What is a Joke? (an occasional series)

A couple of recent articles about the episode of Seinfeld where Elaine takes on the sacred monster that is the New Yorker cartoon got me thinking about what counts as a joke, and how jokes succeed or fail. Thus begins an occasional series within an already rather occasional blog, about the nature of The Joke.

(A caveat: we’re definitely heading for the kind of territory dismissed by EB White in his quotation which provides the title of this blog. Readers with little patience for such phrases as ‘The beauty of the joke is how the expectation is built up through the mapping of each of these terms onto its counterpart in the other sentence’ might want to stop at this point.)

I assume a joke must involve some incongruity or the confounding of an expectation, very often one which the joke itself establishes (Robert Mankoff’s comments about jokes involving contrasting frames of reference are relevant here). This isn’t much use as a definition of a joke (it also applies to whodunnits and surprise parties), but it does allow us to think about how jokes might work, and how one joke might work better than another.

As a starting point, consider a recent exchange I had with a friend (of mine). He asked me for an example of what I considered a good joke, and I offered him the following, which as far as I know comes from Groucho Marx:

‘Time flies like an arrow. Fruit flies like a banana’.

My friend offered me the following (unattributed):

‘How did Darth Vader know what Luke Skywalker got for his birthday? He felt his presents’.

For what it’s worth, I’m not crazy about my friend’s joke (sorry Simon). I’m reluctant to say it’s not funny, or even that it’s not as funny as Groucho’s. If someone said they preferred the Darth Vader joke, I’m not sure I could say that they were wrong, any more than they would be wrong to prefer Jack Daniels to Talisker, or vanilla to mint choc. But I think there are objective criteria on which we can judge jokes, and I think that Groucho’s joke works better as a joke than the Darth Vader one.

Each of these jokes is a pun, and each involves a pun on two words (‘flies’ and ‘like’, and ‘felt’ and ‘presents’/‘presence’, respectively). One involves a reference to a pop cultural phenomenon (though the other does involve reference to a cliché). I don’t think this makes much of a difference, though – many finely-wrought jokes require familiarity with a specific framework or set of assumptions.[i] What does make a difference, I think, is that the Groucho joke establishes and subverts the expectations of the audience in a more efficient and subtle manner. To see how it does this, work backwards. The joke (the confounded expectation) is revealed in the juxtaposition of the two sentences, which have the following respective structures:

First sentence: noun-verb-preposition;

Second sentence: adjective-noun-verb.

The beauty of the joke is how the expectation is built up through the mapping of each of these terms onto its counterpart in the other sentence.[ii] ‘Fruit’ is actually used as an adjective in the second sentence, but it is often used as a noun, and its position after the first sentence creates the assumption that this is how it’s functioning here. Because of that assumption, ‘flies’, which is actually used as an adjective, is assumed to be functioning as a verb; and because of those two assumptions, ‘like’ in the second sentence is understood as setting up a comparison. It’s only when this assumed comparison goes awry that one rolls back these assumptions and uncovers the joke. This sounds extremely pedantic, and of course it is. But it’s a tribute to the joke in question that to appreciate how it works one must go into this kind of detail.

The Darth Vader joke works differently. There’s no expectation confounded, just the incongruity of Christmas in the Star Wars universe. This requires a more cumbersome setup than the Groucho joke; the two frames of reference are yoked together before the punchline, so we’re immediately confronted with the incongruity rather than being allowed to figure it out. This diminishes what is left to be revealed, and signposts what the joke is going to be like. We’re all familiar with jokes of this form, and know that the punchline will be a pun on something from Star Wars.[iii] Again, this isn’t to say the resulting joke will be bad, just that it won’t have the sophistication of Groucho’s. While we can hardly say that someone is wrong to think it funny, I think we can legitimately question their appreciation of how jokes work – their appreciation of wit – if they deny this.

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[i] E.g.,Dorothy Parker’s timeless line ‘If all the girls at the Yale prom were laid end to end, I wouldn’t be surprised’, which is not timeless insofar as it relies on its audience being familiar with the ‘If all the such-and-such were laid to end to end…’ convention.

[ii] I did warn you.

[iii] E.g., ‘What do Titanic and The Sixth Sense have in common?’ ‘Icy dead people’ (for my money, that’s a better joke than the Darth Vader one). See also innumerable sketches featuring Jesus shopping for a cross in Ikea, etc.

His Kingdom Come? (Moonrise Kingdom)

            A quick post on Wes Anderson – partly because I mentioned him in my most recent post, partly because he has a new film out. Super-quick summary: it’s not essential viewing, but if you liked his other stuff, you’ll probably like this one too. Slightly longer summary: I liked his other stuff, and I liked this too, but I liked it less. One reason is a danger ever-attendant on arch humour and comedy of manners, of becoming too dry, too brittle, too mannered. A second reason is a certain staleness in the Anderson Style. Intense young leads; furrowed middle-aged antagonists; epigrammatic dialogue; beautifully composed tableaux; tracking shots of small armies scuttling back and forth, marshalled by said intense leads and/or furrowed antagonists; predictably enough, they’re all here. At times it feels like watching a very skilled tribute to the cinematic oeuvre of W. Anderson.

            The third reason requires a little more explanation. Basically, there seems to be little else to the film than the aforementioned Style. There is less going on here in terms of plot than in The Life Aquatic, and far less in terms of character and empathy than in Rushmore. It’s hard to say much about either of the lead characters (Sam Shakusky and Suzy Bishop) other than they wish to be together and are prepared to embark on a quixotic rebellion to achieve this. Bill Murray’s character (Suzy’s father) is a photocopy of a photocopy of his part in Rushmore.

It might seem odd that this, in and of itself, could make a film less funny, but in Anderson’s case it makes perfect sense. His humour doesn’t work by way of set-ups and punchlines in the dialogue; rather, the set-up is typically the situation itself, and the punchline will be a dry comment on proceedings. (Anderson’s best lines are asides – what is unusual is how he places them at the centre of scenes, rather than having his characters deliver them in passing.) It’s in this way that his humour is closest to that oft-used comparison, the New Yorker cartoon.

Panel cartoons don’t rely on engaging plot or characters; they’ll have just enough detail to let us place what we are seeing and who’s talking. Strip cartoons are ever-so-slightly more expansive: the first panel or two builds up an interaction between usually familiar characters, thus basically working up a little plot. Simplifying for the sake of a brief blog post, one problem with Moonrise Kingdom is the grafting of a panel cartoonist’s sensibility onto a situation which develops through character interaction, more like a strip cartoon. This wasn’t such an issue in the earlier Anderson films, because the characters and story were well-developed enough that each exchange both amused and slid the plot a little further on; and the lines (and in Bill Murray’s case, his trademark expressionless expression) were funnier for coming from a perspective that you could properly engage with. The dramatic aspects of Moonrise Kingdom are too slight to allow for that lightness. And when it’s hard to care about the characters, Anderson’s bon mots rattle around like peas in an empty tin: they make a distinctive sound, but you wouldn’t confuse them with anything that mattered too much.

The Soul of Whit

Things I look out for in gathering material for a blog post: sketch groups busy ‘reinventing the genre’;[i] up-and-coming stand-ups about to squander their promise in something awful on BBC3; funny females and/or articles denying there could ever be such a thing (anything to chase ever-elusive publicity); and writers or performers with a distinctive style. The last category is sparsely populated - it’s a tough job being either funny or distinctive, let alone both.

Step forward Whit Stillman, American auteur and purveyor of the sort of low-energy satire for which the adjective ‘sly’ should have been coined. If you haven’t seen any of his work, think of him as a sort of goyish Woody Allen with fewer zingers, or a less geeky Wes Anderson. These comparisons place him fairly accurately as regards the class of his characters, and his nostalgic aesthetic; they also hint at his humour without really summing it up.

Stillman’s characters want, in a self-conscious fashion, to change the world. His is a universe where you can barely move for bumping into chunks of ideology: decorum, etiquette and Catharism are among the causes spoken up for in his latest film (and first for thirteen years), Damsels in Distress. For a film which is nominally a comedy, it is noticeable how few attempts at humour any of the characters make. Everyone is in earnest here, which can become tiresome but is also the key to the film’s charm. What makes Stillman’s sense of humour so distinctive is how none of his characters are played for laughs. They are naïve, for the most part – though the Cathar turns out to have a hidden agenda – but the film indulges them; they may lose in love or life, they may lose their innocence, but they never lose their belief.

I can imagine this being highly irritating to someone who doesn’t buy into Stillman’s conceit. A lot of what we see seems misguided or downright irrelevant, and the determinately non-judgemental approach taken towards it might come across as precious, a celebration of difference for its own sake. I can sympathise with criticisms of this sort, but I can’t help but feel that they are missing the point somewhat. Stillman isn’t presenting these characters as rebukes to the cynicism of our sullied age, but as studies of people with a very particular set of attitudes towards the past and the present. The humour comes from the incompatibility between their beliefs and the real world, but the joke is on neither them nor us; the joke is our mutual incomprehension. Violet and her companions, ceaselessly trying to drag the male students of Sevenoaks University into an age of innocence or at least one of personal grooming, are ridiculous, but they are not laughable, no more than we would be for ignoring what they get so worked up over.

The obvious danger with this approach is a lack of bite or sharpness in the writing, something compounded in Damsels in Distress by the slow-moving plot. Whitman, it has been observed, makes comedies of manners, but at times his comedy is too mannered for its own good. This is why, for all that I find his films intriguing, I can never enjoy them as much as I would like. Whether this is Stillman’s fault or my own is, of course, another matter.

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[i] Sometimes they even manage it, or close enough.

Simple Pleasures? (Derek, Channel 4)

 

            It’s not usually a good sign for a comedy if the first questions to be asked of it are ‘Is it funny?’ and ‘What’s it trying to do?’ But it’s possible that Rickey Gervais has produced an exception to this rule in Derek, a one-off show that might yet become a series. In fact, I hope it does, although I didn’t find it particularly funny. Let’s see if I can explain.

            Writing about Life's Too Short, I criticised it for being too reliant on the now-familiar Gervais-Merchant tropes. Clearly, Mr. Gervais has been snooping around this blog, but rather than comment directly he has provided the oblique compliment of producing a show which in many ways is unlike anything else he’s done. It’s still shot in a faux-documentary style, and Gervais’s Derek is even more institutionally dependent than David Brent, but that apart it’s a sharp left-turn. The central character labours under no delusions of grandeur, there are no celebs cluttering up the action, and far fewer awkward silences and ‘I-can’t-believe-he-just-said-that’ looks. Derek himself is the kind of person whom you can believe would say inappropriate things, and the people around him are prepared for it (or oblivious to it). He’s the first main character in a Gervais television programme who isn’t a deluded nitwit or the target of the comedy (rather confounding the pre-emptive tizzy into which some commentators had gotten themselves).

            Then again, for much of the show it wasn’t clear what the target was, or if there was one. The show focused on the pretty minute minutiae of life in an old person’s home, and low-key interactions between Derek, Dougie (Karl Pilkington) and Hannah (the excellent Kerry Godliman). The few events which were somewhat out of the ordinary (Derek’s accidents involving pudding and a pond, and an altercation at a pub) felt like forced gestures towards conventional comedy. The exchanges were slow-burn, indeed pretty much no-burn for the first half of the show. You couldn’t really call it a straightforward comedy, but ‘drama’ doesn’t feel right either – there was far too little plot or tension to justify that description.

            This brings us back to the question of the aim of the show. My feeling is that much of what was weak about it was down to the necessarily slow introduction of the characters and the situation, and a deliberate decision to avoid making fun of anyone. It wasn’t just that the comedy wasn’t broad or obvious, but that it was oblique – we needed to know a bit about Derek before we can start to find the humour in his mannerisms. Neither the scene in the bus with Dougie nor Derek’s glee at Joan’s lottery win would have been as amusing if they had occurred earlier.

            To my mind, this kind of comedy requires a series to unfold properly: it’s too slow-moving to work properly in a single half-hour, and it would fit awkwardly with the plotting necessary to carry a feature-length show. That’s not say that I’m sure it would work, but that there is enough here to suggest it could, and I’d like to see the attempt. Put it another way: I’m inclined to say that this was a reasonable effort at a tricky brand of comedy, rather than a mawkish clown-milking-our-tears vanity project. Anyway, given that Gervais is famous enough to make vanity projects if he likes, I’d rather they were (a) different to his previous work, and (b) set in such a resolutely unglamorous milieu. At least give him the credit for trying.

Are Women Funny?

Yes, it’s a bloody awful topic which you’re probably sick of reading about. Yes, I think the whole discussion is, to a large extent, a waste of time. But I’d like to come at it from a different angle (or, I’d like to discuss a related but more interesting issue). Rather than giving lists of female stand-ups, or pondering the different ways in which the comedy industry might favour men, or getting involved in debates about social roles or evolutionary psychology, I’d like to ask, what’s meant by calling someone funny?

            To help get clear on this, let’s start the post again, with a slightly different title:

Are Men Funny?

            Yes, it’s a bloody awful topic which you’re probably sick of reading about… no you’re not, are you? (Which is itself interesting.)

            If someone asks you this question, the obvious response is to ask for clarification, on at least two points: which men? And funny how? Oddly enough, neither of these questions admits of a simple answer. We could, if we wish, limit the question to male comedians, but this isn’t at all the obvious move it might seem. Not only do we all know non-comedians who we would say are funny (some of them are even male) and comedians whom we would say are not (some of whom are, let’s face it, female), but we’re making a pretty substantial assumption that anything useful about funniness can be read off from what happens in a particular workplace. Yes, it’s a workplace where laughter plays an unusually large role, but that only leads to the question, what’s the connection between being funny and making people laugh?

            Let’s consider two bad answers. First, someone is only funny if they make people laugh (or more generally, if people find them funny). Second, anyone who makes people laugh pretty consistently is funny. Neither answer seems right (though there’s obviously something right about each). With each answer, it seems reasonable to ask who is laughing, and why; or if they do not find the person funny, why that is? Is it what the person is saying, or how they are saying it, or their general manner? Does it matter that the person has come up with their own jokes or way of behaving, or that they have stolen or commissioned or adapted them from other sources? Does it matter that you are watching them perform on stage, to an audience of dozens or hundreds, as opposed to listening to them on the radio, on your own (yes it does – you’re more likely to laugh if everyone around  you is laughing as well)? Does it matter if you know the person (it seems to – we find it easier to get a friend’s sense of humour)?

            So things are rather more complicated than a straw poll of ‘Who do you think is chucklesome?’ would allow for. And we can complicate matters further, by pointing out that there are different ways of being funny. Someone who is very quick-witted might have no sense of how to plot a comic play or film; a master (or mistress) of visual slapstick might not be much use if locked in a room and told to write fifty one-liners. A warm and engaging performer might look lost on television; likewise, an act who depends on their onstage persona might struggle on a panel show. I don’t think that Miranda is a funny show, but I think that Miranda Hart is a funny actor, and probably a funny person to boot (she reminds me of a striker making good runs, bereft of a playmaker to pick her out with the right through-balls.)

            Yes, yes, yes, but are men funny? This question makes about as much sense as asking whether men are musical, or boring, or have an aptitude for mathematics. Show me a specific man or group of men, in a specific context, trying to be funny in a certain way, and I’ll be able to give you my opinion. Until then, it’s not a question one can sensibly attempt to answer at all.

Apply this general lesson to the first question asked as you see fit.

Ape’s-Eye View

You may have read about the recent death of Cheeta, the chimpanzee who starred in the Tarzan films alongside Johnny Weissmuller and Maureen O’Sullivan. Or starred in some of but not all of the Tarzan films. Or may have starred in some of the Tarzan films. You get the picture. Coincidentally, I recently read Me Cheeta, the simian thespian’s autobiography. Think I need more than this thin coincidence for a blog post? Think again.

Me Cheeta is a neat idea (chimp spills the beans on Hollywood’s Golden Age), studded with superb caricatures and tastefully bitter lines. What makes it more interesting then the name-dropping opponent-skewering memoirs from which it takes its cue is its sophisticated use of irony. Irony isn’t only a comic device, although that remains its most familiar employment. A useful way of thinking about irony is the manipulation or the effect of differences in points of view, and in particular differences in what is understood from each point of view. We know what Oedipus has done before he does, and this produces a very different effect than if it were to be revealed simultaneously to audience and character alike.

At least three different kinds of irony are at play in Me Cheeta. The most straightforward is the showbiz bitchiness, typically cast in jovial descriptions of cruelty and failure (my favourite example being, apropos Harold Lloyd, that “you can’t keep judging someone for destroying their wife”). The irony here comes from a knowing juxtaposition of tone and material. The different points of view are not that of reader and character, or character and narrator, but of the narrative and a kind of false point of view suggested by the upbeat tone (ironic understatement is another example of this device).

But the narrator is a chimp, and chimps can’t be expected to know everything. In between savage jabs at (mostly deceased) film stars, Cheeta enthuses about human endeavours to help other species, which of course are anything but. Here the irony is unknowing, and the other point of view is our own. This is a nice way to make a moral point without slipping into a moralising tone, and it’s used sparingly enough to be effective.

The third species (no pun intended) of irony is a little harder to pin down. It comes, I think, from the fact that it’s a chimp narrating the familiar story of the studio system as a gilded cage, and finding himself so at home there. This fact itself casts its own light on the lives of the rich and famous: the closer Cheeta can ape them, the further into the animal kingdom they are drawn. For this irony to work, the narrator need not be aware of it, but in this case he is. Witness his striking (and, for all I know, accurate) description of fame: “picture a human and a chimpanzee facing each other in awkward silence, with nothing to be said, the faint inanity of the interaction stealing over both of them. That's what fame is.” Now that’s what I call a great ape.

Old Hat (New Girl, Channel 4)

To start the New Year, a brief post on New Girl, which is all it deserves. I don’t object (much) to the fact that the basic premise is recycled from numerous other shows (Man About the House, Threes's Company, or, in an Irish context, Bachelor's Walk). Nor need we make much of the fact that the main characters, give or take a couple of traits distributed differently, could have stepped straight out of Scrubs (the soulful and genuine one; the kooky one; the white one who acts like their black; the black one who mostly tolerates this).

I do object (a little) to the fact that it is fraudulently pitched as a sort of indie/alternative comedy, when it is nothing of the sort. This is the kind of programme that could only have been made following the success of shows such as Flight of the Conchords, but which borrows only the most superficial trappings from these predecessors. Just as (500 Days of) Summer, a film so dull its title seemed like its running time, was a faux-indie, ersatz-Woody squib, so too is this old-fashioned sitcom, complete with hugs and lessons learned at the end of each episode. Zooey Deschanel sprinkles glitter and twee about her like a demented Sugar Plum Fairy, but there is absolutely nothing alternative, or indeed interesting, going on here at all. I have nothing against Ms. Deschanel per se (despite having just criticised a recent film of hers and being in process of criticising the television programme she is currently starring in).[i] But she is given little to do here, and does it badly, slipping effortlessly into generic Tweety Pie Princess mode. A traditional sitcom would have been one thing; something genuinely oddball another. This is neither, and the worse for it.

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[i] She and Him are quite pleasant.