Guffaw

Laughter isn’t an easy thing to characterise, especially across cultures. I’ve spend enough time in non-English speaking places to realise that I’ll never really understand their humour, but I’ve spent far more time in English speaking places and still even there, I know that I have a different sense of what makes me laugh. Actually the more time I’ve spent in different places, I believe, the less I laugh – I mean an outright guffaw, a good solid belly laugh, an uncontrollable rollicking snort. I still find humour in lots of things – even more than before – but the burst of laughter that I would have served up as a kid no longer comes up.

It’s come up to me recently as I’ve been watching ancient episodes of an American TV western, “Have Gun – Will Travel”. The lead character, Richard Boone, is variously hired or seeks employment in various western US settings, invariably solving a local moral problem with a kind of universal moral wisdom, often augmented by fists or bullets. Sometimes the right people die, and sometimes the right people live, but occasionally the right people are killed and the wrong people simply pay up in specie or in kind to Paladin, the hero, who always emerges and leaves the scene. Paladin in later episodes rarely laughs, even in the every-fifth-episode comic relief plot; but in the first few seasons he laughs every now and again in what can only be called a sinister, exaggerated guffaw. It’s the laugh we laugh when we know evil will be avenged, but because we know, it’s not an honest, open laugh; it’s not the laugh we give when encountering a surprising mishap or an unexpected irony. Paladin only laughs the laugh of the self-aware, and self-satisfied.

I don’t watch much visual media these days, so “Have Gun Will Travel” – filmed from 1957 to 1962 – is pretty much my fill. But I do think a lot about laughter, partially because the people I know come from most different parts of the english speaking world, and their laughter is never congruent. So that’s the question today, a point that Bergson brought up over a century ago: on laughter.

I don’t have a general theory, because that’s not my style. Laughter is definitely a human universal, but it comes in different varieties, and how those varieties come about is an amalgam of history and art and circumstance, and since none of those can be repeated, it makes no sense to try to establish a deterministic theory. I can only observe types, and only those types that I’ve witnessed with some familiarity. Here goes:

American laughter comes about in three forms, which is really quite amazing. As we go through types – note only those types I feel confident about describing; there are an infinite variety – the cultures I’ve observed generally have one or at most two types. Americans, though, have three. There is the anti type, the hatred type, and the absurd type. Each will come up in different forms elsewhere, but I do think America is unique in having all three. Also America lacks a fourth type which will come up in speaking of Canada, but let’s leave that for a bit.

The anti type laughter is exemplified by Jerry Seinfeld. “Did you ever notice how…” he begins so much of his stand up, and he’s right, once you put yourself in a position of noticing, you’re going to notice that what happens is wrong, is idiotic. It involves poor choices and poor assessments of the social situation – where one sits in a subway, the choice of words one has when asking for danishes in a shop – and you can easily counter it with the post-hoc obviously more rational and sane choice which the average individual will never come up with in the moment. It’s easy, maybe a little arrogant, but there is a shared irony that knows all of us do the wrong thing in the moment, and thus it’s not really arrogant: it’s performing a kind of civil service, reminding us all that we’re all ridiculous in the moment. It is, in fact, quite gentle.

The second type of American humour is the absurd. I’m not saying Americans invented it, but there is a long tradition of it and it’s what I grew up on. It’s David Letterman in the early days, with sketches like “Will It Float”, involving dropping objects into a large pool of water and seeing if they float, accompanied by excessive musical accompaniment and rhetorical build up, or his classic skit of destroying objects by dropping them off a five story building, or crushing them with a 5000 pounds per square inch press. The point was not to tell a joke or point out a foible of society: it was simply to revel in the absurdity of a situation. Most of Letterman’s interviews took the form of the humour of the absurd – in fact his best were the ones in which he had an interviewee who also reveled in it, like Bob & Ray or Bob Newhart or Teri Garr – and beyond Letterman, it extended to people like Zucker Abrahms and Zucker, in the Airplane movies and Naked Gun, which interestingly I’ve found non-North Americans to completely, totally not get. Canadians see it as brilliant, but my British friends see them as completely incomprehensible. They sometimes see the gentle crossover versions of Ferris Bueller’s Day Off as being reasonably laugh-worthy, but even then, they don’t get the best part of the jokes, which is the whole, all-encompassing absurdity of the entire film: they mostly just laugh at how the principal has a stock set of slapstick comic pratfalls.

Then there’s the hatred type. It’s the moral opposite of the Anti type; it ridicules those who are different. It’s the basic format of the comic that makes fun of race, or gender, or power, or lack of power, or whatever: if you’re denigrating someone for a laugh, even if that person is powerful, you are effectively employing the comedy of hatred, and is what slapstick is really grounded in as well – “let’s laugh at the object of fun being repeatedly hurt in increasingly awful ways”. What occurred to me living in the United Kingdom over a number of years was that this was the dominant, if not the primary, form of humour in the UK. That’s not to say it wasn’t funny, but it was fascinating to see a culture that employed really only one form of humour as its primary stock in trade. And I have to admit, after a time, I didn’t find it that funny – but that was because even in the David Letterman tradition, where a joke told once was funny, told three times was sort of funny, told ten times was annoying, told 20 times was not only even more funny but was recursively funny – the funny of the hatred type wore out after three times told. It was incapable of recursion; told repetitively, it became propaganda, and political speech is always devoid of humour.

I struggled with that for a bit, because what, really, is the difference between slapstick and Letterman? In slapstick, you physically create comedy by subjecting the actor to an unrelenting set of mishaps; in Letterman’s comedy, you rhetorically subject the audience and the actor to an unrelenting set of identical verbal accidents. But what I think distinguishes the two – what distinguishes the comedy of hatred from the comedy of the absurd – is the fact that the comedy of hatred is directed against some one, or thing, or group, alone. The comedy of the absurd is directed towards us – either us directly, because of the endless repetition, or towards someone who is unavoidably recognizable as us. Jokes that satirise advertisement are almost never hateful, because part of the joke is that we’re all saps for advertisement; jokes that satirise Shakespeare can go either way, depending on whether we are allowed to identify with the players or whether the players are meant to be objects of “fun”.

As I said, though, American humour draws from all three elements. British Laughter, on the other hand, really focuses exclusively on the laughter of hatred, which made it so jarring to encounter when I was over there. Oddly, though, it’s come through even when I’ve returned to North America, and watched the most gentle of imported shows on public television, shows about traveling around the country in old cars or on rarely used public railways. Even those shows involve the hosts pointedly being humorously unkind to one another as a key point of the dialogue, and it only served to emphasise the much rawer unkindness of standup comedians on BBC back when I was living in Greenwich, or the panel shows skewering recent events, or the 80s and 90s throwback comedies. And then I thought back to the 80s British comedies I grew up with on American public broadcasting – The Young Ones or Allo Allo. The latter in particular, which even in memory struck me as being a kind of celebration of the nasty in comparison to its fellow traveler in World War II poorly tasted situation comedy, Hogan’s Heroes, where all the Nazis were at least jolly and incompetent and we all knew the POWs would win. I couldn’t tell back then whether there was a kind of “it’s too close to home” desperation at work in the Allo Allo humour, dripping into the Fawlty Towers depictions of Continentals, or whether it was something deeper. But having spent more time overseas, I tend now towards the latter.

Especially having spend a lot of time in Canada, where comedy tends towards the absurd but even more towards the comedy of the extreme ironic. The programme is now sadly extinct, but I used to listen to This is That, a magnificently bizarre CBC weekly radio comedy that simply mimicked all of CBC radio but in totally absurd, totally deadpan situations. It was not the comedy of the absurd in the American sense, which would have dealt with it as a kind of unreal world; this was presenting the absurd as essentially a part of the fabric of the natural world. I remember one program where a Vancouver Island school sports league decided to ban all contact in all sports, and the broadcasters interviewed (fake) parents and league participants, asking them earnest questions, with answers delivered earnestly. The ex-girlfriend – a Brit – fell for it, and thought it was entirely true, while I was doubling over with laughter because the whole comedic point was only CBC could deliver this kind of interview and not think there was fundamentally something wrong. It was the pinnacle of irony: irony with the delivery failing to be aware of the irony. CBC is full of that kind of thing – The Debaters is high comedy, and even their non-comedy non-fiction is filled with knowing ironic sentiment, like Quirks and Quarks and Under the Influence, in a way that nothing in the rest of the English speaking world really gets.

It shouldn’t surprise anyone that Canadians also excel at the absurd humour of America, but they also just don’t really have a place for the humour of hatred. And while they do well with the humour of the anti, Canadian society – multicultural as it is, multilingual as it is – simply can’t embrace a single point of cultural normality so as to make a Seinfeld humour of comparison versus the norm work. The best they can do is embrace absurdity – how weird is it to be a white guy in a Sikh neighbourhood in Mississauga, or a black guy in Winninpeg, or anyone in Edmonton? – because there isn’t any single norm against which all of us can compare an anti of humour. But in the same vein, Americans don’t really get the humour of recursive irony the way Canadians do – North American radio listeners can surely understand that Wait Wait Don’t Tell Me is a completely incompetent comparison to Because News. CBC gets irony, but misses the point of the humour of the antithesis. It’s okay, we’re different countries.

The other English speaking places I’ve been have mostly been more pure British colonial offshoots and thus favour the British comedy of hatred and mockery, but if you look to other non-English speaking countries, you start to see the gulf of what humour consists of between cultures. I say this humbly, because I feel like there is a world of humour, for example, in Turkey, that I just will never be able to access, but which is also neither unkind nor violent. There are other cultures where the realm of humour seems incomprehensible – China, for example, and I know a lot of people who are from there and have tried to describe that world to me, and I’m just lost – but I know those worlds all have something there which could be described in different terms but relatable terms to how I’ve characterised English language laughter here.

It does make one marvel at the theoretically universal nature of American culture. Clearly it is not universal – it is rooted in something, time, space, geography, historical experience, ad infinitum – but somehow Disney and Microsoft and Universal and Fox plaster their pablum across borders and languages and space with more than a little success. It’s clearly not about comedy forms, though, and it’s not about jokes. A British accountant once told me Americans had no sense of humour, to which I replied we laughed more honestly than any Brit I’d ever met. He didn’t get the joke, but then again, I didn’t get him. The forms of laughter are diverse and not mutually comprehensible – but we still export them. What a joke.