PicoBlog

Philosophers have been puzzled by the fact that sorrow fades. If one form of grief responds to the death of someone you love—not its impact on your relationship—then shouldn’t you grieve forever? The significance of their death for them does not diminish. And it’s not about you.

The puzzle is not merely intellectual: it can be emotionally fraught.   

Our dread of a future in which we must forego the sight of faces and the sound of voices which we love and from which today we derive our dearest joy, this dread, far from being dissipated, is intensified, if to the pain of such a privation we feel that there will be added what seems to us now in anticipation more painful still: not to feel it as a pain at all—to remain indifferent… (Marcel Proust, In Search of Lost Time)

I wrote about this puzzle in Life is Hard, arguing that it turns on the nature of grief as an open-ended process, undetermined by reason, and that practices of mourning guide us where reason can’t.

Grief is not my topic here. Instead it’s the suggestion, made by philosophers attentive to our sense of loss, that our sense of humour is different. Thus Beri Marušić writes, in a wonderful new book on the temporality of emotions:

There is no double vision about amusement: The apprehension that is internal to amusement, such as the appreciation of a joke, is not at odds with our sense of how long it is reasonable to be amused or to laugh. There is no Proustian moment about a joke—no horror in anticipation that one will reasonably cease to be amused by it, even though the joke will continue to be funny.

The observation that a joke remains funny but elicits fewer laughs on repetition has been seen as a problem for the default theory of humour in philosophy: that something is funny when it’s apt for us to be amused by it. The funny is a function of our responses, a “secondary quality”—as being red is (often said to be) a function of how things look. But when a joke is repeated, the objection runs, our amusement fails to track what is really funny.

One response is to deny the premise, as Elijah Milligram does: “When the joke is told again and again, we cease laughing [and] because the pattern of reaction gives its shape to the secondary quality, we say the joke isn't funny anymore.”

But this seems wrong. When the original joke was really funny, it still is, even if you you’ve stopped laughing at it. Why else would you share the joke with others?

You repeat a “stale” joke to friends who haven't heard it because, though it no longer amuses you, it still accords with your sense of humor. … [You] wouldn't serve your friends stale cake just because it used to taste delicious.

Thus Justin D’Arms and Daniel Jacobson, in an essay that presents the orthodox reply to the objection. A funny joke may elicit less amusement the tenth time you hear it, they concede, but amusement is still fitting:

where one's dispositions to amusement stop reflecting one's sense of humor due to overexposure to the object, we can say that repetition is an obscuring factor with respect to a joke's funniness: it affects one's response without revealing one's underlying sensibility.

It would be hard to overstate the dissonance with which I scanned these somber words: “repetition is an obscuring factor” and one’s response to it does not reveal “one’s underlying sensibility”? It’s like a report from an alien form of life, utterly divorced from mine, a philosophy of colour devised by a scientist trapped in a black-and-white room.

For D’Arms and Jacobson,

the tendency of amusement (and other emotions) to fade with repetition … is not itself an expression of the sense of humor (or other sensibilities) but a feature of our dispositions that does not reveal anything about our values.

But for me, and for the comedians I most love, repetition is thoroughly internal to the sense of humour. The initial “observation,” that jokes are less amusing when repeated, is the obverse of an insight. Here is Stewart Lee, the 41st best stand-up ever, getting five good minutes out of repeating this joke:

Comedian: What do you do for a living?

Audience member: I’m in oil.

Comedian: Are you are sardine?

The first joke is that the joke is not very good, although according to Lee’s mother, it’s better than anything he’s ever done. The second joke is how much there is to say about why the joke is not good. The third joke is that saying it at length makes the joke much funnier. (In a later, sharper performance, the critique is silently voiced by Lee, in a dialogue with his mother of which we hear only her part: “No, you’re right, it’s not his job, Stew…”).

Nor is this a one-off occurrence. Repetition is as central to Lee’s comedic ethos as is reflection on his own comedy. The two come together in this sublime excerpt from what is probably my favourite half-hour stand-up set:

Not that the strategy always works. Sometimes the repetition is excruciating, as in Lee’s recent show, Snowflake, where a joke about Ricky Gervais involves six long minutes of inarticulacy—beginning here and ending here—that I can barely watch. (Viewers cannot say they were not warned.)

Jokes sometimes get less funny with repetition, but not always: their character shifts in ways that make demands on one’s sense of humour. Repetition is not an “obscuring factor”; instead, it’s part of the joke.

But there’s a deeper point to make. A critic might complain that my examples don’t involve a single joke, but a multiplicity of jokes at different levels. These are not cases in which the same joke palls and then gets funnier, but in which a different joke is made with similar words. Which means it’s not clear how they bear on the objection that got us started.

To which I say: exactly, yes! The identity of a joke includes its context. The first sardine joke is not the same as the nth, and the initial “Shitbottle” differs radically from the last.

If the objection is that a given joke stays funny, while our response to it changes, the reply is not that our response becomes less fitting but that it’s no longer the same joke. Amusement does have its Proustian moment, its melancholy, if not dread—that the joke remains funny, but is gone forever, inaccessible to experience. As the “weeping philosopher” Heraclitus might have said:

It is impossible to hear the same joke twice.

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