounter with the apparent formlessness of those very large natural objects that go beyond our powers of perception and imagination.  By way of illustration, Kant gives examples of both the “mathematical” and the “dynamical” sublime.  The former may occur when our perceptual and imaginative faculties are overwhelmed by the magnitude of certain expansive and vast features of natural phenomena.  Kant mentions the Milky Way and the seemingly infinite number of stars and solar systems that it contains as spurring a sense of the mathematical sublime.[vi]  When we think of the Milky Way as a whole, we, in a sense, succeed in encompassing the vastness and the infinite number of heavenly bodies that it actually contains into our thought.  Even though we can’t actually perceive or even imagine each and every one of these bodies all at once, we can think them as “an immense whole,”[vii] thereby demonstrating the sublime power of our own minds.  The dynamical sublime, on the other hand, is often experienced when we encounter an object, the natural power of which overwhelms us and causes us to initially experience a sense of our own puniness.  If we are able to maintain a physically safe distance between ourselves and that object, we may resist its potential for destruction and find within ourselves a sense of “courage” that allows us to feel as though “we could be a match for nature’s seeming omnipotence.”[viii]  The sorts of physical objects that Kant mentions as being associated with the dynamically sublime include “...bold, overhanging and, as it were, threatening rocks, thunderclouds piling up in the sky and moving about accompanied by lightening and thunderclaps, volcanoes with all their destructive power, hurricanes with all the devastation they leave behind, the boundless ocean heaved up, the high waterfall of a mighty river, and so on.”[ix]  The power and potential for destruction that these things possess is, strictly speaking, unimaginable and beyond our capacity for perception.  Yet in our sublime enjoyment of them we experience a feeling of pleasure deriving from an awareness of our own psychological ability to transcend nature’s potentially destructive might.  As with the beautiful, it is not the objects of nature that are sublime. Rather sublimity exists in the human mind as a result of its ability to confront and impose meaning upon the objects of nature.

            The sublime feeling is rather paradoxical in that while it is a kind of pleasure, it is also associated with a displeasurable sense of being overpowered and with a feeling of discomfort and uneasiness.  This feeling is triggered by an unsettling realization that there exists something beyond the apprehension of our perceptual and imaginative powers.  These powers must forever remain foiled in any attempt to apprehend the absolutely large.  Only by an appeal to the powers of reason can some sort of unifying principle be discovered that is able to comprehend such a supersensible target all at once, and reason provides this in terms of the “infinite.”  Infinity is not a thing in nature, according to Kant, but rather a mental concept that allows us to encapsulate and unify the formlessness of that which would otherwise remain incomprehensible.  Though the “absolutely large” resists being encompassed by imagination or perception, with the concept of “infinity,” our minds are able to comprehend it, and in a sense to dominate it.  A feeling of sublimity is the result of the discovery of this ability in ourselves.  Our liking of the sublime is a kind of respect, initially triggered by our displeasure over the inadequacy of our imagination and perception, but ultimately culminating in the triumph over nature by way of reason.  Our reason frees us from nature and allows us to experience the feelings of respect which are appropriate to us as creatures governed by the “ought” of moral law, rather than the fear of creatures governed by the “is” of nature.  “Hence sublimity is contained not in any thing of nature, but only in our mind, insofar as we can become conscious of our superiority to nature within us, and thereby also to nature outside us...”[x]

            Is the pleasure of laughter correctly classified as beautiful or sublime?  Burke never mentions laughter in his Philosophical Enquiry, but Kant offers an unambiguous answer to this question.  According to Kant, laughter begins in the free “play of thought” rather than in a confrontation with “the absolutely large,” and for this reason he treats laughter as a subspecies of the beautiful rather than of the sublime.  Kant claims that when we laugh at a jest, our understanding forms an expectation which it eventually finds mistaken, and as this expectation disappears into nothing, a “slackening” of the mind occurs which is transmitted to the bodily organs and experienced as laughter.  This bodily quickening furthers our feeling of health and is the true source of the pleasure in laughter. Jokes, for instance, contain conceptual absurdities and incongruities that painfully frustrate our reason, yet the tension and unease that is produced in us as a result finds an outlet through the bodily motions of laughter.  It feels good to laugh, claims Kant, because in laughter we experience a sort of catharsis that purges the painful unease of our encounter with incongruity.

            Kant claims that beautiful pleasure originates in the mind’s play of the faculties; specifically in a harmony between the imagination and the understanding.  But the pleasure of laughter, as Kant characterizes it, hardly sounds like it fits this bill.  According to Kant, laughing pleasure is “merely bodily, even though it is aroused by ideas of the mind...and consists [merely] in the feeling of health that is produced by an intestinal agitation corresponding to such play.  It is not our judging of the harmony we find in tones or in flashes of wit...but the furtherance of the vital processes in the body, the affect that agitates the intestines and the diaphragm, in a word the feeling of health...which constitutes the gratification.”[xi]  So, rather than in the calm and harmonious contemplation of “subjective purposiveness,” Kant finds the root of laughing pleasure in a confrontation with incongruity that in turn spurs the furtherance of health through bodily agitation.  His own characterization of laughter here seems to conform more closely with the Burkean Sublime than it does with the Kantian Beautiful.

            In noticing this similarity between Kant’s characterization of laughter and the Burkean Sublime, attention is also at the same time drawn to a glaring difference between the two experiences.  Whereas sublime feelings have mixed in with them elements of respect and awe, these elements are totally absent from laughing situations.  In fact, for something to be laughable, it seems as though it must in some sense be contemptible and low.  According to Aristotle we laugh at “the Ridiculous,” and “the aim of Comedy is to exhibit men as worse...than those of the present day.”[xii]  But this is certainly not the way that the sublime works.

            Having shown that there is a problem with the easy categorization of laughter as either beautiful or sublime, it will now be necessary to look at the processes involved in laughter in a bit more detail and to draw some distinctions between differing varieties of “laughing situations.”  This will allow us to clarify the mechanisms involved in humorous laughter and help to discern its relationship to beauty and sublimity with more precision.

Jokes, Comedy and Humor

            One of the problems with Kant’s theory of laughter and humor is that it seems incapable of explaining the sort of humorous amusement that we feel when we don’t laugh.  Laughter does not accompany all, or even most, of our amused feelings.  Often times we encounter situations that we find amusing without so much as cracking a smile.  The pleasure that we experience in these cases is completely separate from any sort of bodily spasms or movements.  We just quietly enjoy the feeling that is provoked in us by the situation that we are focused upon.  Kant surely recognized that this was the case, but he gives scant attention to this simple counterexample.  He persists in claiming that the intellectual capacity for “whimsicality” is “closely akin to the gratification derived from laughter”[xiii] and leaves it at that.  Just how it is that a purely intellectual pleasure is related to bodily pleasure remains mysterious and unexplained.

            In fact, laughter itself is merely a sound that humans produce under a wide variety of conditions and so it is not as interesting as the processes underlying its production.  The philosophy of laughter and humor is not so much concerned with “laughter” as with “laughter about something.”[xiv]  Thus far I have been following Kant and using the term “laughter” in order to cover a whole range of experiences that might better be separated from one another.  Therefore I shall now proceed to articulate a distinction between “jokes,” “comedy” and “humor” that will better equip us to understand a deep point of contact between the processes underlying both humor and sublimity.

(1) Jokes:

            Joking situations include those circumstances in which a story or narrative is intentionally constructed in order to evoke laughter.  Jokes have been discussed at length by Freud, and at the level of technique, Freud’s theory of jokes is almost indistinguishable from Kant’s.  When following a story or narrative, our minds anticipate an outcome by picking up on the clues embedded in the story by the story teller.  A joke, however, is structured so as to subvert and misdirect our expectations by utilizing various methods of ambiguity.  In a joke, there is more than one possible outcome that would sensibly complete the story, and the jokester purposely misdirects listeners towards the wrong conclusion until the very last instant.  This deception by the jokester encourages the listener’s understanding to form a false expectation which, with the delivery of the punch-line, disappears “into nothing” in Kant’s terminology, or is “laughed off” in Freud’s.  For Kant, laughter results when the mind, vacillating back and forth between the punch-line and its lost expectation, communicates this movement to the body.  For Freud, it results when the “psychic energy” originally marshaled for one purpose is found to be unnecessary, and so is discharged in laughter.

            Consider the following joke:

When the unfaithful artist heard his wife coming up the stairs, he said to his lover, “Quick!  Take off your clothes!”[xv]

Here the subverted expectation is that an unfaithful man normally tries to escape his wife’s suspicion and would certainly avoid being caught in the same room as a nude woman.  As the joke begins, we anticipate that the man will try to find some manner of concealing his affair, but our initial expectation concerning how he will do so disappears “into nothing” when we realize that for a certain kind of artist, being in a room alone with a nude woman is part of the profession and so may be less suspicious than being alone with a fully clothed woman.

            Kant emphasizes that in order for a joke to be funny, the expectation of the listener must be transformed into nothing and “not into the positive opposite of an expected object, for that is always something and may frequently grieve us.”[xvi]  If the above joke was reformulated as follows:

When the unfaithful artist heard his wife coming up the stairs he said to his lover, “Kiss me now so that my wife will see!”

the joke would not make us laugh.  Simply contradicting the listener’s expectations brings discomfort rather than pleasure.  In a funny joke, though our expectations may be misdirected, our more general assumptions about the world are validated.  The first formulation of the joke is funny because it plays off of our common belief that unfaithful husbands generally try to avoid detection.  The second formulation is not funny because it simply contradicts that assumption.  Part of the pleasure of jokes derives from the mind’s ability to integrate unexpected possibilities into the understanding.  When we laugh at a joke, we do so because we recognize that an unanticipated outcome sensibly completes a story without contradicting our general assumptions about what the world is like.  We delight in the discovery of new possibilities without being threatened by the dangers of anomie, normlessness and chaos.

            I mentioned earlier that at the level of technique Kant and Freud’s theories of jokes are very similar.  There is, however, a distinction drawn by Freud but neglected by Kant that may help to explain why Kant was lured into classifying laughter as a sub-species of the beautiful.  Freud distinguishes between “innocent” and “tendentious” jokes.  Tendentious jokes are those that give vent to aggressive or sexual drives, and their main purpose is to circumvent the psychological blockages standing in the way of the free expression of life and death instincts.  Innocent jokes, on the other hand, serve no such purpose.  They “begin as play, in order to derive pleasure from the free use of words and thoughts.”[xvii]  It is innocent jokes, thus, which do seem to fit neatly into Kant’s category of the beautiful.  Tendentious jokes, being characterized by the struggle to overcome the repression of hidden drives, seem not so beautiful.  This latter form of joke has something of the terrifying in it, giving vent to sublimated urges which are primitive and potentially overwhelming.  In the controlled context of joking, however, these sublimated urges are conquered and mastered.  Through the ingenuity of the jokester, the power of the Id is harnessed to turn the wheels of laughter.

(2)  Comedy:

            Whereas jokes are constructed, comedy is found in the world.  The most common species of comedy is the “naive.”  Naiveté is the contrary of joking insofar as no situations involving naiveté involve deception.  The naive individual fails to disguise innocent intentions, and we laugh for this very reason.  Most of us normally feel compelled to veil our true desires and wants behind a tapestry of social convention, and so our interactions with one another are often mediated by the expectation that we will have to second-guess the true intentions of others.  However, when we encounter the naive person, this expectation, to use Kant’s terms, “disappears into nothing.”  Naiveté consists in “the eruption of the sincerity that originally was natural to humanity and which is opposed to the art of dissimulation that has become our second nature.”[xviii]

            Kant points out that a spectator, in finding someone naive, reveals possession of a set of expectations not shared by the object of laughter.  According to Freud, when a situation is seen as comic, it appears to the spectator that the people involved in the comedy overcome their own inhibitions without any effort.  This is, of course, because the inhibitions in question are not present in them.  At some level the spectator must indeed believe this, otherwise the comedic behavior would appear “impudent.”  But it is this power to judge someone comic rather than impudent that the pleasure of comedy relies upon.  “The discovery that one has it in one’s power to make someone comic opens the way to an un-dreamt-of yield of comic pleasure...”[xix]  To view a situation as comic is, in this sense, not only to discover the ability within one’s self to interpret a situation in more than one way, but to opt for the more pleasurable interpretation.

            Consider the following scenario:

A child is in attendance at a party thrown by his parents.  All of the guests are marveling at the delicious cake that the hostess has served for dessert.  One guests asks for the recipe, and the hostess simply smiles and nods.  The child, however, blurts out, “But mommy, you didn’t bake that cake yourself!  You bought it at the store!”

            Our immediate reaction is to see the comedy in this situation.  The child appears naively comic because he is inappropriately honest.  We laugh at him because we assume that there is no malicious intent in his comment, only an unreflective adherence to the principle of honesty.  If, however, an adult had made the same comment, we might not find the situation so comic.  Instead we would probably assume that some sort of underlying resentment against the hostess was being expressed.  The point remains that regardless of what is in fact motivating certain behaviors, the comic dimension of those behaviors is dependent upon how we as spectators interpret the scenarios.  If we think the worst of a person’s motivation, we will not find comedy.  If, on the other hand, we assume no malicious intent, but attribute only naiveté to the actor, we may discover comic pleasure.

(3)  Humor:

            The temper that allows humans to make jokes and find comedy in the world is called “humor” or a “whimsical manner.”  For both Freud and Kant, humor is characterized as a talent or ability that enables a human being to interpret the world in a manner different from what others might expect.  A person with a humorous manner sees the world differently from those who do not possess such a manner and is able to find pleasure where others find only pain and displeasure.

            A perfect example of the operation of humor involves the story of a condemned man who, upon approaching the gallows says, “Well, this is a good beginning to the week!”[xx]  The terrifying situation of facing impending death is normally accompanied by feelings of terror and fear.  The attitude of the condemned man, however, denies those feelings, or rather redirects them, and instead makes a joke, thereby extracting pleasure from what would otherwise be a painful situation.  The humorist is uniquely capable of extracting pleasure from a painful world by interpreting circumstances in a different manner from the way most people would naturally interpret them.  In so doing, such an individual may appear comic and bring amusement to others.

            Freud thinks of the humorous attitude as a defensive mechanism, and in fact as “the highest of the defensive processes.”[xxi]  In displacing the psychic energy naturally summoned for one affect into the service of another, humor allows us to guard against depression and despair in the face of the necessities of nature.  Humor empowers us to resist what reality tells us it is hopeless to resist against.  This mighty task is not always accompanied by laughter, however.  Whereas the measure of the effectiveness of jokes and comedy might be found in the amount of laughter they produce, the pleasure in humor is more subtle and sustained.  This is because the possession of a humorous attitude, rather than giving one enjoyment ready-made, instead only allows one to fashion one’s own pleasures from the raw materials of the world.  Because of the extra mental effort and work that is involved in constructing a piece of humor, as opposed to simply finding it in comedy or hearing it in a joke, the gratification that comes to the humorist is more moderate, less explosive, yet is also accompanied by the superior feeling of a job well done.  According to Freud, a humorist taps the energy that would naturally be directed towards feeling a certain emotion and instead redirects and uses that energy in order to manufacture an alternative interpretation of the world’s phenomena.  This, he claims, is why the experiences involved in telling a joke and hearing one are so different.  The explosive, surprised laughter of an audience is inaccessible to the joke teller.  Instead, the humorist feels a more sustained and superior sense of satisfaction, competency and command deriving from the clever and creative manipulation of reality’s raw materials.

            A humorous attitude elevates a human being above the dangers of the world.  In the humorist, Freud claims we find an ego that forsakes the “reality principle” in favor of the “pleasure principle,” and in so doing approximates the processes involved in psychopathology.  Humor refuses to suffer in the face of adversity, but rather demands some sort of pleasure from the world.  It rebels against the natural order of things, liberating humans from the chains of nature.  Humor is subversive, and in making the world’s dangers small, it makes the humorist invincible.

            When jarring incongruities confront us with our inadequate and incomplete knowledge of the world, humor shows us that we can extract pleasure and enrichment from this situation.  Like sublimity, the experience of humor is often spurred by an encounter with incongruity.  All incongruities produce a certain degree of conflict and tension within us, but with the humorous attitude it becomes possible to experience that dissonance as amusing.  Humor allows us to confront incongruities and, instead of being overwhelmed by them, to understand them in an unusual and original fashion.  The creative ability to step outside of routine ways of thinking about things, to adopt new and unconventional perspectives, is part and parcel of the humorous attitude.  With it we are allowed the luxury of lingering upon seeming nonsense, yet we remain unsatisfied with leaving it at that.  Humor requires work, and in the confrontation with incongruity it undertakes the impossible task of making sense out of nonsense.

            Like sublimity, then, humor responds to the world’s overwhelming realities not by giving in, but by forcefully and creatively imposing a sort of pleasurable interpretation upon those realities.  It is the ability to understand the totality of an initially fearful and potentially dangerous situation in terms of pleasure rather than pain that characterizes both sublimity and humor.  In both instances it is the exercise of the mind’s powers that is the source of this pleasure.  Yet there still seems to be an incompatibility between humor and the sublime.  Humor finds pleasure in its refusal to take the world’s dangers seriously while sublime pleasure requires superlative seriousness.  In John Morreall’s theory of incongruity we find the hint of a possible explanation for this difference.

John Morreall’s Theory of Incongruity

            John Morreall offers a theory explaining why we react with fear to some kinds of incongruity and amusement to others.  He claims that when we encounter incongruities in the world, we have three natural, separate types of reactions.  The first is to experience negative emotions like fear, anger disgust and sadness.  The second is to experience puzzlement.  The third is to experience humorous amusement.  Because incongruity is an apparent deviation from “the way things are supposed to be,”[xxii] it is a sign that our knowledge of the world’s structure is deficient, and that consequently our ability to navigate through the environment may be in danger.  Living with certain kinds of unresolved incongruities is not conducive to survival.  Negative emotions and puzzlement are reactions that motivate us towards resolving such dangerous incongruities, while humorous amusement allows us to linger on those incongruities which are not immediately dangerous to us.

            Negative emotional reactions to incongruity impel us towards regaining control over our immediate circumstances.  For instance when we feel fear, our bodies undergo certain physiological changes that motivate us to run away from danger, fight it, cover our faces, etc.  All of these reactions serve to give us some control over what happens and allow us to avoid or to minimize injury. Negative emotions have a positive, practical function in that they motivate us towards regaining control over the world when it has slipped out of our command.

            Puzzlement is a reaction to incongruity that shares many similarities with negative emotional responses.  When we are puzzled by a situation, we experience a kind of tension and uneasiness.  However, unlike with negative emotions, when we are puzzled, it is our understanding of the world, and not the world itself, that we want to be different.  We have a desire to “assimilate reality” when we encounter puzzling, incongruous situations that don’t fit into our understanding of the world.  In this drive towards assimilation, we strive to increase our control by way of being able to anticipate and predict events.  We try to relate the unfamiliar to the already familiar, thereby increasing our understanding, knowledge and mastery of reality.

            Cases of negative emotional reaction and puzzlement, then, share three common qualities: (1) In both there is uneasiness about a situation.  (2) In both cases this uneasiness concerns a loss of control.  (3) Both reactions motivate action towards changing the situation.

            But there is a third reaction that we have to incongruity.  This Morreall calls “humorous amusement.”  Unlike the reactions discussed above, with humorous amusement there is no associated uneasiness, sense of lost control, or desire for active change.  Humorous amusement, rather, is accompanied by feelings of pleasure and the desire to prolong contact with incongruity.  Morreall suggests that an overemphasis on the analysis of joking situations has led many to the conclusion that the resolution of incongruity, as in a punch-line, is where humorous amusement lies.  He points out that, on the contrary, there are many instances where unresolved incongruity also leads to humorous amusement in certain jokes, cartoons, and real life.  How could there be pleasure in unresolved incongruity?

            The answer Morreall gives is that there is survival value in “our drive to seek variety in cognitive input.”[xxiii] This kind of variety encourages our curiosity about the world, resulting in an improved ability to adapt and survive.  Incongruous situations that do not produce negative emotions or puzzlement are occasions for humorous enjoyment because they are novel yet do not threaten our physical survival or our overall beliefs about the structure of the world.  Humorous enjoyment motivates us to linger in our contemplation of certain kinds of novel situations, stimulating our ability to deal with newness and preparing us for encounters with other types of threatening incongruity.

            This characterization is in harmony with everything we have observed about humor so far, and it also suggests a simple and plausible explanation of the difference between the sublime and humorous reactions.  Morreall’s theory tells us that negative emotional states serve to motivate humans towards action and thus to deal with dangerous incongruities in the environment.  If I open a door and find a King Cobra coiled and ready to strike, my reaction to this unexpected situation is to feel fear and run away.  My fear motivates me to act in such a manner that I can go on to live another day, and perhaps learn to be more cautious when I open doors in the future.

            But imagine a situation where I feel fear due to an incongruity between my own puniness and the threatening power of a tremendous thunderstorm.  My instinct may be to run away or to defend myself, but in this circumstance such  courses of action are useless.  I am helpless to defend myself and I can’t run away.  Nothing I do will allow me to gain control over this weather phenomenon, and so the only option I have is to wait out the storm.  In circumstances such as this, negative emotional reactions may make us wish that we could change the conditions, but the overwhelming nature of the situation makes such change impossible.

            Now, I have only a few options under these circumstances.  The first option is to allow my fear to develop to such an unbearable degree that I experience a  mental breakdown; a condition that leaves me helpless.  I might also faint and go unconscious, avoiding dealing with the fear altogether but also making myself vulnerable and unaware of opportunities for escape.  My final option is to somehow find pleasure in my confrontation with the feared situation.  The only way I can do this is to change my subjective response to the phenomenon in question, and so I must, in order to exercise this option, somehow harness my fear for the purposes of pleasure. 

            The sublime and the humorous experiences may commonly be the outcome of a struggle to find pleasure in circumstances of powerlessness where the only other psychological options are completely undesirable.  But the humorous response diverges from the sublime response insofar as with humor the individual actually comes to feel a sense of superiority over the phenomenon being confronted while with sublimity the individual retains a sense of the phenomenon’s superiority.  In the case of the thunderstorm, while it might be possible to experience a humorous response to this weather phenomenon, it is probably very uncommon because of the physically threatening nature of the storm.  While the humorist’s powers of reinterpretation are often times amazing, they do, after all, have their limits.  It is probably extremely unusual, when faced with the absolutely terrifying incongruity between the power of a thunderstorm and the fragility of the human body,  for an individual to gain the mental distance necessary in order to construct a humorous interpretation.

            It is far more likely that an individual in this situation will not be able to become completely distanced from the fear, terror and danger that is involved in this confrontation.  This being the case, it is probable that the sort of interpretation the individual will construct under these circumstances will contain remnants of these negative feelings.  In  the sublime experience, such feelings remain operative and while the individual is at one level forced to recognize the superior power of the thunderstorm, at another level, such an individual still aspires towards dominance over that phenomenon.

            In humor, psychological superiority is actually achieved while in sublimity it is merely aspired towards.  This, in sum, is the key difference between the experience of humor and the sublime.

Conclusion

            Both humor and the sublime are reactions to confrontations with incongruity.  Humorous amusement results when we confront incongruities that we are able to view as unthreatening.  Because these novelties are seen as unthreatening, lingering on them stimulates the mind and its “finer organs,” creating pleasure and promoting our ability to deal with other, perhaps more threatening, surprises that the world might spring on us in the future.  Sublime pleasure, on the other hand, results when we are forced to confront  threatening incongruities that we can do nothing about and that  we are unable to reinterpret in a humorous manner.  Normally, negative emotions motivate us to run away from or fight the objects of our fear.  But when confronted with objects of sublimity, we are completely overwhelmed and unable to take action to change our situation either by fleeing or making fun of the circumstance.  The only positive option in such situations is to reorient ourselves towards the world in accordance with an attitude of sublimity.  The experience of the sublime is, thus, the last means of extracting pleasure from a world that offers us only pain.

            This account of humorous and sublime incongruity explains why humor is associated with feelings of superiority and contempt while sublimity is associated with feelings of respect and awe.  Unthreatening incongruities, as found in jokes and comedy, make us feel superior and elevated because: (1) They pose no danger to our physical well being.  (2)  They pose no danger to our overall beliefs about the world.  (3)  Jokes with punch-lines give us the opportunity to exercise our powers of “reality assimilation” in facing unexpected possibilities.  (4)  Comedy gives us the opportunity to exercise our interpretive powers when we choose to view a situation as comic rather than impudent.  These four qualities give us a feeling of mightiness and invulnerability in the face of the world’s  surprises.

            Tremendously threatening incongruities, as found in the sublime experience, create feelings of respect and awe because:  (1)  They pose some threat to our physical well being or,  (2) they pose a threat to our beliefs about the world.  (3)  In threatening us with harm we are powerless to defend ourselves except through the exercise of our interpretive powers. (4)  In the exercise of our interpretive powers we discover, as Kant pointed out, that we are ultimately capable of extracting pleasure from nature’s overwhelming threat to our well being.

            None of these comments are intended to leave the reader with the impression that either humor or sublimity are passive reactions to the world’s stimuli.  Though we often use the language of passivity in order to characterize these reactions (e.g., “It struck me as humorous,”  “I found the experience sublime.”), both reactions in fact require a kind of talent for reinterpretation that involves a great deal of mental work.  While the pleasure we find in beauty is by comparison quite easy and almost automatic, the pleasure involved in humor and sublimity is far more labor intensive.  Humorous and sublime pleasures require that the individual actively search for ways to make incongruities unthreatening and to interpret them in a manner that produces enjoyment.  When individuals  engage their sense of humor or sublimity, they gain distance from the immediate and dangerous worries of reality by means of actively withdrawing their attention from the potential threat posed by a phenomenon.  With humor, the withdrawal is complete, while with sublimity it is only partial.  In both cases, however, mental effort is exerted allowing us to gain an appreciation for that which initially strikes us as disturbing.

            A sense of humor or of the sublime, then, may potentially be cultivated in much the same manner as any other skill.  With the right application of mental discipline and the appropriate investment of energy, the possibility to enjoy and experience these states of mind is open to everyone.