Being Wrong - Kathryn Schulz [161]
Superiority theory explains why we laugh at, say, Bill and Ted’s Excellent Adventure, “yo mama” jokes, and people who accidentally walk into unusually clean glass doors. Yet it seems neither necessary to comedy (where is the superiority in an elephant joke?) nor sufficient (what is funny about the infirmity of an aging parent?). And it seems to rob humor of two of its central elements, conviviality and lightness of spirit, replacing them, instead, with a kind of each-man-for-himself vindictiveness.
A more generous view of the relationship between comedy and wrongness suggests that we laugh at the errors of others not out of self-satisfaction but out of self-recognition. Some thinkers have even proposed that the whole point of formal comedy is to show us the error of our ways. This notion—we might call it the self-improvement theory of humor—was summarized by the Elizabethan-era critic Sir Philip Sidney, who argued that comedy should serve as “an imitation of the common errors of our life.” Nearly a hundred years later, the great comic playwright Molière echoed that sentiment, observing of his craft that, “the duty of comedy is to correct men by amusing them.”
As different as they are in outlook, the self-improvement theory of humor and the superiority theory of humor have something in common. Both concern the substance of error: according to them, we laugh at specific, recognizable mistakes, whether from a feeling of supremacy or from rueful identification. But a different hypothesis dispenses with the substance of errors in favor of their structure. This is the incongruity theory of humor—and, in terms of both staying power and explanatory range, it is by far our strongest account of comedy. Aristotle subscribed to incongruity theory (and possibly invented it), as did the philosophers Schopenhauer, Kierkegaard, and Kant. More recently, Ward Jones (whom we last encountered delineating the ’Cuz It’s True Constraint) surveyed the comic domain and concluded that instances of incongruity account for “the vast majority of humor.”*
As its name suggests, incongruity theory posits that comedy arises from a mismatch—specifically, a mismatch between expectation and actuality. According to this theory, funny situations begin with attachment to a belief, whether that attachment is conscious or unconscious, fleeting or deep, sincerely held or deliberately planted by a comedian or a prankster. That belief is then violated, producing surprise, confusion, and a replacement belief—and also producing, along the way, enjoyment and laughter. In other words, the structure of humor is—give or take a little pleasure—the structure of error.
We can see this structural resemblance clearly in (what else?) Shakespeare’s Comedy of Errors. The plot concerns two sets of twins separated at birth—a pair of identical servants bonded to their identical masters—who converge, unbeknownst to all of them, in the city of Ephesus, in modern-day Turkey. Predictably, mayhem ensues. One servant is dispatched to run an errand and the other is beaten for failing to complete it; one twin unwittingly propositions the other twin’s sister-in-law, who is appalled at what she takes to be his infidelity; you get the picture.
Why is The Comedy of Errors comedic? As the critic Bertrand Evans has observed, by many standard metrics, it is not. None of the characters are intrinsically funny (either intentionally, as wags, or accidentally, as buffoons), and almost none of the dialogue packs the one-two punch of wit and raunch characteristic of Shakespeare’s later work. The Comedy of Errors is