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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