THE META-STATE STRUCTURE OF HUMOR

I began this series on humor by identifying the meta-state structure of humor (Meta Reflection #40). We can now analyze the experience of humor to detect what it is that jars our consciousness into the delightful, joyful, and fun state as we experience the meta-state of seeing the lighter side of life. If you want to create humor for yourself and others, what is the strategy process for creating states of humor?

1) First get into a “good” state.

This mostly means an un-threatened state. It means that you basically feel “safe”—you feel secure, not in danger, and that your human needs are basically satisfied. This “good” state also means that you are not in an opposing state like a state of anger, resentment, hatefulness, self-contempt, and so on. We all know that when we are in such states, nothing is funny! State of stress, irritability, and feeling unwell diminish and can even prevent humor.

2) Then enter into a context with specific expectations.

This can happen in one second as when someone says something to you that “sets a frame” (sets the stage) putting you into a specific context of understanding. At that moment, your mind and emotion is oriented in a certain way. You live in a certain “world.” Sometimes it takes much longer; stories take longer to set up the expectations. Yet neither you nor the other person have to consciously know the expectations that are set—it is only required that meta-level expectations are set. Why is it so difficult to make anything foolproof? Because fools are so ingenious. How many people here have telekinetic powers? Please raise my hand. So just why did Kamikaze pilots wear helmets?

3) Then let your frame of expectations be jarred.

With the set-up of a particular mind-set of understanding, orientation, and expectation, you next have to experience something that jars you from that state. It could be a word, gesture, phrase, etc. which suddenly and delightfully shifts the frame putting you into a different understanding, orientation, and expectation. This jarring has to happen quickly —surprisingly. Here the timing of the telling plays a crucial role in the jarring of consciousness.

4) To this jarring, then welcome a meta-state moment of realization.

With the sudden, surprising, and delightful shifting and jarring of consciousness, you then experience a moment of awareness about the trick or the tease. For a moment, you rise up in your mind and “go meta” to a higher perspective. As you then gain perspective on the jarred understanding or consciousness, you enjoy the shift and surprise of the playfulness of the joke or pun. You experience humor.

And you thought humor was simple! When it comes to humor, it is actually amazing that it is so complex. Yet if you think about it, that really shouldn’t be surprising. After all, how many times have you not “got the joke?” You didn’t “get it” because to get it required certain background and contextual information. You didn’t know enough to have the needed orientation or expectations and so there wasn’t enough inside you to be jarred.

This last week the new nominee for Vice President of the United States, Sarah Palin, currently the Governor of Alaska who has a reputation for being tough and who has been called a bulldog, asked, “What’s the difference between a hockey mom and a pit bull dog?” “Lipstick!” she said pointing to her lips.

And what about those times when someone took the time to “explain” a joke to you? Didn’t the very act of explaining deflate the joke? Typically it ruins it. Why is that? Because then there’s no surprise, shock, or jarring of consciousness. This is the difference between telling a joke or a story with the appropriate timing and emphasis versus those times when you miss the critical emphasis, set-up, and timing. In humor, we induce one state with our set-up and then shift and jar that state quickly to surprise the person’s expectations. So communicating humor requires the induction of two-states, one after the other, sometimes in very quick succession.

Some years ago I read about the sudden passing of a minister’s wife. Distraught he wrote to his supervising bishop. “Bishop, I regret to inform you of my wife’s death. Can you possibly send me a substitute for the weekend?”

What’s funny here? The humor is in the ambiguity of the word “substitute.” Substitute for what? What is the context? Is it Sunday services or services of a different nature? And are you safe to hear the story? Or did you just lose a loved one?

This analysis of humor explains why even infants will laugh and giggle when mother or father tickles them, but often will not laugh and giggle, but scream and cry when a stranger does so. The infant doesn’t feel safe (#1). [Research indicates infants are fifteen times more likely to laugh when tickled by a parent than someone else.]

This analysis also explains why parents cannot tease young children too much. If you’re a parent, you know that it is often difficult, if not impossible, at times to tease your children about some things. Why? They also are not safe enough with their world to be teased. Professor John Morreall writes in Taking Laughter Seriously, “Once a child has a picture of the world and has operated in it for awhile, he can begin to enjoy humor.” Higher levels of humor require a solid sense of reality, a solid sense of your conceptual world.

This explains why when sanity goes, so does humor. It explains why mental wards are not happy places. Maymond Moody, Jr. M.D. writes in Laugh after Laugh.

“I’ve watched acutely schizophrenic patients in the day room of psychiatric wards, dolefully assembled before TV sets, gazing, unsmiling, and unlaughing, at the nightly dose of situation comedies. But their expression were serious, strained—even more so than when watching the grim and joyless soap operas in the afternoon.” (page 64)

If what happens in the experience of humor is a sudden change of meaning and awareness, then humor inherently involves jarring consciousness (#3). Suddenly, things change and we see things in a new or different way.

“We experience humor when we have a change in our psychological state, whether that state is primarily affective (emotional) or cognitive (intellectual).” (Morreall)

Humor requires creatively mis-matching incongruities. This explains why humor corresponds so closely to states of creativity and innovation. If “humor is that which is out of place in time and space without danger” (Aristotle) then as you begin from a safe state, you have a place from which to play with your concepts of the world, turn them upside down, exaggerate things to the point of being ridiculous, and mismatch things. So what structures “humor” also leads to creative innovations.

George really surprised me today when he told me that he had a big weekend. I knew his end was big, but I just didn’t realize that it was also weak.

Finally, humor also requires the meta-state of stepping back from oneself to gain perspective (#4). That’s why healthy humor is so often identified as a “philosophical attitude” or “philosophical outlook.” Stepping back (going meta) enables us to gain perspective. Often in the midst of conflict or challenge we say, “One of these days I’ll look back and be able to laugh at this.” Laughter here indicates that we have moved away from being inside the problem to being able to look at it from another perspective. We have transcended the problem.

It is in this way that humor protects and saves our sanity. This is what Viktor Frankl discovered in the Hitler concentration camp.

“Unexpectedly most of us were overcome by a grim sense of humor. We knew we had nothing to lose except our ridiculously naked lives. . . Humor was another of the soul’s weapons in the fight for self-preservation. . . . Humor more than anything else in the human makeup can afford an aloofness and an ability to rise above any situation if only for a few seconds.” (Man’s Search for Meaning)

Transcendence describes another aspect of humor. The state and mind-set of a humorous perspective enables us to transcend our situation. The philosophical attitude enables us to look at life philosophically so that we are not swallowed up by it. It gives us some psychological distance and objectivity when facing troubling problems.