There was an amusing moment on Friday night's edition of More or Less, the BBC's entertaining statistical fact-checking programme. A doctor, writing in the Guardian, had claimed that an erection diverts one fifth of the body's blood supply into the penis. Crikey! An amazing fact, if true, which a lot of listeners had asked the More or Less team to verify ("Asking for a friend", I expect). So another doctor was asked by presenter Tim Harford: how much blood does the typical male body contain? Answer, five litres. So, Tim mused, one fifth of that is ... one litre! Um, I'm thinking of one of those one litre bottles of drink... And now I'm wondering whether I've been doing this all wrong! Made me laugh, anyway. [1]
Humour is a funny business [canned laughter]. I like to watch those Netflix "specials", for example, but they rarely if ever actually make me laugh. I often wonder whether they pay those people in the front rows to guffaw and nudge each other over moments of "recognition humour"? The cameras certainly seem to be able to find the right faces pretty efficiently. At best, I get a wry smile from the likes of Taylor Tomlinson or Dave Chappelle, although I confess to getting a broad grin from John Mulaney. Laughter, though? Nope.
One of my old home-town friends, Rob, was a good teller of jokes (he probably still is, although he'll be telling them in French, now). He knew how to pace and voice a set-up and then deliver a knock-out punchline [canned laughter]. But what puzzles me – I actually asked him about this recently – was where he had got all those jokes from in the first place. He didn't seem to know. Of course, back in the Dark Ages of public entertainment – on the long and winding trail from public executions and cockfighting via music-hall turns and silent-cinema slapstick to the Goon Show of blessed memory – the telling of jokes was an essential part of social life. "Have you heard the one about...?" or "Knock, knock!" were the stuff of any night down the pub. Jokes – in the sense of miniature stories intended to evoke laughter – simply circulated from teller to teller, origin unknown, as a sort of oral folk literature. Mind you, apparently Kafka would crack up when reading his own stories to his friends. Here, have you heard the one about the guy who woke up to find he'd turned into a giant cockroach? Heh... [canned laughter]. But, unless I'm mixing in the wrong circles these days, the sharing of the formal joke has largely vanished from most contemporary social settings.
I used to think that everything important – philosophically, spiritually, socially – could be learned by paying proper attention to jokes. Jokes seemed to me the last living vestige of an ancient oral tradition of teaching wisdom by means of tales and parables. Zen koans or the Sufi tales of Mullah Nasruddin, for example, seek to instruct at the same time as they amuse or astonish, as do some of the parables in the Gospels: a pun about passing a camel through "the eye of a needle" (the name of a gate into Jerusalem) has that same faint glimmer of a time-tarnished joke as the cartoons in ancient copies of Punch now have. It's even possible to imagine that much of the philosophical writing of Wittgenstein or Derrida was intended to be hilarious [canned laughter].
One of the more surprising items that I stumbled across in Stevenage public library, somewhere around 1969, was a two-volume tome entitled The Rationale of the Dirty Joke, by Gershon Legman [2]. The book recounts, classifies and analyses hundreds of "off colour" jokes, most of which are very American, totally unfunny, and entirely baffling to an innocent 15-year old. I was too embarrassed ever to borrow the book, but would thumb through it in a private corner of the library. If nothing else, it planted the seed of the idea that there might be more to jokes than making people laugh.
Of course it does help if a joke is funny. But tastes and contexts differ, and what is hilarious with port and cigars in a Vienna drawing room in 1910 may well not work over a cup of instant coffee in the offices of Spare Rib in 1972. Humour is clearly subject to historical change, like everything else. Freud, in his outstandingly unfunny routine Jokes and Their Relation to the Unconscious, gives this example of a joke that he has decided is simply silly (or, in his words, "idiocy masquerading as a joke"):
A man at the dinner table who was being handed fish dipped his two hands twice in the mayonnaise and then ran them through his hair. When his neighbour looked at him in astonishment, he seemed to notice his mistake and apologized: “I’m so sorry, I thought it was spinach.”
Time has had its way with Herr Doktor Freud's ponderous analysis, and this is now just about the only funny joke quoted in the entire book. Though on the rare occasions I have told it I have substituted "custard" for "spinach" [canned laughter].
But here's something Freud-related I read recently that I found interesting:
A new joke, Freud explained, could be traded around “like news of the latest victory.” Freud’s phrasing is dramatic, and his analysis is convincing enough, but it’s never helped me to like the genre of “the joke” as much as I like puns, wordplay, quips, and general banter between friends. It comes back, I think, to Shoemaker’s distinction between the performative aspect of jokes and the collaborative nature of wisecracks. If stand-up comedy leaves me cold (and it does), perhaps it is because it is less founded on human sociability, than wisecracks, which are always rooted in an impulse towards friendship. Next to wisecracking, telling jokes seems lonely to me.
Ben Wurgaft, "Kidding, not kidding: the philosophy of wisecracks", Chronicle of Higher Education, June 21 2024.
There's truth in that observation, I think. A Netflix special is a spotlit one-person performance, where the laughter is not so much the pay-off as a form of punctuation, like musical breath marks, which a skilled comedian can ride through their sequence of "bits", leading up to a final "mic drop" finish and the inevitable standing ovation. It does look rather lonely up there. But not even most professional comedians tell jokes, as such, now. Jokes have gone the way of neat, grand historical narratives – history is long on set-ups, short on good punch-lines – and most comics seem to have swallowed whole the line that they are truth-tellers to power (or fearless sharers of personal anguish) and not mere retailers of jokes to a paying public.
Today there is a pervasive nervousness about the "appropriateness" of the unruly reflexes that trigger our laughter. Real laughter is anarchic, and no respecter of social niceties; an irrepressible sense of humour and wobbly boundaries (especially when loosened further by drink in good company) will catch you out and embarrass you, like an ill-timed fart [canned laughter]. Trust me, I know what I'm talking about. I have to admit that most of the jokes that stocked my personal repertoire before I went to university are now completely unrepeatable. At university, I discovered pretty quickly that telling jokes was about as tragically unhip as wearing an elbow-patched tweed jacket and a tie. Although, as a learning experience it was second to none: there's no quicker way of discovering where the shifting boundaries of "polite society" lie than telling a favourite joke and then watching the appalled expressions form on the faces of people you would quite like to have as friends. And it really doesn't help if you try to explain that a well-turned piece of sexist, racist filth is also a Great Teaching.
But here is a joke for children, that still makes me laugh:
This is the story of the Brown Paper Cowboy. He had brown paper boots, and brown paper trousers, a brown paper shirt, and a brown paper hat. He even rode a brown paper horse with a brown paper saddle. But one day the sheriff had to arrest him. Why? For rustling.
Goodnight, and thank you! [mic drop and standing ovation]
1. Talking of massive erections, here's a link to Roy Harper's "The Lord's Prayer". If you don't know it, why not apply headphones, and give it 23 minutes of your attention? (You should at least listen to the first few spoken minutes, if only to discover the erection connection). N.B. that is Jimmy Page on guitar. Roy Harper's Lifemask album is one of those records that, in its original vinyl incarnation, only had one side as far as I was aware; Talking Heads' Remain in Light is another. I'm pretty sure I've never heard the flip side of either album. Harper's ecstatic recitation of humanity's post-Ice Age attributes reminds me of Christopher Smart's Jubilate Agno, which I'm pretty sure he won't have known. Like Smart's poem, Harper's is packed with overreaching pomposity, some astounding imagery, and more wisdom than you might have bargained for; it's what you might call Prog Folk. He has a great voice and it's an incredible bit of production, too, and then there's that guitar...
2. Although not the most surprising. That was a little stash of pornographic photographs that fell from between the pages of Shakespeare's Bawdy, by Eric Partridge, an entirely serious work of scholarship. It was clear that libraries had designs on me from an early age. "Come in, lad, and look around... Here be treasure!"
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