Speaking about the development of a sense of humor, if, of course, there is a task to approach this issue fundamentally, first of all, one should understand the nature of humor in general. However, it is not so easy to understand it, because. even the most serious research on this topic is more often descriptive than substantive. The whole point here is that for many researchers the foundations of the comic seem so simple and obvious that it’s not worth talking about them.
In most discourse on the nature of the comic there is the idea that the ability to perceive humor is an evolutionary acquisition; that in the primitive society there was a certain need that determined the acquisition of this ability by a person. Proceeding from this, to try to explain the nature of humor is to try to understand the very need, and also to try to describe the patterns by which any phenomena are related to humor by us. Looking at humor in this way, you can very quickly come to the conclusion that in the hidden corners of the human brain there is a genetic memory that allows you to recognize funny things and controls mechanisms that cause positive emotions, such as delight and joy.
The author of the book "Psychology of Humor" - the famous psychologist Rod Martin, attempting to explain the phenomenon of humor in his work, says that scientists have created many theories to identify the necessary and sufficient conditions for the emergence of laughter and humor, determine their mechanisms and find out the reasons why humor is at all pleasant to people.
The ideas of the English materialist philosopher Thomas Hobbes had a huge impact on psychological research in the field of the nature of the comic. They were the beginning of the theories of humor and laughter as a sense of superiority. The English sociologist and philosopher Herbert Spencer distinguished between sardonic and comic types of laughter in his approach. He proceeded from the criteria of attitude to the situation and believed that the basis of laughter is contained in human physiology. Later, this idea was developed by the famous Austrian psychoanalyst Sigmund Freud - he showed that comic, humor and wit are directly related to laughter.
Psychologist Charles Gruner developed the idea of superiority, where humor was seen as playful aggression, in which the triumph of the winner over the vanquished is manifested. In turn, the psychologist and educator Théodule Ribot classifies the theories of the ridiculous - he singles out the theory of superiority and the theory of incompatibility of objects.
Studying the nature of carnival laughter, the Russian philosopher Mikhail Bakhtin took the work of Francois Rabelais as an example. He managed to find out that the main features of such laughter are the appeal to the whole world, universality, ambivalence, focus on the laughers themselves, free play character, incompleteness and aspiration to the future. According to Bakhtin, by participating in the nationwide fun of the carnival, a person becomes liberated and freed from all censorship and internal barriers, loses fear of the regulators of life and external prohibitions. And the art critic and philologist Dmitry Likhachev, in the process of studying the Russian “laughter culture”, noted that laughter is in opposition to the ridiculed culture and contributes to its replacement with a new type of culture.
If we return to foreign psychology, it has a whole range of theories of humor. Most, however, reveal only certain types or aspects of humor, without giving any general picture. Some researchers generally identified more than 80 theories of humor. Naturally, we will not consider them all, but will limit ourselves to only the most significant.
Psychoanalytic theory
Author psychoanalytic approach to the study of the theory of humor, as one should assume, was Sigmund Freud. His theory (as well as in general) was one of the most influential in the field of psychological research on humor in the first half of the 20th century. According to her, humor can be seen as the strongest defense mechanism to cope with difficulties and negative emotions.
In Freud's theory, laughter and humor are understood as manifestations of the unconscious, creating tension and a desire for relaxation. Humor overcomes defense mechanisms due to the "humorous movement" from the area of the forbidden to the area of the permitted, as a result of which the power of the "Id" and "Super-Ego" decreases, and internal censorship and unconscious passions lose their power.
Based on Freud's ideas, unconscious aggressive (generated by libido) and sexual urges from childhood and immaturity seek to find instant gratification and express themselves through pleasure. The "Super-Ego", which includes the requirements and prescriptions of society, counteracts the "Id". "Ego" functions according to the principle of reality - it seeks to come to a convenient compromise between the requirements of the "Id", "Super-Ego" and the real world, which, according to the scientist, is humor.
Sigmund Freud said that humor is the highest defense mechanism, because. avoids negative emotions and look at life situations objectively, without resorting to pathological defensive forms. His experiments showed that:
- People in ordinary life displacing aggressive or sexual urges are more enjoyable with jokes that have relevant themes
- If aggressive and sexual urges are stimulated, jokes related to these urges will be more enjoyable.
- The presentation of aggressive and sexual jokes reduces the strength of the corresponding urges.
In addition, some support for Freud's theory was found in studies demonstrating an increase in sexual and aggressive themes in the responses of respondents who completed tasks for generating humor.
Subsequently, many researchers came to the conclusion that Freud's theory is not consistent with the functioning nervous system in the modern sense, and began to gradually abandon it.
Arousal and Comfort Theory
The arousal theory continues the idea of Herbert Spencer (laughter releases energy) and the idea of Immanuel Kant (laughter relieves psychological stress). Kant pointed out that laughter is an emotion as a result of an abrupt cessation of intense expectation. And another supporter of this theory and the founder modern theory excitation - Daniel Berline - considered in detail all kinds of properties of stimuli that attract attention and cause aesthetic experiences from laughter, games and art. Berline considered them comparative variables, because they implied the simultaneous perception of objects for comparison and comparison. Among the properties, he singled out complexity, novelty, diversity, surprise, redundancy, ambiguity and inconsistency, due to which the perceived becomes unusual and interesting, causing excitation of the brain and autonomic nervous system.
Here we note that the studies of the psychologist Igor Gavansky have shown a connection between smiles, laughter and excitement and emotional pleasure from humor, however, the assessment of fun is always more associated with understanding humor and cognitive assessment. Some other scientists (Godkevich, Zillman, Bryant, Kantor and others) found out that, firstly, the stronger the excitement, the more pleasure a person gets from humor, and secondly, both negatively and positively colored excitement contributes to more pleasure. .
Theory of superiority and humiliation
A huge number of humor theorists consider aggression to be one of the most important features of humor as such; humor itself is a form of aggression. For example, in the Old Testament there are 29 references to laughter, and most of them are associated with shame, ridicule, ridicule, and only two cases indicate the origin of laughter from a cheerful and joyful heart (Arthur Costler's note from the monograph "The Act of Creation" (1964). .)).
The aggressive aspect of humor is also visible in cruelty, when, for example, children tease each other. Among other things, mass humor is often based on the humiliation of another person or self-humiliation. Currently, this form of humor can be observed in various practical jokes, stand-ups, farces, mockery of the shortcomings of others, teasing, ridicule, etc.
If we consider the theory of Charles Gruner, where humor is seen as "playful aggression" and a demonstration of superiority, we can see that humor is a form of play. Laughter in this case is responsible for the rapid restoration of homeostasis (performs physiological function), and also serves as a message about the victory over the enemy (performs a psychological function).
Despite the relevance of theories of humor based on aggression, they cannot be applied to some forms of humor, such as puns, puns, or riddles where there is no aggression. Rod Martin, mentioned above, believes that Freud's approaches to humor (humor - defense mechanism) and Gruner (humor involves aggression and superiority) can become the basis for modern ideas about humor as a method of dealing with the stresses of everyday life. In the first case, humor protects against destructive emotions in difficult situations, and in the second - gives strength to resist situations and people that threaten well-being.
Theory of inconsistency
The presented theory is rooted in the views of Arthur Schopenhauer, who believed that the cause of laughter always lies in the sudden perception of a discrepancy between ideas about objects and their real images. This discrepancy is the most important factor determining the comicality of a joke: everything that does not meet expectations, everything that seems unusual, peculiar, surprisingly ridiculous, seems ridiculous.
This idea was developed by the British psychologist Hans Eysenck. He believed that the cause of laughter is the sudden intuitive integration of incompatible or conflicting ideas, feelings, or attitudes objectively experienced by a person. The idea was also developed by the journalist and psychologist Arthur Koestler: he introduced the term bisociation, which occurs when an event, situation or idea is perceived at the same time from two completely logical but incomparable angles.
It is worth noting the theory of discrepancy resolution by Thomas Schulz. He believed that it is not the inconsistency that makes it possible to understand a joke, but its resolution in a joke: it is the moment of climax in a joke that generates a cognitive inconsistency by introducing information that is inconsistent with expectations. For this reason, the listener goes back to the beginning of the joke and tries to identify the ambiguity that will resolve the inconsistency that has appeared.
There is also a two-stage theory of understanding humor, proposed by psychologist Jerry Sals. In it, the main part of the joke creates an inconsistency, causing the listener to assume a likely outcome. The discrepancy between the denouement and expectations makes the listener wonder and look for a cognitive rule to restore the causal logic, the plot and the denouement. After finding this rule, the discrepancy can be eliminated, the joke is perceived as funny, and humor becomes the result of the elimination of the discrepancy.
The theory is certainly consistent, but this time too Scientific research(in particular, the German psychologist Kurt Goldstein and his colleagues) showed that inconsistency is, although necessary, but not the only condition for humor. We must not forget about the psychological mood of a person for humor and his emotional readiness for it. The incongruity theory is more suited to understanding humor than to its explanation of its emotional pleasantness.
Switching theory
The basis of the switching theory is the ideas of the American researcher Max Eastman. He believed that humor is a fun and playful activity. Later, his theory was supported by Daniel Berline and Charles Gruner, and the psychologist Michael Apter began to develop it. He proposed to distinguish between a serious state of consciousness and a playful mood, in which, after a joke, a person finds himself in a psychologically safe zone.
According to Apter, during the day, a person switches between playful and serious states many times. For example, in a meeting, someone might make a witty joke or make a funny comment that will amuse the other participants and put them into a state of psychological comfort, and after that they will return to a serious state. In the same way, at a meeting of friends, people can stay in a playful mood for a long time, constantly joking, telling jokes, funny stories, etc.
In addition, Michael Apter rejects the theory of inconsistency, introducing the term "synergy". Synergy is similar to bisociation introduced by Koestler and is used to describe a cognitive process where incompatible ideas or representations can be simultaneously present in a person's mind. In a playful state, synergy causes pleasure, and in a serious state, it can cause. Apter's switching theory can be attributed more to the cognitive aspects of humor, issues raised by incongruity theory.
Later, a theory of humor appeared, based on the cognitive complexity of understanding, developed by psychologists R. Weyer and D. Collins. They reworked Apter's "synergy", presenting it in terms of social cognition, and used cognitive schemes for this. When there are several disparate options for perception, both options are simultaneously held by consciousness - this is synergy.
Through much research into understanding humor in a social context, Collins and Weyer were able to show that humor is primarily a form of social interaction, and also considered two the most important factors information processing - cognitive complexity and difficulty understanding. Scientists have suggested that humor gains strength when moderate efforts are made to understand it and when there is more opportunity to work out the cognitive synergy in detail.
Taking into account the ideas of the recognized specialist in the field of psychology of humor Rod Martin, several conclusions can be drawn. First, the theory of switching allows us to explain aggressive and sexual humor and reveal the emotional subtleties of perception and understanding of the comic. And secondly, the ability of synergy to bring a person into a playful state offers opportunities for overcoming stressful situations in a playful way in which they are not seen as a serious threat.
Understanding humor as a game implies that a joke can be viewed as a way of playing with cognitive mechanisms and structures that have developed in a person in order to perceive “serious” reality and life in this environment. Jokes, on the other hand, can be used by people not only as fun, but also as.
The social context consists in the fact that the subjects of interaction (the narrator and the listener) cooperate in the game activity of “distorting” reality, which introduces an element of inconsistency that gives pleasure. If we talk about spontaneous forms of humor, then people are able to operate with thoughts and words, as if teasing each other in a playful way, which reduces tension and changes the view of the situation, which greatly facilitates the search for solutions to complex problems.
Personal approach
The authors of the personal approach are American psychologists Gordon Allport and Abraham Maslow. Allport is inclined to believe that a sense of humor is the most amazing tool for self-discovery. In his work “Becoming a Personality” (1967), he noted that people think about themselves for a very long time, and therefore it would be good if their thoughts corresponded to reality.
Allport believes that a person's understanding of himself is closely related to humor, because they both relate to self-realization, which is their basis. Giving an answer to the question of what a sense of humor is, the scientist refers to the words of the novelist Meredith and says that humor is the ability to laugh at what you love and love it (this also includes the personality of a person and everything connected with it).
Allport shares the concepts of a sense of humor and a sense of the comic. It is the sense of the comic that he considers much coarser (plus, almost every person, regardless of age, has it). Seemingly comical to most people includes absurdity, puns, and rude jokes. Young children always feel the comic, but rarely laugh at themselves. Failures are perceived by people more often with suffering than with laughter. But the ability to laugh at oneself can be attributed to indicators of the maturity of the individual, because a true humorist always sees behind a serious object, even if it is himself, the contrast between what is in sight and what is inside.
Abraham Maslow made many observations of people who had time to self-actualize in life, and noted that they all have a peculiar sense of humor. For example, they do not like cruel humor (when someone is laughed at) and humor built on the superiority of some over others, as well as obscene jokes. They are much more willing to perceive humor, suggestive, causing a smile, rather than laughter; humor that performs a teaching function, as do the same, proverbs or epics. For such people, puns, witty remarks, practical jokes and banter are practically not typical. Also, their humor is more spontaneous than prepared.
The nature of the comic. Brief Summary
We can see that each of the theories of humor has its own point of view. But, as we said at the beginning, none of them gives complete picture what is humor in the global sense. However, useful information and food for thought can be gleaned from any of the above-mentioned theories, because in any case, humor is important in a person's life. And not only because it allows you to cheer up, relax, splash out energy or even increase stress resistance, but also because it is one of the most important ways to build relationships with people around you.
In addition, we must not close our eyes to the fact that humor is the most efficient method brain training, intelligence development and cognitive enhancement. Agree, the sense of humor of an uneducated and educated, unerudite and erudite people will always differ, as, in fact, their jokes.
Laughter appears and exists in the zone of social contact - the contact of people, groups of people, cultures and entire eras. A similar zone of contact is the theory of the comic, in which the spheres of the whole complex are united scientific disciplines, and which considers different levels funny, starting with language games and ending with serious philosophical constructions. At each level, you can find your own logic and the ability to build unique associations and patterns of the funny. At the same time, the proposed models are not at all closed - they intertwine with each other, refine each other and form an integral system.
If you want to study laughter and humor, it is best to start from the beginning, i.e. take one of the most authoritative concepts of the comic, for example, Aristotle, Schopenhauer, Bergson or Bakhtin. Any of them will lead to a wide research path with many branches, signs, answers to questions. But a paradox will also be encountered here - as research continues, more and more new phenomena related to laughter will appear; the nature of the comic will become more complex; new questions will appear, which are far from always possible to answer, because not every manifestation of the funny can be squeezed into the framework of definitions or separated from the totality of phenomena and phenomena of various kinds.
With this in mind, there are two possible scenarios. The first suggests that the heterogeneous definitions of the comic that history offers us can be combined, taking as a basis common signs. As a result, we get a concept that is perfectly suited to comic phenomena and covers a huge range of manifestations of humor. This variant is applicable to empirical research, for example, to the linguistics of laughter with its zeugmas, litots, hyperbolas and other linguistic means. Here they are easily brought under the contradiction of different meaningful plans. However, the fact that contradictions are comical and do not always cause laughter, and in some cases can generally serve as anxiety or sadness, is often overlooked.
If we act according to the second scenario, then it is necessary to abandon any kind of structure and attempts to finally resolve the existing problem. The theory of the comic can no longer be regarded as a beaten track - it appears in the form of a fork with a large number of paths, and each of them serves as the beginning of another fork; some paths may cross, and some will never converge. The path of research can begin at any of the crossroads, because an infinite number of options makes the existence of any particular starting point impossible. As a result, the study of the nature of laughter will become a collection of diverse essays that are united by one theme - the fundamental impossibility of explaining the nature of the comic. But the positive point is that the researcher has unlimited freedom - he is not constrained by any framework or theories, which makes it possible for an unbiased look at humor and laughter. The downside is the futility of trying to unambiguously describe the funny.
The best option would be to follow the path of the golden mean by describing laughter as unity in diversity and plurality in integrity. In other words, there should be a starting point for research, but the work should be structured in such a way as to be able to at least approximately explain the cultural, value, social and emotional-sensory meanings and sub-meanings that determine the desire or unwillingness to respond to funny.
The task of a researcher of the nature of the comic cannot be limited to simple descriptions of the facts offered by psychology, cultural studies, physiology, linguistics, etc., because then everything in common that is expressed in laughter can simply be lost in examples and particulars. Humor, if considered as an integral unit, should cover the general philosophical sphere of research into human existence, not limited by the framework of scientific disciplines.
And, concluding the first lesson, it only remains for us to note that the concept of a "laughing man" is on the same plane as the concept of a "reasonable man." As for the question "What is the nature of humor?", then it should be considered only as an addition to the comprehensive question "What is a person?".
Attempts to explain the nature of laughter will not help to understand the mystery of human existence, but they are necessary for the correct formulation of this very question. Ridiculous opens the veil of secrecy of another facet of truth, because it is - back side serious, and together they are one whole. This means that what is serious can always be tested by laughing at it, and one should speak about laughter with all seriousness.
Of course, a serious conversation about humor does not give the opportunity to put forward concrete and final judgments, because the very nature of the object of study contradicts this. But the search for the mechanisms and laws of the nature of laughter is needed to understand the nature of man, society and culture, and each subsequent stage in the development of the theory of the comic is always a step towards understanding the nature of humor.
This concludes the main theoretical part of our course. In all subsequent lessons there will be more practice than theory. In the second lesson, we will talk about positive thinking as one of the foundations of humor, as well as its development in this vein. You will be presented with exercises and practical recommendations.
Test your knowledge
If you want to test your knowledge on the topic of this lesson, you can take a short test consisting of several questions. Only 1 option can be correct for each question. After you select one of the options, the system automatically moves on to the next question. The points you receive are affected by the correctness of your answers and the time spent on passing. Please note that the questions are different each time, and the options are shuffled.
Democritus. - Aristophanes. - Plato. - Aristotle. - Cicero. - Quintilian. - Lucian
Ancient civilizations, having gone through periods of formation, prosperity and decline, disappeared; time has turned the once luxurious houses and temples into ruins and ashes.
However, the spiritual culture of civilization, expressed primarily in philosophy and knowledge about the surrounding world, is not lost, becoming the basis for the formation of subsequent cultures. European philosophy originated in antiquity; most of the later theories are based on ideas that first arose in ancient Greece and Ancient Rome.
Pre-Socratic philosophy, destroying the mythological worldview, for the first time tried to logically explain the causes of phenomena. One of the subjects of her analysis is the problem of laughter - the most pronounced and at the same time the least understood phenomenon of human life. According to Aristotle in Rhetoric, the rhetorician Gorgias of Leontinus (485-380 BC) took up this problem for the first time, who tried to substantiate the role of laughter in philosophical discussion and oratory practice 1 . Virtually none of Gorgias's works on laughter have come down to our time; more definite conclusions can be drawn about the theory of laughter of another well-known pre-Socratic Democritus, nicknamed the "laughing philosopher".
The most developed theories of the ridiculous are presented in the works of Plato, Aristotle, the peripatetic Theophrastus and Demetrius of Phaler and their Roman followers - Cicero and Quintilian. Some statements about the essence and role of laughter can also be found among the “practitioners of laughter” - first of all, Aristophanes and Lukean, as well as Lucilius, Martial, Juvenal, Persia, etc. Many doctors of antiquity wrote about the beneficial therapeutic role of laughter. Among them, Hippocrates (469 - 395 BC), Herodice (end of the 2nd century BC) and Galen (130 - 200 BC) should be especially distinguished. The Alexandrian librarian Likifon (born in 285 BC), the philosopher Eratosthenes (284 - 200 BC) spoke about laughter in comedy.
1 Aristotle cites the following statement by Gorgias: "You should reflect the seriousness of the enemy through a joke, and his joke through seriousness." (Aristotle. Poetics. Rhetoric. St. Petersburg, 2000, p. 324.)
BC e.), the historian Dionysius of Halicarnassus (54 - 7 years BC), the grammarian Platonius (c. IV century), etc.; the so-called "Treatise of Coislinius" is also known, apparently based on the second part of Aristotle's "Poetics". Brief overviews theories of laughter are found in Macrobius ("Saturnalia"), Pliny the Elder, Plutarch, and others.
Of all the variety of approaches and ideas, the views of Democritus, Aristophanes, Plato, Aristotle, Cicero, Quintilian and Lucian had the greatest influence on the later theory of the ridiculous. These are the ones that will be discussed below.
Democritus. “What is laughter and how it is called, we will leave to judge Democritus,” wrote Cicero in his treatise “On the Orator” 1 . Indeed, the teachings of Democritus of Abdera (c. 460-370 BC) largely predetermined later, primarily medieval and Renaissance, views on the essence of laughter. This doctrine was perceived (for the most part) through the “Hippocratic novel”, widely known in the philosophical and medical circles of Renaissance Europe; on his ideas, F. Rabelais bases his "justification of laughter" - the prologue to "Gargantua and Pantagruel".
The Romance of Hippocrates is a collection of letters in which Hippocrates observes the "madness" of Democritus, expressed in almost constant laughter. “I only laugh at one thing,” Democritus explains the reason for his condition, “over a man full of madness, alien to just deeds, indulging in all sorts of stupid inventions, enduring the most difficult labors with suffering without any benefit ... What a laugh!” In the interpretation of the philosopher, laughter is a state that opposes the emptiness and insignificance of human affairs: “Animals are content with the necessary. Which lion digs gold into the ground? What kind of bull indulges in money-grubbing? What panther is capable of gluttony? The wild boar is thirsty only until he finds water, the wolf, having devoured his prey, calms down, and the man cannot get enough ... Oh, Hippocrates! How can I not laugh…” 2 . As a result, Hippocrates himself agrees with such a view of the world “through laughter”, thus adding his authority to the tradition of apologia for laughter.
The Romance of Hippocrates is, of course, apocryphal; nevertheless, a number of surviving evidence and scattered aphorisms of Democritus suggests that the legend of the laughing philosopher is not a hoax - it is rather a kind of compilation of the thinker's true statements, presented in a fictionalized form. Thus, similar thoughts are mentioned in the era preceding the writing of the "novel". We meet them at Epicurus and his
1 Cicero. About the speaker // Lurie S. Ya. Democritus: Texts. Translations. Research. L., 1970. S. 198.
2 The Hippocratic Romance. Letter 17 // Ibid.
followers, in Horace (“If Democritus were alive, he would probably laugh at that ...” 1), in the quoted quote from Cicero, etc.
Unfortunately, no definite and complete written evidence of Democritus' views on laughter has been preserved. The legacy of the philosopher (Diogenes Laertes cites more than 70 titles), which, according to many researchers, contained works on the physiology and theory of laughter, was mostly destroyed after his death 2 . Nevertheless, on the basis of the surviving one can draw some conclusions about the theory of laughter of Democritus.
First of all, laughter for a philosopher is an integral worldview, a kind of symbol of contempt for material wealth, honors, and fame. This is the look of a sage, full of peace of mind and equanimity (eibitzgp), at the vanity of others and their actions, which are not aimed at comprehending the eternal, but only at obtaining momentary benefits.
The reason for laughter is the aimlessness of the actions of most people. That which seems important, vital, that for which one betrays one's friends and transgresses the law: power, fame, lust, wealth, according to Democritus, is just emptiness (ksvov) 3 hiding behind significance. The sage, on the other hand, should be content with only the most necessary and "flee the vanity of the light." In self-restraint and comprehension of the truth, a person “strives for fair and lawful actions, in vigilance and in sleep he is healthy, cheerful and calm” 4 . The "sage's laughter" is not a manifestation of a sense of individual superiority or misanthropy. “Being human, we should not laugh at human troubles, but should sympathize with them,” 5 says the philosopher. The object of laughter should not arouse sympathy: grief, suffering, people's troubles turn laughter into an ethically unacceptable action. Later, Aristotle would also speak of the ridiculed phenomenon as "a mistake that does not bring suffering", and Bergson - about the "anesthesia of the heart" that accompanies laughter.
We can say that Democritus understands the object of laughter ontologically, as something imaginary existing, non-existence (цг | ov), which claims to be right.
1 Horace. Sobr. op. SPb., 1993. S. 331.
2 Plato may have played an important role in this. So, according to Diogenes Laertes, Plato “wanted to burn all the writings of Democritus that he could collect”; and also “Plato, mentioning almost all the ancient philosophers, does not mention Democritus anywhere, even where it was necessary to object to him; it is clear that he understood: he had to argue with the best of philosophers. (Diogenes Laertes. On the life, teachings and sayings of famous philosophers. M., 1979. P. 372.)
3 Here is a play on words characteristic of Democritus: ksvov - emptiness in the moral and physical (as "atoms and emptiness") meaning. See, for example, the words of Democritus in Lucian: “for there is nothing important in deeds - everything is emptiness, the movement of atoms and infinity.” (Lucian. Collected works: In 2 vols. M., 1935. Vol. 2. S. 381).
4 Cit. by: History of Philosophy in summary. M., 1995. S. 120.
5 Democritus // Lurie S. Ya. Decree. op. S. 367.
to be called true being. In this understanding, laughter becomes a sage's tool against everything ostentatious and hypocritical, an action that exposes the imaginary axioms of everyday life and pathetic ideology (bo^a).
The ontological approach of Democritus is an elementary and fundamental interpretation of laughter, which unfolds into axiological, epistemological, ethical and aesthetic definitions in later history comic theories. In the era of classical antiquity, the ideas of Aristophanes were closest to Democritus' "revealing" interpretation of laughter.
The funniest moment in the history of mankind - 6 hours 3 minutes on October 7, 2001. The funniest animal is the domestic duck. The funniest people are the Germans. These are the results of an experiment by British scientists who studied the sense of humor of the inhabitants of Europe, North America and Australia for two years ... The most funny joke in the world Two hunters climbed far into the forest. One of them suddenly fell. He is not breathing. His friend takes out his cell phone, dials 911 and shouts to the operator: "My friend died. What should I do?" - "Calm down, I will definitely help you," says the operator. "First, make sure that your friend is dead." The sound of a gun shot is heard, after which the hunter says to the operator: "I made sure, now what?" It was this anecdote that was recognized as the funniest according to the results of an Internet study conducted by the University of Hertfordshire in conjunction with the British Association for the Advancement of Science. The participants of the experiment were asked to send their own jokes along with the assessment of other people's jokes. In total, more than 40 thousand jokes were presented, which received about 2 million reviews. The winning anecdote was sent in by British psychologist Gurpal Gossal, who now believes that the high rating of his anecdote is completely justified: "I myself really love this joke. It helps to cheer up, it reminds us that there are people somewhere who are dumber than us ". From the point of view of project leader Professor of Psychology Richard Wiseman, incredible success jokes about hunters have a scientific explanation: all three main types of anecdote find expression in it. The first type, according to Wiseman, are jokes that help to feel superior to the rest. The second is anecdotes that help reduce the impact of events that often cause fear, anxiety or excitement (death, illness, marriage, etc.). Finally, the third type is an anecdote that surprises us with the absurdity of a situation or reaction to an event. The experiment allowed British scientists not only to classify jokes and identify the funniest among them, but also to make a number of valuable observations. Thus, the common domestic duck turned out to be the funniest animal: among the representatives of the fauna, it was she who was most often mentioned in the jokes sent to the competition. The funniest moment of the past few years was declared 6 hours 3 minutes on October 7 last year. It was at this time, according to the testimony of the computer, that the largest number of top ratings was given to one or another joke. Germany is the funniest country in the world. The Germans set highest mark very many anecdotes proposed for evaluation (and Canadians, Australians and Americans - on the contrary). An analysis of the jokes confirmed this generally quite obvious thing: different peoples sense of humor is different. North America: someone else's inferiority A distinctive feature of the American-Canadian sense of humor, researchers call a special love for anecdotes, one way or another emphasizing superiority. The hero of North American jokes either looks like a fool or is made to look like a fool. Here is an example given by Dr. Wiseman. A Texan meets a Harvard graduate. The Texan asks: "Where are you from?" - "From there, where people do not end the phrase with a particle." - "Okay. Well, where are you from, fool?" Actually, about the same and the funniest anecdote according to Canadians. When NASA first started sending people into space, astronauts quickly learned that ballpoint pens don't work in zero gravity. NASA specialists spent 10 years, 12 billion dollars and created ballpoint pen, which writes in zero gravity, under water and on almost any surface, including glass. She is not afraid of either severe frost or 300-degree heat. And Russians use a pencil. The most fun anecdote in the United States is the story about golfers. Two people are playing golf. Passing by the field funeral procession. Seeing this, one of the players, already swung to hit, suddenly stops, takes off his baseball cap, closes his eyes and reads a prayer. "Oh, what a wonderful person you are," his playmate tells him. "This is the most touching scene I've ever seen. You must be very kind!" - "Be kind here! We still lived together for 35 years." The British Isles: a play on words A feature of the sense of humor of the British and Irish is that most of all they love jokes based on a play on words. translate them into foreign languages almost impossible. Here is an anecdote that the British liked very much. The patient comes to the doctor. "Doctor, I have a strawberry stuck in my ass." - "Nothing, I have cream for your strawberries" ("cream" in English - both cream and cream). There is an analogue in the Russian tradition. At the appointment with a proctologist. "Doctor, I have a newspaper in my ass." - "Newspaper? Really?" - "No," Izvestia ". However, the British also love other jokes. "It is interesting that they recognized the joke as the funniest, which should rather be considered American," says Dr. Wiseman. A woman with a child in her arms gets on the bus. The driver, looking at the baby, he remarks: “Noble freak!” The woman goes to the back of the bus, sits down and tells the male neighbor that she was just insulted by the driver. “You can’t leave it like that. Go immediately and tell him what you think of him! the man exclaims. "Let me hold your monkey for a while." Europe and Australia: surrealism Inhabitants Western Europe most prefer jokes that Dr. Wiseman called surreal. A typical example. The dog enters the post office and holds out a telegram form. It says "woof" nine times in a row. The telegraph operator says to the dog: "You only have nine words here. You can write one more "woof", the telegram will not become more expensive." - "But the meaning will completely change," the dog replies. Other most popular view jokes in Europe, the researchers considered "existential" jokes. They make fun of confusing or stressful events. "Doctor! I had a Freudian slip yesterday. I'm having lunch with my mother-in-law, I want to ask her to pass the oil, but instead I say:" What kind of rubbish are you! She broke my whole life!" According to scientists, the most beloved Australian anecdote should also be included in this category. A woman comes to the doctor and begins to complain: "Doctor, just look at me! Hair like wire, face all wrinkled, red eyes - they put it in a coffin more beautifully. What's wrong with me, doctor?" After a few minutes of examination, the doctor replies: "Well, you have no problems with your eyesight." Germany: anything The fact that Germany turned out to be the funniest country at first glance may seem surprising. In fact, this is an extra once again confirms the conventional wisdom that the German sense of humor simply does not exist: as Dr. Wiseman delicately noted, “the Germans tend to find all sorts of jokes funny.” The Germans considered the joke to be quite international as the funniest. : every now and then he picks up papers from the ground, looks at them and throws them away with the words: "Not the same one again." The soldier is sent for examination to a psychiatrist and is recognized as crazy. Having received the paper about the commission, the soldier carefully reads it and, putting it in his pocket, grumbles: "Well here she is. Finally!"
Laughter is a reflex that seems to have no biological purpose, but it often helps to get rid of loneliness, soften aggression, win arguments, quickly determine who is "one's own", and even solve the problem of inequality. Scientist Steven Pinker, who works in experimental psychology and cognitive science, has collected various ideas and studies on humor and described the nature of laughter. T&P publishes a chapter from his book How the Brain Works, which was published in Russian by the Kuchkovo Pole publishing house.
What's so funny?
Here is how Arthur Koestler describes the problem of humor: “What is the survival value of the involuntary simultaneous contraction of 15 facial muscles in combination with certain sounds, often uncontrollable? Laughter is a reflex, but the reflex is unique in that it serves no apparent biological purpose; it can be called a reflex-luxury. Its only practical function, as far as one can tell, is to bring temporary relief from the burden of utility. From an evolutionary point of view, where laughter appears, an element of frivolity creeps into a boring universe governed by the laws of thermodynamics and the survival of the fittest.
This paradox can be formulated differently. It seems quite rational to us that a bright light striking directly into the eye causes the pupil to constrict, or that a pin stuck in the leg causes the leg to immediately withdraw the leg - because both the "stimulus" and the "reaction" are on the same physiological level. However, the fact that a complex mental activity, such as reading a page from Thurber's work, must elicit a specific motor response on a reflex level is a one-sided phenomenon that has puzzled philosophers since ancient times.
Now let's try to bring together the main threads from Koestler's reasoning, from more recent ideas in evolutionary psychology, and from research on humor and laughter proper.
Laughter, as Koestler notes, is involuntary sounds. As anyone knows school teacher, it distracts attention from the speaker and makes it difficult to continue. Plus, laughter is contagious. Psychologist Robert Provine, who has studied the ethology of human laughter, found that people laugh thirty times more often when they are around other people than when they are alone. Even when people laugh in private, they often imagine that other people are next to them - they read a text written by another person, hear his voice on the radio or see him on TV. People laugh when they hear laughter; this is why television comedies use audio recordings of laughter to make up for the lack of a live audience. (The forerunner of this phenomenon was the drumroll, or hitting the rim of the drum after a joke from one of the comedians in vaudeville.)
All this leads to two conclusions. First, laughter is expressed through sounds, not because it represents the release of accumulated emotional energy, but because it can be heard by others; it is a form of communication. Secondly, laughter is involuntary for the same reason that other manifestations of emotion are involuntary. The brain makes an honest, unfeigned and rather expensive advertisement of the mental state, transferring control from the computing systems responsible for voluntary actions to lower-level driving elements responsible for the material part. human body. As with anger, sympathy, shame, or fear, the brain takes the same steps to convince the audience that internal state man is sincere, not fake.
Apparently, other primate species have analogues of laughter. Sociobiologist Ireneus Eibl-Eibesfeldt hears the rhythmic sounds of laughter in the "shouts" that monkeys make when they gather in a group to intimidate or attack a common enemy. Chimpanzees make a different sound that primatologists describe as laughter. It is an aspirated sound that is pronounced on both exhalation and inhalation, and it is more like snoring than "ha-ha-ha" that human laughter consists of. (It is possible that chimpanzees have other types of laughter.) Chimpanzees "laugh" when they tickle each other, just like children. Tickling is about touching vulnerable parts of the body while pretending to be attacking. Many primates and children in all human societies start fights during which they train to fight for real. A make-believe fight is always a dilemma for its participants: the fight must be realistic enough to provide a useful opportunity to practice defensive and offensive skills, but each side must show the other that this is a make-believe attack so that the fight does not escalate into something more serious and no harm done. The laughter of chimpanzees and other "game faces" in primates formed as a signal that the fight was started, as they say, as a joke. So, we have two variants of the laughter prototype: a signal of collective aggression and a signal of feigned aggression. One does not exclude the other, and both options combined can help shed light on the essence of laughter in humans.
Humor is often a form of aggression. When they laugh at you, it is unpleasant and perceived as an attack. Many comedies are based on crude slapstick and offensive jokes, and in less sophisticated settings - including the hunter-gatherer communities where we evolved - the humor can be overtly sadistic. Children often laugh hysterically when another child is hurt or in trouble. We find the same thing in many publications on hunter-gatherer humor. When anthropologist Raymond Hames lived with the Yekuana tribe in the Amazonian rainforest, he once hit his head on a bar at the entrance to a hut and fell, writhing in pain and bleeding. Witnesses of this incident simply shook with laughter. We cannot say that we are very different from them. In the old days in England, a public execution was an event to which the whole family could come and laugh at the condemned to his heart's content while he was led to the gallows and executed. In the book "1984" Orwell presented in the form of an excerpt from the diary of Winston Smith satirical image popular entertainment that worries about its resemblance to a typical evening in a state-of-the-art cinema:
Yesterday at the cinema. All war movies. One is very good, somewhere in the Mediterranean they bomb a ship with refugees. The audience is amused by the shots where a huge fat man tries to swim away, and he is pursued by a helicopter. First, we see how he flounders like a dolphin in the water, then we see him from a helicopter through the scope, then he is full of holes, and the sea around him is pink, and immediately sinks, as if he had taken water through the holes. When he went to the bottom, the audience roared. Then a boat full of children and a helicopter hovering over it. There, on the prow, was a middle-aged woman who looked like a Jewess, and in her arms was a boy of about three years old. The boy screams in fear and hides his head on her chest, as if he wants to screw himself into her, and she calms him down and covers him with her hands, although she herself turned blue with fear. All the time he tries to close it with his hands better, as if he can shield from bullets. Then the helicopter dropped a 20-kilogram bomb on them, a terrible explosion, and the boat shattered into pieces. Then a wonderful shot, a child's hand flies up, up straight into the sky, probably filmed from the glass nose of a helicopter, and loudly applauded in the party ranks ...
The horror that Orwell evokes in us with his heartbreaking description of the horror of the victims shows that cruelty alone cannot be the stimulus for laughter. The subject of ridicule should be presented as making an undeserved claim to dignity and respect, and a funny incident should bring him down a little arrogance. Humor is the enemy of pomposity and outward propriety, especially if they serve as a support for the authority of the enemy or superior. The most attractive object of ridicule is teachers, preachers, kings, politicians, military officials and other powerful people of this world. (Even the gloating of the Yekuan seems more understandable to us if we learn that they are a people of small stature, and Hames is a hefty American.) funny situation, which I saw in real life, occurred during a military parade in Cali (Colombia). An officer walked proudly at the head of the parade, and in front of him walked no less proudly a street boy of seven or eight years old, with his nose up and majestically waving his arms. The officer tried to drive the boy away without losing his stride, but the boy always managed to slip a few steps forward and continued to walk at the head of the procession through the streets of the city.
The loss of self-respect also underlies the enduring appeal of bawdy and "toilet" humor. Most of the jokes in the world are more like The Menagerie than the humor of the Algonquin Round Table. […]
Of course, we would never laugh at such infantile jokes. Our humor is always "spicy", "worldly", "colorful", "frivolous", "juicy" or "Rabelaisian". Sex and excrement are a reminder that whoever claims to be dignified twenty-four hours a day, his claim is unconvincing. The so-called intelligent animal has an unbridled desire to mate, moan and squirm. And, as Isak Dinesen wrote, “what is a person, if you think about it, if not an ingenious and precise machine that turns Shiraz red wine into urine with infinite skill?”
Ironically, however, humor is also a favorite tactic in rhetoric and intellectual debate. Wit in the hands of a skilled polemicist can turn into a dangerous weapon. Ronald Reagan owed much of his popularity and effectiveness as president to his ability to silence opponents and critics with one witty remark—if only for a minute; for example, reflecting on questions about the right to abortion, he once said: "As I see it, everyone who advocates abortion has already managed to be born." Philosophers love to retell the true story of a theorist who stated at a scientific conference that while some languages use double negatives to express a statement, no language uses a double affirmative to express a negative. One of the listeners in the back rows answered this: "Yes, yes ...". Perhaps Voltaire was right when he wrote that " witty saying proves absolutely nothing,” Voltaire himself was known for his penchant for using just such statements. The perfect sarcastic remark can give the speaker an instant win - deserved or not - and silence his opponents. We often see that one succinct saying contains the truth, the proof of which in other words would take several pages.
And here we come to Koestler's attempt to reverse engineer humor. Koestler was one of the first enthusiasts of cognitive science at a time when behaviorism dominated everywhere, and he was the first to draw attention to the inventory of rule systems, ways of interpreting, ways of thinking and frames of reference in the mind. Humor, he says, begins with a thread of reasoning in one frame of reference that runs into an inconsistency: an event or a statement that makes no sense in the context of everything that came before. The discrepancy can be resolved by moving to another coordinate system in which the event will have a value. And in this frame of reference, the position this person will be understated. Koestler calls this transition "bisociation". Many of Koestler's examples of humor are timeless, so I'll demonstrate this theory with a couple of examples; however, I will have to analyze them in detail, because of which I will have to say goodbye to the humorous effect. Lady Astor tells Winston Churchill: "If you were my husband, I would put poison in your tea." He replies, "If you were my wife, I would drink it." This answer is paradoxical in terms of the murder coordinate system, because usually people don't want to be killed. The discrepancy is resolved by switching to a suicide frame of reference in which death is the desired release from suffering. In this coordinate system, Lady Astor is the cause of a failed marriage, and this is far from the best role.
A climber falls off a cliff and catches a rope over a thousand-foot drop. In horror and despair, he raises his eyes to the heavens and exclaims: "Is there anyone up there who can help me?". A voice is heard from heaven: "You will be saved if you prove your faith and let go of the rope." The climber looks down, then up, and then shouts: “Is there anyone else who can help me?”. From the point of view of the coordinate system of religious plots, where God works miracles in exchange for a demonstration of faith, and people are always grateful to him for this deal, the climber's answer is absurd. The inconsistency is resolved by moving into the frame of reference of everyday life, where people have a healthy respect for the laws of physics and skepticism for those who try to challenge them. In this frame of reference, God (and, indirectly, his supporters from religious institutions) may turn out to be a fraud - however, if this is not the case, then common sense climber will lead him to his doom. […]
Koestler's three components of humor - inconsistency, resolution, and ridiculous position - have been confirmed by numerous experimental studies of what makes a joke funny. Crude humor featuring physical actions works through conflict between the psychological frame of reference in which the individual is the reference point for beliefs and desires, and physical system coordinates, in which a person is just a piece of material substance that obeys the laws of physics. "Toilet" humor works through a conflict between the psychological frame of reference and the physiological frame of reference in which the person produces disgusting substances. Dirty humor also works through conflict between psychological and biological frames of reference; in this case man is a mammal with all the instincts and organs necessary for internal fertilization. Verbal humor is based on the conflict between two meanings of a word, the second of which is unexpected, delicate or offensive.
First, dignity, importance, and other balloons that humor pierces with such ease are elements of the power/status complex. Influence and status benefit those who have them at the expense of those who do not, so peasants always have a motive to revolt against high-ranking persons. Among people, influence is not just the trophies of victory in the struggle, but a kind of vague aura acquired as a result of the recognition of effectiveness in any of the areas of human interaction - such as courage, dexterity, skill, wisdom, diplomatic abilities, connections, beauty, wealth. Many of these prestige claims are, one might say, "in the eye of the beholder": they immediately crumble to dust as soon as the beholder changes their assessment of the strengths and weaknesses that together constitute a person's worth. Therefore, humor can be a weapon against domination. The user of this weapon draws attention to one of the many unflattering characteristics that any mortal has, no matter how influential and powerful he may be.
Secondly, a dominant position can be claimed when you are alone with the enemy, but not with the whole crowd. A man with only one bullet in his gun can hold dozens of people hostage if they don't have a way to give the signal that they should all jump on him. No single government is powerful enough to control the entire population, so when events unfold quickly and people lose confidence in the authority of the ruling elite, they can overthrow it. Perhaps that is why laughter was put at the service of humor - this involuntary, disorganizing and highly contagious signal. When timid chuckles turn into unbridled merriment, like a nuclear chain reaction, people begin to recognize that they all saw the same flaw in such a much-praised leader. If the offender were alone, he would risk reprisal from the object of ridicule, but if there is a whole crowd of offenders and they all, clearly in agreement, point out the weaknesses of the object, this is a reliable way. Hans Christian Andersen's story about the king's new clothes is a good parable about the subversive power of collective humor. Of course, in everyday life we do not have to overthrow tyrants and shame kings, but we have to question the claims of countless braggarts, bullies, bullies, windbags, do-gooders, hypocrites, machos, know-it-alls and prima donnas.
Thirdly, the brain reflexively interprets the words and gestures of other people, doing everything possible to make them reasonable and sincere. If speech is fragmented or unintelligible, the brain mercifully fills in the gaps or shifts to another frame of reference in which what is said would make sense. Without this "principle of relevance" language as such would be impossible. The thoughts behind the simplest sentence are so intricate that if we tried to express them in a speech in full, our speech would begin to resemble the ornately verbose style of legal documents. Let's say I say, "Jane heard the tune of an ice cream truck outside. She ran to the chest of drawers, took the piggy bank and started shaking it. Finally, some money fell out.” Although I used few words, you understood that Jane was a child (not an octogenarian), that she was shaking a piggy bank (not a chest of drawers), that coins (not banknotes) fell out of the piggy bank, and that she needed money to buy ice cream (not to be eaten, invested, or bribed an ice cream vendor to turn off the tune).
The joker manipulates these mental mechanisms in such a way that the public, against their will, begins to think about a judgment that can resolve the inconsistency. People like the truth expressed by this judgment because it was not forced upon them in the form of propaganda that they could reject, but was a conclusion that they arrived at on their own. This judgment must contain at least some justification, otherwise the audience will not be able to deduce it from the rest of the facts and will not be able to appreciate the joke.
This explains the feeling that a witty remark can express a truth that is difficult to put into words, and the fact that it is an effective weapon that makes people agree, even for a moment, with what they would otherwise deny. Reagan's quip that all pro-abortion advocates have already been born is such a banal truth - we've all been born - that at first glance it seems meaningless. Nevertheless, it makes sense if we proceed from the position that people are divided into those who have already been born and those who have not yet been born. It is in these terms that the opponents of abortion prefer to talk about this problem, and anyone who understands this statement, thereby implicitly admits that such a formulation is possible. Based on this formulation, an abortionist has a privilege, but wants to deprive other people of it, and therefore is hypocritical. This does not mean that this argument is one hundred percent valid, but it will take many more words to refute it than the dozen words used by Reagan. The "highest" forms of wit are cases in which the listeners' cognitive processes turn against themselves, causing them to draw derogatory conclusions from premises they cannot deny.
Humor is not always malicious. Friends often tease each other - this is a completely harmless occupation; moreover, an evening spent in joking conversation with friends is one of the greatest pleasures in life. Of course, much of this pleasure is based on the fact that friends taunt people who are not part of their circle: this strengthens friendship in full accordance with the principle "the enemy of my enemy is my friend." However, a large part of these jokes is self-deprecating and condescending teasing, which, apparently, seems to be pleasant to everyone.
Social humor not only cannot be called aggressive - it cannot be called especially funny either. Robert Provine did something that no one had even thought to do in over two thousand years of ranting on the topic of humor: he decided to watch in the street what makes people laugh. His assistants would surreptitiously approach groups of people talking on a college campus and notice what made them laugh. What did they manage to discover? Typical phrases after which people started to laugh were “We'll see you guys again” and “What would that mean?!”. As they say, it is difficult to explain, it must be seen. Only 10 to 20% of all situations could be described as funny, and then by very mild criteria. Most funny phrases out of 1200 examples were the following: "You don't have to drink, you buy us something to drink"; “Do you go on dates with representatives of your species? and “Do you work here or are you just pretending?” Provine notes: “Just because laughter is often heard at crowded parties, it doesn’t mean that guests are talking crazy about each other. funny jokes. For the most part, the dialogue leading up to the laughs is reminiscent of dialogue from an endless TV sitcom written by an extremely mediocre screenwriter."
What explains the attraction of almost unfunny chatter, which in most cases makes us laugh? If humor is the antidote to self-esteem, the antidote to dominance, then it doesn't have to be used solely for malign purposes. The basic idea is that people, interacting with each other, should choose from a menu of different concepts of social psychology, each of which has its own logic. The logic of dominance and status is based on implicit threats and bribery, and it disappears if the superior can no longer implement them. The logic of friendship is based on the willingness to help each other on an unlimited scale, no matter what happens. People strive for status and dominance, but they also strive for friendship, because status and dominance are transient, and a friend will remain by your side in sorrow and in joy. These two options are incompatible, and here the signal problem arises. Given any two people, one of them will always be stronger, smarter, richer, handsomer, or more powerful than the other. There are always conditions for establishing a relationship of "dominant-submissive" or "celebrity-fan", but neither side wants the relationship to develop in this direction. By downgrading the qualities by which you could subdue your friend or a friend could subdue you, you signal that the basis of your relationship - at least for you - is not status or dominance. It is best if this signal is involuntary and difficult to fake.
If this idea is correct, it could explain the similarities between laughter in adults and responses to simulated aggression and tickling in children and chimpanzees. Laughter seems to be saying, "It may seem like I'm trying to harm you, but I'm just doing what we both need." This idea also explains why friendly jokes are an accurate gauge used to gauge how you relate to a particular person. You won't tease a superior or a stranger, but if one of you pulls off a tentative joke that gets a positive reaction, you'll know that the ice has been broken and that the relationship is moving towards friendship. If the teasing causes a disgruntled smirk or an icy silence, you will understand that this disgruntled person does not want to become your friend (or maybe even interpreted your joke as aggression or a challenge). The constant chuckling that is characteristic of good friends is a reaffirmation that friendship is still the basis of the relationship, despite the fact that one of the parties regularly has a reason to take control.
The significance of laughter and everything connected with it for art and literature can hardly be overestimated. Laughter as a facet of human consciousness and behavior, firstly, is an expression of cheerfulness, spiritual gaiety, vitality and energy, and at the same time - an integral part of benevolent communication (remember Leo Tolstoy's Nikolai and Natasha Rostovs in the uncle's house after the hunt). And secondly, laughter is a form of rejection and condemnation by people of what surrounds them, a mockery of something, a direct emotional comprehension of certain contradictions, often associated with a person's alienation from what he perceives. This side of laughter is associated with the comic (from other Greek "komos" village holiday). Much has been written about the comic as a source of laughter (primarily mocking) (Aristotle, Kant, Chernyshevsky, A. Bergson), meaning by it a certain deviation from the norm, absurdity, incongruity; blunder and ugliness that does not cause suffering; internal emptiness and insignificance, which are covered by claims to richness and significance; inertness and automatism where agility and flexibility are needed.
On early stages In the history of mankind, laughter most clearly revealed itself as a mass one and existed mainly as part of festive rituals. In wide famous book MM. Bakhtin about F. Rabelais, carnival laughter is described as a very significant facet of culture (primarily folk) different countries and epochs. The scientist described this laughter as nationwide (creating an atmosphere of universal unity on the basis of a cheerful feeling), universal (aimed at the world as a whole, in its eternal dying and rebirth, and above all - at its material-bodily and at the same time festive side) and ambivalent (component the unity of the affirmation of the inexhaustible forces of the people and the denial of everything official, both state and church: all sorts of prohibitions and hierarchical establishments), the main thing is that it expresses and realizes freedom and marks fearlessness2. The carnival worldview, according to Bakhtin, is characterized by cheerful relativity, the pathos of changes and renewals, and the relativization of the world. And in this one can see the similarities between Bakhtin's carnivalism and Nietzsche's Dionysianism.
The concept of carnival laughter (the book about Rabelais was published in 1965) had a great and undoubtedly beneficial effect on cultural studies, art criticism and literary criticism of the last three decades, sometimes causing criticism. Thus, attention was drawn to the connection, not taken into account by Bakhtin, of carnival "looseness" with cruelty, and of mass laughter with violence. In contrast to Bakhtin's book, it was said that the carnival laughter from the stories of Rabelais is satanic. The mournful, tragic subtext of Bakhtin's book about Rabelais, written in the 1930s and 1940s, is clearly revealed in the recently published manuscript of the scientist, which says that life is inherently (at all times) riddled with crime, that the "tones of love" are drowned out in it. and only "from time to time the liberating tones of saturnalia and carnival sound." With the passage of historical time, the cultural and artistic significance of laughter, which goes beyond the scope of mass and ritualized festivity, increases as an integral part of everyday life - private life and individual communication of people. It has been established that even among primitive peoples, laughter, "greeting everyone", symbolized "friendly and good company". Such laughter (it can rightly be called individually-initiative) is closely connected with easy, confidential communication, with a lively conversation, primarily with the fact that P.A. Vyazemsky called "communicative cheerfulness." It is present in the literature of different countries and peoples. In this regard, Plato's dialogues are also significant (especially "Phaedo", where Socrates, on the eve of his execution, "smilingly" talks and jokes with his students), and the narrative fabric of such works of the New Age (very different), as "The Life and Opinions of Tristam Shandy, gentleman" by L. Stern, "Eugene Onegin" by Pushkin, "Vasily Terkin" by Tvardovsky, and the behavior of a number of heroes domestic classics(Let us recall, for example, Mozart's penchant for a light joke, poetized by Pushkin, or Prince Myshkin's invariable smile in Dostoevsky).
Individually-initiative laughter can also have an alienating-mocking character. The term irony has traditionally been used to characterize it. An ironic disposition towards everything around, towards the way of life of people and their habits was inherent in the ancient Greek cynics (V-IV centuries BC) with their penchant for outrageousness, malicious cynicism, and street scandals. The militantly nihilistic laughter of the Cynics remotely, but quite clearly, anticipated the ironic mood of F. Nietzsche's works. In Thus Spoke Zarathustra we read: "I commanded the people to laugh at their great teachers of virtue, at their saints and poets, at their deliverers of the world." The philosopher wrote about himself: "I do not want to be a saint, rather a jester. Maybe I am a jester." From the laughter of cynics, threads stretch to the forms of behavior of the futurists of the beginning of our century, and even more so to the now widespread "black humor".
A significant phenomenon of culture and art of modern times - romantic irony. According to F. Schlegel, the ability to irony elevates a person above the contradictions of being and, in particular, above the "base prose" of everyday life. Attributing his own view of the world to Socrates, Schlegel noted that "irony makes fun of the whole world." Speaking of irony, he also argued that "everything in it should be a joke and everything is serious, everything is sincerely frank and everything is deeply hidden," that "irony is a clear consciousness of eternal mobility, infinitely complete chaos." About the duality of irony, which helps a person to discover the “divine idea”, and at the same time is capable of destroying that “to which she herself gave the appearance of life,” K.-V.-F. wrote a little later. Solger. This kind of universal irony, being painted in tragic tones, is present in the work of writers of the Symbolist circle (A. Blok, A. Bely). An apologia for total philosophical laughter is inherent in modern humanists of a structuralist and post-structuralist orientation. Thus, M. Foucault (France) in a book of 1966 argued that nowadays "one can think only in an empty space where there is no longer a person", that the desire to think and talk about a person is an "absurd and absurd" reflection, which "can be opposed just philosophical laughter.
An ironic view of the world is capable of freeing a person from dogmatic narrowness of thinking, from one-sidedness, intolerance, fanaticism, from trampling on living life in the name of an abstract principle. T. Mann spoke persistently about this. At the same time, "irony without shores" can lead to a dead end of nihilism, inhumanity, and impersonality. F. Nietzsche felt this painfully: “The habit of irony spoils the character, it gradually gives it a trait of malevolent superiority, you begin to resemble angry dog who, by biting, also learned to laugh. " A Blok wrote about the negative potential of total irony in the article "Irony" (1908), characterizing it as a disease, rampage, blasphemy, the result of intoxication, as a symptom of the loss of humanity in a person; in 1918 - S. N. Bulgakov ("Now is a winning time for irony and gloating").
Irony, which knows no boundaries, is capable of "turning around" in a total denial of the human in a person. According to I.P. Smirnov, valuable literature in its postmodern branch tends to reproduce human reality as monstrous. Here the authors "conceptualize the subject as an uncontrolled "wishing machine" as a mechanical-organic monster."
Along with the universal irony directed at the world and human life in general, there is (and is very productive for art and literature) irony, generated by the perception and comprehension of specific, local and at the same time deeply significant contradictions in people's lives and their historical existence. It is this kind of ironic mood that is present in humorous and satirical works.
Voinovich's satire deserves a serious and unbiased approach. This is a master who knows how to use and artistically combine elements of literary traditions in an original way. Voinovich writes about people who, under the conditions of the totalitarian regime, have been turned into an embittered, frightened and greedy crowd.
And it should be noted that with him these people sometimes act in situations that repeat the most heroic and touching collisions of world classics, Russian classics and folklore.
