March 1952, New York, NY
Bateson: “Of the three types of convulsion, laughter is the one for which there is the clearest ideational content. It is relatively easy to discuss what is a joke, what are the characteristics that make a joke, what is the point of a joke. The sort of analysis that I want to propose assumes that the messages in the first phase of telling the joke are such that while the informational content is, so to speak, on the surface, the other content types in various forms are implicit in the background. When the point of a joke is reached, suddenly this background material is brought into attention and a paradox, or something like it is touched off. A circuit of contradictory notions is completed.”
Pitts: “Is not the definition of a good riddle that its answer is a good joke?”
Teuber: “Certainly, or a poem. All these forms of expression have this in common: they point simultaneously at the value and at the limiations of all schemata. They force us to realize that the communication process is what it is - it cannot do without the schemata. They make communication, for a moment, about communication.”
At the Ninth Macy Conference, cultural anthropologist and cybernetician Gregory Bateson presented some ideas on the role of laughter in communication. To Bateson, laughter signified the recognition and reconciliation of paradox, “the agreement that X is both equal to Y and not equal to Y.”
Puns are a simple example that fits his definition, they take advantage of some ambiguity in language to get a brief rise out of the reader, but the same can be analogized for most any kind of joke (with varying degrees of success). The point of this presentation was not to find a formula for what makes something funny; rather, Bateson was trying to point out the more fundamental role that paradox plays in language and communication.
For any formal system, including systems of communication, there are statements that cannot be represented explicitly by the elements of the system themselves. These are “holes,” so to speak, in a space of symbols: regions that cannot be pointed to by any symbol itself, only circumscribed by some sequence of them. As an anthropologist, Bateson recognized that these gaps in communication are crucial for social function, signifying kinship among people with the same universes of symbols. There are some jokes that only work in English, some that only work in Russian, but slap-stick humor can be found in any corner of the world.
Maybe if a crow and I had some shared sense of the world, we’d be able to build some kind of language by paradox, but unfortunately we share far, far less in common with the communication systems of our fellow animals than we do each other.