Performing Arts Field Paper

Jokes

Ted Cohen

Excerpted from Pleasure, Preference and Value, Eva Schaper, ed., Cambridge University Press (1983). Reprinted by permission of the publisher.

If it is irrational to fail to be persuaded by a good argument, what is it to fail to be amused by a good joke? Not irrational, I think; certainly not in the same way. It is like being without taste. We will say ‘irrational,’ I think, not only of someone unpersuaded by a good argument, but also of someone who is unable to see that it is a good argument if the form is plainly valid and the premisses obviously true. And we will, I think, deny a sense of humor not only in someone who isn’t amused by the funniness he sees, but also in someone who can’t see the funniness when it is clearly there.

What is a sense of humor? A capacity to be amused by the amusing, I suppose. What makes this capacity remarkable is that it is not coerced into activity. You don’t have to laugh. Your response is not compelled in the way that an argument compels belief. Your response is not arbitrary, however. We don’t all just happen coincidentally to be laughing when we’ve heard a joke, as if we’d all simultaneously been tickled under the arms.

If I am correct, then the ‘If—then’ in ‘If you hear a joke, then you laugh’ stands for a relation we are poorly equipped to describe, for it is neither sternly logical nor merely contingent. Surely the joke must cause you to laugh, but it isn’t the same as when tickling makes you laugh. It is exactly the relation Kant is ill-equipped to describe when he undertakes to analyze the judgment of taste. This judgment, he says, exhibits a response (to beauty) which is free but also somehow necessitated.

What is wrong with you if you are not amused, if you are not reached by this non- necessary, non-contingent relation? In escaping the proper response you are not so much wrong as different. It is not a trivial difference. It is a difference that leaves you outside a vital community, the community of those who feel this fun. It is a community that creates and acknowledges itself in the moment, and is powerless to conscript its membership. To fail to laugh at a joke is to remain outside that community. But you cannot will yourself in, any more than you can will yourself out.

A point in telling a joke is the attainment of community. There is special intimacy in shared laughter, and a mastering aim of joke-telling is the purveyance of this intimacy. The intimacy is most purified, refined, and uncluttered when the laughter is bound to the joke by the relation I have just been worrying over, a relation in which the laughter is not exacted but is nonetheless rendered fit. There are derivative forms of intimacy, in which the laughter is not so absolutely free. These obtain when the joke calls upon the background of the audience and uses this as a material condition for securing the effect. I think there are two main forms.

In the first form the joke is hermetic. It really makes sense only to those with special information, and the intimacy brought to those who qualify is bound up with a recognition— or re-recognition—that they do constitute an audience more select than humanity in general. The joke occasions the reconstitution of that select community. For an hermetic joke the required background may be very specific and decisive.

What is Sacramento? It is the stuffing in a Catholic olive.

Either you know about pimento and the Church and its sacraments, and you get this joke, or you don’t know these things and the joke is opaque. In America a very common device of this kind of joke is the incorporation of words or phrases in Yiddish. Appreciators of these jokes were once nearly restricted to certain Jews, but this has changed as an endless stream of Jewish comics forces more and more elements of Jewish humor, including vocabulary, on more and more of the general public.

Not every hermetic joke offers itself on this all-or-nothing basis. Some have depths which permit appreciation on different, if cumulative, levels.

One day Toscanini was rehearsing the NBC Symphony. He stopped the playing to correct the trumpet line only to discover that the first-chair trumpet had intended exactly what he had played, and disagreed with Toscanini over how it should go. There ensued a heated argument which ended only when the trumpeter stalked angrily off the stage. As he reached the wings he turned to Toscanini and said ‘Schmuck!’ The maestro replied, ‘It’s-a too late to apologize.’

If you know only the word ‘Schmuck’ you can manage this joke. In fact even if you don’t know what it means you can sense enough from its phonetic quality to salvage the joke. But the more you know of professional musicians in New York, of Toscanini’s ego and his peculiar approach to non-Roman language, and so on, the more you will make of the joke.

Here is a more intricate example of an hermetic joke.

A musician was performing a solo recital in Israel. When he ended the last selection, a thunderous response came from the audience, including many cries of ‘Play it again.’ He stepped forward, bowed, and said, ‘What a wonderfully moving response. Of course I shall be delighted to play it again.’ And he did. At the end, again there was a roar from the audience, and again many cries of ‘Play it again.’ This time the soloist came forward smiling and said, ‘Thank you. I have never been so touched in all my concert career. I should love to play it again, but there is no time, for I must perform tonight in Tel Aviv. So, thank you from the bottom of my heart—and farewell.’ Immediately a voice was heard from the back of the hall saying, ‘You will stay here and play it again until you get it right.’

This joke works with nearly any audience, but its total riches are available only to those who know the Jewish religious requirement that on certain occasions the appropriate portion of the Hebrew Bible be read out, that those present make known any errors they detect in the reading, and that the reader not only acknowledge these corrections but that he then go back and read out the text correctly. That audience—those entirely within the community of this joke—will not only be able to find this extra level, but they should also find it a better joke. For them there is a point in the story’s being set in Israel, and if there were no point in that, the joke would do better to omit the geography altogether.

In the second derivative form of intimacy the joke is likely to be rather simple, although not necessarily, and the background required is not one of knowledge but one of attitude or prejudice. I call these affective jokes. The most common examples are probably what in America are called ethnic jokes. It is not necessary that one actually believe that Jews are immoral, or Poles inept, or Italians lascivious, or whatever: Indeed, most appreciators known to me have the opposite beliefs. What’s needed is not a belief but a predisposition to enjoy situations in which Jews, Poles, Blacks, or whoever are singled out. ...

The little schematism I’ve sketched divides jokes into two kinds, the pure ones and the conditional ones. The conditional ones, the ones the success of which requires a special background in the audience, are again divisible into two kinds: the hermetic ones, whose presumed background is one of knowledge or belief, and the affective ones, which require of the audience a particular prejudice, or feeling, or disposition, or inclination. (If you have a passion for this you might further divide the affective jokes into those for which the requisite predisposition is affirmative and those for which it is negative. In what Americans call a ‘Polish’ joke, the prejudice defames Poles. In Warsaw, however, a Polish joke is typically celebratory, and in the story a Pole subdues a Russian or a German or the Polish government.)

I am not saying that pure jokes are better. And they do not seem to be more interesting as a subject. Let me note two excellent topics associated with the complexity of conditional jokes.

First is the matter of active complicity. When your special background is called into play, your sensibility is galvanized. Something that sets you apart from just any person is brought into your apprehension and this adds to the quantity and alters the quality of the intimacy achieved. The point is like the one I think Aristotle has in mind when he declares the enthymeme the argument most suitable for certain kinds of persuasion. His idea is this: If you wish to set your audience in motion, especially with an eye toward provoking them to action, then you are well advised to induce them to supply the initial momentum themselves. You can do this by offering them an incomplete argument. They must then undertake a mental scramble in order to locate the premisses necessary to render the argument valid. This scramble is a motion of the mind undertaken before the legitimate arrival of the conclusion, and that motion augments the persuasion implicit in the validity of the completed argument. So it is, approximately, with conditional jokes. The requirement of a special background is not stated explicitly. The audience discovers that and it also discovers that it can supply what’s needed. It is further aware that not everyone can supply the background (unlike an enthymeme’s audience which potentially includes everyone because minimal logical acuity is enough to formulate the implicated missing premiss). In doing this the audience collaborates in the success of the joke—the constitution of intimacy—just as the audience for an enthymeme collaborates in the construction of a valid argument, with the difference that the audience of the joke derives additional intensity of feeling from knowing that the success is due to them specifically, that other groups would fail.

A second good topic concerning conditional jokes is the means they afford to a kind of fakery. A conditional joke demands a special contribution from the audience, either cognitive or affective. What if the joke-teller himself cannot supply this special constituent? In the first case, where the implicated background is cognitive, the teller is like a parrot, and he cannot himself know (find) what fun there is in the joke. This charlatan resembles a musician who doesn’t divine the sense of a piece but nonetheless bangs it out note for note, or a religious practitioner who reads out texts or prayers in Latin or Hebrew, perhaps even ‘with feeling,’ but doesn’t know what the words mean.

In the second case, where the requisite special contribution is a matter of feeling, the teller is more like a liar. He can, typically, find the fun—recognize it or identify it—but he cannot feel it. Perhaps the plainest examples of this insincerity are jokes told to groups of (say, racially) prejudiced people—genuine bigots, that is—by one who does not share the true depths of the bigotry but means to ingratiate himself with the group. This is a kind of fraudulence, like that of the man who says ‘I apologize’ without feeling sorry, of the artist who mimics unfelt forms, and of the performer who does not feel the passion in the scores he plays with mindless virtuosity.

The two kinds of fakery are different. The first is, mainly, simply bizarre. The second is more devious, even deceitful. In both, however, there is the fraudulence of emptiness, as both betray the commitment to intimacy I have characterized as a kind of generic aim of joke-telling. The teller of these jokes is inauthentic: He invites and even induces you into a putative community in which he himself has no place. Who is he to be issuing these invitations?

The difference between pure and conditional jokes corresponds to a difference in moral and religious conceptions. The idea of a pure joke rests on a conviction that at some level people are essentially the same and can all be reached by the same device. This is, perhaps, a fundamentally Christian idea. The denial of the possibility of a pure joke rests on a conviction that people are essentially different, or at least that they belong to essentially different groups. The idea that all jokes necessarily are conditional seems to me a kind of Jewish idea (not the only kind).

Those who believe only in conditional jokes will concede that it is possible to appreciate a joke whose community does not include oneself. How is this possible? It must be through an act of imagination which transports one into the relevant community. Thus I can appreciate jokes meant for women, Englishmen, and mathematicians, although I am none of those. There is a point, however, at which it becomes impossible for me to be amused. I reach that point sooner when the joke is anti-Jewish or anti-American than when it is anti-women or anti-English. And there is a point for any type of affective joke beyond which its instances are objectionable. They are in bad taste. If you think that lapses of ‘taste’ are always relatively innocuous, then I would insist that these jokes are in fact unacceptable—immoral. Why does this happen, and when?

I cannot give a complete answer, even in outline, because there is a fundamental question I do not know how to answer. Suppose that x is some real event, and that it is (morally) unacceptable to laugh at x. The question I cannot answer is, under what conditions is it wrong to laugh at a fictional report of x, and why? It may be that a heavy traffic of amusement in x-jokes creates or reinforces beliefs or attitudes that are themselves objectionable or that lead to intolerable acts. That answer is insufficient, for two reasons. First, there is little evidence to show that it is always true, and some indication that it is sometimes false. Second, it doesn’t get to the heart of the evil, even if it is true, for even if it could be demonstrated that these jokes lead to no bad ends the jokes themselves would still be offensive. With no good answer to the question of why (and when) it is wrong to laugh at a story of something you shouldn’t laugh at, I shall nevertheless go on to suggest how an answer—if we had one—might lead to an understanding of the unacceptability of some jokes.

Suppose that prejudice against Ps is a bad thing, and that to be amused by an x-joke requires a disposition which is related to anti-P prejudice, although that disposition is not itself a prejudice. The joke will be accessible only to those who either have the disposition or can, in imagination, respond as if they had it. The joke is obviously conditional—it is affective; but it will also be fundamentally parochial (essentially conditional, one might say) if there are people who cannot find it accessible. What people will be in this position? Ps, I think. Even the imagined possession of the disposition is in conflict with what makes these people Ps. To appreciate the joke a P must disfigure himself. He must forsake himself. He should not do that. In fact he cannot do that while remaining a P. The rest of us, who are not Ps, should not appreciate the joke although we can in this sense in which a P cannot. The joke is viciously exclusionary, and it should be resisted.

What this implies depends upon exactly what people essentially are. Are they essentially men or women, of some race, of some age, of some religion, of some profession, of some size? That is a fine question in the metaphysics of morality, and one I do not care to answer here. I offer this account of a kind of unacceptable joke as an explanation and justification of why some people find some jokes intolerable. A currently common exchange begins with a man telling a joke (involving women, typically) which a woman finds offensive. She objects and is told she has no sense of humor. Her reply could be that she cannot bring her sense of humor to that joke without imaginatively taking on a disposition which is incompatible with her conception of herself as a woman or a certain kind of woman. And if she is essentially a woman or a certain kind of woman, then she cannot reach the joke without a hideous cost.

Although the basis for a pure joke has an obvious moral flavor, akin to the idea of a universal human sameness, conditional jokes are also congenial to the serious idea of morality. Conditional jokes are related to the idea that we can respect and even appreciate one another while remaining irreducibly different. They carry a danger, however, for their parochialism easily becomes unbearably sectarian.

A final note about pure jokes. The major question, I suppose, is whether there are any. If there are, they will be jokes whose presumptive success depends on nothing whatever. The audience needs no special background. They bring to the joke only their humanity. Now the question is, when you tell such a joke, upon what basis do you expect anyone else to be moved? The answer must be: Upon the fact that the joke moves you, plus your estimate that it moves you simply as a person and without regard to any idiosyncracy of yours. The logic here is exactly the same as that which Kant cites in answering the question, By what right do you judge anything to be beautiful (where this means: Upon what basis do you suppose that anyone else should take pleasure in this thing?)? Kant answers: Upon the fact that the object pleases you, plus your estimate that the pleasure is due to nothing about you beyond the fact that you are a person.

But now comes the nasty question, which Kant believes he can answer with regard to the beauty of things, and I am not so sure about with regard to the funniness of jokes. If a thing touches you, so to speak, only in the rudiments of your person—if ever such a thing happens, with all those things dormant which make you more than just a person; why should it be good as well for any other rudimentary person? Isn’t there room within even the most elementary, stripped-down, homogenized human sensibility for variation? Couldn’t you and I be mere men and nothing more, and yet be pleased by different beauties and laugh at different jokes? No, says Kant, in the first instance, for the capacity to feel this pleasure is identical with the capacity which makes knowledge possible (and knowledge is possible, he insists interminably). And so there is an argument, however good.

Is there such an argument for the postulation of a universal sense of humor? I do not know. Is the capacity to find a joke funny a basic, essential feature of our sensibility? It needn’t seem entirely implausible that it is if we suppose it to be, minimally—and it is only its minimal presence that matters—the capacity to feel simultaneously the appropriateness and the absurdity of a punch line. It is like feeling the wonderful hopelessness of the world. (Or is it the hopeless wonder of the world?) But must every one of us have within himself the capacity for that feeling, however disfigured it may have become? God knows.

The sudden click at the end of a certain kind of joke is its hallmark. There is an unexpected, an almost-but-not-quite-predicted coincidence of moments. And this is part of a marvelous reflexivity. Earlier I guessed that the whole joke relates to its effect in an enigmatic relation which renders that effect both unforced and fitting. The relation can be found again entirely within the joke. The joke itself has a beginning which leads to an end which is unforced (and so, unpredicted), but altogether right. In laughing we fit ourselves to a joke just as its punch line fits to its body, by this relation of self-warranting propriety. It is a kind of mirroring. We find ourselves reflected in a surface which mirrors our dearest and perhaps most human hope: to do well, but not under compulsion. A joke shows us that and shows us doing that. Anything which can show us that aspect of ourselves deserves fond and serious attention.