In preparing for my book chapter, I asked Jonathan Gottschall, who practices evolutionary literary criticism, if he knew of any scholar who has published on the theory of comedy from the evolutionary perspective. He passed the question on the Joseph Carroll who suggested the work of Robert Storey. My own book chapter on Toole's Confederacy does have a section on the theory of humor, and it does point toward evolutionary explanations for the existence of the human capacity for humor, but I did not cite Storey's work. I am perhaps remiss in that regard. So here I will analyze an article by Storey on the theory of comedy.
The article I will examine is: Storey, Robert. (1996). "Comedy, Its Theorists, and the Evolutionary Perspective." Criticism 38 (3): 407-441.
Robert Storey covers a wide swath of territory in this long article. Overall, I support Storey's basic argument; however, I take issues with some particulars. One major difference I infer is that I support David Sloan Wilson's theory of multilevel selection, and I don't think Storey would. I see the evolution of humor driven by its function as a low-cost social mechanism to promote group-level genetic selection. Storey's theory of comedy just differentiates between preservation of the individual and preservation of the genes within the individual. I think he sees the selection pressure that drove the evolution of humor to be similar to the one hypothesized by Hurley, Dennett, and Adams (see my blog post from July 1, 2018). So we have major differences in how we envisage the evolution of humor.
The details:
Storey begins by attempting to provide an evolutionary explanation for both smiling and laughter. He spends a fair amount of time arguing that smiling and laughing evolved from different and contrasting origins. But then he agrees with van Hooff that they both evolved into "nonagonistic signals" to help avert violence in small group social interactions (419). My own perspective is that they probably do not come from different origins, but even if they did, they are so tied now to the experience of humor, which evolves because of its social function, that it really doesn't matter.
Smiling in general signals from one person to others that the smiler is not a physical threat to the recipient of the smile, it is a signal of submission. When boxers and wrestlers have their pictures taken, they are told not to smile for the camera, as it is a sign of weakness. Laughter, as van Hooff and others have argued, evolved from the pant-hoots of primates who play in mock-aggression, where youngsters in the group practice their skills. The pant-hoot signals that this mock-aggression is not real aggression, and that the opponent should not interpret it as a real challenge for dominance which might be met by lethal violence. Storey sees this as a form of aggression, but I see it as again a form of submission, because there is no real challenge occurring.
Storey sees the common element in humorous situations to be "the presence of a masterable discrepancy or incongruity ..." (421). This is not a bad observation. For myself, I consider that there are two fundamental aspects of humor: a cognitive incongruity and a social or emotional tension. I also suspect that the cognitive derives from the social, as sketched below.
A cognitive incongruity can create emotional tension because, within a small group, there is usually a socially constructed unitary view of the world; that is, there is a right way to interpret things and a wrong way. (Michael Mulkay discusses this idea in On Humour, Blackwell, 1988.) The dominant individuals in the group usually set the rules for what counts as the right way to understand the world. So a cognitive incongruity potentially threatens the social order. So for me, the cognitive discrepancy and the social tension are tightly related.
Storey, by contrast, sees "the adaptive advantage of assimilating incongruities into diverse behavioral and cognitive systems" as driving the evolution of humor (421). This is similar to Hurley, Dennett, and Adams theory that humor evolved from our intelligent brain's need to do consistency checks on its set of committed beliefs. Hurley focuses on the single mind in isolation and sees the social as entirely secondary. Storey at least discusses both the humorous quality of social transgression and the cognitive incongruity of humor.
Again, within the theory of humor, Storey suggests that Hobbes was right that laughter signals a sudden glory of superiority, or in his case a pleasure at mastery. I prefer Hutcheson's rebuttal to Hobbes from 1726, where Hutcheson sketched out the first incongruity theory of humor.
Moving on to comedy, Storey sees the two nearly universal determinants of comedy being a) humor and b) the triumphant hero. He observes that you can have comedy with just one of these, but you need at least one, and most comedies have both. I have characterized comedy in a similar way, viewing the determinants as humor and a more-or-less happy ending. Again, one is usually present, but there is dark comedy without a happy ending and sentimental comedy without much mirth.
Storey then takes Northrop Frye's system of comic character types to put forward his own set of types, which may also be influenced by Apte. Frye had a) the imposter, b) the self-deprecator, c) the buffoon, and d) the churl. Storey enumerates a) the fool, b) the wit, c) the rogue, and d) the romantic hero (426). To Storey, they are not so much fixed roles as centers of gravity. Storey then spends time differentiating several types of fool and wit.
My own perspective is that these character roles each function to adjust the status hierarchy within the social group of the characters of the cast. For Frye's types, the imposter tries to claim too high a status, the self-deprecator purposely takes a lower status as a tactic, the buffoon is incapable of keeping any but a low status, and the churl transgresses the social rules of the group, trying to reject the group's hierarchy entirely. For Storey's types, again, the fool may have a status higher than deserved or cannot understand the social rules, the wit uses language to take down the status of others, the rogue dares to reject the social hierarchy, and the hero in the end achieves status, whether the hero is deserving of it or not.
Storey compares tragedy to comedy. For him, tragedy drives its hero to isolation while valuing affiliation; comedy drives its hero to union (happy ending) while valuing individuals. "In laughing at the fool, or with the wit, or (ambivalently) in complicity with the rogue's transgressions, we enjoy in comedy a release from the necessity of negotiating social compromise. Comedy may explicitly valorize that compromise, especially when it ends in promiscuous festivity, but implicitly the laughter of its audience serves the interests of the masterful individual alone" (431).
I disagree with this. Tragedy mourns the loss of someone who deserved high status but through fate or flaw does not achieve it. Comedy deals with status adjustment within the group and usually results in harmonious social relations in which the members in the end arrive at an appropriate social status. To my way of thinking, humor often deals with negotiating social compromise. The masterful individual is one who either, on the one hand, uses humor to bring about these changes or, on the other hand, understands the humor and therefore belongs to the subgroup that participates in the change.
Because of his views on tragedy versus comedy, Storey sees tragedy generating altruistic feelings and comedy generating selfish feelings of individual superiority to others. But in fact humor can be used as a corrective to gently modify behavior that breaks the groups norms, therefore altruistic. Self-deprecation can also be used to lessen envy toward oneself from other group members, building affiliation. So comedy can also generate altruistic feelings.
Storey sees a fundamental paradox or conflict between the harmonious ending of comedy and the aggressiveness and love of freedom implicit in laughter and humor. He sees the submission of the individual to family and genetic continuity as related to the smile; laughter is the realm of the free individual. So for him, the hero of a comedy is duped into accepting the smiling marriage which will curtail his prankster freedom (and for Storey, the hero is typically male). The independent young dandy is roped in and tied down by domestic expectations. "To be brief: romantic comedy serves ultimately the gene, not the phenotype that laughter preserves" (434).
I agree that the traditional Shakespearean comic ending, which features marriages all around, is a movement from immaturity toward responsibility, but the marriage also indicates enhanced status of the new couple within the group. If one of humor's chief functions is to readjust the social status within groups, we can see that that young upstart was undermining the false status of the blocking character, and he or she was striving toward his or her own stable status. (For a female version, watch the movie "What's up, doc?") A group does not always give the low-ranking members much freedom, so the rise in status caused by accepting responsibility may mean more freedom to influence the group's actions. So the genotypic tyranny of the harmonious romantic ending may in fact also represent more freedom. The traditional happy ending is an achievement of stable respect within the group which may include a partner and the social framework for a family.
That having been said, I agree with Storey that the romantic comedy tends toward harmony within the final social group. However, I think that the happy ending does not need to be limited to Harold Lloyd's panicked look as he weds the girl and loses his bachelorhood. It can be any return to harmony within a social group after a plot of social status conflict and any rise of a deserving member to a proper group status.
