Being Wrong - Kathryn Schulz [162]
This “exploitable gulf” that makes The Comedy of Errors funny has, in fact, been merrily exploited by other humorists throughout history. False beliefs might be the essence of error, but they are also one of the most popular and effective of comic plot drivers, from Tartuffe (possibly the funniest comedy of manners of all time) to Tootsie (possibly the funniest romantic comedy of all time).* This gulf in understanding also creates much of the inadvertent comedy of everyday life. Like the misadventures in Ephesus, my misadventure in Massachusetts was funny because of the discrepancy between what I thought I was doing (hurtling into my sister’s car) and what I was actually doing (hurtling into a stranger’s car). In other words, the very thing that leads us to err—a gap between the world as it is and the world as we think it is—also produces the pleasure of comedy.
We have encountered this pleasure-in-error before, most notably in the form of optical illusions. In fact, comedy and illusion are close kin. In his influential 1900 essay on laughter, Henri Bergson posited that, “A situation is invariably comic when it belongs simultaneously to two altogether independent series of events and is capable of being interpreted in two entirely different meanings at the same time.” When one situation can support two different visual interpretations, you get an optical illusion (such as the vases/faces image, or the young woman and the old maid). When one situation can support two different intellectual interpretations, you get, among other things, The Comedy of Errors. You get Abbot and Costello’s Who’s on First. You get puns, where one word or phrase can be interpreted in two different ways. You get misheard song lyrics, where one set of sounds can be parsed to produce two different meanings. You get the children’s game of Telephone, whose pleasure derives from the juxtaposition of an original message with the errors introduced into its garbled form. We laugh at all these things for much the same reason that I laughed at my headlong plunge into a stranger’s car: because of a gap between what we expect at the beginning (Groucho Marx: “I’ve had a perfectly wonderful evening”) and what actually comes next (“but this wasn’t it.”)
In saying this, I’m not trying to suggest that incongruity amounts to a Unified Field Theory of humor. After all, I began this book by quoting Bergson’s injunction against “imprisoning the comic spirit within a definition.” Not every instance of comedy arises from error—from an “exploitable gulf” between expectation and actuality. Conversely, not every error is comedic; we know from painful experience that the violation of belief can disturb or devastate us instead of making us laugh.† Still, while humor can sometimes exist apart from error, it couldn’t thrive in a world without wrongness. Take error out of the picture and you drain down the well of comedy—not to rock bottom, perhaps, but to drought conditions. If we want to keep laughing as much as we currently do, we must also keep bumbling into the gap between the world as we think it is and the world as it turns out to be; we must keep on getting things wrong. At best, we can learn to laugh at these mistakes—but at the very least, we can take comfort from the fact that, in the broadest sense, we laugh because of them.
It is an odd thing, this gap I keep talking about. On the one hand, it forms a moat between us and everything else, giving us both error and (when we look into it too deeply) an unpleasant case of existential vertigo—an awareness of being fundamentally alone. On the other hand, it also gives us comedy, including the kind we deliberately create to leaven one another’s lives. Nor is that the only kind of creativity that arises from this gap. The psychologist Rollo May argued that all art “issues