Ordinary Sociology » Blog Archive » It’s a Joke, Son. The Comic Mood. Part II

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

Its a joke, son. A woman goes to a party and meets a famous artist who she finds inordinately attractive. After several drinks she goes with him to his studio and spends a night of deliriously passionate lovemaking. In the morning she awakes to find that she has been with a notorious look-alike no-talent guy. No sign of big time artist. The woman’s happiness and sense of victorious achievement immediately changes to anger and shame. The lover in the night had been a starkly concrete illusion.

A confusion of identity joke–one man substitutes inappropriately for another. A persistent and fruitful plot –Oscar Wilde’s play (made into at least two movies) “The Importance of Being Earnest” enlarges on this idea. Also note theme of sexual relationship, where one of the pair claims a higher social status than the other, as a form of social mobility. The joke being in the diverting way this ambition is thwarted. Upward social mobility is pushed as an economic motive in conservative sociology. The usual route is through promotion on the job, with increase in salary and respect, but the step up with intimate association and possible marriage with a higher ranking other is not unknown. In the 1930s people with this kind of ambition were called gold diggers. The term has fallen into disuse since. The American ideology emphasizes equality of person regardless of status. All American marriages are presumed to be based on love and affection. An extreme form of mobility through sexual favor is dramatized in the French film “Priceless. Hors de Prix” (2006).The heroine lives with a succession of much older wealthy men hoping for the eventual security of a loveless marriage until she is lured back to ordinary life through her conventional love of a young hotel worker. In American films where passion and mobility intertwine the prostitute or hotel maid fall for and are won by youthful and handsome millionaires. They can’t help themselves, money be damned. This rescue motif takes its pure form in the folk tale “Cinderella”.

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The joke or comic incident is an act that induces a pleasurable mood whose measure is the laugh. This funny event is embedded in an interaction sequence. In its simplest form only two people are involved. The identification of the comic incident is directional.

(1) Prospective, forward looking: the person initiating the action intends it to be comic, and he signals this in some way, sometimes subtle. But whenever intention precedes the joke, all present get some warning about the nature of the act upcoming–a wink, a giggle, a flat statement. By the time the joke begins we are all usually alert to what is happening.

Another requirement for the comic incident is the laugh or some similar index of a developing pleasurable mood within one or more of those participating. The intentional act without the expected response is a failed joke.

A question of intention then. Person A might signal an upcoming action is supposed to be comic. But if there is no sign or if the sign is not clear or if A pretends retroactively that it was intended to be funny just because B laughed, we have a borderline joke. Some concrete incidents can not be precisely categorized.

(2) Retrospective, backward looking: the action occurs spontaneously, it emerges from the ongoing scene, and some of the people involved laugh. Agreement or consensus appears (however marked) that the act had been funny. Person A dribbles his ice cream over his new shirt and some of those present fall-down laughing. Not intended but still leading on to the happy mood. Both A and B try to catch a ball and become entangled as the ball eludes them. Either or both of them laugh. There is no intention but there is an immediate recognition that something funny has occurred.

Another possibility. a person may laugh and have a pleasurable feeling but if there is no comic action, purposeful or not, antecedent or simultaneous, there is no joke. Best way to go. Feel good, babe, we’re all with you.

Summarizing: The identification of a comic incident is a matter of decision after evaluation of three elements:: (1) intention, (2) the act, and (3) the pleasurable mood change. Five possible outcomes: (1) no joke–none of the elements present. A free laugh possible for no identifiable reason. (2) failed joke–intention and act are there but no mood change. (3) borderline joke–intention and act can not be clearly established and no spontaneous comic act is identified but there is a change toward a pleasurable mood. It is not a free laugh since we suspect something funny happened but we don’t know what. (4) spontaneous joke–the incident arises from the on-going interaction. Not intended yet the pleasurable mood change occurs and the comic action is immediately recognized. (5) Intended joke, all elements in place–intention, comic act, laugh. Bingo!

The players in an interaction sequence are not limited to two. But exactly how many there are and what their contributions may be in each concrete case is a matter of observation. Sometimes it is fixed by formal rules but may also vary with time, place, and state of culture. The contributions of each will also vary during the rolling out of the interaction sequence. Who is doing what may shift among those present. What we want to describe is the kinds of people and the kinds of acts that we might have in particular kinds of comic presentations. I am presuming that the order of the interaction might have some consequence for the kind of comic event that is generated and vice versa. Not all of these elements have to be present, and those that are can be assigned to different people or can be collapsed down to the essential dyad. We have: (1) the joker ego, called A here. He solely, or with any or all others present, constructs the comic incident. (2) the alter ego as responder, called B here. He is the interlocutor, the one who helps set up the situation for the joke. He also responds once the joke is out or he joins with A to produce the funny action. (3) the on-looker, a third-party, sometimes called the kibitzer. The spectators are amassed here as a separate part. They magnify the effect achieved by A and B. Commentary and critique usually are found here. (4) the butt, a lot of comic action is aggressive and even destructive. It may involve criticism, attacks on the social status of the other or on the social order itself. There might be bullying. Hatred may be expressed. Humiliation, embarrassment, abuse, threat may be heaped on a specific person or on an ethnic group or some other category. The object is the butt. This dark element in the supposed comic event is not universally comic. Not everyone will be laughing. (5) the moral authority, the censor who is present within most participants as a self-imposed limit and a sharing in the cultural definition. In psychology it is called the super-ego, but in society it may be located in a formal authority like the political administrator and the police and the judiciary. Sometimes the moral authority is imposed by parts of the audience organized within informal voluntary groups. This censoring process blocks out sectors of tabooed comic action. (6) the research/observer. Another hovering eye. Supposedly objective elements like research sociologists who also intervene in the field of action often by their non-comic statements. In a sense the stand-back-and-look-objectively-person includes us (me and you as we share this narrative about the comic). We cool ones who think we can objectify the others. We are actually part of the mix. (7) the non-laugher. as we have been saying this refusal of the joke suggests lines of demarcation within the society or group. The distinction of those in the mood (and those not) suggests political and socio-cultural differences. This rejectionist pattern is another way into the analysis of the joke’s meaning.

Even more player types may turn up and the model can be stretched to accommodate them–like the (8) alien/stranger who will have great difficulty getting the joke unless it is purely physical. or (9) the heckler, who unexpectedly intervenes and twists the interaction in a new direction. There is nothing sacred about a model. Its purpose is to abstract a unity of order and process found in a class of real events. The model can adjust to accommodate the real events selected.

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A note on Lenny Bruce. I saw him in a small Near North side club in Chicago. Just walked in, sat at the bar with a view of the dance floor, ordered a beer for–I don’t remember, only it was a reasonable price–say two dollars. Bruce came out and talked for an hour. He showed a great deal of concern for his audience–he kept adjusting his act, was charming, modest. One joke: Man insures his mother’s life and then puts her on a plane with a time bomb that explodes and kills everyone aboard. (Actual news event of the time.) “Guy like that can’t be all bad.” says Bruce. A wry indirect comment on bleeding heart liberals who transform even the most despicable evil into misguided error. Another joke: the story begins with a warning to the women and girls present about masculine sexuality–all the women present now categorized as innocent virgins. You can’t be shocked at the guys (I am paraphrasing him) have to realize they can’t help themselves. Talked about the case of the severely injured man in the ambulance, dying, who makes an erotic grab for the attending nurse. A back handed slap at the fearful sexual repression of some of the moral hardliners. (This narrative is a gloss on the the Little Red Riding Hood and the Wolf folk tale. It exaggerates a small part of the male-female relationship into a massive and overpowering threat. The part is made to stand for the whole. The humor is in the unique use of language to paint a surreal image. Meanwhile the audience entertained, the narratives comic. No wild eyed ranting the night I saw him. Nothing to fear but fear itself. Bruce died after shooting up heroin. An inglorious way to go. You get some idea of Bruce’s skill (in part based on an approximation of free association) from a five minute You-Tube video. He starts blandly but very quickly begins developing a theory of why the police are harassing him. Turns out (more or less) that the governing authorities want to get a full night’s sleep but are kept awake by the noise of comics and night club people who want to party into the wee hours of the morning. The police are the confused intermediaries. Everyone is simply following his own reasonable path into unreasonable confrontation. Of course the actual process is a selective censorship that is targeting one comic for his ideas on religion and for his occasional common language. He exaggerates by minimizing. Wanting a good night’s sleep is a better motive for suppression of the other (more understandable) than the uptight moralist denouncing an obscenity that in the regular course of events he won’t ever actually hear. While Bruce is using his nasty words, old man moral authority is supposed to be fast asleep.

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Note. Turns out that that the injured man in the ambulance joke is famous in its own right. Some commentators offer differing interpretations. A British comic advanced the theory in 1999 that the the man in the ambulance was Lenny Bruce and that he made advances on the nurse because he was turned on by her uniform. OK, friend, you’re entitled to your opinion but let me ask you this: What was the nurse doing in the ambulance when she is supposed to be back at the hospital? Furthermore couldn’t the injured man have been so drugged up that he only hallucinated the attack. Also since he was in a weakened condition wouldn’t it be more logical that the nurse turned on by his high status as an internationally renowned comic have made a sexual pass at him. In a sense the nurse stands on her head. Its not that unusual, sex starved nurses mooning over totally zonked and helpless male patients in ambulances. There has got to be an explanation.

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A story about a small businessman during a slump, an economic downturn. He needs money for payroll and for stock. Can’t get a loan from his usual sources. Starts traveling to other cities hoping to find a open-minded and courageous investor. Winds up in Detroit, a city he has never visited before. Despondent. Passes a local movie house, enters for shelter never noticing what film is featured. Turns out to be a horror film. He is totally frightened and disgusted by what he is witnessing. But riveted. He stays through to the awful end and leaving the theater he notices that he feels better. He realizes that business might be bad but nowhere close to being as miserable as the oppressed spectator at a horror movie. The movie showed him a pit deeper and hotter than the one he was actually in. Jauntily and with a smile he walked off into the late Detroit night. There has been a change of mood. There had been a prior act. Now we are left with the essential question assigned us by our own analysis: Do we have to call that horror film (title unknown) a comedy? Tentative answer: it’s borderline.

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Starting with the idea of the comic incident we are pushed toward the much larger topic of the sociology of mood and finally to the necessary analysis of the institution of entertainment. (I hear the music welling up, first slowly and lightly and then with increasing volume and force. “That’s En-ter-tain-ment” the up energy voice shouts, enunciating each syllable) And that’s where this comic stuff is ultimately cataloged. (There are two versions of this song–the old Milton Berle theme song (sentimental recounting of backstage theater life) and a more recent revision by The Jam. Both rousing and mood changing.)

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Famous musician gets religion and studies medicine and starts a clinic for poor villagers in the most inaccessible jungle recesses of Africa. He is saintly. A gross, culturally limited woman visits his clinic from the West and intrudes herself into his life for a week. Misunderstanding what she sees, making impossible demands, distracting the saint from his work and his contemplation of the ineffable She is a pain in the ass. Saint orders her from the compound and tells guard to kill her if she turns up again. (Adapted Elaine May & Mike Nichols skit.)

Moral goodness has its limits. The intrusion of an alien into an ongoing moral and social order is experienced as aggression and leads to conflict. Another form of invasion. Ironically it is the do-good imperialist who himself is invading Africa (even with good intentions) who is in turn invaded. The painfully intrusive visitor challenges the norms of hospitality. Movie “The Man Who Came to Dinner.” (1942) is an example of the genre. The stranger enters your space and you find that following the rules of hospitality you can’t contain him. You are beyond the normal set by your culture and have to figure out what to do next. You are forced to invent your next action. Always a comic situation and worth a laugh so long as you are neither the host or the intruder.

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

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