Jokes and Humor Among the People.

And then there is the everyday laughter.

Roll call every morning in the Army: Wake up, fall out in platoon formation along side the barracks. Sergeant calls every name  alphabetically. “Here, here, here,” the soldiers answer. Some say “yoh”.  Very rarely someone will offer the more formal “present”. For some reason when you hear it in the dark before dawn it is funny. The public refusal of an imposed uniformity.

One member of the unit is still in his bunk by the door overlooking the formation, catching a few extra winks. He answers “here” from the wrong direction. Here but not exactly here. Sergeant does the famous double-take with slow burn.

A serious misdemeanor, the culprit will be punished–extra duty,  restricted to camp– but a local, ordinary humorous event has happened.

It has the social order of the comic incident.  The man in bed is A, the instigator. The Sergeant is B, the responding other, the second banana. The platoon is the audience. There is the change in mood expressed in the laughter and a general agreement that it occurred spontaneously during a rule breaking act   No professional comic or troupe of actors. No music. Just everyday life, a people’s joke.

We don’t have a measure. Each of us participates in and witnesses these local comic events but we hardly ever note and file what happened. Unreported, rarely recalled, the action and the mood merely a bit of inconsequential smoke.  But suppose each of us kept a diary of comic incidents and  sent them to a specialized web site where they could be classified and analyzed.  Weekly reports could be issued on the comic moods of the people.  Another item for the news announcer: stock market quotes, weather forecasts, war casualties, lurid crimes, and comic mood.  We are in Joe Gould’s territory–history from the bottom up.

We don’t have a measure but we do have patterns.  Ordinary comic incidents can be sorted by  topic, content, and internal order.  The moment for each is unique and singular but on reflection similarities emerge.  They are not exactly the same but they fall into distinctive classes and sometimes they are strikingly alike.

It is a case of pattern from pattern. We inherit pattern, perpetuate pattern, and pass pattern to others.   We duplicate endlessly. I’ll list a few of the obvious ways.

(1) Imitation.  A case of hear and then say.  A joke can pass from local setting to local setting this way like rumor or a commercial craze like the hulla hoop.  It can be as a narrative, a play on words, a physical act. You witness an incident and then later initiate a replication in another setting.   The experience of repetition is so repetitive that some preface a joke by asking, “Have you heard this one?” Maybe not, but I recognize the pattern. (I am avoiding mention of patterns of physical aggressions so familiar that they are named but so mean spirited that I refuse to perpetuate them.  You can all remember these for yourselves.)

(2) The social order itself is repetitious.  For example the sameness of education:  the formal school and classroom, the teachers and students and  principals and superintendents,  the curriculum and teaching methods–all have minor  variations at most on a universal way.  Say classroom and presume that everyone will recall a similar image. The local groups are acting out of a near  uniform social order.  The roll call story  is  an institutional  pattern. Imitation not needed. We simply react to a similar stimulus which in  large part is the same institutional order.

(3)  Sharing culture sets another series of patterns of comic incidents and jokes.  Misunderstandings between the genders might reside here.  The inarticulate and clumsy man trying to seduce the dim witted woman for example.  The masculine interest in sports versus the feminine interest in romance.  The woman window shopping leisurely while the man is  focused on the walk itself. The man who refuses to admit that he is lost lest he have to ask another for directions and his exasperated mate. If the cultural norm is there the comic pattern will follow.

(4) A sharing of knowledge of  prior events.  Remember the story of the three daffy dodgers on third base and the next day the similar comic comments about it.  The dodgers have three men on. Oh yea, which base?  Calling up a shared memory can be the joke.

(5)  Language, the double meaning of a word.  Lay, pink, ginger, screw, French, come,  clap,  pile, dump, bang.   I’m laughing.  If these don’t ring your bell, try scratching your own list. We can find a mutual comic mood if we all recognize the anomaly.

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Oliver Hardy and Stan Laurel, famous movie comic team of the 1930s, are carrying a grand piano across a flimsy rope bridge that hangs over a deep chasm. A wild eyed concert pianist is sitting atop the piano fingering the keys from the wrong direction. Half way across (with the dizzying sway accelerating, the rope unraveling and pulling away from its moorings, the roaring of the distant rock strewn rapids below  mingling with a jazz rendition of Clair de Lune) we look over Stan’s shoulder and see an angry 500 pound great ape approaching from the opposite direction. Stan stops to consider their predicament. “Is the toll on this bridge refundable if you don’t make it across?”

(If I recall correctly, Laurel and Hardy did a piano moving skit. The rope bridge and the ape comes from someone explaining what a topper is.  I added the piano player and the  toll refund.  Add the links to two versions of Clair de Lune and the picture of Laurel and Hardy in retirement and this post wins at least five stars.)

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Impossible nightmarish  situations aside, mood is no joke. There seems to be lots of mood patterns  going in different directions, but no overall summing up. Think of all the concurrent moods of all the people. How can you possibly describe it? The joint mood of  the assembled audience sharing stimulus and context might be the maximum sharing of mood that we can expect. Yet on occasion, we all sense a unified mood field across the entire society.  It is never a perfect moment,  but we sense intuitively that what we are feeling  is part of a larger welling mood among the mass of us in our society.  In the audience and among the actors and staff at the theater this perception is stark and obvious. It can be described as a group mood. But for the larger groupings like the community, the city, the society this concrete immediacy of perception is missing.The measure is missing.  Statements about this large dispersed group’s mood may simply be projections  of one person’s imagination.

Yet we can site some facts that suggest mass mood.  The shock and mourning visible on the death of a president in office or of a revered public figure. People paying their respects along the tracks where the train carrying the body passes, people lining up to pass by the coffin on display, people along the parade route of the funeral procession.  The tears, the somber looks. Still we can’t say everyone is caught only some portion.

 Certainly leadership elements are aware of the possibility of a popular mood and some of the cadre work is directed toward exerting  influence over it. Sometimes the emphasis on excessive optimism, everything copacetic, goes against an obvious reality and is caught out.  This seems to have happened during and after the Katrina Hurricane where the happy talk dissolved in the waters of inundated New Orleans.

To the extent that we suspect that the mass mood may exist most of the time it is in default mode–sort of a normal mix. But with a striking happening conveyed via the mass media this mass mood can take a very definite and distinctive form–acts of war, natural catastrophes, famous personalities acting out, iconic crimes, investigations and court cases. These can generate uniform stimuli and a shared  mood.

At this level mood is similar to, but in content separate from,  opinion.  Compare the mass to the local to the individual mood.  I would guess that the quality of the mood goes from crude to nuanced, from persistent to volatile, from less governable to self-governable. It is as though the mass society is something like a herd of cattle on the move.  The cadre cowboys are ever alert to mood–keep the gang from stampeding but at the same time keep them moving in an orderly manner in the same  cadre decided direction.

I am convinced that a human (and, each in its own way, animal) ability to read the other and the situation  is a biological given.  This sensing ability, admittedly distorted and blocked and sometimes exaggerated by the culture and the social order, is always at work but only occasionally does it crest and become unified and apparent.

I saw this process clearly while working in a small civil service office of 40 to 50 workers who interacted day by day over time and reached crudely uniform readings of each one’s character and capabilities in the process.  The presented persona, the public face, is pierced and a version of the actual functioning person reached.  You can’t fool all the people all the time. I know that they were reading me with more accuracy than  I was reading myself.  A form of the magical mirror.

So part of the mass mood is located in the shared readings of the participants, part is in the manipulation  and distortions and corrections introduced by the active cadres.

The comic at this inflated level is another question.  It is more likely to be generated by mass media instead of bubbling up from the bottom.  Perhaps on mass holidays like New Years Eve or Mardi Gras in Brazil, a platform for the comic might facilitate a wide-spread comic mood.

But this is a special topic of its own. Very iffy. We will step back from this precipice and maybe follow it up in a later post.

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The complex of the comic incident established–intent, action, mood–what might be its consequences? How does the comic fit into the larger scheme of the ongoing social order? The answer varies with unit of action and analysis  (individual, local group, mass)  and by type of initiator (professional or ordinary), and by degree of intention.  Another vast topic.

First the comic mood is part of a larger biological cycle to which we are committed by our very nature.  We die and we live, we wake and we sleep, we hunger and are sated. we laugh and we cry, are happy and sad.  Our capacity for persistence in one direction is limited. A dialectic is in operation.  Out of this we have the notion that the task oriented group, under discipline and focused, will eventually break for tension relief with horse play, comic incident, relaxation and pleasure. So one function is comic relief itself.

Second. In Pittsburgh I fell in with a group of young professionals who met every Saturday evening for a few hours of sociability. Group made up of couples and associates.  Influenced by a persistent member who was an architect and city planner, the group began telling off-color stories, mainly involving incest and would continue along the same line for up to two hours.  Invariably we would become bored and even exhausted and  despondent and  the session would break up like a brittle sheet of ice under a sledge hammer.  Suddenly all go home.

The formal, fixed narrative joke became a block to any hope for friendship and intimacy.  We didn’t talk about ourselves and listen to the hopes and fears and projects of others–all thwarted by a wall of jokes. The outcome, a barrage of jokes that prevented the development of the group and its members. The joke can be a poor substitute for friendship and intimacy. The group can freeze up.

Third.  Another class of comic incidents take the opposite turn and by breaking the ice allow the group to move toward greater closeness.  Spontaneous banter, playfulness, sharing in the development of the comic action convert the group to an accepting circle.

Four. Wit, double meaning, exaggeration, irony, analogy permit the comic to elude the censorship, especially under a police state and dictatorial regime. The joke  expresses a resistant solidarity among those present and alert.  The comic can be a political act.  In a freer environment the negation and attack on the other and his ideology can be more direct.  The limit is the sensibilities of the other–democratic contention occurs within a larger agreement and unity and this sets a limit, conventional and self imposed. Some part of the comic action is always involved with censorship–informal or official.  At its most benign it is called good taste–going over the line is the act of a barbarian and a cad. The comic as heavy aggression.

Five.  Then there is the direct satisfaction of the search for diversion.  We go to a place decorated to suggest opulence–the old movie palaces, the casino, the house of pleasure, the various forms of theater–and are transported to pink cloud dream and given respite from the daily grind.  The professional comic world under the supervision of  owners and employers provides a conventional way.  Dream, sleep and entertainment.

Six.  Gallows humor. British army officer is being tortured by members of a satanic terrorist cult. Hanging by his heels, head down, he fears that his loose change will fall out of his pockets. The stoic made comic. A movie theme. I got this example from the British movie “The Four Feathers.” Another scene from an American movie, “Arise My Love”– a captured American volunteer in Spain during their civil war awaiting his turn before the firing squad plays cards and jokes with a Spanish priest who is trying in vain to prepare him for his after-life.

Humor gets us ready for the anticipated rough patches.  It is also the humor of an elite sensibility, a cultural attitude directed by training and social position.

And then there is the case of Arnold Rothstein, a gambler at his peak who draws a royal flush in a high stakes poker game just at the moment that an assassin shoots him.   A final joke at the expense of the victim. The last illusion. A hot hand but it comes from a cold,  fixed deck.  Rothstein was involved in syndicate crime, rumored to be  behind the Chicago Black Sox scandal.  The story has a mythic quality (the Wikipedia biography doesn’t mention it). Like the Brit losing his change it expresses a wish for a graceful style under trying circumstances.  If one has to go out this is probably one of the better  doors to open.

It’s a Joke, Son. The Comic Mood. Part II

A Sociology of the Comic—Jokes to You Buster and Don’t You Forget It.

A Foundering Research Project. Revisiting Three Posts

Observations On and Around Jobs

The Obviously Missed. The Blind Spot Revisited.

Unemployment

Revisit of Blogs Past. Looking for a Pebble on the Beach

Jury Duty Three. A Service for Amateurs.

Jury Duty–Two. A Case of a Negotiated Verdict