CELC: Theory of Humor #30: Cultural Evolution and Humor

This series of blog posts began as a set of observations about literary research on the novel A Confederacy of Dunces (Confederacy), by John Kennedy Toole, but I have extended it to include evolutionary literary criticism. I have recently begun to work on incorporating cultural evolution (from Joseph Henrich, who follows the work of Robert Boyd and Peter Richerson). To read the blog post that began this inquiry, see my post from July of 2025 entitled Henrich's Secret of our Success, Cultural Evolution as a new foundation for evolutionary literary criticism.

For years in this blog, I have explored the nature and origins of mirthful humor (especially from 2017 to 2020). In February of 2018, I articulated what I consider to be my own theory of humor as I merged two of the major schools within this discipline. (Note: I may call this my own theory of humor, but it is very similar to many other theories of humor. I haven't created something new so much as put my own spin on ideas that have been around for centuries, if not millennia. For a discussion of how similar many of those theories are, read this blog entry from October of 2018.)

In April of 2020, I showed how this theory could fit into a branch of evolutionary psychology. (Others may challenge my claim that I am using evolutionary psychology, as I use ideas that fall outside the strict definition of evolutionary psychology originating with Tooby and Cosmides.)

Since the summer of 2025, I have been trying to migrate the foundation of my approach to literary criticism to cultural evolution as articulated by Joseph Henrich. This effort raises the question: how does a foundation of cultural evolution change my theory of humor? Toward the end of this blog post, I will give an example.

At the beginning of my inquiry into humor, in a blog entry from July of 2015, I discussed the personality traits of the hero of a physical comedy. I had taken that list of traits from a documentary starring Rowan Atkinson. (Unfortunately, that video has been taken down from YouTube, probably because it has many clips of classic physical comedy from film.) In July of 2016, I issued a bit of a correction. Not all physical comedy conforms to the list of traits from that documentary, though Atkinson's list is still quite good in many instances. For the example I give below, I will review that Atkinson list of personality traits and discuss how they might fit into a theory of cultural evolution.

My Definition of Humor: Mirthful humor has two components: first, an incongruity that is triggered when two scripts or "mental spaces" in the brain clash with one another, and second, a social / emotional component. The social component often features disparagement or a lowering of social status, and the emotions are often inconguous emotions. Those two components usually occur within a playful context. Some humor focuses on the first component—incongruity—while other humor focuses on the second component—social adjustment.

I have adapted this theory of humor to be compatible with evolutionary psychology, but a version of evolutionary psychology that includes David Sloan Wilson's multilevel selection theory. I argue that humor often functions to adjust social status within a group of people, an adjustment which can be either gentle or aggressive. Non-violently adjusting social status helps a social group function smoothly. Having a well-functioning social group is important for group selection within multilevel selection theory. Within the framework of evolutionary literary criticism, humor can reinforce pro-group behavior and discourage anti-group behavior.

Cultural Evolution: How does this theory change under Henrich's cultural evolution? In The Secret of our Success, Henrich discusses four essential features that distinguish human social life from that of other species (186-7). One: "We live in a world governed by social rules, even if not everyone knows the rules." Two: "Many of those rules are arbitrary, or seem arbitrary ..." Three: "Others care whether we follow these rules, and react negatively to violations;" and four: "We infer that others care about whether we follow these rules" (186).

As Henrich continues, "From the gene's-eye view, survival and reproduction would have increasingly depended on the abilities of one's bearer (the individual) to acquire and navigate a social landscape governed by culturally transmitted local rules ..." (186).

How do social groups police violations of those norms according to Henrich? Typically in small-scale societies, "the sanctioning of norm violators begins with gossip and public criticism, often through joking ... and then intensifies to damage marital prospects and reduce access to trading ..." (188). As I have argued, when humor is used to sanction someone, it is typically a non-violent mechanism. What happens if the norm-violator does not get back into line? "If violators are still not brought into line, matters may escalate to ostracism or physical violence ... and occasionally ... group executions" (188). The background for this theory is found in the works of Boyd, Richerson, Bowles, and Boehm. Please consult Henrich's Secret for references.

The Example: Atkinson's theory of the slapstick protagonist

Below are the elements of Atkinson's theory of the personality traits of the hero in a physical comedy. I list the element and then explain how it fits into the framework of cultural evolutionary literary criticism (CELC).

1. Atkinson: The slapstick hero is alienated from his society. CELC: He finds himself in a low position on the social status hierarchy or outside it and has already been, to a degree, ostracized.
2. Atkinson: He is childish. (Childish here means that he is naively selfish.) CELC: This indicates that he refuses to adopt social norms which might include cooperative behavior toward others or is incapable of understanding them. One could say that he takes actions that might, if allowed, advance individual reproductive advantage, even when the social norms forbid those actions.
3. Atkinson: He has to fight with ordinary objects. CELC: He has not adopted the cultural practices that allow him to participate in the group's collective knowledge about their local environment, such as using tools properly.
4. Atkinson: His body can be humorous itself. CELC: His physical body may prevent him from conforming to social expectations. This relates to a form of prestige that is based on appearance or physical ability. He cannot achieve high-status within the dominance and prestige hierarchies of the group because of his diverging appearance or abilities.
5. Atkinson: He is uncivilized and cannot or will not conform to social rules. CELC: This point directly addresses his inability or unwillingness to embrace cultural learning. This point arguably includes several of the other traits, such as childishness.
6. Atkinson: He is a threat to respectable people. CELC: Respectability relates to conforming to social norms and staying within a prestige hierarchy. Again, because he refuses to conform to social norms, the slapstick hero is a threat to those for whom social norms are the basis for the group's status hierarchy.
7. Atkinson: He mocks authority and politeness. CELC: This is a sub-point of being a threat to respectable people and not conforming to social rules, but here his refusal to conform is intentional and active. He may already feel ostracized from the status hierarchy and actively reject it because he has himself been rejected.
8. Atkinson: He spreads confusion. CELC: Violating social norms causes the social order based on prestige and cultural learning to be thrown into disarray.
9. Atkinson: The final trait. He always survives his travails. CELC: Many violators of social norms who violate those norms to gain dominance or for genetic advantage threaten the basis for the social order. Those violators can be killed in retaliation. However, the slapstick hero is often like a child who is too immature to understand why social norms should be followed. He is not a fundamental threat to the social order, but the social order may have to restrain him. He might be expelled as a scapegoat, but he does not need to be killed to punish his refusal to follow social norms.

CELC: Role of Language in Human Nature

This series of blog posts began as a set of observations about literary research on the novel A Confederacy of Dunces (Confederacy), by John Kennedy Toole, but I have extended it to include evolutionary literary criticism. I have recently begun to work on incorporating cultural evolution (from Joseph Henrich, who follows the work of Robert Boyd and Peter Richerson). To read the blog post that began this inquiry, see my post from July of 2025 entitled Henrich's Secret of our Success, Cultural Evolution as a new foundation for evolutionary literary criticism.

A variety of thinkers have held that human language is the medium of all thought within the human brain and is an essential precondition to us becoming reasoning beings. For example, this claim can be found in Ludwig Wittgenstein's Tractatus Logico-Philosophicus. In a very different school of thought, the literary theorist Kenneth Burke also held that we think in language.

In the present day, some contemporary branches of Critical Theory hold that language is the crucial trait that allows humans to escape from biology and construct their world socially. One formulation of this idea is, "The world must be made to mean." For example, the book Ten Lessons in Theory is an introductory textbook to Critical Theory. In that book's introduction, Calvin Thomas writes, "The phrase 'textual anthropogenesis,' then, involves what's called linguistic determinism, or what I'll call semiotic materialism, the argument, also to my mind permanently revolutionary, that any human reality, and any individual or collective 'subject' thereof, any and all persons, must be made out of language as a specifically 'anti-natural'--unreal or 'anti-real'--form of productive labor." (xxiv).

Steven Pinker, as a neuroscientist and advocate for evolutionary psychology, holds that language is not the stuff of thought. Pinker argues that the mind thinks in its own internal thought-language called mentalese. Pinker started out in the field of neurolinguistics, so he is in an excellent position to make that case. To him, verbal language is a mechanism by which we can package information, originally formulated in mentalese, and share it with other individuals within our language community. It is a communications protocol, not the machine language of the brain's central processor. (To give my own example of non-linguistic thinking, a good chess player can sit down to a game and think hard for hours without using any language at all. A sculptor can do the same while wielding the chisel.)

The cultural evolution of Boyd, Richerson, and Henrich says that cultural learning is the essential precondition for what makes us human, not language per se. Language evolved in a cultural context in which we were already learning from one another.

Henrich argues that the skill for crafting physical tools may have come before verbal language. Sophisticated tool-making requires recursive mental procedures which parallel the recursive mental procedures of language. Therefore, tool-making could have been the cognitive path evolution took to build the genetically programmed neural structures that became the preadaptation for human language (Secret, pp. 250-255).

Language presents a tricky problem for evolution. If a single individual in a proto-human species were to begin to develop language, with whom could she speak? What selective advantage would accrue to this lone proto-speaker? It is difficult to see how language as a stand-alone instinct with specialized brain wetware can evolve. It would be like the sound of one hand clapping.

On the contrary, a social group that has a gifted tool-maker can benefit even if that individual's mental abilities are unique. Everyone else can still use those superior tools, even if they don't have the brains to make them. Brain structures that facilitate a complex Chomskyan grammar might have evolved because of the selective advantage that was conferred on early human communities with singular individuals who could produce superior tools. Only then did the selective advantage for cultural learning take those brain structures and adapt them to create this powerful communication system we call verbal language. Language, once evolved, then turbo-charged cultural learning.

For those theorists who have argued that language is a necessary precondition for humans evolving the capacity to cooperate with one another, Henrich argues that it is the other way around. "For complex communicative repertoires to evolve in the first place, this cooperative dilemma has to have already been at least partially solved. Therefore, language can't be the big solution to human cooperation" (257).

Whether the theory of language-through-toolmaking is confirmed by later research, this scenario at least offers at path by which it could have occurred. In Chomsky's original formulation of his universal grammar, the language instinct popped into existence as a fully formed spandrel, like Athena from the head of Zeus. Pinker's neurolinguistic work shows that the Chomskyan grammar which is universal among humans has some of the "Panda's thumb" imperfections that indicate that it has evolved, but Pinker did not explain how the human brain was able to boot-strap our sophisticated language-related traits from brains that lacked human language. Tool-making-first theories solve the paradox.

Post-script: As for recent research into the evolution of language-enabling structures in the brain and throat, scientists have compared the DNA of Homo sapiens (us) with the DNA of Neanderthals and Denisovans. They have found that the most rapid evolution within the human genome since the split with those other species has targeted the vocal tract and other language-related structures (as well as genes that have flattened the face and eliminated the chimp-like muzzle). See for example: Gokhman, David, et al. "Differential DNA methylation of vocal and facial anatomy genes in modern humans." Nature Communications 11.1 (2020): 1189.

Bibliography

Henrich, Joseph. The Secret of our Success: How Culture is Driving Human Evolution, .... Princeton UP, 2015.

Pinker, Steven. The Language Instinct. William Morrow, 1994.

Thomas, Calvin. Ten Lessons in Theory: A New Introduction to Theoretical Writing. 2nd Edition. Bloomsbury Academic, 2023.

CELC: Cultural Evolution and Biological Evolution

This series of blog posts began as a set of observations about literary research on the novel A Confederacy of Dunces (Confederacy), by John Kennedy Toole, but I have extended it to include evolutionary literary criticism. I have recently begun to work on incorporating cultural evolution (from Joseph Henrich, who follows the work of Robert Boyd and Peter Richerson). To read the blog post that began this inquiry, see my post from July of 2025 entitled Henrich's Secret of our Success, Cultural Evolution as a new foundation for evolutionary literary criticism.

One might reasonably ask: how does this theory of cultural evolution differ from the sorts of culture-first theories of human nature that might be found in the philosophical tradition of Critical Theory? It turns out that there is a big difference.

Using as a guide to critical theory the book Ten Lessons in Theory by Calvin Thomas (2/e), one can see that a foundation of that school is that humans are fundamentally different than other animals.¹ We humans have achieved a plane of existence in which we can define ourselves. Thomas uses the term antiphysis to signal this discontinuity. Language has allowed humans to cease to be bound by biology.

Thomas's version of Critical Theory--or just "Theory" as he calls it--seems to have some relationship to Henrich's cultural evolution. After all, Thomas calls the human condition, in contrast to mere animal nature, a "'sociogenic' and/or 'biocultural' existence" (22-23 of the preface). Thomas sees his antiphysis arising from Marx's historical materialism, and Marx was a reader of Darwin.

Nevertheless, antiphysis is a stance that culture is nearly completely divorced from biology. Thomas looks to Lacan as an authority, for example. Thomas's Freudian theory of child development is a century out of date. He argues that our use of language means that we have the ability to define ourselves ("the world must be made to mean") in a way that escapes scientific attempts to describe us. For Critical Theory, the philosophical "reification" which is a necessary precondition for describing the world in a scientific way is itself an evil to be exorcised. In particular, for Critical Theory, we have transcended the influence of natural selection.

By contrast, Henrich argues in Secret of our Success that cultural evolution has taken over from genetic evolution among humans, but that biological evolution still operates. In particular, he writes, "Cultural evolution is a type of biological evolution; it's just not a type of genetic evolution" (263). Again, "cultural differences are biological differences but not genetic differences" (263). He makes these statements after explaining that the skill of reading and comprehending a written language "actually rewires our brains to create a cognitive specialization" (262). Finally, culture may have taken over from genetics, but natural selection is still shaping the process.

A more hard-line, genes-only evolutionary psychology diminishes the role of culture in building the human being. However, Henrich's cultural evolution does not abandon completely the behavioral constraints that flow from the genes. "We evolved genetically to have (somewhat) programmable preferences, and modifying our preferences via cultural learning is part of how we adapt to different environments" (266). The word "somewhat" indicates that genes do still have an influence on preferences.

Footnote 1: It is my sincere hope that Thomas' Ten Lessons in Theory is fairly representative of Critical Theory in general, because I have studied it (the second edition), and I don't want to have to slog through another book about Critical Theory related to literary criticism.

Post-Script

In looking back over my history with evolutionary literary criticism and Henrich's cultural evolution, I see that the transition has been more gradual than I realized. I had listened to an audiobook of Secret of our Success in the summer of 2023. I have found evidence that it influenced my thinking about ELC before January 1, 2025. That might help explain why I subsequently declared that a transition from ELC to CELC was not that dramatic of a shift. What happened in the meantime was that I actually studied Henrich in detail and realized that I had to rewrite my entire theory.

Bibliography

Henrich, Joseph. The Secret of our Success: How Culture is Driving Human Evolution, .... Princeton UP, 2015.

Leighton, H. Vernon. "Henrich's Secret of our Success, Cultural Evolution as a new foundation for evolutionary literary criticism." John Kennedy Toole Research. Posted July 1, 2025. URL: https://leighton-toole-research.blogspot.com/2025/07/

Thomas, Calvin. Ten Lessons in Theory: A New Introduction to Theoretical Writing. 2nd Edition. Bloomsbury Academic, 2023.

Ignatius as Romantic Aesthete, Idea #33, and More Toole Resources Moving to OpenRiver

On December 31, 2025, (yesterday) the university where I work, Winona State University, shut down the server that I have been using to publish many of my John Kennedy Toole resources and other resources. I will be exploring means to migrate my content to other servers.

Therefore, I have converted the rest of my JKT resources to PDF documents and am making all of them available in one of two places. The first place is OpenRiver, the institutional repository for Winona State University. A list of my resources on OpenRiver can be found at: https://openriver.winona.edu/do/search/?q=author%3A%22H.%20Vernon%20Leighton%22. The second place is my ResearchGate account, located at: https://www.researchgate.net/profile/Vernon-Leighton or click here: Vernon Leighton, ResearchGate.

My university has allowed me to create some webpages on a WordPress site, so my directory for various John Kennedy Toole resources is now at: John Kennedy Toole Research at educate dot winona dot edu. It has links to: 1) a PDF version of my Ideas for Papers or Term Papers on John Kennedy Toole's A Confederacy of Dunces, the Occasional Series; 2) a PDF version of my Critical Annotated Bibliography of Obscure Scholarship on John Kennedy Toole and A Confederacy of Dunces; 3) a PDF version of my lecture, The Dialectic of American Humanism: the Lecture Script; and 4) a PDF version of my John Kennedy Toole's Papers: A cautionary tale of scholarly research, lecture script. I have decided that I will no longer be adding entries to either "Ideas for Papers" or the "Obscure Scholarship," so they will be fixed PDFs.

Versions of Evidence of Influences and ResearchGate

My "Evidence of Influences" paper was my first big study of Toole's novel. I had had several versions of that study. The version which I produced to accompany my big peer-review article, "Dialectic of American Humanism" (2012) was version 2.0. I did produce three years later a version 2.1, but no one has cited it, and I have not updated it since. I will let 2.1 vanish (unless you can find it on a way-back machine). Version 2.0 is the canonical text, and it was already on ResearchGate. A "Green" open access version of the peer-review article "Dialectic of American Humanism" is also already available on ResearchGate. You can find links to those resources on my John Kennedy Toole Research page on educate.winona.edu

As a perk to you for going to the OpenRiver site, I am adding one new entry to the "Ideas for Papers," which I have also included as part of this blog entry.

Idea for Paper about JKT and Confederacy, #33: Ignatius as Romantic Aesthete

Most of my ideas for papers on John Kennedy Toole, such as comparing Ignatius to Kosmo Kramer, are rather modest. This is not one of those modest ideas. This is a Big Idea. I had been saving it for myself. I believe that it genuinely warrants a peer-reviewed paper. Were I to devote further effort to writing one more scholarly paper on Toole's A Confederacy of Dunces, this would probably be it.

Within the Toole Papers at Tulane, one will find that Ken Toole studied the 19th century English Romantics extensively. For example, in the Fall of 1956, Toole's Tulane transcript indicates that he took "English 651: English Romantic Poets, Blake, Wordsworth, Coleridge, Byron, Shelley, Keats."

When Kenneth McIntyre wrote a book chapter for Theology and Geometry (2020), edited by Leslie Marsh, about the possible influence on Toole of the Kierkegaardian concept of the aesthete, I wrote to him. I let him know that there was no mention of Kierkegaard in Toole's surviving papers, but his studies of Romanticism are extensive, especially Keats. If Toole was thinking about an aesthete, it was probably not a Kierkegaardian aesthete but an aesthete in the mold of Keats or one from the Walter Pater school. Such an aesthete might be related to the sensitive types in Proust and Waugh’s Brideshead Revisited, discussed in Idea #14 above.

This theory that Ignatius is a Romantic aesthete meshes nicely with theme of Neoplatonism. The Romantics were big on Platonism and Neoplatonism. I would recommend to a scholar starting on this topic the book The Platonism of Shelley by Notopoulos (1952), which was contemporary to Toole's intellectual education. This Neoplatonism also nicely connects to Evelyn Waugh.

This theory also fits well with Ignatius's self-image as a genius. The Cult of the Genius was strong among the Romantics. Because Ignatius is a parody of a genius, A Confederacy of Dunces may be seen as mocking the pretensions of the Romantic aesthete.

Thesis: Explore the parallel themes within the tradition of English Romanticism and within A Confederacy of Dunces. Discuss aestheticism, Neoplatonism, and the role of the Genius.