Theory of Humor Series, Part 21, Critique of Robert Storey's theory of comedy

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 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.

Toole and Van Cleve's Assessment of his Homosexuality

During academic year 2016-2017, I had as a colleague Stewart Van Cleve, author of the book Land of Ten Thousand Loves, a History of Queer Minnesota. He had spent a great deal of time studying the LGBTQ archives at the University of Minnesota, and he had used that collection extensively to write his book. I posed to him the question of John Kennedy Toole's sexual orientation. Here is what I took away from that conversation. If I mischaracterize what he said, that is my error.

To preface this, I have to say that I have not studied the current theoretical framework for LGBTQ studies. At one point, I thought that any man who had sex with other men would be called "gay." Now as I understand it that is not the case. Van Cleve indicated that the current umbrella term for all sexual behavior that is not heteronormative is "queer," which used to be a slur people avoided. Gay is apparently a public identity, and to be accurate, one can use the phrase "men who have sex with other men" to describe the behavior.

I explained to Van Cleve that two inexperienced researchers had written the book Ignatius Rising, published by Louisiana State University Press. In that book, they stated that they had found some individuals who reported knowing Toole and that those individuals knew that he had had sex with other men. That book has been attacked by several individuals who were close to Toole on several grounds. First, the critics charged that the authors had not handled primary sources correctly. They may have taken passages of letters out of context, and they several times did not get permission to quote letters. Second, the persons they found who claimed to knowledge about Toole's sexual behavior were criticized as being the sort of people who might make things up to get attention. They were deemed unreliable. LSU Press stood by the book, despite the criticism.

Van Cleve referenced a book called Men Like That: A Southern Queer History. He explained that especially in the South, there is a long tradition of men who compartmentalized their sexuality. They did not see themselves as gay, but in one compartment of their lives they had sex with other men. New Orleans Carnival encourages people to compartmentalize behavior. What happens during Carnival doesn't count toward who you see yourself as. Again, the term gay is a public identity, rather than a description of behavior. So I posed the question, "Does that mean that we can doubt the accuracy and conclusions of Ignatius Rising?" He indicated that we probably should not reject the book, based on my summary of the situation.

I have until now I have kept my distance from Ignatius Rising and have treated the issue of whether Toole had sex with other men as an open question about which one could not be certain. Based on the opinion of someone who has expertise in the field, I now conclude that it is more likely than not that he did have sex with other men, however you label the behavior, although there still exists the possibility that in fact he did not have sex with other men.

Postscript

This question of how we label and think about John Kennedy Toole gets us into a philosophical exploration of the underpinnings of the historical disciplines. Do the dead have a right to privacy? What is the purpose of historical inquiry anyway? Plutarch, in the beginning of his collection of biographies, stated that each of his stories had a moral. In each case there was a reason that he was writing about the individual in question. When I read that, I thought, yes, but what if further investigation reveals that the subject turned out not to exemplify the moral Plutarch had chosen? What if new evidence shows that Caesar or Cato was completely different than Plutarch wanted him to be? In our own country, what if the DNA proves that Thomas Jefferson really had fathered children by one of his African American slaves, despite the vigorous denials of his supporters? What does that fact do to our understanding of Jefferson?

We live in an era when the dominant social value is to learn about someone, flaws and all. So at funerals, family and friends will get up to reminisce about the departed, even if the memories are a bit embarrassing. My father grew up in a different era, and his father was a funeral director. My father once said, "Well, it was a good thing they brought in a minister who didn't know the man, so that he could say with a straight face that the deceased had been a wonderful person who would be missed." Dignity and respectability were much more important than historical accuracy.

It is clear that Toole was very private about his life. On top of that, according to Joel Fletcher, Toole's mother curated his legacy and selectively weeded the papers that made it into his archival collection. Perhaps also many of his old friends and colleagues do not wish him to be thought of as different than he presented himself. But flawed as it is, the evidence within Ignatius Rising does have to be taken seriously and not dismissed. Unless we just want to give the man his privacy and with it some dignity.

Even giving him his privacy comes with a certain irony. The main character of Confederacy struggles on the edge of respectability and cannot attain it, and fans of the book love Ignatius in part due to his lack of dignity. The humor in the book is disparaging, though not mean-spirited. Many aspects of Ignatius are modeled on Bobby Byrne, whose dignity suffered from the book. Considering that the book is about celebrating the people of New Orleans warts and all, one can argue that it is out of keeping with Toole's own ethos to afford him too much dignity.

Post-postscript

Another thing that Mr. Van Cleve mentioned was that A Confederacy of Dunces was one of his favorite books. I had always wondered how members of the gay community felt about the book, considering that there are stereotyped and caricatured LGBTQ characters in the book. With a sample size of exactly one person, the book is not rejected by the gay community.

Quick Note: Irony

There is some irony to the fact that my blog entry on April Fool's Day did not discuss the theory of humor, much less fools. It is especially ironic, because in the paper that I submitted for the book chapter, I have a section discussing the theory of fools and Ignatius as a fool. So happy foolish May Day, preceded by an April Serious Day.

However, in saying that this situation is ironic, I do not mean the type of irony investigated in Linda Hutcheon's book, Irony's Edge.

The Occasional series of Ideas for Papers on John Kennedy Toole, Part 25: Psychiatric Hospitals

A Confederacy of Dunces features a protagonist whom many in the book consider to be mentally ill. Several characters encourage his mother to have Ignatius committed to the mental ward at Charity Hospital, and Santa Battaglia even fantasizes that he will be tortured there. At the end of the book, Ignatius narrowly escapes being caught by the ambulance crew sent to take him to Charity.

A recent book by Lone Frank called The Pleasure Shock: The Rise of Deep Brain Stimulation and its Forgotten Inventor, tells the story of Dr. Robert Heath, who was the head of psychiatry at Tulane University beginning in 1949. Heath pioneered the practice of stimulating the brain with electrodes. He experimented on mentally ill patients throughout the 1950s and 1960s in ways that today would be considered unethical.

His most notorious case was that of a man who was mentally ill, abused drugs, lived off the favors of gay men, and was suicidal. While the man was at Charity Hospital, Heath tried to use electrical stimulation of the brain to change him to a heterosexual. The case only became public in 1972, soon after which Heath's work was held up as an example of unethical human subjects research.

This particular instance with its sexual dimension would have been a perfect influence for Confederacy had it been public before 1963; however, there may have been other instances from the 1950s that could have influenced Toole. Heath first presented his electrical stimulation research at a symposium in New Orleans in 1952. Throughout the 1950s, he experimented with combinations of stimulation and hallucinogenic drugs on the mentally ill in New Orleans. If any of this work became public, or was known through gossip, it could have influenced Toole. (Note: the descriptions of actions at Charity in the novel do not include electrical stimulation, so there is no direct reference to the practice in the novel.)

Another possible, even likely, influence on Toole's portrayal of psychiatric treatment was Ken Kesey's One Flew over the Cuckoo's Nest, which was published in 1962, just before Toole wrote most of Confederacy in 1963.

Thesis: Explore the public understanding of psychiatry and the treatment of patients at psychiatric hospitals up to 1963. Might the specific culture of psychiatric treatment in New Orleans have made this theme especially relevant to Confederacy of Dunces?

Theory of Humor Series, part 20, Status hierarchies

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 the theory of humor that I am developing, I argue that there are two fundamental aspects of humor: an incongruity aspect and a social aspect. The social aspect often deals with adjusting status among the members of a social group. The adjustment is often downward, laughing at someone in order to bring that person down a peg, or using self-deprecating humor to deflect envy about one's own high status.

I have been purposefully vague about what status is. When I first started trying to explore the theory of humor, I was well-aware of my own view that humor often adjusts status downward in a group. So I explored the social psychology literature regarding the nature of group status. Two profound facts emerged from what I learned, one, that all groups have emergent status hierarchies and, two, that humans are loyal to groups, even if the group in question is barely a group.

First, from the 1940s onward, Sharif, Harvey, and other social psychologists established that when experimenters place humans together in groups to perform an activity, we will sort ourselves into status hierarchies, often unconsciously. There is basically no such thing as a functioning group that doesn't have at least an implicit status hierarchy. It is also the case that most (perhaps all) social animals exhibit social hierarchies, so the topic is not limited to humans. The term "pecking order" comes from the study of social hierarchy among chickens, who enforce the social structure by pecking each other.

Second, from the work of Henri Tajfel, it has been shown that even the most minimalist groups, groups where the members do not know each other and which have no known shared qualities, exhibit in-group bias and loyalty. So you can never get away from in-group / out-group divisions, no matter how you try to educate people about things like the universal brotherhood of man (to use a particularly gendered version of the idea). Combine these two findings, and we have the conclusion that humans are strongly motivated to belong to groups and to strive for status within those groups.

Within the status literature, one major division is between dominance and power on the one hand and informal social status on the other. Dominance carries a threat of violence, whereby those higher in the pecking order might harm those lower in the order if they do not comply with the rules established by those higher in the group structure.

Social status, on the other hand, might be collectively and unconsciously agreed upon by all group members, and might not carry a threat of violence. All members in the group may confer high status on some members in the genuine belief that those others should have high status, not out of fear. There have been studies of bee hives and other social networks that show that decision-making in groups can come from the bottom-up, not pushed down from powerful members of the group asserting their self-interest. I suspect that the status dynamics within human groups are usually a combination of top-down dominance pecking order and bottom-up hive decision-making.

The difference between hard dominance and a softer social status is also manifest in humor. A social group in which there is the palpable threat of violence often does not feature public humor with the dominant members as targets, but the powerful may ridicule those low in power, and those lower in rank may use humor amongst themselves to lower the stress of being powerless. Indeed, the highest status individuals might take actions which would otherwise invite ridicule, but no one ridicules for fear of punishment. This seems to be supported by the findings of Ruch's 3WD studies, which show that religiously fundamentalist personalities are negatively correlated with appreciating the humorous qualities of jokes. An angry god does not joke around, and certainly not with self-deprecating humor.

For informal social status hierarchies, self-deprecating humor and teasing are not uncommon. Those high in status signal to others, "Hey, I am just one member of the group, even though I have had this status conferred upon me." The status is deserved, it is not maintained by fear. Those high in status are not threatened by criticism of their shortcomings. They deserved their places.

The contrast between power dominance and softer social status may not be a dichotomy. It may be a spectrum, or it may be multi-dimensional. I am not convinced by my modest investigation of the literature that the issue is settled. For example, a military leader may inspire others to follow because that person displays qualities that confer status; however, because the leader has followers, the leader can use that structure to exercise dominance and power.

I suspect that the phenomenon of social status hierarchies is not studied as much as it might warrant is because the idea that social groups are always structured goes against the political ideals of our culture. Also, one way to motivate those lower in the status hierarchy to work hard is to claim that there is no hierarchy, so those high in status in our culture who control the funds for studying social behavior may have a disincentive to prioritize the study of status hierarchies. The claim that there is no hierarchy can come in the form of claiming we are all equally children of God (some traditional religions), or claiming that we all have the liberty to pursue happiness (secular liberalism), or claiming that the dictatorship of the proletariat has transformed us (communism). Take your pick.

Nevertheless, humor does function within this world. Ridicule especially is a powerful tool for social modification of behavior. A group where those who are high in status tolerate or encourage humor at their own expense generally is a stable group which is not maintained by threats of violence.

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.