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

A Saturday night gathering of neighborhood families to play pinochle. After three hours of play the gang spirals down from the competitive high with coffee and cake and casual socializing. Charlie F, the master machinist, finds a cloth measuring tape lying around and his pixie side suddenly alert he begins to measure his body the way a tailor would to fit a suit. Conversation stops and all watch.

He measures his thigh and announces the number, then his waist, chest, neck. Each time reading the exact number. Finally he circles his head with the tape and holding the mark with his finger reads it off.

“Zero.” he laughs.

A physical-conceptual joke. The flourishing of the tape and then the number. The image of the tailor measuring himself. Itself a parody. Then the circumference of the head suddenly becomes a measure of the brain, of intelligence. An incongruity—confounding body and mind. Zero. Nothing there, a dope. Self-referral. The actor is commenting on himself. Ironic. He obviously is not dumb since he has the wit to enact this joke. He, in good humor, disparages himself and elevates all the auditors a notch. You are no longer the feared and negated dim-wit, he assures the others, since I have assumed that crown. Spontaneous, out of the blue, whether invented in the enactment or called up from an established repertory. For those few present a moment of grace, pulling the rabbit from the hat, not there-there. A healing act.

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Start with the joke. Either a narrative or a physical act or a quip that has some probability of comic effect. It is part of the larger category of actions evoking a pleasurable mood—feeling good and happy. A mood whose external sign is the laugh, smile or grin.

The opposite mood is the sad, the down, the discouraged. In theater the drama is characterized as comic or tragic depending on ending. The desire/plan of the actor/protagonist is achieved or thwarted and the audience responds with the conventionally parallel feeling of happy or sad. The sharing of the feeling either way is the additional meta outcome.

But there is a much larger range of moods—pensive, focused, determined, frightened, relaxed, romantic, angry, shy, curious and so on. They are established and defined in language. We all know that moods can change quickly or slowly or be persistent and continuing, or can be intermixed. Moods can be described by analogy, like feeling light as a feather, or feeling blue (depressed), red (angry), green (envious). In the same way we recognize that moods can be responsive to events like parades, music, cheers, sports actions, news reports. Mood is altered by lectures, reading, quiet talks with friends and family, partying, athletics. We have mood altering nostrums—alcoholic beverages, psychotropic drugs.

While mood is physically located within the individual and in detail might be as unique as a fingerprint it also can be shared by group members. In theater, sports field, class room, work station, wherever people congregate as audience, the events and enactments and incidents they witness together have a uniform effect upon them. This unity is the group mood. It can feed back and enhance the individual feeling into an ascending or descending spiral. There can be a multiplier effect. The group shifts mood together in response to a shared stimulus as with a rousing speech, a melodramatic opera, or witnessing the fall of an attacked building. The sharing is transparently obvious to all. The emergent reality of the group, the plural, can be sensed directly and starkly.

Mood isn’t everything. The sociologist hardly attends it because he is so busy tracking interaction, institutions, culture, methods and so on. Yet it is there, a biological capacity that is implicated in social action. A physiological process that can be culturally the same for those present. It has a definable social dimension. The socio-cultural side of the comic has at least three parts: one is this meta element of shared mood, two is the social order through which the comic nexus of act and consequence is expressed, and three is the socio-cultural order and its evaluation that is embedded within the joke itself.

In classical sociology, mood is called affect. Parsons contrasted it with affective neutrality. Feelings are permitted in some cases and rejected in others. It implies that mood can be socially turned on and off like an electric light. I would suggest that mood is a constant process within each individual (like our capacity for invention) Some may have a greater depth and range of feeling but we are all constantly in feeling mode. The socio-cultural pattern calls it out or suppresses it, turns it in one direction or another, molds it. And in turn the pattern is shaped by the surge of feeling. But there is always the possibility of the unique way or the sub-socio-cultural way. You, and we, do not have to laugh on cue.

We are into a complex notion here. Suppose you have a feeling that is so unique that none of the concepts in your language describes it. How do you tell another about it? Or even how do you conceptualize it for yourself? You take the poetic step of precisely using our available words to paint/describe a new image of the new mood. There are other ways I am sure. We spot the new in the other or in the situation or the process. We make-up a neologism The human experience of mood, feeling, affect is universal. Through it there is a constant building of culture and, in the opposite direction, a destroying or forgetting and a cultural loss. Entertainment ain’t all canned tuna fish.

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The comic, the joke, has a professional, specialist order in our society. We have stand-up comedians who earn their livings by telling jokes. We have commercial media that are mood enhancing, titillating, manipulating. It reaches us through books, theater, television, Internet. People hire out as comic writers, cartoonists, and so on. At the same time there are the comic incidents in ordinary life where the sense of humor is engaged and those present share in the comic perception and the shared sway of mood.

A unified sociology of the comic has to gather together, and make sense of, all of these comic mood generating patterns and then has to follow this material as it pushes outward through the entire social order. An encyclopedic task.

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Story
Baseball game, Two men on base and batter hits ball on ground to furthermost precincts of the field. Lead runner rounds third base and heads home but ball is thrown to catcher and to elude a tag the runner retreats toward third base. Second runner meanwhile reaches third base and stands on bag. The hitter, who is very fleet afoot, at that moment slides into third base. Three men on third and the third baseman gets the ball and tags two of them out. The third runner, dazed and confused, steps off bag and is also tagged. Triple play. (An actual variation of this play happened to the old Brooklyn Dodgers with Babe Herman as the hitter and last man into third base.)

But this is an impossible situation. Only one runner can park safely on a base. It is an incongruous event, surreal and therefore comic. It has not been planned or scripted. By each runner only paying attention egocentrically and either not attending the coaches or the coaches momentarily abstracted, the players fall into this embarrassing tableau.

For the cognoscente spectator to witness such an unusual and unexpected event is a moment of treasure. But sometimes the fall into the unexpected is on the tragic side. The injury, the bean ball. The separation of comic-tragic is a fine line.

I traveled the Staten Island Ferry for seven long years, out and back every work day. The ferry leaves its Manhattan slip and consistently turns right to round Governor’s Island day and night, day by day. Twice during my transit it deviated. Once another boat suddenly blocked the way to the right and the Captain steered left and went through the Buttermilk Channel between Brooklyn and Governor’s Island. I caught that and had a frisson (shiver) something like the fans at Ebbets Field nust have felt seeing three men on third base. Not much laughing but an up, a comic absurdity, a nearly impossible breaking of the normal way. In a second incident the Captain had to change the orientation of the ship, the front should have been back and vice versa, so he left the Manhattan slip and turned hard right and started up the Hudson River like you would back up your car to get out of a tight spot. Then he switched steering to the new front or bow and on we went to Staten island taking a very unusual route. I only caught the final second of this maneuver being so immersed in the stories of the New York Times that I almost missed this gem of the unexpected. These moments are out there reaching us, it would seem, randomly and depending upon our knowledge and our active senses and our ability to appraise and appreciate. If you live in a dry country you hate to miss a rainy day.

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There is a paradigm, a model, that at a very general level scoops up a very large class of comic incidents and jokes. The situation starts with an on-going classical interaction sequence now expanded to five elements (at last count.) These can be thought of as the processes encasing and carrying the joke or comic incident. There is…

(1) the joke teller/actor/the governing sensibility. The action starts with him (either individual or group). He could be the one telling the story or starting the action. He should be obvious, but even if we don’t see him clearly we can’t go far wrong by staying close to the interaction sequence.

(2) the other/alter, the second banana, the interlocutor. Without this responder, real or imaginary, there is no interaction.As the sequence rolls out he might emerge as top banana. Expect a lot of shifting around .

(3) the third party/audience. The on-looker. This element can be passive or take some part in the action, usually in the form of commentary and critique. In addition to the extent that ego and alter are aware of third-person and have some orientation toward him (or the third party group), he can affect the rolling out of the action. The mood that comes out resonates and gains volume here. Ego and alter are the sticks, the third-party is the drum.

(4) the subject or object of the action sometimes called the butt is a fourth element. The aggressive side of the joke, humor as a weapon, becomes visible here. The put-down, the humiliation, the bullying, demeaning of the other is not necessary in the comic situation but we have to recognized that the possibility and the fact that overt or veiled aggression is present. As in the Charlie story, ego can be the butt, the aggression is absorbed by the self.

(5) the moral authority or the censor is another possible presence. This is the imperious overview that tests the act and either prevents or distorts the rolling out. Censor can make the joke disappear. It prevents (or struggles against) the expression, at least in polite society, of the lewd for example. It may also demand that certain acts occur as in prejudice and hatred. It finds its locus of expression as an intervening. Some or all of the actors present might be the carriers, pro or contra, of a moral attitude. Freud’s super ego can be the censor of the self as well.

These parts can compress down to one, the writer or idle muser imaging or visualizing the joke. The social order becoming a fantasy or a plan. Those present can shift the elements they represent over time and as the interaction rolls out. As noted, the comic ego and the alter interlocutor can exchange places. The moral element can be diffused through all. So the actual incident may look different while concealing in plain sight the same pattern. The model provides a standardized series of issues that should be attended in the description of any comic incident.

This model is not carved in stone. Revise it or replace it as reality and mood require.

This is a vast topic. Many miles yet to travel

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

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