Talking with Beethoven (and Dr. Ira Progoff)

    Today's improvisation is a memory. For several years in my 20s, I took workshops in depth psychologist Ira Progoff’s “Intensive Journal Method,” and kept a journal accordingly. What I got from this practice and my brief interactions with Dr. Progoff himself was a more flexible perspective on time in life, and an understanding that “selves” or "identities" are stories that we tell ourselves. One of the basic tasks of this journal method is to periodically draw up a list of major life events in order to divide a life into periods.  As you return to repeat the exercise over time, your markers of major periods will change with your changing perspective on your past. These lists of “Stepping Stones” as Dr. Progoff called them, become revealing in comparison, providing yet another perspective viewpoint especially after many years have passed.

My interests in drama and history led me to focus on the Dialogic aspects of the Intensive Journal.  Writing out someone else’s “stepping stones” is the first step in having a dialogue with someone who is dead or no longer present. With the exception of considering an “entire lifetime”, this exercise was almost identical to one I had done in actor training as a Drama student, and I was keen on learning what I could from it. When Dr. Progoff came to the west coast to lead a workshop on writing dialogues with historical figures I somehow enrolled and showed up despite my general flakiness at the time. The historical figure I chose, Beethoven, had overcome a serious handicap to produce his greatest works, and this seemed an inspiring choice. In preparation for the workshop I read the standard biographies and a LOT of other books about Beethoven. At the workshop itself, I constructed a narrative of my subject’s life before trying to enter into imaginary dialogue with him. Everyone at the workshop was in the same stage of the process with their chosen figure. There is something uniquely serene about the atmosphere created when forty or fifty people are writing and meditating quietly in the same room with similar purpose.

At lunch there was a "silent table" where you could eat if you didn’t want to talk to anyone before returning to the work. I sat there one day across from a bright-eyed elderly woman. I was in my 20s so I don’t really know how old she was, probably my age now! She acknowledged me and though we both kept silent, I felt that I had not been alone at lunch. The next day I saw her at a “talking table” and sat near her. She had heard me read aloud from my dialogues with Ludwig, but I didn’t know who her subject was.

     “Saint Dominic.” She answered. “I’m a Dominican nun. I need to talk to him about some things.”  I laughed and knew I had found a friend at the workshop.

Later that day, one of Dr. Progoff’s assistants asked me if I was interested in becoming a workshop leader. I said, “I think so, I’m not sure.” She told me that Dr. Progoff would meet with me for a talk and stroll in the garden at a certain time and that I could ask him whatever questions I had. The workshop was held in a Catholic Retreat center on the peninsula, in Redwood City. Redwood City has an archway over its “downtown entrance” that reads “CLIMATE BEST BY GOVERNMENT TEST.” It was true. Dr. Progoff and I walked through an idyllic garden in glorious weather. He said I had a “flair” for the work. I said “I have a care for it,” trying to be clever and modest and just feeling awkward and phony as soon as I said it.  Luckily, he was wise and dismissed it as nervousness. We talked about my Beethoven project, and I asked him about being a workshop leader in an official status and admitted that I was not sure I was mature enough  yet to do it. He said, “Well, that tells me that you probably are.” I didn’t go on to lead any Intensive Journal workshops, but I felt I had achieved something by being asked.

My dialogues with Beethoven felt real in many ways- --first, in that he was reticent and resisted talking with me at all. When I asked him questions about his relationship with his sister-in-law and her son Karl, his nephew, he lost his temper with me. Beethoven accused me of judging him when I had no real knowledge of the situation. I apologized and asked him about how he overcame his depression when he knew he would soon be deaf.  The answers that I wrote for him were things I had learned by reading his “Helinginstadt Testament,” essentially a suicide note in which he talks himself out of committing suicide.  I thought that I chose Beethoven because I admired the music that he created despite his deafness, but what I learned from the workshop was that his life had more to teach me than I could absorb in a few days of intensive writing and meditating. I didn't consciously realize it at the time, but I was looking for a way to be productive despite my own depression, which when I felt normal or hypomanic was something I tended to compartmentalize and deny.  Beethoven was forced to confront the loss of his reason for living when he went deaf.  He would miss performing and it would be frustrating trying to teach others to correctly play the music he would write. Then it occurred to him that not hearing the noise of the outside world (or bad music) might be liberating, and more importantly that “the music he would write” would not exist at all if he did not live to complete it.  My dialogue with Beethoven produced a wealth of insights that continue to this day, not the least of which is the importance of finding the work that wouldn’t be done if you didn’t do it.

Everyday Life- Between the Landlords and the Gophers

Between the Landlords and the Gophers

      Recently, the conflict between nature and civilization placed me in the middle of a dispute between my landlords and an unknown quantity of gophers. The gophers were digging tunnels and throwing large mounds of dirt and rock up onto the grass. This is apparently what gophers do. I felt intimidated by the ability of such small animals to move so much earth so quickly. The condition of the yard was also deteriorating because the landlords have their own substandard gardener whose method of dealing with the gophers was to throw more sand and rock on top of their holes. The gophers simply made fresh holes elsewhere in the yard.  The landlords wanted the gophers gone and left me a pitiful but torturous trap to use. I shuddered and hoped I never had to spring such a medieval device on a living creature.     

     At the time we moved in   to the house the gophers were only digging in the back yard. When the landlords cut down two of the three trees in the back, it seemed to scare the gophers away for a couple of weeks. When they returned, it was in the front yard. The gophers were making bigger mounds more quickly, as if exacting revenge for the day the earth above them shook with the violence of chainsaw and woodchipper. In their fresh new front yard digs the gophers chewed up the lawn and the flower beds from underneath. They were making use of the tunnels along which ran the sprinkler lines, so they didn’t need to dig more. They were just pissed. By this time so was I. The predator pee was too expensive and “iffy.” So, I tried drowning them out, hoping they would hate it and move to another yard or back into the field behind the house. I would find the freshest mound and dig until I found a hole. I put the hose right into the hole and turned on the water. The first time I tried it water shot out of another hole about 3 yards away. The next morning I went out and found newly built mounds of freshly dug earth. The gophers just moved over and made new little dirt volcanoes erupting out of the calm grass. My friend Jake, a former student from Georgia who was visiting looked at the yard and said, “I’ve never seen anything like this.” It looked like a miniature of a trampled on mine-field.

     Finally, after saturating the ground and running up the water bill, I gave up and went to the hardware store to see if I could find a humane solution. Poison and kill-traps were all they had. I bought what seemed like a strong, quick-killing trap and as the cashier rang it up she said, “A lot of people have been buying these lately.” I felt a little better about what I had to do thinking that there must be a local gopher epidemic. I still hesitated for days, hoping that if I stopped chasing them they would stop chewing up the yard. Finally, I had to dig between two recently made holes and plant the trap in the tunnel. This trap was concealed under a molded black plastic hood, which kept the light and dirt off the catch and made it appear to be part of the dark tunnel.  The instructions said that if you hadn’t caught one in three days you should move the trap. Instead I waited three days to dig it up. There was a gopher, smaller than I remembered them being, dead in the trap. I felt terrible. I wished that I hadn't done this, and hoped this was the only gopher.

Unfortunately, the largest mound so far was built-up on a new hole the next morning. I hesitated for a couple of days, and then planted the trap again. This time I couldn’t make myself dig it up for almost a week. When my wife threatened to do it, I went out immediately and "took care of it." This gopher was bigger than the first one.  Luckily, there have been no new holes since then, and the yard and flower beds are looking green again, if still pock-marked and uneven.  I don’t know what to do with my feelings of guilt about killing an innocent but destructive creature. I am confused because I feel a kinship with all life and yet I know that territorial matters in nature are often matters of life and death.  I am becoming a more conscientious omnivore. I did not kill these gophers for food directly, but the landlords threatened us with damages if we didn’t “USE THE TRAP! NOTHING ELSE WILL WORK. WE’VE TRIED!” We need money for food, unlike gophers.

I really am sorry, gophers. In the human world people “own” land, as strange as that must seem to you who work it.  This isn't my land either.

Cognitive Slapstick

Cognitive Slapstick: What Audience Laughter Reveals about “Theory of Mind”

                                                C. B. Davis, Ph.D. 2008

            Comedy, whether “stand-up” monologue or theatrical presentation is arguably the most overtly interactive of performance genres. As such it provides a promising but extremely problematic test case for the evaluation of audience reception theories. Audiences for comedic plays and monologues expect to laugh together involuntarily, and this spontaneous laughter is generally taken to be the sign of a performance’s intended s success. Theories of humor and empirical research on laughter have until recently focused on the cognitive capabilities involved in appreciating humor (Gruner, Dzemiok, Krichtafovitch, McGhee, Chapman and Foot et. al.) but recent inter-disciplinary studies indicate clearly that most human laughter (as much as 80 per cent) occurs not in response to humor, but in everyday social situations (Provine, Gervais, Rutter). How do the cognitive triggers for laughter intersect with the affective social reasons, where do they overlap and how do they differ? While ephemeral and hard to pinpoint, social factors are almost always involved in both the initial stimulation and subsequent contagion of audience laughter. Is there an observable way to separate, for example, the cognitive task of recognizing incongruity and resolving it, from the accompanying social stimuli for laughter? If both “getting it” cognitively and “feeling it” socially are necessary conditions for eliciting spontaneous contagious laughter, how does one explain those rare occasions when we laugh alone or the occasional lone laughs that burst forth from sincerely amused (and often quickly stifled) individuals?

            My essay will explore how two ostensibly opposed and rival versions of “Theory of Mind” can be applied to the audience dynamics for comedy. I will first outline the ways in which Theory-Theory or Folk Psychology (Carruthers, Nichols and Stich, Gopnik and Wellman,) and Simulation Theory or sensorimotor mirroring (Gallese and Goldman, Gordon 1995, Harris ) would differ in their explanations of the stimuli or triggers for laughter. My purpose in this comparative investigation is to show that the trigger situation that explains the widest range of involuntary “laughters” involves both falsification of belief representations (TT) and empathetic projection or sensorimotor mirroring.(ST). This is in response to colleagues who have, I feel, latched onto the simulationist “motor equivalence” explanation of empathy and mindreading too unproblematically (McConachie, Rokotnitz  et al.) Applied to appreciation of comedy, what insights does Simulation provide over Theory Theory explanations? Intuitively, the difference between physical or non-verbal comedy and jokes seems relevant. From the viewpoint of embodied cognition, verbal comedy might be explained as metaphorical extensions of  what trigger laughter in physical comedy, but even with slapstick that doesn’t automatically rule out the perhaps crucial involvement of generalized behavior recognition through “theory –theory” or “belief representations” related to social cognition and understanding intentions.

            In his essay, “Falsifiable Theories for Theatre and Performance Studies” Bruce McConachie (2007) equates “social cognition” with Simulation and implicitly harmonizes the nature of Jeannerod and Jacob’s visuomotor representations with Gallese’s work on mirror neurons. Such links gloss over substantial controversy about simulation as a route to empathy and about the relationship between mirror neurons, the human motor system, and the understanding of intentions. Jeannerod himself has pointed out repeatedly that because a given action can be originated by very different intention, a simple motor equivalence is of no help in disambiguating them. Gallese and Goldman try to solve this problem by theorizing that the statistical frequency of action sequences (the detection of what most frequently follows what) as they are habitually performed or observed in the social environment, can constrain preferential paths of inferences/predictions.  But while the prediction of a subsequent action might lead to understanding of motor intentions or proximal goals, it does not seem enough in itself to enable understanding of an other’s “ prior, social or communicative intentions” (Jacob & Jeannerod). Naomi Rokotnitz also tilts her characterization of audience reception away from Theory Theory “This simulation involves neither overt knowledge nor conscious inference but is achieved by physically participating in the observed actions. The role of abstract theorizing in ascribing mental states to the actions of others is largely overtaken by attention to the embodied mechanisms of cognition” ( McConachie & Hart,  2006,135). If simulation is the basic or predominate way we understand the intentions and beliefs of others, it applies to humor and the trigger for laughter as well as its social contagiousness.

            The prediction of behavior and the understanding of intentions are relevant to the trigger for laughter because these tools seem precursors to recognizing the social incongruity factor in laugh elicitation (Gervais and Wilson, et al). But as Noel Carroll points out, “…for something to be incongruous requires that we be able to point in the direction of something else to which it stands in some sort of  relation of structured contrast or conflict (above and beyond mere difference or lack of connection)” (Carroll 328). This version of incongruity seems sympathetic to Theory-Theory in needing an information base, but in order to say this Carroll has to deny true incongruity to nonsense and non sequiturs, both of which may elicit laughter, particularly in children. If non-sequitur is not true incongruity, it may developmentally be a sort of pre- or “baby incongruity.” Carroll would no doubt object, but even tickling and peek-a-boo have an element of incongruity, and specifically they are primal examples of social incongruity: you can neither tickle yourself nor play peek-a-boo alone. In tickling, the incongruity results from the conflict between the involuntarily reaction to an attack in a vulnerable area of the body and the simultaneous realization that the attack is “in play”, or not really threatening (Koestler, Schultz). If the tickler is unfamiliar to the infant/“ticklee”, the baby’s fight or flight response kicks in and with it a cry of alarm rather than laughter’s signal that “everything’s ok!” The incongruity inherent to peek-a-boo has to do with the developmental threshold of the awareness of object permanence. If  mother did not reappear, crying rather than laughter would follow. A pratfall or similar mistake strikes the laugher as an incongruity because it is either unexpected or because it is anticipated as a possible error. The reason that broad physical comedy is so basic and universal may be that the displacement activity of laughter has been hard-wired in us since the early and doubtless awkward stages of bipedalism, an instance of phylogeny paralleling ontogeny in the way infants learn to walk by trial and error! Throwing a child into the air and catching them elicits laughter if the adult is trusted, as does mock predation  (“I’m gonna’ get you”) and other forms of rough-house play, which also elicits the proto-laugh display in apes. So the screams of laughter associated with the incongruity of it somehow being safe to be attacked, chased or falling are a developmental stage in the appreciation of not only incongruity but pretend play and the capacity for pretense in general.

             But does believing that one is safe require the concept of belief? For the child in his parents arms, the answer would seem to be no. None of these primary laughter-eliciting behaviors (tickling, peek-a-boo or rough-house play) or subsequent infant laughter at slapstick-like physical mishaps would seem to involve being able to attribute belief, even to oneself. Yet the attribution of errors or false beliefs to other agents has been postulated to be one of three indispensible requirements for the elicitation of laughter. According to by evolutionary psychologist William Jung, this falsification of beliefs must also be accompanied by empathy or understanding (not sympathy) for the agents involved, and at least a neutral attitude toward those who undergo positive vs. negative changes of status or well being. But the most inclusive of these criteria is falsification of a belief, which aptly covers a wide range of phenomenon singled out in other less parsimonious theories of humor. For example, Incongruity or Surprise theories describe a situation in which the subject forms an expectation and that is then falsified by the second (the incongruous) aspect that was absent in the expectation (Jung 225). The Superiority theory (Gruner, Buckley) .is accounted for with the falsification of a belief because the winner and loser of the conflict can be an agent as in a put-down, or a point of view as in a punch-line style re-interpretation of events. Jung even suggests that most of casual conversational laughter occurs in situations that somehow involve the act of falsifying beliefs, expectations or intentions, e.g. the surprise meetings, insults “in jest” or children making unexpected and socially inappropriate things pronouncements (Jung 226, 228). But first I will consider how ST and TT handle the other two of Jung’s criteria for triggering laughter, which are less general but even more slippery: Empathy and what he unhelpfully calls “Sympathetic Instant Utility.” The two overlap considerably, the latter being a vague sense that the laugher is not negatively disturbed by the lowering of status of an agent or point of view.

            The literature of cognitive studies is filled with conflicting, contrasting and conflated definitions of not only empathy and “off-line” simulation but behavior prediction, “mind-reading”, emotional contagion, role playing, and the act (or concept) of pretense. There is no room here to review arguments about what exactly the term Empathy is meant to cover, but the two major explanations of mind-reading and belief attribution are simulation-based (ST) and information based (TT). In Goldman’s simulationist account of empathy, for example, the subject takes the perspective of another person, then a pretend-state generator feeds into our emotional response system. The emotional response system operates on that pretend state, just as it would operate if the state were real. Goldman distances empathy from having to have a knowledge base by conceiving it as “a special case of the simulation process in which the output states are affective or emotional states rather than purely cognitive or conative states like believing or desiring” (1993, p. 141). In the Theory Theory explanation of empathy, the emotional response system receives input from the subject's beliefs and memories. Empathic responses might arise when the subject is reminded of events in her past similar to those of the object of empathy. Of course, this process of `remembering' analogous past experiences need not be fully conscious or voluntary(Carruthers 21).; and there is no evidence that such associations are a slower process than simulation. Seana Coulson has proposed an incongruity theory of humor that relies on Turner and Fauconnier, in which two incongruous mental spaces are activated at once, and resolved in the blend. If the complexity of conceptual blending can operate at great speed unconsciously, why would Simulation be faster, especially if there is any efferent motor “copying” involved.

            Another point that seems glossed over in simulationist accounts of empathy is that of the difference between the understanding of other’s intentions and the prediction of their behavior. It has been demonstrated that before young children are able to reason about beliefs, they can represent goals and intentions (Frith and Frith, 2003; Saxe et al., 2004) and accomplish joint attention with an understanding of gaze direction, attention and even pretense. (Tomasello).  Nevertheless, in the early 1980s, the psychologists H. Wimmer and J. Perner showed that a full-fledged TOM and with the ability to pass the False belief Task doesn’t develop before the age of 3 to 4.

             Zoologist Basil Hugh Hall’s “displacement” theory of laughter implies that Empathy is at least sometimes the cause that triggers the momentary ambivalence that is often interpreted as the result of recognizing incongruity. In Hall’s explanation, this momentary state of ambivalence is analogous to the sort of situations that trigger the “fight or flight” response. Hall’s theory postulates that laughter evolved from a basic “fight or flight” vocal displacement activity. Laughter is then “the displacement of emotive neural activity, on the fear (negative) side of approach and avoidance motivations, when it is denied expression by opposition or redundancy.” The two possible emotive responses to an approach/avoidance conflict are some degree of fear or aggression. If as Hall suggests, that laughter is a displacement of fear he is line with “Relief” theories of humor (Freud et al), but would seem to ignore the aggressive aspects of insult humor and slapstick. But from here Hall makes an intriguing leap to an entirely new perspective on the persistent “Superiority” theories of humor. When we laugh at someone else’s misfortune or mistake, etc. Hall suggests that we are not laughing from relief but because the simulated emotions of fear pain or startle are at odds with our “safe” position in the situation, hence the redundancy of the emotion. But it seems clear that when realization of that redundancy hits, it is, after all, a form of relief. The most profound aspect of Hall’s revision of the Superiority Theory is the idea that those who laugh at the inferiority or degradation of others are actually more afraid than aggressive. Because empathy is automatic, those who laugh at the unfortunate cannot help putting themselves in the situation of those they are belittling, and thus what Hall calls the “emotive weight” behind their laughter is fear rather than aggression.

            Considering the evidence from developmental studies together with ideas from evolutionary psychology I have now briefly sketched in some possible variables in the trigger for laughter: the recognition and tolerance of ambiguity, the ability for pretense, empathy or understanding for the agents or their stand-in POVs, and the ability to attribute beliefs (especially false beliefs). The laugher must also have certain equanimity about the incongruity and its resolution, whether the conflict is one of sense, behavior, or beliefs and desires. I have not specified much of the social context relevant to laughter, other than the fact that it is a reflex that has become largely ritualized across cultures in similar ways, creating allowances for certain kinds of social faux paux to become humorous (Gervais and Wilson). The ritualization of laughter also eventually evolved into the ability to produce controlled, polite or tactical nervous laughter called “non-Duchenne” which does not involve the eye muscles as does the involuntary Duchenne variety. However, even though humans have the ability to chuckle politely on purpose, most of social laughter is genuinely involuntary, and thus a reliable sign that someone is not being deceptive. Sociable occasions attended by groups of friends are the most fertile ground for laughter to both start and become contagious, and most comedy audiences fit this description (Rutter). The division of Duchenne and non-Duchenne laughter leaves the different kinds of spontaneous laughter unclassified, kinds defined by strength, duration and other qualities, and  by the degree to which laughers lose control of their muscles. None of these variations however affect the variables of the trigger. Now, what can these variables and parameters tell us about the relative validity of Simulation and Theory Theory? Instead of analyzing a variety of jokes to find the most parsimonious theoretical explanation for the elements of the laugh trigger, let us consider the negative example, the laid egg, the dud, the act of bombing.

 The Trigger for Laughter: The Negative Example

“An individual has only his or her personal taste, and his or her individual sense of humor. With a whole audience to play to, invariably there’ll be someone who’ll be chuckling away at what B is doing, and providing that other people can see the joke, that original laugh will be quite contagious” (Wright 186).

            In the above quote from his practical book on physical comedy, John Wright (of Trestle Theatre Company and Told by an Idiot,) states the obvious in a productive way. A crowd of people increases the possible laughs that can be instigated especially by a flexible, interactive performer, who (like all good clowns) is sensitive to what the audience thinks, is funny. While the odds are also better in an amiable crowd that laughter will be contagious, even a single laugher can get a ripple started, but only as Wright reminds us, “providing that other people can see the joke” (186). I am one of those people who not only laughs when alone but sometimes in public when no one else does. Sometimes mine and other people’s solo laughter has helped performers get a rapport going with reticent or sleepy audiences, but no matter how contagious a single laugh, it will not even prime for the next one unless others also see the joke. Directors and comic performers know that the difference between getting a laugh and not is sometimes a matter of punctuation through expression, gesture, a slight change in the inflection of the voice or the timing of the moment. A very funny line can easily be flubbed, or lost between laughs if the performer is not spontaneously adapting with the give and take of talk and laughter that is also a part of our everyday conversational idiom.

            Imagine that a joke or comic moment that has never failed to get a laugh falls flat for the first time. Depending on the skill of the comedian the failed joke may still be an opportunity for a laugh, but why did it fail this time? The comedian can blame the audience for being slow or not having a sense of humor, but if they are catching most of the jokes, then it is harder to lay the blame on the spectators. If the comedian executed the bit in precisely the same way that it has always worked and the audience laughed at everything else, the only conclusion is that there is something taking place on an interactive level, a mysterious nullification or subtraction that is somehow making the moment less than the sum of its parts.     Is the laughter or lack thereof predictable, in theory, provided we could pinpoint all the possible variable causal factors? In order to understand why a potential laugh is not “triggered” I will look at the usual reasons someone finds an intended joke unfunny or misses the attempt entirely. Now we can more specifically ask “what can be added and taken away from the performance end and the audience end that might make the difference in laughter being triggered or not”?

            From the performance end, for example, it might be gesture that helps just enough to make the joke or bit work in getting the laugh, or getting a much bigger laugh. So, what work was the gesture doing in terms of empathy, falsifying a belief (identifying an error), or on the issue of changed status or well being? What could the gesture be adding that pushes any of these trigger requirements over the threshold? Is it a sign being read? It could be, or it could just be supplying emphasis or attitude or a “play signal” that makes or breaks the laugh. Gestures can be funny in and of themselves of course, provided that the context is also enacted communicatively. In the right context even a verbal joke can consist of a mere gesture, as in Morgenbesser’s famous reply to Austin’s pronouncement that in no languages do double positives create negatives… ” to which he replied “Yeah, Yeah!” The context rather than the words themselves contains the gesture here, but the tone of voice probably carried it. (I have always wondered how big of a laugh he got---this would depend on if the audience felt “safe” to laugh at the falsified belief of Austin! Whatever the change in vocal or physical inflection or timing, the failure any joke or bit has to be a failure of one of the trigger requirements: the gesture that failed to communicate as incongruous, as evidence of a false belief, as the falsification of a belief, or it fails to punctuate or direct the audience attention to the resolution of the incongruity at the right time.

            On the audience end, the failure of one sure-fire joke is harder to explain than would be the failure of most of them. Anyone who has ever directed or performed in a comedy or done standup knows that audiences can differ greatly in their “willingness” to laugh and that audience size has something to do with it, as if there were a critical mass for laughter. The size and arrangement of the audience and playing space and the resultant qualities and levels of intimacy and distance have been studied in relation to comedy only recently (Rutter). Having directed thirty or so comedies and attended most of the performances I can attest that the biggest and most sustained laughs seem to happen in audiences of over a hundred people. My unscientific estimation is that the laughter doesn’t get much more frequent or intense with larger audiences, even when a 300 seat theatre is only half full. It may be significant that 150 are close to the “Dunbar number” or the estimated size of the average hunter-gatherer group. If there are too many loners and not enough groups of friends the variables predict that the audience makeup will be less conducive to laughter. This however wouldn’t be the case for our hypothesized audience since it has been laughing at most of the jokes with the exception of our example dud.

             I have said little about timing, but it is the most interactive domain of the performance-audience relationship. The relevant variable in evoking laughter is the distance between the “set up” and the “punch line” or in physical comedy between the set-up and the surprise or anticipated in error. Giles and Oxford (1970 ) called the “cognitive distance” between these events the ‘time-span’ of the humor. Short time-span humor occurs when the setting of the scene is made quite explicit at the time of the punch line as in slapstick or sarcasm. When time-spans become longer as in puns or satire, the scene setting has become less explicit and the laugher has to keep the original event in mind in order to make the punch-line or “blow off” meaningful and funny. Since children laugh and respond to physical comedy long before they can comprehend language or develop long term memory, it seems likely that a knowledge based approach best explains laughter triggers that are somewhat “hidden” in speech. The cognitive distance between the set up and denouement of a performed joke or bit of business cannot be too long, for reasons that become clear in my analysis of the double take below.

            One of the first technical lessons about comedy I learned was from an acting teacher who told us not to anticipate laughs, but listen to them; do not let them die out completely before coming back in with the next line; and always execute a movement of some sort just before breaking back in. This instruction is an axiom, an easily remembered mantra like “look both ways before crossing” in other words, a theory through which to hone an embodied practice. A skilled comedian or clown knows how to surf on the swell of audience laughter in such a way that the dismount smoothes the audience back into the action or conversation. This keeps the pacing and momentum of the crowd’s mood in-synch with the performance, suggesting both an intuitive sense that relies partly on Simulation and the habitual spontaneity of embodied practice, and partly on conscious axioms that are passed on through the cultural inheritance. Theatre, sports and jazz practice provide many examples of such axioms, from persistent superstitions to durable fundamentals like “keep your eye on the ball,” and “play when the horn player breathes.” So the timing necessary to the laughter trigger is something that can be learned and theorized for practical use, even before it has become the embodied skill it is based on. As a final catch all example that begins and ends with timing, I will quickly schematize the basic “double-take” of physical comedy using a combination of TT and ST.

            The double take is a durable bit of shtick that can be as challenging to master as a difficult technical passage in music or a repeatable golf swing. According to John Wright, Lecoq maintained that the first take should be equally distanced between the start of the action and the second take (Wright 160). Wright disputes this but recognizes that the axiom is based on a valid principle, “There’s a danger we’ll forget the first take completely, so that the second take will look like another incident”(16). How long a performer might stretch this time between takes depends on how long that the performer can keep the audience’s attention on the first take while they are still simulating his lack of response.

            In terms of  the false belief criteria, the second take falsifies the belief that there was nothing to react to on the first take. The ideal first take is just an acknowledgement with nothing on it, no attitude, no real awareness even. At the heart of the double-take is a truth about just how active or inactive a process perception can be. The double- take demonstrates an axiom of folk psychology, that people will look without seeing, or see without noticing things. Thus, the ideal second take is as exaggerated as the delay time warrants. Between takes, the audience must balance on the incongruity of believing that the clown has this false belief, that a villain has sat down next to him and that he hasn’t noticed. We are tossed in the air but we know we’ll be caught, so the falling, not the fall, makes us laugh.

            When inexperienced actors anticipate each other’s timing as well as the audience’s response they tend to over-punctuate or resort to their own non-Duchenne laughter and overt signaling of “laugh cues.” Here we have interactivity working against the laugh through the same feedback process that can help laughter gain momentum. Directors of comedy know that laughs also need to be spaced and paced to build and sustain over the course of the performance. If the audience sits for a long time without laughing, the second act will never be able to make up the momentum, whereas if the first act is too funny, too often the audience becomes tired from the strain of laughing hard and frequently. The high degree of shared attention and interactivity between a great clown and a great audience is breathtaking, and when every age group can laugh at a wordless gag, ( in the presence of a great clown or a silent show like Mummenshantz), it is an even more unifying experience than an entire audience agreeing about almost anything else. This is why television imitates the audience with laugh tracks and if not, why timing of action and editing is best built on reactions at the human scale.

            There’s an embodied metaphorical relationship between verbal humor and physical comedy. Just as more complex, higher and more symbolic cognition is ultimately based on sensorimotor action schemata; all varieties of verbal humor can be seen as metaphorical extensions of basic physical mishaps, which we react to, like pre-false belief infants, with visceral, simulation-based responses. This analogy serves also between recognizing incongruity and “correcting” it (solving or –re-solving the incongruity) and “relief of passing danger”- which is a reflex, like laughter at broad physical comedy. Pre-false belief infants can laugh, not just through contagion and imitation but when their recognition of incongruity is safely challenged. Studies of autistic individuals and subjects who suffer damage to their right-frontal lobe often lose their ability to appreciate verbal humor, though they laugh at broad slapstick and some socially inappropriate actions. My current research begins with the likelihood that we will find that a few very basic prototype experiences are the root of why humans laugh at physical comedy, and by schematic extension, all humor.

            It is unlikely that any one variable ever has only one constraining cause, but an interesting study could be made of performers’ and directors’ own explanations of audience behavior, including superstitions and self-fulfilling prophecies like “second night let-down.” While we will never pin down all the variables exactly, taking the cognitive and social norms into consideration may enable us to reverse engineer historical jokes and comedic styles more accurately. Cognitive norms and cultural norms overlap, but their comic transgression often contrasts them in their incongruity. The recognition that most humorous events employ framing and context in order to trigger laughter acknowledges information-based approaches to the attribution of false belief, whereas the timing and joint attention required for the comic process to unfold seems best understood as Simulation. Extreme seriousness was not a flexible enough mental state for our hominid ancestors, who had to deal with many surprises in a dangerous and often rapidly  changing environment. Thus, a neural vacillation similar to motivational conflict causes an involuntary vocalized displacement activity which is also a signal to conspecifics that “all is well after all.” That all is actually not well, despite the laughter, is an incongruity that takes more than mere recognition to find funny.

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The Cultural Evolution of Big Cat Shows in the Circus

The Cultural Evolution of Big Cat Shows

     The study in this case is the phenomenon of wild animal shows, specifically big cat exhibitions of the genre still popularly recognizable in the erroneous term “lion taming,” but usually involving mixed species, especially tigers, and a male or female trainer/presenter alone in the cage with the animals. The modern version of this performance genre dates back to 1833 in the U.S. and it is today an “endangered” species of performance and a morally and politically contested tradition. To grossly oversimplify, the big cat show has undergone a gradual evolution from applauding the human performer for simply getting in and out of the cage alive, to histrionic displays of bravery and dominance, to more and more gently cueing the animals to perform carefully taught “tricks,” now referred to by trainers as “behaviors.” Regardless of the ethical stance one takes on animals in entertainment, any activity this dangerous, this expensive and time-consuming and this difficult  requires explanation beyond a tendency to enact patriarchal dominion and Anglo-imperialism (J.M. Davis 2002) or a spectacular response to anxiety about human superiority in the wake of Darwin’ s new theory (Goodall 2002).[1] The precarious survival of the “big cat act” has complex economic and historical roots, as does the campaign against it. The protest has backfired at crucial turning points in the history of the genre, but now more than ever threatens to relegate the icon of the “lion tamer” to the once under-erasure status of blackface minstrelsy, which has in recent years has been at last acknowledged by historians as central to the formation of American popular entertainment.

     The “product” of wild animal shows is what the audience sees; the “instructions” are the actual signals, training routines and performance structures used by trainers and performers. Thus there are two simultaneously evolving lineages of practice and representation to trace in the memeplex of wild animal shows. The distinction between the two lineages (product and instructions) is analogous to the difference between functional and causal representational content. The distinction may often seem counter-intuitive as to which is causal and which is functional. In the circus as in all areas of show business, the image cultivated for the public’s consumption works at different levels, but the demographic of the addressee is usually very clear, as when female trainers are depicted in advertisements in a way that sexualizes their performance. Circus historians always have to dig deeper than publicity and oral tradition to learn which stories are true, which are apocryphal, and which are traditional, in that the same kinds of stories are applied to various clowns, trainers, acrobats, showmen, etc. Besides deliberate use of stories that have “survived” in oral tradition, there must be a great deal of unconscious selection going on with these tales by the time they become sub-genres. The oral culture of the circus provides an “inside” and “outside” code for distinguishing members of the “tribe.’ Circus hierarchies have been inherited but also change over time, as evidenced by the decline of big cat trainers as stars in the post-Gebel-Williams circus. As a kind of tribe, the circus passes lore vertically along the isolated meme pool of the circus. Outside the circus, stories adapted for “horizontal” public consumption are parallel to the performances themselves in that they are the “product” of the cultural inheritance being passed down vertically within the traditional knowledge of “how” to do circus.

            In the wild animal shows, the most general difference between instructions and product transmission is the apparent behavior of the cats as framed in performance and the actual operational conditioning at work behind it. For example, a common “bit” near the end of big cat shows involves one of the cats refusing to leave the arena. The actual reason the cat will not leave is that the trainer is standing in front of the exit pathway. When the trainer asks politely and makes a bow or other respectful gesture he or she is actually stepping out of the exit-way and allowing the cat the distance needed to maintain the appropriate “fight or flight” distance from the trainer.[2] The cat will then appear to the audience to be responding to the gesture rather than the now open pathway. Many trainers have incorporated the “uncooperative animal” meme into their acts, a meme that is traceable directly to the equestrian tradition, as are many other practices in large animal training and showing. The earliest example of this common circus meme seems to be a comic routine, called in England since the 1770s, The Taylor Riding to Brentford, to which Phillip Astley added the subtitle: The Unaccountable Sagacity of the Taylor’s Horse.[3]  In the context of big cats shows, the uncooperative animal act was initially used in the Beatty-style “fighting act,” by training certain snarly cats to strike and growl at him when he approached their pedestals. Beatty knew from experience what excited audiences, but he also wanted an act so dangerous that he never had to be worried about being replaced. His earlier Polar bear show (inherited from the Hagenback show) was actually more dangerous than his lion and tiger combinations, but because bears have a more benign cultural image (another meme with a long lineage) Beatty adapted to the big cats and the sure-fire audience reaction to what trainers of the period called working “wild” in the trainer’s parlance, in which the actual danger is less than it seems but there is maximum performance of what appears to the audience as the spontaneous wildness of the  animals. In the nineteenth century most acts “worked wild” and were often were called “hurrah” acts, a sort of chaotic parade in which the cats were rushing about wildly, jumping and growling, but kept in constant motion. Beatty’s cats were taught to enter this way for many of his shows, but the practice is now extinct in live shows.

In the 1930’s, when circus star Clyde Beatty was at the peak of his fame and popular success he was introduced by ringmasters as “the world’s foremost subjugator of jungle brutes,” along with other similar epithets of dominion.  In the 2001 season Ringling Bros. Barnum and Bailey’s advance publicity for tiger trainer Sara Houcke billed her as “the Tiger Whisperer.” The RBB& B responded to a marketing perception that family audiences wanted a “kinder, gentler wild animal act.” No animal trainer since Günter Gebel-Williams (who retired in 1990) had received so much mass media publicity. Sara was in print ads, television commercials, and even a mildly S&M glamour spread in Details magazine, sans tigers.[4] In interviews she emphasized that the audience would see the close relationship between her and the tigers instead of merely a series of stunts done on command.  After Sara’s first year with the Blue unit of RBB&B Circus, the flood of publicity ran dry. Within two more years Sara Houcke, bearer of a distinguished circus surname and a good deal more than fifteen minutes of fame, had quietly disappeared. What happened? Was she a victim of hype or overexposure? Did marketing misjudge the audience’s change in taste, or was it just that when presented with a kinder gentler animal act, audiences found it dull? [5] I will return to this question in conclusion.

Presentational encounters between humans and wild animals have always been sites of enactment for the opposition of Culture and Nature, but the steel cage of the circus arena has also been a socially contested site, where attitudes towards and ideas about wild animals are tested against cultural production.  Animal rights activists and many advocates of animal welfare, including some trainers, feel that the wild animal act has long since reached its historical zenith.[6]  Yet millions of people continue to attend animal circuses worldwide each year, and trained wild animals appear in films and on television more than ever, although their performances and bodies are increasingly altered or “enhanced” with computer generated images. Today, the circus industry in the United States publicizes their “state of the art care” of animals, while groups like PETA and PAWS proliferate shocking narratives of abuse. While I feel that the wild animal act is not quite teetering on the edge of extinction, its historically precarious position offers a unique opportunity to examine the complexity of factors influencing changes in public taste and adaptive changes in performance practices..[7] 

I have spent the last decade researching the big cat trainers and their performance genre from every angle possible. Remember that here I can barely offer a summary of my findings. No single essay can reflect the amount of data and documented examples required for a memetic investigation. If I were to look at big cat shows from the stance of Evolutionary Psychology, I would have a much easier time of it, since the prehistoric environment of adaptation offers a good “ultimate” explanation for why people have always and will continue to be fascinated by encounters with “alpha predators.” A quote from nature writer David Quammen says it well:

Great and terrible flesh eating beasts have always shared landscape with humans. They were part of the ecological matrix within which Homo sapiens evolved. They were part of the psychological context in which our sense of identity as a species arose. They were part of the spiritual systems that we invented for coping. Among the earliest forms of human self-awareness was the awareness of being meat.” [8]

The cultural phenomenon of big cat shows is not explained however, by our atavistic fear and respect for wild predators, or by the cognitive equipment evolution endowed us with.  Memetics is still needed to explain the variety of forms that encounters between predator and prey have taken under the profound influence of human culture. “Natural selection thinking” led me to pay the most attention to the most widely distributed popular culture because I was looking for common themes in mass circulation. The subject matter I looked for included not only representations of circus performers and trainers but also of wild animals in general. My sources have included published books on every aspect of circus life,[9] including hard to find but numerous biographies and memoirs of trainers; [10]recent scientific studies on the health and welfare of circus cats and elephants today,[11] popular magazine and newspaper articles;[12] publications produced by the circus industry and animal training professionals[13], as well as publications of animal rights organizations; and unpublished material from archives and personal interviews. [14] I compared these with more specialized and elite cultural artifacts such as scientific publications, and while it was no surprise that the content differed strongly along these lines, I did not expect that the differences would be so consistent.

Attitudes toward wild animals have been influenced by a wide range of powerful memes and dominant memeplexes, from the biblical concept of Dominion and the arguments of Enlightenment philosophers, to popular song, fiction and cinema, television shows and documentaries, cartoons, comics and children’s literature, zoos and the news media. Performers have historically capitalized on all of these memes to draw attention to and bias the audience through costume, names, music and gesture. Isaac van Amburgh, the first internationally known “lion tamer”, incorporated the use of Biblical iconography most famously, wearing togas and cloaks, and enacting narratives of divinely granted dominion in which the power of faith over animals made the deadly but cowardly beasts cower before him and lie down next to lambs in the cage. The actual reason for the behavior of Van Amburgh’s cats was intimidation with crowbars, but the “Daniel in the Lion’s Den” meme was an extremely successful promotion and became his iconic image in portraits and posters. Despite the pseudo-religious posturing, Van Amburgh is remembered in circus lore as the father of the American “fighting act,” which is usually cited in opposition to the European approach in which the cats are put through performance memes borrowed from equestrian display. The “picture-acts” in which the cats posed in formation and did carefully executed leaping and standing behaviors were only possible with the development of training that did not use intimidating force, but rather rewards and concern for the animal’s health. These methods are traditionally associated with William Hagenbeck, an animal dealer who began developing the method between 1887-1889 after his brother William was killed by tigers during a performance. After the Hagenback methods began to spread, there does seem to be a general evolution toward trainers spending more and more time with their animals, and this has refined their observations and understanding of animals’ psychology. Most trainers learned their craft from a combination of imitation and directed learning while on the job. In America today there is only one accredited program for professional wild animal trainers, and the profession itself is dominated by women. [15]

The memetic aspects of my research are helped by the traceable lineage of European and American training methods and show styles. Circus history is rich with examples of performers copying each other’s acts or trying to compete by adding more and more dangers and challenges. Fliers and daredevils are particularly prone to a kind of runaway selection once competition becomes heated, but trainers also compete in having the most cats in the cage at one time, the most different species in one act. Feats that register as impressive to both audiences and trainers seems to clearly have an adaptive advantage, e.g. the increasing number of cats used in “lie downs” and “rollovers, a particularly difficult trick to manage since the cats are assuming vulnerable positions which correlate with their instinctive submission behavior. Circus families pass down vertical cultural inheritance and most trainers began as apprentice/assistants, called “grooms” in Europe, again from the equestrian tradition, but almost always referred to in American circus as “cage boys,” emphasizing their low status and reminding them of their manure shoveling duties.

What were the selection pressures for the content of wild animal shows? Public opinion, certainly, as circus has historical both pandered to and cultivated audience tastes for dangerous stunts. One interesting thread consists of changes in the costuming and music used. Nineteenth century trainers often used military uniforms and band marches as accoutrements, a practice that was essentially what evolutionists call a “founder effect” in that Phillips Astley and other circus pioneers has cavalry background. In the 1930s Beatty was famous for his “white hunter” costume with pith helmet. Mabel Stark wore a tight fitting white leather suit, which had practical applications as well as sexual and symbolic associations.[16] The Charly Baumann/ Gunter Gebel-Williams school of European born trainers wore spandex and sequins and used popular music, giving their dangerous acts a light touch and framing them as pure entertainment. Spangled tights were used by lion tamer George Conklin as early as the Civil war period, but the theme of his act was clearly based on dominance, as a banner over the lion den read “Conklin is Our Master.” Conklin is often cited as the first to use an ordinary stool or chair to confuse the cats and keep them at a distance. The “chair, pistol and whip” became part of the lion tamer iconography when Clyde Beatty combined them in his live and motion picture appearances. All of these framing devices: wardrobe, music, and gestural style, were memetic adaptations that catered to changing audience tastes and perceptions of both animals and trainers, keeping the steel cage in the center ring and near the top of the circus hierarchy for decades.

Representations of animals and trainers have been more consistently ambiguous than I anticipated at the beginning of my research.  Both negative and positive recurring representations have been much more complicated and nuanced in novels than in movies or other mass media.[17] Movies and pulp fiction about the circus are historically replete with representations not only of vicious animals but also of vicious people who lord over or have unnatural affection for animals because they cannot interact socially with other people. Circus people have long been stereotyped as outsiders and misfits, but the narratives of delinquent cage boys and wicked alcoholic trainers have been particularly consistent for over a century.  In some cases these “bad trainers” are contrasted with “good trainers” who nevertheless maintain their dominant positions in the cage culture (and their lives) by intimidating the cats. In the last few decades the “bad trainer” meme has adapted to fit into the memeplex of animal rights, resulting in its reduction to an uncomplicated, iconic image of cruelty that has been extremely successful at replicating a politically correct but unexamined reaction to the use of animals in entertainment. The circus has retained much of its wicked and worldly image in popular culture, although today, people are more likely to see a circus narrative through television or movies than a live circus or even a televised animal performance, once a staple of the (almost extinct) television variety shows that were once broadcasting juggernauts.

Traditional circus has managed to survive waves of public resistance and social and economic change by adjusting to different venues and shifts in audience tastes, but it has always been a high-risk venture for financiers and managers as well as performers. This makes the circus an especially sensitive barometer of these changes in public taste and audience composition, and it also makes the circus an easier target for animal rights groups than the massive film industry or the many smaller “backyard” menageries and roadside zoos that feature wild animal shows. The major change in the venues and location of circus audiences occurred in the 1950s when the larger shows ended their tent tours of rural areas and small towns and began to perform in more sophisticated urban arena venues. Historically, British and American circus audiences have been consistently composed of predominately lower middle or working-class spectators. On the other hand, the demographics of PETA, for example, are upper middle to affluent. Working-class and rural attitudes towards animals have always been more utilitarian that those of intellectuals and those with the leisure time to devote to various “reform” causes.

PETA has been so successful at transmitting the “bad trainer” meme that for many people I spoke to, it filters out all but the most negative information about training or use of animals. For these people, training is a priori, a bad thing. There is no mention in any of the PETA literature I have poured over that addresses what would actually happen to the big cats and elephants that are currently performing. Contrary to the popular romanticized vision of the wilderness, big cats have always shared territory with humans. Nature comes before culture, but the concept of nature as pure presence is a cultural product of civilization. There are no remaining habitats for any species of big cats that are completely beyond human influence or active management, and very few legitimate refuges for “retired” performing animals.

.Accusations of cruelty and protests against animal acts were not new in the 1980s. The 1920s saw the rapid rise of reformers like the Jack London clubs, usually cited in circus histories as causing the ban on cat acts in the 20s. Jack London’s Michael, Brother of Jerry, published in 1917, aroused a reaction no previous condemnations had. Whether or not London actually saw brutal training procedures is open to serious question. Much of his description is almost verbatim from a bitter satire written by Maurice Brown Kirby entitled “The Gentle Art of Training Wild Beasts.”(Everybody’s Magazine 19, Oct 1908). [18] London was suffering from uremia and serious depression and opium addiction he labored in agony to finish it before he died.” Boyce Renseberger in the NY Times wrote that London’s polemic against trainers converted more people than all his books dealing with socialism. In 1925 RBBB announced that all acts containing big cats has been “discarded because the management recognized that in many quarters there is a decided aversion to the presentation of trained wild animal acts which convey to people the suggestion of cruelty in handling and training.” Parents objected to brining young children to a show in which men or women entered beast cages (n 163 NY Times March 1925).  John Ringling personally didn’t like wild animal acts, and did not allow them in his circus until 1919. For him it wasn’t because of any consideration of the animals but because the cage and chute dominated the arena and were difficult to break down. Only the public’s interest and the fact that his brother Charles Ringling liked animal acts allowed for them in the Ringling owned circus. The rising of the Reformers however gave him an excuse to ban the acts. The print media editorialized, urging the other circuses to follow Ringling’s example, but they didn’t. It’s hard to gauge if this earlier wave of protest was really strong enough to influence anyone in the circus business or audience. In any case it left the door open for the other large circus organization the ACC, to specialize in wild animal circuses. Their success eventually pressured Ringling to end the ban.

Most animal trainers and animal rights activists  hold and express diametrically opposed versions of “the truth,” both claiming their own view to be informed, compassionate, and even reasonable. I qualify ‘reasonable” because both trainers and ARAs have ultimately utopian goals that if explicitly stated seem impossible and eccentric to mainstream sensibilities. The philosophical bottom line of the animal rights movement is a utopian vision in which humans would have as little effect on animal life as possible. [19]  From this point of view, all training and inclusion of animals in entertainment is, a priori, cruel. Yet the reply of the culture of wild animal trainers is that they are committed to the equally utopian ideal of positive, mutually beneficial interaction between humans and animals. For the trainers this interaction consumes the greater part of their everyday life, demanding an uncompromising level of commitment if the animals are to be presentable to the public in entertainment contexts. Animal rights activists counter that spectators at the circus or cinema see only a distorted and denatured image of humiliated and enslaved creatures that bear little resemblance to animals in the wild.  The great majority of people find themselves somewhere between these extremely contrasting positions, concerned about the welfare if not the rights of animals, but as likely to become vegan and give up their pets as they are to become intimately involved with wild animals. More than in any previous period, popular culture today continues to favor and perpetuate negative images and narratives of trainers, a recurrent theme in the endlessly rerun Simpsons, as well as in the news media and talk shows. Hooking into powerful memes, the politics of animal rights has infected the discourse of animal welfare with the effect of unforeseen and usually unpublicized results, including the deaths of many performing animals.

---

[1] See Janet M. Davis, The Circus Age: Culture and Society Under the American Big Top,  University of North Carolina Press, 2002; and Jane Goodall, Performance and Evolution in the Age of Darwin, London: Routledge 2002. See also, Paul Bouissac. Circus and Culture: A Semiotic Approach. Bloomington, Indiana University Press, 1972: 106, in which the semiotician decodes a greater variety of role-playing and symbolic relationships represented or alluded to in the big cat acts.

[2] H. Hediger, The Psychology of Animals in Circuses and Zoos, Dover Books, 1968 ;( 24-125).  See also Paul Bouissac, “Behavior in Context: In What Sense is a Circus Animal Performing?” in Thomas Sebeok and Robert Rosenthal (eds.) The Clever Hans Phenomenon: Communication with horses, Whales, Apes and People, New York, New York Academy of Sciences, 1981, (24).

[3] A.H. Saxon, Enter Horse and Foot: A History of the Hippodrama in England and France, New haven, Yale university Press (30-31).

[4] This was not the first time that a female animal trainer’s attractiveness was exploited in circus publicity, but the targeted audience was never so blatantly invited to stand in for the tigers!

[5] The RBB&B Circus shifted its now minimized publicity attention to Mark Gebel-Williams, whose act in most respects resembles that of his father, with whom he performed from a young age.

[6] Sharon Rendell, Living With Big Cats: The Story of Jungle Larry, Safari Jane and David Tetzlaff. IZS Books, 1995. (191-193.).

[7] A major research project, the University of Michigan Genre Evolution Project, is currently testing a wide range of possibilities for evolutionary cultural analyses. The project, (under Rabkin and Simon) justifies its choice of the Science Fiction story as a genre for very practical reasons; the lineage can be easily traced through the extant magazines etc, and their letters columns give more than demographic information about reception. The increasing presence of female writers in the genre and the advent of special effects movies have been shown to have very specific effects on the direction of variation. I strongly suggest anyone working in cultural evolution compare her own strategies and categories of change to the Michigan project in detail.

[8] David Quammen, Monster of God: The Man-Eating Predator In The Jungles And History Of The Mind. W.W. Norton & Co. New York, (2003), 3.

[9] Reliable and recent firsthand accounts of circus life include: Bruce Feiler, Under the Big Top: A Season with the Circus. Perennial, HarperCollins, 1995; Charles Wilkins’ The Circus at the Edge of the Earth: Travels with the Great Wallenda Circus , McClelland and Satewart, Inc. Toronto, Ontario.(1998).

[10] A small sampling of trainer biographies: Bonavita, Jack, “How I Am Became A Wild Animal Trainer,” The Delineator 74 (Sept. 1909); 254; Lucia Zora, Sawdust and Solitude.  Boston, Little, Brown & Co. 1928. Alfred Court, My Life With the Big Cats. Simon and Schuster, New York, 1955; Alex Kerr, No Bars Between, London, Cassell and Co. (1957); Clyde Beatty with Edward Anthony. Facing the Big Cats: My World of Lions and Tigers. Doubleday and Co. (1965); Jimmy Chipperfield, My Wild Life.  G. Putnam’s Sons, New York, (1976); Damoo Dhotre and Richard Taplinger. Wild Animal Man.  Taplinger Publishing Co., New York (1973); Sharon Rendell, Living With Big Cats: The Story of Jungle Larry, Safari Jane and David Tetzlaff. IZS Books (1995); Günter Gebel-Williams with Toni Reinhold, Untamed: The Autobiography of the Circus’s Greatest Animal trainer. New York, William Morrow and Co. (1991).

[11] C. H. Nevill and T. H. Friend. The behavior of circus tigers during transport. Applications of Animal. Behavioral Science. 82 (2003.) 329-337; J. L. Williams, and T. H. Friend. “Behavior of circus elephants during transport.” Journal of. Elephant Managers Association 14 (2003)8-11

[15]  A student’s journey through the Exotic Animal Training and Management(EATM) program at California’s Moorpark Community College is chronicled in Amy Sutherlands. Kicked Bitten and Scratched New York, Viking Press, 2006.

[16] For example, the meme of the trainer Mabel Stark’s white leather suit had an effect on the audience (sexually titillating, symbolic of purity undone by a tough leather exterior, etc), whereas the functional aspect of the white leather suit was entirely practical. Before wearing the white leather, Mabel Stark wore a similar black leather costume. The tightness and the slippery hard leather surface were advantageous in keeping the tigers from being able to catch her with their claws or teeth. Regardless of whatever symbolic or eye-catching effects the suit had on the audience, the black tended to show the light colored semen of the tiger, who often ejaculated during the “wrestling” act with his trainer, whereas the white leather did not show the semen, which even in the Roaring Twenties of the circus was deemed unseemly. Nevertheless, despite this visual precaution or because of the rumors about it, Mabel Stark’s act has been remembered as “sexualized” in circus lore, fiction and undoubtedly in an upcoming feature film biography starring Kate Winslet. based on a fictionalized biography cited elsewhere and directed by Sam Mendes. The fill seems to have been held up for several years after Roy Horn was attacked by a tiger in the Mirage theatre, Las Vegas. Word of progress on the film has only recently resurfaced.

[17] Notable are two recent novels: Robert Hough, The Final Confession of Mabel Stark. Atlantic Monthly Press, 2001 for which a film adaptation is planned; and Sara Gruen, Water For Elephants, Algonquin Books of Chapel Hill, 2006. One of the most realistic and nuanced depiction of big cat trainers ever is Edward Hoagland’s Cat Man, written in 1955 and reprinted by Arbor House (New York), in 1985.

[18] A bitter satire by Maurice Brown Kirby “The Gentle Art of Training Wild Beasts.”(Everybody’s magazine 19 (Oct 1908) pgs4350445. The first thing to break is an animal’s spirit, and this had to be done with a club. Animals he wrote” are not taught, they are pushed and shoved and mauled and whipped and dragged and choked and tortured into tricks.” Ethics are out of place in the arena. So is sympathy. The animals has neither, Why should the trainer be affected by them?”