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The Alpha Comedian

Why humour is not based on status

This is an excerpt from chapter two of the book

Status is probably the second most commonly accepted theory of comedy after surprise. They can coexist, though, because the difference is that theories on surprise are more about how jokes are told. Theories that say comedy is based on status focuses more on what jokes are about.

Status theories are definitely more tenacious than other theories. When I've debated with other people, especially other comedians, about theories on comedy, I've encountered many people who insist that humour must be related to status, and will accept no other alternative. At the same time, though, they are sceptical of my proposal precisely because they acknowledge that ultimately no one knows what humour really is, so obviously some unknown comedian without credentials such as myself couldn't have possibly solved such a big mystery. I find it hard to reconcile their basis of scepticism about any new theory with their confidence in status as an explanation¹ .

Playing with people's social status is undeniably useful in creating comedy. One of Keith Johnstone's² great contributions to improv, comedy, and storytelling in general, was the insight that status isn't something that people have, it's something that people do. It's an insight that is so fundamental that people take it for granted now. However, before being exposed to Johnstone's notion of status as an activity, not a quality, most people might just assume, for example, that a king simply has higher status than a peasant. Their actual status relationship, though, is determined by the actions that they direct toward each other. It's a fantastically useful concept to grasp, because all sorts of comical situations can be created by shifting around behaviours in relation to status. Having the peasant be unimpressed with the king's authority, question it, or make sarcastic comments, or anything else that challenges the assumed status positions is standard comedy fare³ .

If a lot of comedy is about status, does that mean all comedy is status? Humans, like many social animals, are very sensitive to slight variations in social standing, and it is the focus of a lot of our thinking and behaviour. Status affects who we might be romantically or sexually attracted to and how we pursue those relationships, who we accept criticisms and advice from and how we take it, where we want to work and how we feel about our jobs and coworkers, and on and on. How much status is present in humour isn't really evidence of humour's connection to status, because status has an influence on pretty much every social interaction we have.

It could be argued that every item of clothing we have chosen to wear is impacted by our pursuit of status, but did clothing originate as a human display of status, or merely as a way of protecting us from the elements? Probably both. Sometimes you wear a jacket to look cool, sometimes you wear a jacket to not die of hypothermia. Most often it's somewhere in between. Most jackets are probably worn to look at least passable by current fashion trends while keeping you slightly warmer in cold weather. Which came first, jewelry for status or animal skins for warmth? Is jewelry a separate category from clothing? I have no idea, I just know that adornments for status and clothing for utility have separate origins. The point is that just because status concerns have merged into clothes to the point where it practically dominates all our clothing purchases doesn't mean status is clothing. If we stopped caring about status, we would still wear clothes for a variety of reasons⁴ , so it would be incorrect to develop a theory of clothes based entirely on status. Similarly, in the case of humour, we have to ask, if we stopped caring about status, would we still tell jokes?

The question for humour has to be narrowed down to whether or not comedy must be based on status in order to exist at all. With that consideration in mind⁵ , what exactly is a theory of comedy based on status trying to tell us?

The essential idea is that humour is a sensation we get when people's status is changed or exposed in some way. Somehow humour and laughter is bound up in how we communicate to each other our perceptions of each other's status. That's a vague and open ended description of how status and comedy are connected because under the umbrella of status there are many variants that differ with each other enough to make it hard to summarize status theories into something more specific. The diversity of variants can be extreme enough that some aren't even compatible with each other⁶ .

For example, one idea is that comedy is a sort of “alpha male” activity. Laughing at others is a way of asserting dominance. But another idea is that telling jokes is the domain of the outsider, the member of the group who uses comedy as a way of getting acceptance to compensate for their low status. While both of these ideas are based on status, if one of those is true, then the other can't be.

Other theories in this category state that jokes must always have a “victim”, someone who is the “butt” of the joke, a person being made fun of or laughed at. Some variants state that the victim can be anybody, even the comedian, such as in the case of self-depreciating humour. Other variants state that there is always a third party, someone being made fun of, which makes both the comedian and the audience feel better by putting that other person down, which in effect raises their own perception of status.

Within this category we can also include those theories that state that comedy is about cruelty. What distinguishes cruelty from saying that there is a victim is that theories based on cruelty say that comedy must necessarily be an attack, not merely that it be revealing of a flaw. The victim variant allows for the victim to be incidental.

That a number of variants of status theory exist with different proposals of how status gets used to generate laughter seems to be evidence that status is flexible in its connection to comedy. So it would be kind of tough to adhere to any one specific variant too strongly.

However, the weaknesses of the particular variants doesn't make the overall premise wrong. If one abandons any insistence on exactly where a comedian or the audience has to be in the status hierarchy, then a more general idea emerges that states that the important thing is simply that status be exploited. That is more defensible, since it leaves open the possibility that one comedian can put himself down, and another can put someone else down, and both are creating comedy from the attempt to expose or change somebody's relative status position. From this stand point, that comedy arises from the shift or exposure of status in general, you can start to wrap that explanation around a lot of comedy.

As much as making status theories too specific is problematic, being too open also comes with a price. Status is a large and nebulous topic on its own, so without some kind of explanation of what its connection to comedy is, we don't have anything to differentiate when comedy is happening from when status is happening in a non-funny way. Just as there are situations are surprising but not funny, some situations change status without causing laughter. To make status work, we need to account for these differences, but without creating a status theory that is too rigid and creates contradictions within observable humorous situations as described above.

When a person gets promoted at work, they don't necessarily bust a gut laughing. I suppose they could, but there's no automatic and direct correlation between a status change and laughter. There can be feelings of pride, respect, admiration, or whatever else. When they swear the president of the United States into office, they don't have to take time to let him get over the giggles. And of course, status going doesn't always cause laughter. There are a lot of times when my friends have lost jobs, lost possessions, lost status, and I didn't laugh, I sympathized.

Like Keith Johnstone pointed out, we do status, we don't just have it. In our interactions, people can act in high status and low status ways, and change those mannerisms and their status with it. When we have that happen to us or to others, laughter is not the one and only response. Sympathy, shadenfraude⁷ , concern, and other responses are equally likely in any given situation. Sometimes you say something that comments on someone's status, and they are merely insulted and no one laughs.

I've heard status theories account for this difference between the presence or absence of laughter is the difference of safety. So, for example, having your friend lose their job is not funny because it's your friend and they actually lost their job. A comedy sketch about a guy losing his job is funny because it's not a real person and not a real job loss. Meh. In adding the safety condition, we've fallen off the edge into the patchwork theory zone. We're adding conditions to save the theory, not merely allowing status to do its job of explaining itself. And we're just expanding the messiness, really, because sometimes we do laugh when it's real⁸ , and sometimes we don't, and sometimes we don't laugh when it's fake, and sometimes we do. With the safety condition in there, we're going to have to add yet another axis on the matrix of conditions to account for when safety matters and when it doesn't, thus expanding the patchwork. You can see how patchwork theories creep up on you.

Speaking of patchworks, status also does not say anything about timing. Any beginning comedian can tell you that the single most important component in getting laughs is timing. A joke told too fast, too slow, or simply with the wrong rhythm, will fail to work. However, why would that be if comedy was status? Assuming a comedian were able to convey the essential information about a person's status and why we should laugh about it, why would the status if the victim remain unsuccessfully challenged to a funny degree if the joke comes out with a pause or beat at the wrong time?

Status advocates might say that the teller of the joke has adversely affected their own status by telling the joke wrong. They have lowered their status making it not possible to tell the joke properly. However, that concept is the initial spark in an explosion of patchwork repairs. If the joke was already intended to be self depreciating, why didn't the lowered status of bad timing make the joke more funny? If the joke was about status, but status affected the telling the joke, then is status a matter of material or delivery? If it's both then good luck drawing up the matrix of when either matters and how much and when. At the beginning of this section I said that surprise is more to do with how jokes are told, and status is more to do with what jokes are about. Whether it's surprise or something else we include to account for the timing aspect of comedy, we're adding stuff in, not deriving explanations from the paradigm.

This is the main problem of status theories, and the root cause of why status is such a hard fought battle. It's not that status does such a good job of explaining comedy, it's that status is on its own such a large and flexible concept. How exactly status works in human society and individuals is as much or more mysterious than humour. Certain elements are known, such as the fact that it's well understood that people generally want more status, just like it's well known that people like to laugh. However, whether or not the mechanics of how our perceptions of status is biologically wired into us, what's included in the catalogue of methods we use to display and perceive status, and many other fundamental issues, are not totally solved, and some things are completely unknown.

Within the mystery of how status works is a wide open area for making connections to comedy. All one has to do is find the right glue in the form of an assumption of how status works.

For example, consider puns and silly word play. Swapping one word for another just because it sounds silly doesn't change anyone's status⁹ . Especially consider reading a pun that is written down that makes you laugh. How is anyone's status affected when you are alone enjoying silly word play?

Status advocates claim that in this situation, the person telling the pun is asserting higher status by showing off their mastery of the language through word play. If the pun is written down, then the reader imagines the presence of the other person in order to complete the status circuit¹⁰ .

Wait, what? How do we know either the motivations of the person writing the pun down, or the thoughts of the person reading? We don't, and even if you asked the reader, any scientist would tell you that asking someone what they think they were thinking when they thought about something from a few moments earlier is fraught with so much bias as to make any answer very suspect.

The reason we assumed the motivations of the person who wrote the pun, or the thoughts of the person reading the pun, are because those assumptions are the ones that make the status theory connect to humour. And we can get away with it because it's part of the unknown territory of status. We don't know to what degree people imagine other people when reading something, and whether or not we'd have a status relationship with that imaginary person, so no one can tell us we're wrong.

Here's another example for good measure. What about when a baby laughs? My friend has a six month year old baby that laughs at seemingly random and inexplicable things, like when people fake sneezing, when she's lifted up high, or when she successfully grabs a slice of apple. How is it that a baby that has no concept of social norms, can't even speak – heck, she can't even walk – be so sensitive to status as to be laughing about it?

A possible explanation from the status theoreticians is that maybe the baby doesn't have language or social skills yet, but we do know that babies seem to possess predispositions for learning certain skills. For example, one largely accepted theory about language is that it's too complicated to learn absolutely from scratch, so human brains are born with some kind of structure that is the foundation for a capacity to absorb languages. Exactly which language a child learns is determined by what they are taught. But the ability for language is something they are born with.

Perhaps in a similar way, there is a status structure in the brain. While particular social norms will be determined by the culture the child grows up in, the potential for understanding status is something innate. A child may laugh at seemingly random things, but that's only because it's still piecing together what status is.

Here the assumption is about how status develops in our infant brains. We have no idea no idea if or how a brain has a biological wiring for status perceptions, let alone to what degree it is present in an infant. And precisely because it's not known one way or the other, it's part of the big mystery of status that can be exploited build assumptions.

Assumptions like these aren't just the domain of obscure comedy situations, either. While a lot of comedy can be obviously seen in a context of status, like a comedian making fun of the ruling political party, a lot of jokes and interactions aren't so straightforward. What if a comedian takes a mundane topic such as popping bubble wrap and makes a joke out of that? Whose status is going up or down by commenting on a mundane activity that anyone might do?

The status advocate might suggest that what is happening is that everyone in the audience wasn't sure their joy in popping the little plastic bubbles was something everyone else did. Since the comedian has brought it out into the open, it reveals to everyone that it's not a private matter, but a common one. Everyone's status goes up because they go from individuals with private and potentially embarrassing habits to being regular people that everyone can relate to.

It's a plausible explanation, but not one could be derived from any evidence, even if we were to actually conduct the experiment. Just like the problems we had when asking the person who read the pun, we don't have a way of seeing status shifting in a person's mind, we only have the unreliable and biased method of asking. Where did the assumption of embarrassment come from? Why do we assume that people would initially consider their bubble-wrap popping habit to not be wide spread? It doesn't really matter if we assumed embarrassment, the uniqueness people feel, or anything else. They're all just assumptions we're putting in to make status work. If we were to do a survey and ask the audience what they thought, and if we found people who didn't feel embarrassed or different from the community, we could just as easily make up a status connection for them too. That guy who is proud of his bubble popping habit? He laughed precisely because he felt his status go up because he was proud of his own self confidence in not being ashamed of something other people weren't admitting to. See how easy the status assumption method is?

If ever a status theory comes across a situation which is outside of the status paradigm, the solution is simple. Just assume something about how status works that can't be known or disputed, and build an explanation out of that. Assume that the person reading a pun imagines someone telling it. Assume a hypothetical module in the brain that enables babies to perceive status. Assume whatever disposition the audience needs in order to feel their status go somewhere. Okham would not be impressed¹¹ .

Status seems like the most complete explanation of comedy only because status has enough unknown territory of its own that can be mined for all the assumptions you need. By starting with the axiom that all comedy is status and then justifying after the fact how the status fits into the joke, the whole purpose of finding the root cause of humour has been turned on its head.

What have you explained by saying humour is status, if the definition of status can be anything it needs to be in order to explain humour?

footnotes

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