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Hobbes, Freud, and Kant walk into a bar. The bartender says, "Hey, which of you guys can tell me why humans laugh?"
Let me back up a bit. There are three classic theories of humour. The "superiority" theory—that's Hobbes (also Plato, Bergson)—locates the essence of humour in the "sudden glory" we feel at the humiliation of others. It suits jokes about cuckolds, racist jokes and put-downs, like:
Angry guy walks into a bar, says to the bartender, "All agents are assholes."
The guy sitting at the end of the bar says, "Just a minute, I resent that."
"Why? You an agent?"
"No. I'm an asshole."
The "relief" theory of humour—that's Freud (also Spencer)—says that humour allows us to get around our inhibitions. The set-up fools our inner censor, and the punchline liberates repressed impulses. It suits naughty jokes—like this one, told to me by one of my students at a Catholic girls' school. "Mr Holt, what's better than roses on a piano? Tulips on an organ."
And the "incongruity" theory—that's Kant (also Pascal, Schopenhauer)—says humour is a matter of the logical abruptly dissolving into the absurd. "Do you believe in clubs for children?" WC Fields was asked. "Only when kindness fails," he said.
A theory of humour must also account for laughter—a very weird thing. As Arthur Koestler said, "Humour is the only domain of creative activity where a stimulus on a high level of complexity [a joke] produces a… sharply defined response on the level of physiological reflexes." Why the spasmodic chest-heaving, the strangulated respiratory gasps; so pleasant when issuing from oneself, so annoying when coming from the next table?
The superiority theory doesn't really answer this question. The relief theory at least gives it a try. According to Freud, keeping forbidden impulses down takes an expenditure of nervous energy; when those impulses are liberated by a joke, this now-superfluous energy gets discharged through the facial and respiratory muscles. Not bad in theory, but there's a problem. If Freud is right, the most inhibited people should be the ones who laugh the hardest at a raunchy joke, since they have the most repressed energy to discharge. In reality it's the least repressed who guffaw the loudest.
The incongruity theory of humour, being the most intellectual of the three, should have the toughest time with physical laughter. Koestler called laughter a "luxury reflex," since it doesn't seem to serve any evolutionary purpose. But he did not live to see the advent of evolutionary psychology, which can find an explanation for anything. The neuroscientist VS Ramachandran offers this one for the origins of laughter. Imagine you're ranging through the jungle with your hominid pals. Suddenly a threat appears: you hear another hominid band rustling around nearby. You and your comrades tense up into fight-or-flight mode. But then you spot that the enemy "hominids" are actually monkeys. To communicate that the threat is spurious, you emit a stereotyped vocalisation—one that is amplified as it contagiously passes through the band, so everyone gets the message. At the core of this evolutionary rationale for laughter—call it the "false alarm" hypothesis—is incongruity: a seemingly grave threat revealing itself to be trivial. For Kant, that's also the essence of a joke.
The threat trivialised by a joke is often a very real one—thus jokes about sickness and death, Jewish jokes about the Holocaust or the charge of deicide that Christian persecutors historically brought against Jews because of the crucifixion ("What's the big deal? We only killed him for a few days"). Pretending that such things are of no consequence makes them bearable. The same applies to metaphysical mysteries, like the one Heidegger made heavy weather of: why is there something rather than nothing? When an earnest student put this question to Sidney Morgenbesser, a waggish Columbia philosophy professor, he replied, "Even if there was nothing you still wouldn't be satisfied!"
The cruel jokes explained by the Hobbesian superiority theory and the lewd ones explained by the Freudian relief theory must contain some sort of incongruous twist if they are to work. A look at the history of jokes reveals that the mix of ingredients shifts over time, with meanness and lewdness gradually giving way to intellectual pleasure in incongruity. That's progress! Or is it? Chimpanzees, who separated from humans about 5m years ago, also laugh and grasp simple incongruity jokes.
In fact, only with civilisation do you get humour based on forbidden impulses and contempt for out-groups. But civilisation—which can be defined as cities plus writing plus sexual repression—goes back only 6,000 years or so. Here, then, is my bold prediction: in the fullness of time, humour will shed these low elements and revert to its original essence: delight in incongruity for its own sake. And our most remote descendants will laugh hardest at the thought that what appears to be the ultimate something—the universe itself—will eventually wink out in a Big Crunch or expand into trivial nothingness. Yes, the end of the world has the logical form of a joke.
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