There are probably whole Johns Hopkins U. Press books to be written on the lallating function that humor serves in today’s US psyche.
That’s the beginning of a footnote in David Foster Wallace’s Some Remarks on Kafka’s Funniness. It just so happens that I’m reading such a book right now, minus the emphasis on “today’s US psyche.” The book is called Inside Jokes, and it posits an evolutionary explanation for the existence of humor that I actually find compellingish. It’s maybe best explained through analogy:
Humor is the reward for mental de-cluttering. It’s like a mother (Momma Nature) trying to get her aimless adolescent (us) to clean up his dirty room (mess of a mind) by hiding candies (humor) under piles of clothes (absurdities/inference errors).
Okay, I’ll just let the authors explain it:
Mother Nature has hit upon much the same trick to get our brain to do all the tedious debugging that they must do if they are to live dangerously with the unruly piles of discoveries and mistakes that we generate in our incessant heuristic search. She cannot just order the brain to do the necessary garbage collection and debugging (the way a computer programmer can simply install subroutines that slavishly take care of this). She has to bribe the brain with pleasure. That is why we experience mirthful delight when we catch ourselves wrong-footed by a concealed inference error. Finding and fixing these time-pressured mis-leaps would be constantly annoying hard work if evolution hadn’t arranged for it to be fun. This wired-in source of pleasure has then been tickled relentlessly by the supernormal stimuli invented and refined by comedians and jokesters over the centuries. We have, in fact, become addicted to this endogenous mind candy in much the way long-distance runners become addicted to the endorphins their strenuous efforts pump into their blood streams. Humor evolved out of a computational problem that arose when our ancestors were furnished with open-ended thinking.
I’m reluctant to be That Guy who knocks a theory (which is by definition a simplification) for being too simplistic, but if the idea is that humor is the reward for doing the otherwise unpleasant mental work that leads to cleaner, more accurate, less biased perceptions and judgments, then I think the authors are making an assumption that I am just going to go ahead and call simplistic. Here’s why:
The goal of evolution is pretty clear, and it ain’t mental accuracy.
To the authors’ credit, in some contexts mental accuracy is an evolutionary bonus (e.g., it’s good to know that the smilodon is eyeing you for reasons other than your handsomeness), but in other contexts it clearly isn’t (e.g., if you truly, honest-to-godly recognize that you are a 6-foot wad of primate, microbes, and viruses in an incidental universe in which only two outcomes are guaranteed, then it becomes a bit more challenging to, shall we say, get upward).
Here’s what I like about the theory: Humor as reward. That seems simple – obvious, maybe – but that simple/obvious idea evokes profoundish questioning about why something gave you the giggles. Reward for what, why, and how? In other words, what the eff are you giving me this amusementy reward for, Nature? These are precisely the type of questions that traditional theories of humor shirk, and that is reason #1 why they are (to me) so unsatisfying. The theories are merely descriptive, attempts to identify (and piss poor attempts at that) what criteria are necessary or sufficient for the funnies, but they offer 0 explanatory power, i.e., they cannot say how or why incongruity or superiority or relief is funny. I can understand, though, why they shirk these questions, because it becomes especially convoluted when you start asking questions like, why humor here but not over there? In short, this stuff is really freaking complicated. Good luck trying to answer these questions in a Wikipedia entry, or even a John Hopkins U. Press book.
I started quoting a footnote from DFW at the beginning of this post. The rest of it takes a ballsy (though wildly speculative) poke at why we Kardashian-age Americans generally find the stuff funny that we do:
A crude way to put the whole thing is that our present culture is, both developmentally and historically, adolescent. And since adolescence is acknowledged to be the single most stressful and frightening period of human development – the stage when the adulthood we claim to crave begins to present itself as a real and narrowing system of responsibilities and limitations (taxes, death) and when we yearn inside for a return to the same childish oblivion we pretend to scorn* – it’s not difficult to see why we as a culture are so susceptible to art and entertainment whose primary function is to escape, i.e. fantasy, adrenaline, spectacle, romance, etc. Jokes are a kind of art, and because most of us Americans come to art now essentially to escape ourselves, it’s understandable that most of us are going to view Kafka as not all that funny, or maybe even see him as a repulsive case of the exact sort of downer-type death-and-taxes reality for which “real” humor serves as a respite.
*(Do you think it’s a coincidence that college is when many Americans do their most serious fucking and falling-down drinking and generally ecstatic Dionysian-type reveling? It’s not. College students are adolescents, and they’re terrified, and they’re dealing with their terror in a distinctively US way. Those naked boys hanging upside-down out of their frat house’s windows on Friday night are simply trying to buy a few hours’ escape from the grim adult stuff that any decent school has forced them to think about all week.)
