Buried in the Endnotes, part 1: Freud's two theories of humor

This entry could also be entitled the Theory of Humor Series, part 24.

This blog post serves two purposes. First, because readers often do not study the endnotes to a paper, I want to highlight information buried in the endnotes. Second, the idea discussed here was actually someone else's idea, and I did not properly attribute the idea in the paper.

In my new paper, just published as a book chapter in Theology and Geometry: Essays on John Kennedy Toole’s A Confederacy of Dunces, I mention Freud's "first theory of humor." In the endnote I explain that Freud over his long career had come up with two contradictory theories of humor. Here is the endnote:

Freud’s first theory of humor, originally published in 1905, deals with the release of desires from the id that were forbidden by the superego, and it is found in Sigmund Freud, Jokes and Their Relation to the Unconscious (New York: Norton, 1963). His second theory of humor, originally published in 1928, sees humor as a tool used by the superego to help the ego deal with stress. See Sigmund Freud, “On Humour,” in The Standard Edition of the Complete Psychological Works of Sigmund Freud, v. 21, ed. Anna Freud and James Strachey. (London: Hogarth Press, 1961), 160-166.

Freud's first theory of humor is well known, as it had an entire book devoted to it, and it was published early in his career. But he did have a second one, which gives an entirely different explanation for humor. I would argue that my own theory of humor is simpler and can accommodate both of them.

Further point: Sometimes scholars will fail to give credit to the source through which they came upon a fact or idea. I may learn of a fact from a text, let's call it B. B cited the original source, let's call it A. When I publish the fact in my own paper, let's call it C, I may cite its origin in A without mentioning that I learned of it from B.

An example of bypassing attribution can be found in the biography of Isaac Newton. He first developed infinitesimal calculus using concepts and techniques from Rene Descartes's algebraic geometry. But when he went to publish, Descartes had a reputation for atheism, so Newton restructured the proofs of the fundamental components of calculus using the more awkward classical geometry. Descartes's influence was erased from the proofs.

With regard to Freud's two theories, I also made a bypass. I learned of the two theories from the book Bevis, Matthew. Comedy: a Very Short Introduction. Oxford UP, 2013. I did not even include that book in my bibliography. Instead, I cited the original texts by Freud. This omission is worse than failing to show the path of the idea. Noticing that Freud had two theories may have been an original observation by Bevis. My apologies to Matthew Bevis for not crediting him for the idea. He does deserve the credit (unless he took it unattributed from someone else).

Theology and Geometry: the First Half of the Book

In order to correct my own chapter, I was given galley proofs of the entire book, Theology and Geometry: Essays on John Kennedy Toole’s A Confederacy of Dunces, ISBN: 978-1-4985-8547-7, which is due out on February 15th. So I have been slowly reading the rest of the book, admittedly not in its final form, and I am about halfway through.

Among the essays in the first half of the book, the one that succeeded the most in getting me to think differently about Confederacy was the essay by Kenneth McIntyre which is called "Amusingness Forced to Figure Itself Out." He argues that Ignatius can be viewed as an aesthete in the Kirekegaardian philosophical framework. That view of Ignatius is very productive, and I like it.

I would add as an observation that Ignatius might also be seen as an aesthete in the Walter Pater school of aesthetics. In terms of actual influences, in the Toole archives there is evidence that Ken Toole studied the Romantics and subsequent philosophers and artists extensively. There is no evidence that he studied Kierkegaard (though of course an absence of evidence is not evidence of an absence). Toole was influenced by Percy, and Percy was clearly a student of Kierkegaard, so perhaps Toole was directly or indirectly influenced by Kierkegaard. However, Kierkegaard was influenced by the 19th century aesthetics movement, so I think it more likely that Toole and Kierkegaard were both influenced by the same school of ideas. (I know that talking actual influence is intellectually gauche, or even sinister, but my wife is left-handed, so that's okay.)

That having been said, McIntyre has mined a rich vein of ideas in his essay. Kudos.

PS. The pre-order ranking of Theology on Amazon is still at about two million, so the excitement is not building, alas.

Retinal detachment and Theology and Geometry

I had a retinal detachment about a month ago. This is a minimal blog post to let you know I am still kicking.

Fortunately, despite my vision problems, I was able to check the galley proofs of my book chapter for the upcoming collection: Theology and Geometry, edited by Leslie Marsh. The ISBN will be: 978-1-4985-8547-7. The price is a whopping $90.00 even on Amazon. My apologies for the price, but they may have to break even on just a few sales. (IMHO). I pre-ordered a copy on Amazon, and I may have driven the Amazon ranking down to about two million. If someone else pre-orders, we might get it down below one million. Eat your heart out, Harold Bloom.

The Amazon URL for the book is: Theology and Geometry: Essays on John Kennedy Toole’s A Confederacy of Dunces

Theory of Humor Series, part 23: a Buddhist Jokebook

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.

That having been said, I am going to spend this month examining an individual book. My wife gave me a jokebook called Letting Go is All We Have to Hold Onto, by Gregg Eisenberg. He describes himself as a Buddhist-Jewish standup philosopher. Many of the jokes relate to Buddhist ideas.

I am not an expert on Buddhist culture and theology, but I have gotten through an Alan Watts book or two, I have read Hermann Hesse's Siddhartha, and I did spend a weekend once at a Zen Buddhist monastery in New York State. So one could argue that I am not unfamiliar with many of the concepts. You could say I know enough to culturally appropriate, or culturally inappropriate as the case may be.

From my experience, Buddhism, especially Zen, confronts practitioners with paradoxes. Part of the point, I believe, is to reject rational explanations for mystical experience. Also, the goal is often to negate the self, turning away from the instinctual drives that motivate much of human behavior. So many Buddhist proverbs feature either a logical contradiction or a rejection of the social status dynamic or both.

In the theory of humor that I have articulated in this series on this blog (as well as in my book chapter in the book "Theology and Geometry") I argue that there are two fundamental aspects of humor: a) a cognitive incongruity and b) a social aspect. An absurdist joke highlights the incongruity more than the social aspect, and put-down humor often highlights the social over the incongruous.

Because Buddhist ideas often deal with incongruities or social abasement, they easily supply the framework for jokes. Many koans have the structure of jokes, especially absurdist jokes. One famous question is: "What is the sound of one hand clapping?" Because clapping is a two-handed activity (barring variations such as slapping the thigh), just one hand cannot actually clap. Woody Allen easily riffed off that koan by claiming that he got kicked out of the boy scouts because he tried to start a fire with one stick rubbed together.

In Eisenberg's book, he uses the full range of both incongruity and social dynamics. Many of the jokes play off the fact that some quality that is not generally valued in the rest of society is highly valued within Buddhism. So there is the joke: "When I see how little progress I've made in my Buddhist practice lately, I feel emptiness inside." Generally, when someone says they feel emptiness, it means that they are emotionally depressed. But with Buddhism's value on abasing or negating the self, feeling emptiness inside is a good thing. The first part of the sentence cues the reader toward a negative, but the punchline flips the reader from the mundane value system to the Buddhist value system.

The Buddhist value on self abasement leads to paradox. The Zen master is held in high esteem, yet she achieves that high esteem by negating her self. So someone motivated by ambition for self enhancement within a Zen community has to strive toward self abasement. This leads to jokes such as: "I am so much more than just a guy sitting here stripping away his delusions of grandeur." If you think you are so much more than that, then you are not a guy stripping away his delusions of grandeur at all. Another in this vein: "I always figured a little false humility is better than no humility at all." False humility is in fact the state of having no humility at all.

Within some branches of Buddhism there is the concept of the altruistic master. The peak of enlightenment is nirvana, where the individual eliminates the desires of the self so successfully that the individual escapes from the cycle of suffering in the world. Or something like that. The Bodhisattva is a person who can reach nirvana, but who delays doing so to help others along the path. Therefore, those not close to nirvana are lower in status than those closer. This leads to jokes such as: "I want to become a Bodhisattva in this lifetime, and when I do, I'm taking all you schmucks with me." By referring to others with disparagement, the speaker is far from enlightenment (maybe). The joke nicely combines the disparagement tradition within Jewish humor with the paradox of the Buddhist concept. The paradoxical social dynamic is built into Buddhism, and the joke merely highlights it.

Therefore, IMHO, I find that my theory of humor is well illustrated by the material in this jokebook.

The Occasional series of Ideas for Papers on John Kennedy Toole, Part 26: Post-modernism, Gravity's Rainbow, and Confederacy

I must confess that I am not a big fan of post-modern thought. I actually think, horrors, that science has something to say about the world in which we find ourselves, and that there is a world in which we find ourselves that behaves in a generally consistent manner. I do not find it surprising, for example, that creationists back in the 1980s began to employ reasoning borrowed from deconstructionists to critique biology.

Recently, I was studying Thomas Pynchon's novel, Gravity's Rainbow (GR). It is a difficult novel, but one that has attracted many scholars and critics. It is definitely a post-modern novel, meaning that Pynchon himself rejected the modernism of such writers as Wallace Stevens. Although there are perhaps many definitions of post-modern, I think one element that GR embodies is a willingness to subvert the reader's expectations for how a narrative plot should be structured. Critics have described the ending of GR as a plot that explodes like an incoming rocket into fragments that do not hold together. One study of Pynchon I would recommend is Molly Hite's book Ideas of Order in the Novels of Thomas Pynchon.

For those unfamiliar with the novel, the plot is challenging to summarize or characterize. However, one of the structural themes is to compare the novel to the flight of a rocket. Early in the novel an observer in London watchs the dawn launch of a V-2 (or A4) rocket highlighted by the sun's rays in distant Europe, the rocket heading for London. The novel seems to end with the reader being in the audience of a film version of the novel in Los Angeles as an ICBM comes in to obliterate narrator and reader. Or maybe that is not the plot. Maybe there are a thousand plots. You the reader are left to decide.

One aspect of GR is to challenge the concept of cause and effect. When a ballistic rocket strikes, those nearby experience a seeming reverse of cause and effect: they experience the explosion first, then the sound of the explosion, and then the sound of the rocket coming in. Likewise, at the beginning of the final section, you experience jumbled fragments of stories first, then at the very end of the the final section you hear a nuclear ICBM approaching a cinema in Los Angeles, where presumably you are watching a movie which is also the novel. Maybe.

One of GR's major characters, perhaps the protagonist if one exists, is Tyrone Slothrop. His crazy career through the book occasionally seems to represent that of a fool and scapegoat. At one point, he wears a pig costume and the authorities hunt for the man in the pig suit in order to castrate him.

Philosophically, the traditional narrative forms were becoming passe in the 1950s, 1960s and 1970s, and post-modernism was the avant-garde style blazing a new path. James Joyce in Finnegans Wake tore away at narrative form, but he still looked back to mythological structure to give meaning to his work, perhaps. So one could call him a modernist for trying still to order the universe. Samuel Beckett's work challenged the very concept of meaning and language and a story, so he is post-modernist.

Among intellectuals, GR was very impressive, abandoning the more traditional narrative form, yet using enough pop culture details to help keep the reader. Because it rejects narrative forms and structures that readers find comfortable, it is difficult to read and appreciate. For masochistic readers who want to suffer to prove that they are reading great literature, it is perfect. It repels the philistine, which is part of its attraction. (That is also part of the attraction of James Joyce's later work.)

Some critics have tried to claim that Confederacy of Dunces is post-modern. Kline argued that the plot used comic metynomy instead of cause and effect. In my opinion, that is wishful thinking. The plot of Confederacy is a very traditional comic plot going back to the Greek New Comedy of Menander. There are multiple threads of plot, but no more than one might find in Shakespeare. The chaos is caused by Ignatius, who is not to radically different than a carnival fool, part of the western tradition for centuries. I believe Toole held to an ordered universe and was looking back to modernist writers such as James Joyce and Evelyn Waugh as his guides, rather than to the more radical post-modern movement among his own contemporaries.

Both GR and Confederacy use comic chaos. Both have major characters who embody that carnival inversion of order. But they are quite different texts and different protagonists (presuming that Slothrop is actually a protagonist).

It is worth pondering the reception of the two novels both among critics and the public. Confederacy has not attrached to sort of critical attention that GR has: the number of studies of GR listed in the MLA Bibliography is an order of magnitude greater than the number of studies of Confederacy. So Confederacy is not the darling of the intellectual Elect. But the Amazon ranking of Confederacy is an order of magnitude higher than that of GR, so Confederacy has been better received among the common reading public, the Philistines. (Yes, I know that it is ironic to say that the readers of GR are part of the Elect when GR seems to oppose the Calvinist Elect and to celebrate the rejected Preterite.)

Thesis: Explore Confederacy's relationship to post-modernism as manifest in Gravity's Rainbow. Compare Ignatius to Slothrop. Is Confederacy of Dunces a post-modern novel on the cutting edge of literary theory, or is it, as I maintain, a novel looking back to predecessors and wallowing among comfortable narrative forms, as gruntled as a scapegoat pig in slop?

Cutting Room Floor Series, part 2, The Neuroscience of Humor Comprehension

As I have mentioned before, I have written a book chapter for the upcoming monograph on John Kennedy Toole, a book that has the working title "Theology and Geometry." Because I have trimmed items as I have edited the chapter, I plan to put some of them in this series of posts, called "The Cutting Room Floor."

Forward: Strange traffic patterns

Back in February of 2019, I reported that there were strange spikes in traffic on this blog. The spikes were generated by a machine running Linux. The traffic would jump from the typical five hits a day to two hundred. But no one blog entry recorded the traffic. Those spikes have gone away.

Cutting Room Floor Item Number Two: The Neuroscience of Humor Comprehension

In my book chapter, I have a brief discussion of the neuroscience of humor comprehension. I had a further statement of brain waves which was not essential to my point. The information comes from the book "Ha! The Science on When We Laugh and Why" by Scott Weems. The first two sentences stayed in the final version of the chapter. Here it is:

The job of the anterior cingulate is to resolve cognitive conflicts coming from other parts of the brain. The dorsal area of this structure focuses on resolving logical puzzles such as grammatical conundrums, while the ventral area deals more with conflicting emotions. For example, when a traditional joke hits its punchline, there is a positive deflection in the brainwaves at 0.3 seconds centered in the anterior cingulate, indicating that the brain is working on resolving an incongruity, followed by a negative deflection at 0.4 seconds across the rest of the brain, indicating that the incongruity has been resolved to produce the meaning of the joke.

Theory of Humor Series, part 22, Literature as play for group status

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 was reading Eric Weitz's The Cambridge Introduction to Comedy (Cambridge UP, 2009) a while ago. Weitz was discussing Purdie's theory of mastery of discourse. I came upon an idea below. This idea is from the Summer of 2016.

All of literature is a status display. I write a work or compose a poem. In theory, I could create it only for myself, but language is fundamentally social, a form of communication. By creating a text and sharing it, I try to assert social status. If the audience refuses to attend the reading or fails to buy the book, they reject my play for higher status. Or they write bad reviews and even make fun me. This is analogous to the individual in a small group who tries to dominate, but is rejected by others in the group. The would-be author is ignored or ridiculed.

Fashion (including literary fashion) as dominance: I try a new look or literary style as a dominance / status display. This could be a clothing style, a new aesthetic of literature such as a stream-of-consciousness or magic realism, or a specific literary text. If the group adopts the new style, I become a fashion leader. If my assertion is rejected, I am humiliated. (The theory of memes also addresses this type of social behavior, but I agree with Steven Pinker's critique and rejection of memetics.)

One question is: does the new fashion come about because the vast majority of the social group suddenly embraces it, or does the majority of the social group embrace it because important gatekeepers in the group like the new style and promote it? I am not an expert in the social psychology and marketing of style trends, but I think that promotion by influential group members, arguably high-status individuals, is crucial to a group's adoption of styles. An inner circle will prove its own high status if the styles it promotes succeed in being adopted more generally. So a new fashion probably needs a status leader to succeed, but the would-be status leader needs success in fashion promotion to reaffirm high status as an insider.

Within society, there are multiple structures of status. One group may have a low opinion of the values of another group. So a text that is a bestseller for one segment may be beneath contempt for another segment. The genius of Shakespeare was that he wrote for both the groundlings and the royal court. Proust, on the other hand, did not write for the groundlings.

Considering that this blog is about John Kennedy Toole, it should be noted that Toole's own effort at a status display through Confederacy failed during his lifetime. He was only willing to send the manuscript to Simon and Schuster and refused to make the edits Robert Gottlieb demanded, and the novel wasn't published. It was only eventually published thanks to the grit of Thelma Toole, his slightly unhinged mother. That, and the fact that it was actually a pretty good novel. The gatekeeper to give it a literary validation was Walker Percy. His introduction was the ticket to its serious consideration. Ken Toole only gets to enjoy a moderate esteem after his demise. He had the talent to gain status, but he didn't have the tenacity to win it.

As far as that goes, the fact that this blog only has two followers suggests that I haven't exactly achieved a high status either. What goes around, ...

A friend of mine has opined: "All narrative is propaganda." If propaganda is a text with a political intent, and if politics is group status dynamics writ large, then this view of "literature as a status display" is related to "all narrative is propaganda."