Cutting Room Floor Series, part 1, Carl Gustav Jung and Psychology

I have decided to start a new series I am calling "The Cutting Room Floor." The reason is because I am finishing up this book chapter on John Kennedy Toole, and there are things I wanted to put in my paper, but which just don't fit. They are slightly off-topic and the chapter is too long anyway, so I am cutting them. But I think that they are worth saying, so I will say them in this series.

Forward: Strange traffic patterns

BTW, I see that I now have two followers. Thanks to both of you.

From December 2018: The blog statistics have a strange trend: most of the traffic is now from an unknown country, and the operating system for the traffic is now ninety percent Linux. What's with that? Is it just an army of bots? Or do most people use Linux now routed through a VPN in Antarctica? Very strange.

From January 2019: The usage this month was concentrated on two days. Those two days had about 200 hits each. The rest of the month had about 30 hits. The two countries the traffic came from were the United Arab Emirates with 198 hits, and Spain at 193 hits. The site from which the most traffic was referred to my blog was a porn site. Most of the traffic is from a Linux platform. Again, very strange. But on to the real topic of this entry.

Cutting Room Floor Item Number One: The psychological validity of the theories of Carl Gustav Jung

In my book chapter, I have a brief discussion of Jung's essay on the trickster archetype. While reading the essay, I ran across a statement by Jung that to me signals that his system is completely bogus as science. I was going to put it in the footnote to my discussion, but it is just not worth the increase in word count. Here it is:

... Jung's work seems to be worthless as science (to say nothing of its racism), as Jung claims that conflict “is simply an expression of the polaristic structure of the psyche, which like any other energic system is dependent on the tension of opposites. That is why there are no general psychological propositions which could not just as well be reversed; indeed, their reversibility proves their validity” ("On the Psychology of the Trickster-Figure," 269). Yikes. To say that a proposition is proven valid only if its reverse is valid is crazy talk.

Jungian psychology is bogus. Full stop.

Best of John Kennedy Toole Scholarship #17: Simmons

I have been using this blog to explore the theory of humor; nevertheless, it is a blog about research on John Kennedy Toole and his novel A Confederacy of Dunces, so I thought I would pause to offer a post about the novel.

As I said in June 2013, I would like to offer an annotated bibliography, one citation at a time, of the best of the scholarship on Toole's Confederacy that is findable via MLA Bibliography (as opposed to obscure). Here is item number seventeen:

Citation: Simmons, Jonathan. "Ignatius Reilly and the Concept of the Grotesque in John Kennedy Toole's A Confederacy of Dunces." Mississippi Quarterly 43, no. 1 (1989): 33-43.

Annotation: This paper is, as the title indicates, a deep study of the concept of 'grotesque' in relation to Confederacy. Simmons explores the origins of the word grotesque, the Roman caves or grottos, which during the Renaissance were discovered to have images of bizarre and distorted figures. Simmons argues that the medieval era did not have a concept of the grotesque, because thinkers in that era saw the world as carefully ordered by God (36). Needless to say, this ignores examples of the medieval grotesque such as some of the characters in Chaucer’s writings (about which Toole himself was quite familiar, see my own Evidence of influences). Simmons then offers a stereotype of the Renaissance as favoring the grotesque (37). Finally, there is a discussion of Jonathan Swift and a comparison of some of Swift’s themes and images to those of Toole (38-42). This section is well done, and evidence from the Toole Papers back up the hypothesis that Toole knew Swift well. Simmons argues that the animal images of Ignatius point to him being part bear (41-2). While he analyzes those images well, Simmons ignores that they are largely generalized descriptions of a mammal which could apply to a dog just as much as a bear. Considering Ignatius has sexual longings for his deceased dog Rex, the tie to dogs is probably more plausible than the tie to bears. As long as one ignores the simplistic comparison of the Renaissance with the Medieval era, this is a good article.

Because I tend to gloss over the grotesque in this novel, this paper is a good counterweight to my own interests.

Theory of Humor Series, part 19, Gervais and Wilson and the Origins of Laughter

This series of blog posts began as an analysis of the comic quality of the novel A Confederacy of Dunces (Confederacy), by John Kennedy Toole. After about ten posts, I had only just laid out the theory of humor I am using to frame the analysis. In early 2018, I was invited to write a book chapter on Toole and Confederacy, so now I will only use this series of blog posts to more fully articulate that theory of humor.

I discuss here the following article:

Gervais, M. and D. S. Wilson (2005). The evolution and functions of laughter and humor: A synthetic approach. Quarterly Review of Biology, 80, 395-430.

I like this article and think it is important. Gervais and Wilson review extensive evidence for the evolution of laughter and humor, looking at physiological evidence, neurological evidence, and psychological evidence. While it is not the centerpiece of their paper, they include Wilson's "multilevel selection theory" and the observations that many of the evolutionary benefits of laughter and humor accrue to groups rather than individuals. While in general I agree with them, I think that they do not place enough weight on the social function of humor in adjusting group status hierarchies, which indicates an even larger group-level benefit. In their speculation about how laughter and humor evolved, they do not fully embrace the group-level selection pressure as the primary driving force. I would be willing to go that far.

Gervais and Wilson open their investigation with empirical evidence that laughter is an evolved instinct. Cross-cultural studies show the common feature eliciting Duchenne laughter is incongruity and unexpectedness. This laughter usually involves both a playful frame and a second interpretation of the event, which they call "an alternate type of intelligibility" (398). Here is a quote: "There is thus an intuitive family resemblance among the different proximate causes of Duchenne laughter, such that they can be characterized as sharing a single form or structure: a sudden unexpected change in events that is perceived to be at once not serious and in a social context—that is, nonserious social incongruity" (NSI) (399). NSI includes protohumor such as tickling, play, physical mishaps. This conclusion supports both the incongruity aspect and the social aspect of all humor.

I do not disagree with that view. In fact, the more I study the issue, the closer my own views move toward this conclusion. Back in February, 2018, the sound bite version of my theory of humor was "incongruity plus disparagement." Now, my theory is roughly "incongruity and social / emotional aspects often in a playful context, and the social is often disparagement. The emotions are often incongruous emotions; the motive for producing the humor is often a social function." Not exactly a sound bite. But it can be reduced to a true sound bite: "incongruity plus social." Or Gervais and Wilson's phrase "nonserious social incongruity."

The reason for my focus on disparagement is based on social psychology. The human social environment includes built-in but dynamic status hierarchies. A serious challenge to the status hierarchy can include violence and dehumanization and may cause a social group to split. The fact that most laughter is in a nonserious environment means that there is no direct and violent dominance struggle going on. A playful individual is usually one who is submissive. Because some humor can disparage its target to the point of terrorizing the target or inciting violence, I think that not all humor can be called nonserious, so I prefer my "incongruity plus social."

Gervais and Wilson offer a list of the many positive social functions of humor and laughter (404), including the reduction of in-group aggression, which I consider of huge group-level benefit. They note that laughter is a social lubricant, increasing in-group feelings, etc.

Gervais and Wilson discuss the contagious nature of laughter in relation to mirror neurons and the positive psychology of mitigating tension and building social bonds. They conclude, "Duchenne laughter is essentially a medium for emotional contagion operating through an intersubjective mirror system" (423). But they ignore that the content of much that is humorous has the effect of lowering social status.

They also discuss evolutionary psychology. The central question from this perspective is: why is it adaptive in the presence of NSI to elicit play from an individual? They bring in Wilson's multilevel selection theory. The social bonding benefits of laughter and play accrue to the group level. Laughter incurs low costs for promoting group beneficial behavior.

They offer hypotheses about the origins of laughter, suggesting that laughter developed before language. Reducing stress on the savannah, humor might have been an ersatz grooming activity. Dunbar hypothesized that language was an ersatz grooming behavior, but laughter fits the profile better than language. As the brain developed more sophistication, the positive emotion might become decontextualized from actual play and tickling.

Gervais and Wilson argue that there is a benefit to the stress relief of signaling that the group is in a safe situation. They see the status hierarchy functions of laughter coming late in human evolution. Joyous Duchenne laughter came first; it was then co-opted for hierarchy maintenance by non-Duchenne laughter (418). I disagree with them here. I believe that, for humans, one of the biggest dangers and sources of anxiety is being on the business end of the social hierarchy. So the status deflation of disparagement humor is a huge emotional relief. So humor whose social function is status lowering can be genuine, Duchenne laughter.

In short, I think this is an important paper for pulling together the many threads of evidence in the biological and psychological literature in order to analyze the evolution of laughter and humor. I think that they could have gone further with the group-level benefits, specifically the social function of adjusting status hierarchies, which should have been a major activity as humans evolved into an species capable of altruism due to group-level selection pressures. I think that group-level selection could be the primary driver of the evolution of humor from primitive pant-hoots of primates during mock aggression.

Theory of Humor Series, part 18, Rhetorical Event by David Wright review

This series of blog posts began as an analysis of the comic quality of the novel A Confederacy of Dunces (Confederacy), by John Kennedy Toole. After about ten posts, I had only just laid out the theory of humor I am using to frame the analysis. In early 2018, I was invited to write a book chapter on Toole and Confederacy, so now I will only use this series of blog posts to more fully articulate that theory of humor.

In preparing for this study, I discovered a Ph.D. thesis that had a chapter discussing exactly my topic, the humor in A Confederacy of Dunces. I do not want to spend much time in my own paper discussing this dissertation (or perhaps even mentioning it), so this blog will allow me the space to do so. The author and I take very different approaches to the problem. The citation to the thesis is:

Wright, David A. The Rhetorical Event of Modern Southern Humor: A Requisite Element in Discourse. Ph.D. diss., University of South Carolina, 2013.

To Dr. Wright:

Please do not worry that my criticism will hurt your reputation. In my online Bibliography of Obscure Toole Criticism, the text I had the lowest opinion of--Ron Bell's thesis on nihilism in Toole--gets the most clickthrough traffic. So I did Bell a favor by criticizing him. Perhaps my criticism will help your exposure, too.

Part I: Theory of Humor

In Wright's dissertation, he begins by reviewing major categories of theories of humor. But rather than selecting one, he declares that the variety of them cannot be resolved into a single, definitive theory of humor. He then says he will use his own rhetorical theory of humor, which he defines as picking and choosing among the categories and using whichever element he finds most useful for the task at hand (10). This untheory is a meta-version of some modern literary theories, which value texts which are unresolvable and transgressive and which violate boundaries of genre, power, and gender. Because Wright sees humor as being elusive and unresolvable to a single theory, the rhetorical untheory of humor is the solution.

To his credit, Wright's rhetorical theory of humor does put the social aspects of humor front and center. Humor does have a social function as a core aspect, and Wright's examination of performers and audiences and how they negotiate the meaning of comic acts is laudable. While I disagree with some of the details of his examination, this focus on the social really is better than the cognitive theory of humor put forward by Hurley, Dennett, and Adams. Better to have some social functions described than no social functions at all.

In surveying existing theories of humor, Wright describes four major categories: 1) incongruity theories, 2) superiority theories, 3) Freudian theories, and 4) cognitive theories. He claims one and four are different. To me, one and four are two parts of the same thing. As for Freud, Freud actually had two different and opposing theories of humor, but the one Wright discusses is a subset of the category of release theories of humor. The theory I use--that humor has two fundamental aspects, incongruity and a social function--can handle most of his categories.

Early in the dissertation, Wright claims that he will devote a chapter each to these four different categories as related to southern humor; however, the dissertation does not focus on them. Instead, it veers off into more of a rhetorical analysis of comic performance. If I had to guess, I would suspect that, when he read Linda Hutcheon's Irony's Edge for chapter two, he shifted the focus away from a catalog of examples of theories of humor and toward an analysis of the relationship between the humor producer and the audience.

For my purposes of defining humor, chapter two's attempt at studying the incongruity within southern humor is worth examining. Specifically, when Wright goes to apply his incongruity theory of humor, both of his examples also strongly feature disparagement, which is more appropriately handled by a theory of humor focused on humor's social function, such as a superiority theory of humor.

The first example of incongruity is the episode of The Beverly Hillbillies where Jethro Clampett is psychoanalyzed. Wright correctly studies the incongruity, but then off-handedly acknowledges that the episode is a put-down of "the pompous psychiatrist" (53), i.e. superiority. The second example is one where Barney Fife of The Andy Griffith Show complains about his status being diminished, but he does it in a way that further diminishes his status (55). While it does feature incongruity, it also features a social lowering, which fits a superiority theory of humor. Thus, in his chapter applying the incongruity theory of humor, Wright uses examples that have both incongruity and the social function of status lowering.

Chapter three studies the persona projected by stand-up comedians, southern comedians in particular. Chapter four examines the role of the audience in the comic performance, both as a passive body reacting to the rhetorical acts of the comedian and as the body passing judgment on those acts. Finally, chapter five studies Confederacy of Dunces in the context of the grotesque and its transgressive qualities.

Part II: Specifically about Confederacy of Dunces

When reading the chapter of the thesis on Confederacy, it struck me that Wright did not understand the book at all. In that sense, Ignatius Reilly has scored a triumph: he has confounded the budding Dr. Wright. And considering that some of the reasoning in the dissertation is similar to logic used by Myrna Minkoff, it is a double triumph for Ignatius. But on to the details.

To start off the chapter, it is obvious that Wright dislikes the book and strongly disapproves of it, quoting a theorist on the potentially harmful effects of humor. He seems not to understand that Ignatius's racism, sexism, and homophobia are being ridiculed by the text, so he thinks the book itself is racist, sexist, and homophobic (139). Because these are cultural positions he opposes, he hates the book. Although he says that Ignatius is hilarious, he also describes him as horrifying, disgusting, and despicable (148). It is doubly ironic that Wright uses Hutcheon's Irony’s Edge, which is a book that warns of the political risk of recipients who misunderstand attempts at irony, because he then proceeds to miss the glaringly obvious ironic gap between Toole and Ignatius.

(I had for years wondered how Confederacy, with its stereotypic portrayal of gays, was viewed by members of the gay community, but in 2017 I had a conversation with Stewart Van Cleve, historian of gay Minnesota, and he opined that Confederacy was one of his favorite novels. Clearly, not everyone shares Wright's view that Toole’s book is harmful to contemporary understandings on race, gender, and sexual orientation.)

Wright tries to use the carnival theories of Mikhail Bakhtin to study Confederacy. First, I will review his use of Bakhtin's comic mechanisms, then I will reflect on Bakhtin in general. For my own study of Bakhtin's theory of humor, see Theory of Humor Series, Part 16.

Wright takes three comic mechanisms from Bakhtin and analyzes Confederacy’s use of them. They are: 1) ritual spectacles, 2) comic verbal compositions, and 3) curses and popular blazons. For the first, he declares, “In a very real sense, Ignatius is one sustained walking, eating, pontificating, belching ritual spectacle that draws the somewhat episodic novel together” (150) Wright focuses on violations of the norms of decorum of the comic form and argues that Ignatius violates those norms both on the high-brow and on the low-brow end of the spectrum.

For the second mechanism, Wright points to Ignatius’s journal entries, letters, and scraps of attempted scholarship as comic compositions. Wright notes “The key to Ignatius’s character, and in some ways the novel as a whole, is that he does not mean this letter or his other writings as jokes whatsoever” (155) His point is valid: while Ignatius acts as a court-fool or Lord of Misrule, he does not see himself performing that role. For the third mechanism, curses and stereotypic labels, Wright compares Ignatius’s profusion of verbal abuse to the circumspect sarcasm of Burma Jones.

Unfortunately, Wright misses part of the point of Bakhtin and ends up supporting theories of carnival that contrast with Bakhtin. For Bakhtin, carnival was a continuous people's revolt against the established political hierarchy. The class inversion that is often featured in carnival-like festivities was not a temporary release that allows the official order to continue. Instead, it is a second life, in which hierarchy is abolished, a parallel reality which reveals itself when it cannot be contained in the town square.

Umberto Eco criticized Bakhtin's ideas and argued that carnival does indeed act as a release valve, allowing the oppressed of society a brief holiday carefully controlled by the social hierarchy. So it is with some surprise that one finds Wright claiming Bakhtin as his theoretical framework but then saying that carnival is a social release valve (149). He calls his chapter "Releasing the pyloric valve," and he sees Ignatius as a release valve for the other characters.

An even older tradition of understanding carnival comes from the school of anthropology that culminated in James Frazer's Golden Bough. That tradition featured an individual who represented the god of agriculture. That god was to die at the end of the year and become reborn, renewing life to the earth for the next planting. Roman Saturnalia was such a tradition, in which an individual was selected as the Lord of Misrule, who oversaw festival inversion of the social order and who was put to death at the end of the festival. Other such traditions featured a scapegoat who was subjected to mock death or who was expelled from the community in order to renew it. I have pointed out in Evidence of influences that Frazer's model was the one available to Toole when he wrote Confederacy, and in fact Ignatius identifies himself as a scapegoat, and he is expelled at the end of the book, as the community is renewed.

Bakhtin's vision of carnival was quite different from this sacrificial scapegoat. His carnival features all participants exchanging abuse, heckling each other in a process of rebirth through the lower bodily stratum, which features the grotesque. There is no expelled or killed representative of a god dying and reborn. Ironically, Wright cites Bakhtin but arrives at Frazer’s conclusion, “For growth and change to happen in this story, in this place and time, the grotesque symbol must be purged”(156-7).

Wright sees Ignatius as a release valve for the rest of the society around him (155). But that is not the case. Ignatius is the agent of chaos, upsetting corrupt social relations, such as those of Mrs. Levy and Lana Lee, so that a healthier social order can occur after he is expelled from the community. Ignatius is the chaos before the rebirth. But Wright is correct that the final renewal occurs because the other characters finally act with agency and purpose (156). And he is correct that Burma Jones is the counterpoint character to Ignatius (159).

Wright ends by saying that any resolution to the novel must come from the reader. Which means that he could not find a resolution in the text itself, despite the fact that the book features a classic comic resolution for everyone except Ignatius. He thinks we are supposed to stand in harsh judgment of the characters in the book (160), when the opposite is true. It is clear that he did not understand what Toole was trying to do, and, as I say, the novel confounded and repulsed him.

Score one for Ignatius Reilly.

Theory of Humor Series, part 17, Hutcheson, Bergson, Koestler, Spencer: How many theories of humor are there?

This series of blog posts began as an analysis of the comic quality of the novel A Confederacy of Dunces (Confederacy), by John Kennedy Toole. After about ten posts, I had only just laid out the theory of humor I am using to frame the analysis. In early 2018, I was invited to write a book chapter on Toole and Confederacy, so now I will only use this series of blog posts to more fully articulate that theory of humor.

For a quick recap, humor has IMHO two fundamental aspects: incongruity, a contrast that causes the brain to try to resolve a puzzle of interpretation, and social functions including especially disparagement, which is a non-violent way to adjust the dynamics of a group status hierarchy, an adjustment which can be either gentle or aggressive. I will try to refrain from calling it MY theory of humor, as the theory is largely pieced together from various strands from others.

In preparing my current book chapter, I have been going back and reading the original text of various humor theorists through the years. Earlier, I had been relying on modern historians of the theory of humor to distill for me the wisdom of the earlier humor theorists. In those histories, each theorist is given a few sentences. Hobbes: sudden glory of superiority. Bergson: human as automaton. Etc. Then the historian laments that there are such a multiplicity of theories, none of them has fully capture humor, UNTIL NOW. Hurley, Dennett, and Adams make this claim. Others have also. And I cannot deny that I am to a certain degree in the same business.

Reading the original theorists has given me a surprise. Many of them largely agree with each other. They might have slightly different takes on the same basic ideas, but the commonalities are much greater than the differences. And that makes sense: they are all talking about basically the same phenomenon. They might plug it into different philosophical systems or theories of the function of the mind, but it is basically the same thing.

For example, Francis Hutcheson is described as the earliest philosopher to discuss the incongruity theory of humor. He was in fact directly refuting Hobbes, who was as good at devising a theory of humor as he was at squaring the circle (which is to say, not good). Yes, Hutcheson does put forward incongruity, which is my first aspect of humor, but then in part three of his treatise, he also talks about the social functions of humor, which is my second fundamental aspect.

Likewise, Bergson is known for saying that laughter is generated when we see a human acting like a mechanism. The ultimate would be Charlie Chaplin in Modern Times. However, his definition of being an automaton was broad, including absent-mindedness for example. And he argued that humor always has a social aspect. He saw laughter as a signal from the viewer to the person acting comical to snap out of it and be mindful or to conform to group norms. One can see the automaton as a form of incongruity. So Bergson also saw humor as incongruity plus a social function.

Arthur Koestler is best known for the word "bisociation," which means an event is connected to two associations. In other words, an incongruity. But he saw that in order to have a jolt of humor, there needs to be at least a trace of aggression. He then defined aggression so broadly that it covers a number of social functions. To me, humor's most common social function is to lower social status tension within a group, which would fall under Koestler's definition of aggression.

I have not read Herbert Spencer yet, but I think the situation will be similar. He is known for the hydraulic theory in which nervous energy builds up and through hydraulic pressure has to have an outlet. Laughter is the overflow valve. This theory influenced Freud's first theory of humor. But Spencer's briefest phrase is "descending incongruity." Although he meant descending more broadly than social status reduction, it certainly includes that as a major portion of the cases. So I would put Spencer in with the others about the two fundamental aspects of humor.

So in the histories of humor theory, these four thinkers are treated as though their ideas are much different, and much different than the theory I use. I now see them as largely the same. I guess I am a lumper, not a splitter. Call me a Lumper Kerl.

Bibliography

Hutcheson, Francis. "Reflections upon Laughter," in Reflections upon Laughter and Remarks upon the Fable of the Bees. Originally published in a magazine in Dublin in 1725, then compiled Glasgow: Baxter, 1750. Reprinted New York: Garland, 1971.

Bergson, Henri. “Laughter,” in Comedy: An Essay on Comedy. Ed. by Wylie Sypher. Originally published in 1900. Garden City, NY: Doubleday, 1956.

Koestler, Arthur. The Act of Creation. London: Hutchinson, 1964.

Spencer, Herbert. "The Physiology of Laughter," Macmillan's Magazine, 1 (1860): 395-402.

Theory of Humor Series, part 16, Mikhail Bakhtin "Rabelais and his World" Review

This series of blog posts began as an analysis of the comic quality of the novel A Confederacy of Dunces (Confederacy), by John Kennedy Toole. After about ten posts, I had only just laid out the theory of humor I am using to frame the analysis. In early 2018, I was invited to write a book chapter on Toole and Confederacy, so now I will only use this series of blog posts to more fully articulate that theory of humor.

In my investigation, I have read the following book, and I will analyze it here.

Bakhtin, Mikhail M. Rabelais and His World. Cambridge, MA: MIT Press, 1968. All unattributed page references below are to this text.

Although in the past (Evidence of Influences, 30n16) I questioned the validity of using Bakhtin's Theory of Carnival to study John Kennedy Toole's A Confederacy of Dunces, I did not mean that Bakhtin's theory of humor was thereby completely invalid. I believe it is useful to compare the theory of humor I use to Bakhtin's, especially since other scholars freely use Bakhtin's theory.

In his book Rabelais and His World, Bakhtin put forward a vision of humor and society, especially claiming its existence historically in medieval Europe, which some have argued was a veiled substitute for Soviet Russia. Although he was criticized by some historians because he offered little actual documentary evidence for his vision, his theory has been influential among literary critics. His ideas did not appear before an English-speaking audience until he was around seventy years old, and they became popular around the time of his death at 79.

Bakhtin's basic idea is that in the mists of time there were two social orders which were equally sacred (6), an order with a social hierarchy, and an order ruled by festive laughter and equality. With the rise of the state, the hierarchy became official and the festive order went underground. But in events such as Roman Saturnalia and medieval Carnival, the festive order came to the surface. This festive order was a Second Life (he may have been the source of the phrase "second life") in which the oppressive hierarchy of the formal medieval society was cast aside.

This utopian Second Life is freed by laughter from dogmatism. In earlier time, it was characterized by a celebration of the grotesque and the free heaping of insults and abusive language (16), especially scatalogical insults, with perhaps some urine and scat thrown in, literally (147). One of Bakhtin's innovations is to argue that the grotesque and scatalogical bring people down below the waist, which is also where the reproductive organs are found. So abusive language and earthiness also mean regeneration, renewal, and productivity in the "material bodily lower stratum" (78). So flinging abusive language and other things liberates and renews the society. Also, modern literary scholars are fond of the concept of transgression, and Bakhtin saw the grotesque of Second Life featuring ambivalence and transgression (26). He links insanity to the grotesque (49). In our Internet start-up era, Bakhtin even resonates with the phrase "creative destruction" (121).

As a theory of humor, this system has interesting qualities. On the one hand, it recognizes disparagement and celebrates the suspension of status hierarchies. On the other hand, humor has the social function of uniting the community in a play mode. As far as incongruity goes, the grotesque and scatalogical are in sharp contrast to traditionally valued beauty, intellect, and order. However, there is no snap of linguistic frames, no bisociation where the audience jumps from one possible interpretation to another. There is no element of surprise, unless some official didn't see the insults or horse apples coming at him. It has a bit of Freudian relief theory, in that the official order represses our animal urges and our pent up resentments toward the status hierarchy, which are released in carnival.

As far as it goes, I like the fact that Bakhtin's theory has a play aspect, which a theory of humor should have. I also like Bakhtin's application of disparagement within a social hierarchy. His is not a strict Superiority Theory: the producer of the humor does not necessarily need to feel superior to the target. So in that sense, Bakhtin's theory is not too distant from the theory I use. The idea of Second Life is like Mulkay's "humorous mode" or Apter's "paratelic zone." Yet another aspect of Bakhtin's theory is the presence of the bodily nature of the human animal, and the content of humor often deals with that animality and physicality, a fact that I do not focus on in my own thinking. These aspects are all to Bakhtin's credit.

Bakhtin's theory has problems, though. It does not recognize that most disparagement humor has a specific target, either an individual, who to some degree had it coming, or a social group. Also, Bakhtin sees the entire society partaking in generating the humor, whereas most humor has a specific author whose humor production constitutes a claim toward status. Most humor is generated conversationally among small social groups, which does not fit into the Bakhtin theory. More seriously, although Bakhtin celebrates ambiguity, his grotesque does not have the listener or spectator jump quickly from one possible interpretation of the statement or event to another, which many humor researchers have shown is a major aspect of humor.

Bakhtin's theory supposes that within Second Life everything is a big party and everyone is happy about it (more or less). I agree that some social functions of humor are to lighten the mood within the entire social group and, if everyone is joyfully heaping earthy abuse on each other, the activity could be a form of play with an affiliative social function, but in the real world the targets of humor often can be embarrassed, offended, or humiliated by it, or even terrorized if the intent of the humor is to dehumanize. Let's not forget that in the ancient Roman Saturnalia, the person chosen as the Lord of Misrule was put to death at the end of the festival.

I argue that one of the primary social functions of humor is to non-violently adjust the status hierarchy, not suspend it entirely. Terrion and Ashforth showed that when disparagement is used as affiliative teasing, the target of the humor has high enough status within the group not to be threatened by it (Human Relations, 55: 55-88). For non-affiliative social functions, Zillman and Bryant (Journal of Experimental Social Psychology, 10: 480-488) showed that subjects had an increased feeling of mirth to an aggressive joke if they felt that the target deserved retaliation. For truly abusive disparaging humor, the evidence supports the idea that the social function is to bring down a peg those perceived as deserving it. Bakhtin's theory misses the fact that humor can be pointed and can have a serious social function within our first life. The utopian Second Life hides the fact that we actually only live in one life, and that the humorous mode and the serious mode are linked. So as a general theory of humor, Bakhtin's ideas have major problems.

So, as they say at the carnival: Close, but no cigar.

Robert Byrne and Ignatius: Communication with Maurice duQuesnay

Since this blog is supposed to be about John Kennedy Toole and his novel A Confederacy of Dunces, and since I have spent the last six entries on articulating a general theory of humor, I thought I would pause that series and add an entry on Ken Toole.

A while ago, Prof. Maurice duQuesnay contacted me. He is a contemporary of Toole's and had known him and his family back in the day. I was familiar with his name, because he had written a forward to a lecture by Robert Coles that had been printed as a pamphlet, which I reviewed in my bibliography of obscure Toole criticism. He had learned about me because of the bibliography.

He then sent me some texts, some of which relate to John Kennedy Toole. One was the 2009 issue (Volume 9) of an annual serial called Explorations. It contains three items relevant to Toole studies. First, duQuesnay wrote a memorial to Robert Byrne, the person many have argued was the model for important aspects of Ignatius Reilly's personality. The second item was a poem by Robert Byrne. And the third item was a review by duQuesnay of the Nevils and Hardy book, Ignatius Rising. I will briefly discuss each of the three here.

Prof. duQuesnay is a defender and supporter of Robert Byrne. He sees it as unfair that Bryne is identified with Ignatius Reilly. What I found interesting about the memorial is that, although Ignatius is not an exact copy of Byrne--and Byrne had many qualities Ignatius lacks--even in duQuesnay's positive description, you can easily see that Ignatius is indeed an exaggerated caricature of Byrne. So even an essay arguing against the Byrne-Ignatius relationship provides evidence for it. For more details, I refer you to the essay itself.

The poem by Byrne does not dispel the theory that Ignatius is a caricature of Byrne, either. It is not as ridiculous as a poem by Ignatius would be, but it has enough of a whiff of pomposity to suggest Toole had hit the mark.

I found the review of the book Ignatius Rising noteworthy because some contemporaries interested in the Toole legacy have seriously condemned the book, and duQuesnay does not. Joel Fletcher (writer of Ken and Thelma) and Kenneth Holditch (executor of Thelma's estate) both have heavily criticized Ignatius Rising for mishandling sources and using unreliable testimony to argue that Toole was gay. duQuesnay does not bring up that issue at all. For the most part he accepts the book's presentation uncritically. He spends most of his review showing that the book is as much about Thelma as it is about Ken. So not everyone who knew Ken Toole well hates Ignatius Rising.

Hopefully, if Prof. duQuesnay reads this blog entry, he will not be offended by my observations.