Benign Violations and Distant Mishaps

Is it possible that the 29th International Society for Humor Studies conference is already over? Boy, time flies when professors in the arts and humanities and the biological and social sciences (along with an occasional interloping cartoonist) are dissecting humor.

This was my third conference, and like my marriages (also three) they just keep getting better. Now, when I say that this conference was “better,” I don’t mean funnier. The purpose of the I.S.H.S. conference is not to get laughs but to explain them through research and analysis in fields such as psychology, sociology, anthropology, computational science, and linguistics. A sample linguistic analysis from “The General Theory of Verbal Humor” (G.T.V.H.), by Victor Raskin and Salvatore Attardo, will give the non-humorous flavor:

A text can be characterized as a single-joke-carrying text if both of the [following] conditions … are satisfied: (i) The text is compatible, fully or in part, with two different scripts; and (ii) the two scripts with which the text is compatible are opposite in a special sense.

Which is not funny, is not meant to be, and shouldn’t be, but does describe how funny works in jokes like this:

“Is the doctor at home?” the patient asked in his bronchial whisper. “No,” the doctor’s young and pretty wife whispered in reply. “Come right in.” The two scripts or narratives are “patient” and “lover” with the punch line triggering a switch from the former to the latter.

The point is that jokes can illustrate humor but not explain it. You can’t explain a joke with a joke, because that would lead to an infinite regress in which each joke would have to be explained by another joke, eventually using up all the jokes in the world, leaving us with a very sad planet, and with one damn joke still left to be explained.

So, if the purpose of a humor conference is to explain and not entertain, then going to one in search of hilarity would be like going to a conference on human sexuality looking for titillation. And that brings to mind what, according to the late, great Spy magazine, was George H. W. Bush’s favorite joke:

“How do you titillate an ocelot?”
“You oscillate her tit a lot!”

Yes, I know, it’s infantile, vulgar, stupid, and, worst of all, demeaning to ocelots. I apologize on all counts. But I’m bringing it up because it shows the limited usefulness of G.T.V.H., and maybe of any single humor theory. While we have readymade scripts for the actions of “patients” and “lovers,” we have never encountered the kinky scenarios described in the ocelot joke.

But where G.T.V.H. fails us, another theory, B.V.T. (Benign Violation Theory), steps in, custom-built for all that is infantile, vulgar, and stupid in humor. Peter McGraw and Caleb Warren presented it at the conference in a paper entitled “Too Close for Comfort, or Too Far to Care? Finding Humor in Distant Tragedies and Close Mishaps.”

B.V.T. can be seen as the scientific formulation of Steve Martin’s quip that “comedy is the art of making people laugh without making them puke.” Its basic tenet is that for something to be funny, script or no script, it has to be experienced as both wrong (a violation that threatens beliefs of how things should be) and not wrong (benign or somehow acceptable) at the same time. The ocelot joke is, on one level, a violation of how we implicitly think things should be (we don’t need signs at zoos prohibiting sex with ocelots), but at the same time is made O.K. because it is just a wordplay fantasy and therefore can be seen as acceptable. This neat Venn diagram sums up the sweet spot for humor:

This jibes nicely with the cliché that tragedy plus time equals comedy, because the distance of time makes threats less threatening. But B.V.T. goes further, using this diagram

to argue that attempted humor can not only be too close (a recent tragedy) but also too far (a distant mishap). And in writing that last sentence I made a typo that nicely illustrates this point. Instead of typing “too far,” I wrote “too fart.” That made me laugh in the moment, but now that moment is gone, and with each passing moment the little bit of funny that was there drains away, leaving me without humor and trolling the Internet for ocelot jokes.


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