On the counterintuitive in everyday life (6)

6. In comedy

Just as in photography, in comedy there is also often something which is counterintuitive, or in what makes us laugh.

Approaches to and theories on laughter are numerous, and since I am not at all specialized in this domain, I will not try to discuss them in this post. That said, my aim is to show that in particular pieces of comedy, the crucial element which makes us laugh is a counterintuitive one. I will first limit my subject to the kind of comedy which is usually defined as absurd, and then offer some examples by analyzing two typically counterintuitive pieces of comedy.

The absurd in comedy

Talented humorists master, use and combine many means and effects in order to make us laugh, and resorting to the absurd is one of them. But the absurd, as with any other humoristic means, may not be so easy to handle as one might believe. Its mere use is probably not what makes a particular piece of comedy successful; as we will see, the resort to the absurd is always limited. In order to illustrate this point, here is a deliberately twisted variation on a famous joke riddle theme:

Why did the chicken run across the road? Because there was a house coming.

This attempt at a joke clearly resorts to an absurd element: houses are not moving objects and do not “drive” on roads, and even if this were the case, the chicken would not have chosen this precise moment to run across the road. Despite this absurd element, it is very unlikely that this “joke” would make somebody laugh, and that it would be successfully passed on in popular culture. Here is now the original:

Why did the chicken run across the road? Because there was a car coming.

There is also an absurd element in this probably more successful joke: the chicken ran across the road because a car was coming. This is absurd since we know that the chicken, like all animals, has an instinct of self-preservation, and would not have run across the road precisely because a car was coming. But despite this absurd element, all the expectations that we have about such a scene remained unchanged: this is a car (and not a house), which is coming on the road; and this is not very surprising, since roads are specifically intended for cars (and not for moving houses). On this basis, one can conclude that the resort to the absurd in a joke must be limited and moderate in order to be successful: a chicken with suicidal tendencies may be funny, on condition that it does not try to commit suicide with the help of a moving house.

As one can see, the construction of the latter joke is very close to Boyer’s recipe for creating successful concepts, and I will now continue this comparison by analyzing two typically counterintuitive pieces of comedy.

Philippe Geluck’s Le Chat

In his comic strip work Le Chat, Belgian humorist Philippe Geluck often resorts to the absurd. The lead character of Le Chat is a big cat standing up, dressed like a human being and philosophizing about everyday matters. Here is a specimen of his puzzling way of considering things:

 

(Translation: box 1: “Idiocy is much superior to intelligence”; box 2: “for all the world’s intelligence will never understand universal idiocy”; box 3: “whereas a bit of idiocy is sufficient to understand whatever is intelligent”.)

This comic strip represents an excellent illustration of the rule that applies to every piece of comedy resorting to an absurd element, namely, to draw correct inferences from a false premise; or, in other words, to prove something which is wrong in a logical way. In philosophy, this would be called a paradox and rejected; in comedy, this may be precisely what makes us laugh. Why is this the case?

Every odd or unusual proposal which is submitted to us is attention-grabbing; in this case, it is not usually accepted that “idiocy is much superior to intelligence”, and this proposal then constitutes a counterintuitive element. This however does not suffice for the comic strip to be funny; if it stopped there, we would not be amazed and would simply reject this proposal. But it does not stop there. In the second box, this unusual proposal is developed into another proposal which seems to be totally satisfactory: it is convincing to say that the world’s intelligence will never allow the understanding of universal idiocy. But then there is a third box, which reverses this position and presents another absurdity that a bit of idiocy is sufficient to understand whatever is intelligent. Of course, no one will be fooled by such a reductio ad absurdum, nor accept the initial proposal on this basis. But the entire sequence is perhaps funny because it proves to us in a “logical” way something that we perfectly know to be wrong, and then constitutes a puzzling experience, since we are usually not accustomed to consider things in such a way.

Just as Boyer’s successful religious and supernatural concepts, Geluck’s Le Chat comic strips resorting to the absurd are violating certain characteristics of acquired concepts (a cat saying something which is absurd), while keeping all the other characteristics unchanged (anthropomorphic cat’s absurd proposal is developed in a logical way).

Decoupled mode of thinking in Raymond Devos’s sketches

Those acquainted with Boyer’s work will have recognised, in my account of the absurd in comedy, what he calls the “decoupled” mode of thinking in Religion Explained’s chapter three. The decoupled mode of thinking actually consists of drawing inferences on the basis of imagined premises, and then allows us to predict plausible consequences, which is very useful in many situations (e.g. ”If I do not eat this morning, I will be hungry at noon”). The notable fact is that in the decoupled mode of thinking, just as in comedy resorting to the absurd, the inferences are produced in a logical way from the imagined premise. Pieces of comedy resorting to the absurd then constitute a particular kind of decoupled mode of thinking, in which the imagined premise tends to be clearly counterintuitive, and seems to have no usefulness (apart from making us laugh).

In some of his famous sketches, French humorist Raymond Devos (1922-2006) showed a striking capacity for handling decoupled cognition in the absurd mode. Devos often depicts scenes of everyday life, in which he introduces an absurd element, and then produces correct inferences from it, until an unexpected dénouement. In “Ça fait déguisé” (“It looks disguised”) the narrator, who is driving his car, is arrested by a policeman for a banal logbook control. But the narrator refuses to believe that the policeman is an authentic one, and then asks him for his papers. The policeman, not very self-confident, tries with no success to convince the narrator, and a real questioning then begins, except that everything is inverted in comparison with what usually happens: it is now the policeman who must prove that his papers are in order, and that he has nothing to feel guilty about… And this continues until the narrator, not convinced at all, arrests him and leads him to the police station, where the superintendent states: “This is not the first time that he has been brought to us!”". What is remarkable in this sketch is that the absurd is limited to the strict minimum, namely that here the driver questions the policeman. Apart from that, the usual form of a banal logbook control and all the feelings and the possible consequences which are inherent to it are preserved, such as suspicion, feeling of guilt, a bit of harassing, the necessity to convince and, finally, an arrest. In other words, Devos is successful in answering logically to an absurd imagined premise: ”What will happen if a driver arrests a policeman?”.

* * *

Geluck comic strip Translation note: if it were translated literally, the last box of the Geluck comic strip would be more or less meaningless in English culture, and I have therefore adapted it in order to conserve its absurd character and its humour. However, I do not wish to betray in any way its creator, and French-speaking readers will be able to make their own assessment. On the other hand, I thank Stuart Hartley, for having brought this to my attention and for having helped me to resolve it.