Footnotes to Chapter 3: Laughter and Bisociation
1. [note 1 is missing in the original thesis, though referenced in the main text of chapter 3 � oversight?]
2. [page 86] This observation requires further precision and elaboration which is impossible here. In any case, see our analyses of Sanskrit verses demonstrating �The Role of hāsya in śṛngāra� (chapter VIII) for the application of these principles.
3. [87] �In classical associationism the successive states of consciousness were visualized in linear form, as chains or trains of thought. But a linear form of representation cannot express the different functional rules which govern the progress of the stream in different fields� In our diagrams the separate fields were represented by two intersecting lines; a more adequate visual representation is to indicate the two fields by different planes (we often speak metaphorically of �levels� or �planes� of thought); their respective slant in space will symbolize the different functional organization of the fields. The modified diagram will then look like this: [diagram???]
4. [90] Excellent examples of such a situation, technically called �the junction of emotions� (bh�va-sandhi) in Indian aesthetics, productive of laughter in the protagonists and humor in the connoisseur, are found in the isolated love-verses (muktaka) from the poet Amaru analyzed in chapter VIII, �The Role of hāsya in Sanskrit Love-Poetry (śṛngāra).�
5. [93] P.E. McGhee, �Development of the Humor Response: A review of the literature,� Psychological Bulletin, 76, 1971, pp.328-48.
6. Mary K. Rothbart, �Incongruity, Problem-Solving and Laughter,� Humor and Laughter (pp.37-54), p.45.
7. [96] This observation may be usefully compared to I.A. Richard�s remarks on the �cognitive aspect� of organic and emotional reactions. People with exceptional color sense judge �not by attentive optical comparison or examination, but by the general emotional or organic reaction which the colors evoke when simply glanced at� (Practical Literary Criticism, p.99), without being able to specify any objective features on which their judgment is based. �Such judgments are not a simpler and more direct way of taking cognizance of things, but a [97] more indirect and complex way. It is not thereby shown to be a less primitive process. On the contrary, simplified ways of thinking are commonly advanced products� (loc. cit.). These remarks apply also to aesthetic experience in general, which is in fact an active skill of knowing, though generally tacit. For Richards, �the chief difference (a derivative difference very likely) between a sensitive and an obtuse individual lies in the fact that the obtuse person has not learned to interpret the changes in his general body consciousness in any systematic fashion. The changes may occur and [98] occur systematically, but they mean nothing definite to him. This kind of intervention of organic sensation in perception plays a part in all the arts� (ibid., p.100).
8. [106] Henri Bergson, Le Rire, originally published in 1916; Presses Universitaires de France 1940; 1981 (399th edition). See pp.3-4, 102 and contrast with his remarks towards the end of the book, pp.148-51. Comedy�s very commitment to society and its association with the play of intelligence forced Bergson to deny that comedy was a genuine art. Koestler too refuses the status of genuine art to comedy, which he grants to tragedy, but because the former is based on the �self-assertive emotions� whereas tragedy is based on the �self-transcending� emotions. Bergson is especially guilty of restricting laughter to Gurdjieff�s intellectual center. �The worst shortcoming of Bergson�s theory is its complete neglect of the emotional dynamics of laughter, of its tension-relieving aspect. For him laughter is society�s corrective punishment of a social behavior, that is, of a lack of adaptability, and there the matter ends; how such a corrective reflex has developed, its genesis and physiology are without interest to the metaphysician� (Koestler, Insight and Outlook p.421). Unfortunately, Koestler too has not devoted sufficient attention to the superiority theory of humor derived from this familiar corrective function in order to integrate it into the bisociative theory. This is what we have tried to do in our chapter on the �semblance of aesthetic emotion� (ras�bh�sa; pp.316-21) devoted especially to Bergson�s central thesis on the social significance of laughter, which we will therefore not discuss here restricting ourselves instead to its cognitive aspect.
9. [107] In this theatrical type, �each person is inserted into a series of events that concern him, and of which he has the exact representation, and upon which he orders his speech and acts. Each series interesting each of the personages develops in an independent manner; but they have crossed each other at a certain moment under such conditions that the acts and words that form part of one of them can just as well fit the other. Hence the misunderstanding of the personages, hence the equivocation�� (Rire, p.75). Here each [108] series functions as one of the fields of the bisociation, and we view the common terms simultaneously through the eyes of both protagonists. Whereas Bergson sees in the quiproquo an exceptional case of the comic, it can be shown, on the contrary, that it only renders explicit and exploits to the maximum the bisociative structure underlying all forms of the comic, by making each field correspond to the entire interpretative framework of an independent personage with whom we have to identify ourselves.
10. [109] Thus tripping over an obstacle (Rire, p.7) is comic because a movement has mechanically persisted instead of adapting to the obstacle; a fixed idea (pp.10-11) is mechanical for it intrudes into situations where it does not belong; the comic vice, unlike the tragic vice, gives the impression of being mechanically imposed from without (pp.11-12) instead of being rooted deeply in the life of the character; the comic deformity (pp.17-20), unlike the non-comic one, appears to be the permanent retention of a grimace expressing some obstinacy in character or attitude where we would expect the supple mobility of features characteristic of life, and this mechanical effect is what the caricaturist exploits (pp.20-21); an orator who repeats certain gestures mechanically (pp.24-25) instead of infusing them with the life of his speech; imitation (pp.25-26) is funny because it isolates the automatism in a living person by reproducing it; outmoded clothes give the comic impression of disguise (pp.29-31) for they seem to mechanically envelope the living person, and ceremonies function in the same way with respect to the entire [110] society when their rigid form is dissociated from their living function (pp.34-35); and so on. All these elements appear to be �mechanical� only because they generate an original associative field that is at variance with the field pertinent to their present context. Disguise, for example, is comic only when it does not succeed and we instead perceive the projected appearance and the real person simultaneously; so too, imitation is funny not because it is mechanical but because we bisociate it between the imitated and the imitating, for acting, which is successful imitation, is not comic in tragedy.��
11. [111] W.K. Wimsatt and C. Brooks, Literary Criticism: A Short History
(henceforth LC), (1957;
12. [115] Here Freud approvingly refers to Bergson�s own objections to explanations of the comic pleasure that imply some kind of bisociative model. Our answer to Bergson is hence partly applicable to Freud�s objections as well.
13. See chapter VII, pp.180-88, for the reinterpretation of �incongruity� in terms of bisociation, which also covers such notions as �comic contrast� and �comic comparison.�
14. [117] Where the rendering explicit of the unconscious contents by the psychoanalyst is found funny by the patient, Freud notes that this occurs only when the latter has attained a certain degree of consciousness of this content. �Any uncovering of unconscious material of this kind strikes us in general as �comic�. Many of my neurotic patients who are under psychoanalytic treatment are regularly in the habit of confirming the fact by a laugh when I have succeeded in giving a faithful picture of their hidden unconscious to their conscious perception; and they laugh even when the content of what is unveiled would by no means justify this. This is subject of course, to their having arrived close enough to the unconscious material to grasp it after the doctor has detected it and presented it to them" (Jokes, p288, note 1). It would appear the that the cause of the laughter is not the dream-like materials themselves of the unconscious, but the juxtaposition of the conscious and the (originally) unconscious content of these materials. We are clearly falling back again to the bisociative structure.
15. [120] G.T. Fechner, Vorschule der Asthetik, vol. I, chapter V,
16. Freud describes �the pleasure that serves to initiate the large release of pleasure as �fore-pleasure�, and the principle as the �fore-pleasure principle�� (Jokes, p.188). The joke �comes to the help of major purposes which are combating suppression, in order to lift their internal inhibitions by the �principle of fore-pleasure�. Reason, critical judgment, suppression�these are the forces against which it fights in succession; it holds fast to the original sources of verbal pleasure and, from the stage of the jest outwards, opens new sources of pleasure for itself by lifting inhibitions� (Jokes, pp.188-89).
17. [129] See our comments on L. Makarius� observations on the terror and disgust evoked by ritual clowns in their native spectators, in chapter IV, p.143.
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[this concludes the Footnotes to chapter 3: �Laughter and Bisociation�]