Testing the theories of laughter on Nasreddin Hodja

I drive the 413 across Ankara, and between stops I listen to lectures. A few weeks ago it was a lecture on why things are funny. The lecturer went through the theories one by one, with jokes from English comedians as examples, and I found myself testing each theory on the jokes I know best, which are the Nasreddin Hodja stories my grandfather told at every family meal.

Nasreddin is the wise fool of Anatolia. Akşehir claims his tomb and holds a festival in his name; Arabic speakers know a close cousin called Juha, and in Persia and Central Asia he is Mulla Nasruddin. Nobody knows how many of the stories go back to a real man. What matters is that they have been told for centuries, in many languages, and they still work. If a theory of humour cannot explain Nasreddin, I do not trust it.

The theories, quickly

Superiority. Plato, in the Philebus, treats our laughter at the ridiculous as a mixture of pleasure and malice. Hobbes made the view famous with his phrase "sudden glory" in Leviathan: we laugh when we suddenly see ourselves as better than someone else.

Relief. Laughter releases nervous energy that has built up, usually energy we were holding back. Freud's book on jokes (1905) is the best-known version.

Incongruity. Something we expected does not happen; something that does not fit appears instead. Kant, in the Critique of Judgment, describes laughter as arising when a strained expectation suddenly turns into nothing. This is the theory most philosophers now start from.

Benign violation. A newer refinement from the psychologists Peter McGraw and Caleb Warren: something must seem wrong (a breach of logic, manners or safety) and at the same time be harmless. Tickling is a mock attack. A tragedy joke is fine years later and terrible the next day.

And one more, which the lecture left out: Henri Bergson's Laughter (1900). Bergson thought we laugh at "something mechanical encrusted upon the living", a person behaving like a machine, and that laughter is society's way of correcting that rigidity.

Test one: the donkey

A neighbour comes to borrow Nasreddin's donkey. Nasreddin does not want to lend it, so he says, "Sorry, the donkey isn't here." At that moment the donkey brays loudly from the stable. The neighbour says, "But I can hear it!" Nasreddin, offended: "Who are you going to believe, me or a donkey?"

Superiority does badly here. Nasreddin is caught lying; if anything we should feel superior to him, but that is not why we laugh. We laugh with him, at his nerve. Incongruity does much better. He turns a matter of plain evidence into a question of whose testimony is more respectable, and the shift is absurd. Benign violation adds the right detail: the lie is tiny, nobody is hurt, and the neighbour will get over it.

Test two: the cauldron

Nasreddin borrows a cauldron from a neighbour. He returns it with a small pot inside. "Your cauldron gave birth," he explains. The neighbour, pleased with his profit, accepts the little pot. Later Nasreddin borrows the cauldron again and does not return it. When the neighbour comes asking, Nasreddin says sadly, "Your cauldron has died." "How can a cauldron die?" "You believed it could give birth."

This one is harder for incongruity theory, because the absurdity is not resolved into nothing. It is resolved into a lesson. The neighbour accepted nonsense when it paid him and rejects the same nonsense when it costs him. Here superiority theory finally earns its place: we enjoy seeing a greedy man caught by his own logic. But the superiority is moral, and it is shared by the whole audience against a vice, not by me against a person. Hobbes's "sudden glory" is too selfish a description of what we feel.

Test three: "Eat, my coat"

Nasreddin goes to a wedding feast in his old work clothes. Nobody greets him or offers him a seat. He goes home, puts on his best fur coat and returns. Now he is welcomed and seated at the head of the table. When the soup arrives, he dips the sleeve of his coat into it and says, "Eat, my coat, eat. It was you they invited."

This is where I think the lecture missed something. The joke is funny, but it is also a criticism, and the criticism is the point. Al-Jāḥiẓ, the ninth-century Basran writer, took the relation between jest and earnest seriously, and his Book of Misers is still funny because the misers are allowed to argue for themselves, often brilliantly, while the reader sees through them. Nasreddin's coat belongs to the same family. The laughter makes it possible to say something to the hosts that could not be said straight.

Bergson would say the hosts are the mechanical ones, greeting clothes instead of people, and that laughter corrects them. I think he is right about this story, though I doubt it is true of all laughter.

Test four: "You are also right"

Nasreddin is serving as a judge. The first man states his case, and Nasreddin says, "You are right." The second man states the opposite case, and Nasreddin says, "You are right." His wife, listening, says, "They can't both be right." Nasreddin thinks, and says, "You are also right."

Pure incongruity: a contradiction, then a third. Bergson fits beautifully too, because the formula repeats like a machine. But there is something extra. Every one of us has been that judge, wanting to agree with whoever spoke last. We laugh at ourselves. No superiority there at all.

What I conclude

After a month of tests, I do not think the theories are rivals. They answer different questions.

Incongruity explains what is funny: the shape of a joke, a pattern set up and broken. It is necessary, but it is not enough, because a mistake on a timetable is also incongruous and nobody laughs at it.

Benign violation explains when it is funny: why the same story works at a family dinner and fails at a funeral, and why some Nasreddin stories, about wives or about foreigners, land badly now. The violation stopped being benign for many listeners, and that is a real change, not oversensitivity.

Superiority and Bergson's correction explain what laughter is for, sometimes. A community uses laughter to mark greed, vanity and rigidity. That is why Nasreddin is a hodja, a teacher, and not just a clown. The Hobbes version makes this sound like vanity. The better version is that of al-Jāḥiẓ: jest can carry earnest when earnest alone would not be heard.

My grandfather never explained a joke. He told it, waited, and if the children did not laugh, he told it again more slowly. I used to think that was because he was old. Now I think he knew the timing is part of the joke, which is the one thing no theory I have read quite explains.