This blog is supposed to be about John Kennedy Toole's novel A Confederacy of Dunces (COD). However, I have been working on a parallel track on the theory and practice of evolutionary literary criticism (ELC), as is evidenced in my book chapter on the comic mechanisms in COD. This post is another installment in a series of posts reframing the ideas of Kenneth Burke within the theory of Evolutionary Literary Criticism. This series has little relation to COD per se. Thank you again for your patience, my two followers.
I have been using a book published in 1996 by C. Allen Carter for much of what I know about Burke's ideas. I hope his assessment fairly characterizes Burke's thought. After studying Carter, I discovered that his book has not been reviewed by any text indexed in the JSTOR database, which suggests that it made very little impact on the scholarly community. Either Burke does not interest scholars, or Carter's work does not. One fact that suggests that Carter might not have a complete perspective on Burke is that Barbara Foley described Burke as having two kinds of scapegoat, which Carter does not mention. Carter himself admits that some of the categories he ascribes to Burke (the religious dimension, for example) are not ones that Burke himself explicitly named. So this book is more Carter's synthesis than pure Burke. I will below refer to this synthetic body of thought as being from "Carter and Burke."
There will be several more entries in this series of blog posts regarding Burke, but for April Fool's Day, I thought I would discuss Carter and Burke's theory of humor. Burke has many categories of language. Carter infers from Burke's writings that there are two categories of language which he did not specifically label as such. One is religion and the other is humor.
Religion sets some things apart as having absolute dignity, the sacred and holy. Religion instills followers with the ability to take action for a cause by instilling commitment through persuasion. To Carter and Burke, humor is the opposite of religion, and specifically the opposite of commitment through persuasion. "Humor often fosters a sense of detachment, as several theorists of comedy have noted, that is very different from, even perhaps the opposite of, commitment through successful persuasion. Even the least cynical kinds of humor are hard to rally behind" (Carter 122).
While I agree that religion often focuses on holding up something as high status, I disagree with the view that humor discourages commitment. Carter and Burke's claim is that humor does not generate action in the world but acts as a critical stance toward action in the world. I will admit that commitment is the act of raising up a cause to high status within a group, a cause the group must follow, while humor lowers the status of group members or their ideas and weakens the status of its targets, making them not worthy of high dignity. It is a pulling down of some elements of a group rather than a postive programme of raising status. However, humor builds in-group belonging and prepares a group for the forward action of commitment by eliminating or ridiculing alternatives.
An example of "humor fostering action" is the work of Volodymyr Zelenskyy. In the comedy series "Servant of the People," which made him famous, the running joke is the plight of an honest man in the corrupt Ukrainian state. It mocks and ridicules the former president Yanukovych and his ostriches. When the show aired, the outrage which it encouraged translated into the action of the Ukrainian people: they actually elected Zelenskyy as their president. He has gone on to inspire them to willingly sacrifice their lives and property to fight an apparently unwinnable war. Critical stance indeed.
My own theory of humor has two fundamental parts, a social aspect and a cognitive incongruity aspect. Burke sees language as a symbol system that rests on the congruity between words and the things in the world to which they refer. In this framework, he sees humor coming from the incongruity that can occur between language and its references. This idea is part of Burke's belief that human cognition is mediated by language, which Steven Pinker debunks (see my earlier blog entries). To Carter and Burke, because our world is mediated by language, all humor passes through language. In the case of humor, Steve Martin demonstrated that you do not need language for humorous incongruity when he unzipped his fly and smoke came out.
Carter and Burke value commitments and do not want humor to discourage their formation, but they support using humor to pull us back from political absolutism. They also want comedy to be used charitably (Carter, 126). However, humor is a tool, and you cannot pick and choose when and how humor will be employed. That having been said, when a would-be authoritarian imposes absolutism, one of the first things to happen is the suppression of comedy.
Burke is a philosopher who universalizes things, and in humor as with other topics, he goes too far with his theories. As Carter says, "The largest incongruity of all is the mismatch between our expectation to live indefinitely--and our foreknowledge of death. All humor is based on some variation of this fundamental existential incongruity, and in every laugh is the rattle of this absurdity. Comedy is a defense mechanism of the spirit, the expression of a need to distance the self from death" (127). I say, give Carter and Burke an inch, and they take it more than a mile; they take it to the abyss. Most humor is not hanging over the abyss. Monty Python did end the movie "The Life of Brian" with the song, "Always look on the Bright Side of Life," which is an example of Burke's gallows humor; however, most humor does not point to death but to chickens crossing roads.
To bring this discussion back to evolutionary literary criticism, my theory of humor posits that humor is a non-violent social mechanism for managing status hierarchies. Comics such as Zelenskyy rally group support against those who place themselves high in the group when they do not deserve it. As such, it can function to further group selection, both as a challenge to group dominance and as a secondary support for policing free-loaders in favor of altruistic punishers. It can be an antidote to pathological entelechy or a weapon to disparage out-groups. Carter and Burke do not see that function, except in the extreme case of pulling us back from suicidally absolutist dominance.
Carter, C. Allen. Kenneth Burke and the Scapegoat Process. U. of Oklahoma Press, 1996.
