Between Laughter and Satire: Aspects of the Historical Study of Humour 3031217381, 9783031217388

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Between Laughter and Satire Aspects of the Historical Study of Humour

Conal Condren

Between Laughter and Satire

Conal Condren

Between Laughter and Satire Aspects of the Historical Study of Humour

Conal Condren University of New South Wales Sydney, NSW, Australia

ISBN 978-3-031-21738-8    ISBN 978-3-031-21739-5 (eBook) https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-031-21739-5 © The Editor(s) (if applicable) and The Author(s) 2023 This work is subject to copyright. All rights are solely and exclusively licensed by the Publisher, whether the whole or part of the material is concerned, specifically the rights of translation, reprinting, reuse of illustrations, recitation, broadcasting, reproduction on microfilms or in any other physical way, and transmission or information storage and retrieval, electronic adaptation, computer software, or by similar or dissimilar methodology now known or hereafter developed. The use of general descriptive names, registered names, trademarks, service marks, etc. in this publication does not imply, even in the absence of a specific statement, that such names are exempt from the relevant protective laws and regulations and therefore free for general use. The publisher, the authors, and the editors are safe to assume that the advice and information in this book are believed to be true and accurate at the date of publication. Neither the publisher nor the authors or the editors give a warranty, expressed or implied, with respect to the material contained herein or for any errors or omissions that may have been made. The publisher remains neutral with regard to jurisdictional claims in published maps and institutional affiliations. Cover Credit: IanDagnall Computing / Alamy Stock Photo This Palgrave Macmillan imprint is published by the registered company Springer Nature Switzerland AG. The registered company address is: Gewerbestrasse 11, 6330 Cham, Switzerland

To J.M.D. & M.R.

Acknowledgements

As substantial parts of this work have been developed from previous essays, I am happy to express my appreciation to the editors and publishers. Jessica Milner Davis encouraged me to develop my chapter in Satire and Politics (Palgrave, 2017). Daniel Derrin and Hannah Burrows allowed me to extend and reorganize my contribution to The Palgrave Handbook of Humour, History, and Methodology (2021). In both cases I am also grateful to the publishers, Palgrave Macmillan. A shorter version of the third essay was originally an invited contribution to Humor: International Journal of Humor Research (2012). My thanks to the copyright holders Mouton de Gruyter for permission (excluding open access) to use this, and to Sophie Schmale for expediting matters. In each case the arguments have been amended, corrected and expanded and the evidence to support them increased. Each is now the basis of two chapters. Additional thanks are due to Jessica Milner Davis, who has long been a source of kindness and critical consideration; Daniel Derrin provided constructive engagement with my ideas; Mark Rolfe is always helpful and informed, as is Margaret Rose; Richard Fisher has given expert advice on the bewildering changes in the publishing industry; he and Massih Zekavat have helped me negotiate them. Delia Chiaro (University of Bologna) directed me without fuss to reading I should have known, as have Indira Ghose (University of Fribourg) and Kerry Mullen (RMIT). Mon-Han Tsai (Chiba University) and Ron Stewart (Daito Bunka University) have helped with all matters touching Japan and China. Their knowledge has given me an undeserved garnish of learning. Caroline Cousins commented on an early draft, and without Ryan Walter (University of Queensland) I vii

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might not have got this far. Suzanne Foster (archivist, Winchester College) speedily answered questions, as did Andrew Riley (Thatcher Papers archivist) at Churchill College, always willing to go beyond the calls of duty. Andrew, Allen Packwood, Director of the Churchill Archives Centre, Mark Goldie and Piers Brendon are all Churchill College friends from whom I always learn. This too must be said of my business partners Damian Grace and Roger Coombs. Thanks are due also to the Institute of Advanced Studies in the Humanities, University of Queensland (alas now abolished) for research travel support. Lina Aboujieb has been a most supportive editor, and the anonymous reviewers she chose did me the honour of reading the manuscript with care and critical acumen. As I was not able to take up all their suggestions for improvement, I hope they think it was still worth all the effort. Saving the best for last, my wife Averil constructed yet another index.

Contents

1 Introduction  1 Part I Laughter and the Study of Humour   5 2 Laughter and the Formation of a Concept of Humour  7 3 The Universality and the Genealogy of Humour 41 Part II Method and Its Limits in the Historical Study of Humour  67 4 Context and Intention 69 5 Translation and Reception 85 Part III Defining Satire and Satiric Humour 109 6 Definition by Dictionary, Origin and Implications111 7 Definition  by Adjacent Terms, Genre and Satiric Definition131 ix

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Contents

Part IV Satiric Humour in Popular Culture: The Yes Minister and Yes, Prime Minister Television Satires 149 8 Theory and the Absent Political System151 9 The Satiric Presence of Political Discourse181 10 Conclusion201 Bibliography209 Index233

CHAPTER 1

Introduction

I This work examines closely related topics to which I was initially attracted by the challenges of understanding humour in history. The very designation of something as humorous is still apt to marginalize it. Occupying a place towards the edges of the academic world, the study of humour can be of secondary interest even to those who pay it due attention. By the same token, the historical study of humour has hardly been central to humour studies, dominated as it has been by research in psychology, linguistics and sociology. There have been some notable historical studies, to be sure, but for the most part what has passed for history has been a matter of instrumental, even glib genealogy, or the retrospective application of the dominant theories established by psychology and linguistics. The purpose here is to go further in rectifying an imbalance, not by writing a history of humour, or humour studies, but by exploring the potential, the problems and implications of a more thorough historical approach to humour. To do so is to cast doubt on a good deal that has been taken for granted, not least by disengaging notions of humour, satire, comedy and laughter that are too often tumbled together unreflectively—a curious situation given humour’s recognized potential for encouraging reflexivity. Principally, the four essays that follow constitute a ground-clearing exercise, the last being a detailed case study of humour in contemporary history.

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In Part I, I focus on the uncertain intersection between laughter and what came to be called humour in English from the late seventeenth century, and on the genealogical rewriting of that relationship to project humour as a universal human attribute subject to philosophical scrutiny since the times of Plato and Aristotle. Whatever it might mean, the frequently proclaimed universality of humour has no historical warrant, but has aided the creation of an august, promotional lineage for humour studies. I conclude Chap. 3 by taking Hobbes, a byword for the ‘superiority theory’ of humour, to exemplify the sort of myth-making involved in academic genealogies. As a corollary, in Part II I discuss the methodological difficulties of studying humour with more historical rigor and sensitivity. The specific question of definition is put to one side until Part III where I consider satire, once independent of humour, but now, at least in English, seen predominantly as subsumed by it, and so definable in various ways. Thus, the chapters survey the problems in determining satire’s scope and equally what satire might show about definition. For those indifferent to the matter, the conclusion might suffice—that for the historian, definition is unhelpful when dealing with the range of satire. For others, how I get to that point may be of interest. Part IV examines the extraordinarily popular Yes Minister and Yes, Prime Minister political satires, initially televised in Britain in 1980–84 and 1986–88, respectively. They constitute the genesis of a whole subfield of popular culture and are arguably still the richest example of it—justification enough for sustained attention. In these relatively recent works visual and written forms of satire come together, and the coalescing notions of humour, comedy and even satire might be fairly reliable because chronologically and culturally constrained. Part IV also shifts from largely theoretical arguments about the history of humour to theory in humour, albeit with an emphasis on theories that have origins in an earlier world. The argument in Chap. 8 is that the satires carried well-digested political conceptions and beliefs into popular culture as representations of political reality that have to be taken largely on faith. The satires also had a propagandistic force that their theoretical dimension makes clear. In Chap. 9, however, we have theories of language that critically inform the manifest presence of an available aspect of politics. In the end, it is theory itself in relation to practice that humour helps render problematic. The trajectory of the whole volume is, however, less chronological than one of increasing specificity.

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Those who work on humour are usually acutely aware that it can be a means of exploring matters of wider interest. Even the arcane and arid regions of social science methodology might be grist to humour’s mill.1 And so it is in what follows: from the exemplification of academic myth-­ making, and philosophical problems of historiographical inference and intentionality, to the variable nature and limits of definition, the relationship between political theory and practice and the character of political argument. One purpose, then, is to illustrate how humour can become a valuable trace through complex issues that are frequently simplified by ignoring it. The concomitant risk is that those principally interested in humour will think that I have strayed too far into alien territories, while those at home on such terrains will think I have not trodden far enough. Balance arising from compromised assiduity is always precarious for the interstitial essayist, and it is particularly so in using satire to explore definition. Arising from the mid-1970s, the academic study of humour also provides a sub-theme, for it is an easily neglected context for what is often said of humour past and present.2 Indeed, I suggest that the misrepresentation of the history of humour theory illustrates familiar processes in the politics of institutionalization. That is, humour theory putatively dating back to antiquity is analogous to the lineal imagination that created the history of political thought and of international relations, so garnishing nascent disciplines with suitably impressive pedigrees. An additional aspect of establishing an academic presence concerns the often necessary but sometimes distorting divisions of labour in university aggregations of activity. We usually call them disciplines, although some are not. The understanding of satire has not conspicuously been aided by being regarded conventionally as a literary phenomenon, let alone a genre and therefore the responsibility of departments of literature, concomitantly to be shunned in political science, sociology and philosophy. This is certainly less the case than it used to be, and as I hope to show by example, some interdisciplinarity is a helpful supplement to overspecialized diets. Humour studies is necessarily interdisciplinary. How the subject matter of humour is studied varies considerably, and so that other crucial mark of an academic identity, a specialized argot, has not been established. Approaches to humour can be so different that they have little in 1 2

 Lockyer and Weaver, ‘On the Importance of the Dynamics of Humour’, 1–13.  Attardo, Encyclopedia, xxxi; Chapman and Foot, It’s a Funny Thing.

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common. The sociological study of networks behind the Weimar nightclub would seem to be a world away from the use of Magnetic Resonance Imaging to understand cataplexy when stimulated by cartoons. Yet for the most part those studying humour have shared enough to nurture some of the attributes of a common enterprise of understanding: humour is taught in a range of universities, there are research institutes, scholarly journals, monographs, encyclopaedias, handbooks and volumes of edited essays. In recent years introductory studies have helped consolidate and display some sense of intellectual cohesion. There are international conferences, societies, networks and doctoral students. Sometimes there is even money, at least an accepted entitlement to apply for it. The falsification of what is presented as a shared intellectual inheritance stemming from antiquity may be a condition for such flourishing. What follows is cohered above all by attention to vocabularies in use and is best read sequentially as an expression of an approach to a demanding area of study, but the topics are sufficiently distinct for its four parts to have some independence as related essays within the highly accommodating essayical form. In keeping with its spirit, there is no pretence to being definitive. In other respects, the essay is ideal for those of a sceptical disposition (which I am), for the young not wishing to appear arrogant (which I am not), for the overworked with less time than they would like (ditto) or for the older with more experience than they wish to share of failing to be definitive. As I have noted in the acknowledgements, a good deal of what follows has been developed from previous iterations of arguments needing extensive rewriting to create a cohesive whole. The first part, however, has had a former existence largely in my head, where it was fleetingly the last word.

PART I

Laughter and the Study of Humour

CHAPTER 2

Laughter and the Formation of a Concept of Humour

I Discussions of laughter echo from antiquity, and are now widely taken as encompassing humour. Certainly, the relationship between the two is formally recognized to be asymmetrical. As Alexandre Mitchell briskly states, humour is an intellectual construct, laughter a physiological response.1 Nevertheless, the differences are often blurred with the collocation laughter and humour almost suggesting a single topic. Alfred L’Estrange set a precedent in the late nineteenth century, and more recently G.B. Milner encapsulated the conventional slippage in his coinage homo ridens: a sense of humour revealed in laughter helps define homo sapiens.2 Similarly, a large-scale history of humour can be written by attention to whatever makes us laugh or smile—another questionable collocation.3 Laughter

1  Mitchell, Greek Vase-Painting, 8; see also Preston, Essay on Ridicule, 70–1, 77–9; Glenn, Laugher in Interaction; Provine, Laughter: A Scientific Investigation; Parvulescu, Laughter: Notes on a Passion; Leffcourt, Humor The Psychology of Living, 23; Morreall, Taking Laughter Seriously, 1–3; Eagleton, Humour, 1–3; Nel, ‘He Who Laughs Last’, 1–2; Rosen, ‘Laughter’, 455–6; Attardo, Linguistic Theories, 10–13; Trouvain and Truong, ‘Laughter’, 340; Ruch, ‘Psychology of Humor’, 23. 2  L’Estrange, History of Humour, 1–22; Milner, ‘Towards a Semiotic Theory of Humor and Laughter’, 1–30. 3  Bremmer and Roodenberg, A Cultural History of Humour, 1; Trouvain and Truong, ‘Laughter’, 341.

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and smiles, as L’Estrange wrote, are the signs of humour.4 The psychologist D.E. Berlyne distinguishes between the laughter of relief, agreement, comprehension, triumph, embarrassment and scorn, yet does so in the context of treating laughter and humour as much the same.5 Apparently in societies lacking a word for humour, laughter can still be a ‘key’ to it. Couched in Austinian terms, laughter becomes humour’s perlocutionary effect.6 Or, the word humour can simply replace laughter, presumably in the interests of stylistic variety.7 In numerous ways, laughter becomes testimony to humour’s universality. It springs, like Minerva, fully armed from the brain, a taste for it being ‘fixed to the very nature of man’.8 Affirmations of the universality of humour have amounted almost to an article of faith in anglophone humour studies, thus Humor: International Journal of Humor Research simply announces in its scoping statement that ‘humor is an important and universal human faculty’. Such a relentlessly repeated claim can cover a multitude of sins (Chap. 3), but at least humour’s being tied to laughter narrows the field to what is ubiquitous and commonly recognizable. In being promoted as the seventh sense or a faculty, humour has been made as natural as laughter. It has even been said to be genetically encoded.9 Yet, as Daniel Derrin has recently remarked, such beliefs are increasingly vulnerable to historiographical scepticism.10 Indeed, it is the historical plausibility of this broad species of proposition about laughter and humour’s universality that I wish to examine in these first two chapters. A sense of humour entails self-awareness. That is, we can do or say things that are found amusing, but only apparent self-understanding entitles someone to conclude that we have a sense of humour. The antics of 4  L’Estrange, History of Humour, 1, 14–15; see also Holland, Psychology of Humor, 15–17; for more caution Ruch, ‘Psychology of Humor’, 21–3. 5  Berlyne, Conflict, 256–9; see also Holland, Psychology of Humor, 16–18, collapsing both laughter and humour into the comic. 6  Morreall, ‘The Philosophy of Humour’, in Attardo, ed. Encyclopedia, 2, 266; see also ‘The Philosophy of Humor’, in Zalta ed., The Stanford Encyclopedia of Philosophy; Attardo, Linguistic Theories, 12–13; Carrell, ‘Historical Views of Humor’, 302, 305. 7  For example, Gruner, The Game of Humour; Billig, Laughter and Ridicule; Pollio, ‘Notes towards a Field Theory of Humor’, 1, 213–30. 8  L’Estrange, History of Humour, 1, 6; also Guidi, ‘Humor Universals’, 18; Swift, Intelligencer, 3 (1728), Works, 8, 232. 9  Forabosco, Il settimo senso; Attardo, Linguistics of Humor, 300; for more caution, Ruch, ‘Psychology of Humor’, 77–9. 10  Derrin, ‘Introduction’, 11.

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animals might amuse, but we do not because of our reactions attribute to them senses of humour. To accredit chimpanzees with such a sense is to hypothesize self-consciousness from observed behaviour. It is to test the range of our firmly established concept of humour regardless of whether the evidence is anecdotal, gathered under controlled conditions, or is analogically inferred from the study of children.11 The precondition for evidence of the requisite reflexivity in humans I take to be the availability of at least a rudimentary conceptual vocabulary through which a sense of humour can be isolated, articulated and deposited in the records of human activity.12 That is, to state what should be obvious: the primary evidence for any concept lies in the language from which concepts are formed. Humour is no exception. It is a necessary condition for asserting or denying that humour is universal. As I shall suggest, however, this condition appears to have been established in English during the seventeenth and eighteenth centuries. The universality is in part a function of convenient academic amnesia. Thus, we need to ask where and when people start reflecting on humour. If laughter is simply presupposed to be the key to humour, then discussions of laughter in antiquity can be regarded as an outcome of a pre-existing phenomenon, what Swift called ‘the thing itself’, and questions of hard evidence are simply begged.13 Or more specifically, as Aristotle, discussing tickling, held (disputably) that only the human animal laughs, so we might conclude, or imply, that he recognized humour’s universality.14 Yet, in both evolutionary and historical terms, the path, as Gruner states, from tickling to humour is tortuous and uncertain. The seismic shift Indira Ghose finds in the history of laughter is, I shall argue,

11  Gamble, ‘Humor in Apes’, 163–79; McGhee, ‘Chimpanzee and Gorilla Humor’, 408–49; Ruch, ‘Psychology of Humor’, 78. 12  Gifford, ‘Humour and the French Mind’, 534–548, for a specific discussion; cf. Ruch, ‘Forward and Overview’, 3–14; on humour’s importance for conceptual reflexivity, Lockyer and Weaver, ‘On the Importance of the Dynamics of Humour’, 7–11. 13  Swift, Intelligencer, 231; see also, for example, Chao and Westbrook, ‘Introduction’, 3, who, starting with a not unreasonably broad notion of humour, write as if it were shared by others. 14  Aristotle, Parts of Animals, 673a 8–10; Andreoni and Magelhaes, ‘Humor, Laughter and Rhetoric in the Corporate Environment’, n.p. [2]; Malecka, ‘Humor in the Perspectives of Logos’, 1, 495–506, 503–5; Grossman, ‘Jokes in Psychotherapy’, 148, although without specific reference to Aristotle; Darwin apparently identified laughter among chimpanzees; see Martin, The Psychology of Humor, 3; Billig, Laughter and Ridicule, 180–1.

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very largely a matter of its conjunction with something quite recent, a conception of humour.15 Certainly, the functions of laughter (γελαω) in Aristotle’s world can coincide with the present broad scope of humour.16 L’Estrange noted that Hesiod had Zeus laughing with delight at fine singing. In the Odyssey Homer has serving girls laughing together with merriment, although the construction ‘both’ (τε και) that joins laughter and merriment indicates that they are quite distinct. More typically, Penelope’s suitor Antinous bursts out laughing (εκγελασας) while inciting violence.17 Cognate forms of γελαω designate jesting, buffoonery, mockery (κατα-γελως), the ridiculous (καταλεγεστος), being a sneerer (γελαστες) and doing something for laughter’s sake (επι γελωτι); ευτραπελια often meant wit, and ευτραπελος was a man of a pleasant even playful disposition, a characterization redolent of what we call humour. Several words with the root σκω designate jibes, scoffs and jeering. But of all the terms Liddell and Scott list with the root γελ, only γελοιος (laughable) is glossed as having a secondary meaning of facetious or humorous, and most are heavily freighted with the aggression that is so often taken as inimical to humour. It is epitomized in Antinous’s spontaneous laughter as he relishes the prospect of a humiliating injury to a beggar. In short, the discussion of laughter was without any word directly or persistently corresponding to humour. Mitchell’s intellectual construct is, linguistically speaking, missing. Greek is nevertheless sufficiently suggestive of what would later be regarded as humour to make the importation of the term into ancient culture almost inadvertent, even among scrupulous scholars.18 In context, this may sometimes be harmless enough, but to ignore the absence of a direct expression for humour, let alone a vocabulary organized around its conceptual functioning, is hardly a triviality when humour is the object of our attentions. It is to misrepresent evidence, and for such falsification only redescriptive invention is required. The sleight of pen in the collocation laughter and humour easily enough prepares the ground, smuggling  Gruner, The Game of Humor, 124; Ghose, Shakespeare and Laughter, 1.  Halliwell, ‘The Uses of Laughter in Greek Culture’, 279–96; Lombardini, ‘Aristotle on the Political Virtue of Humor’, 203–30, reconstructing Aristotle’s arguments as about humour. 17  L’Estrange, History of Humour, 1, 28; Homer, Odyssey, Bk 20, l. 8; Bk 18, l. 35. 18  Rosen, ‘Laughter’, 460, 465, 466, 467; Halliwell, ‘The Uses of Laughter in Greek Culture’, 283, just after warning against the importation of modern categories into antiquity; Jazdzewska, ‘Laughter in Plato’s and Xenophon’s Symposia’, 198 for a sense of humour. 15 16

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humour into the picture when laughter is discussed. Any assumption that comedy must be an expression of humour has the same effect. Plato’s critique of laughter and comedy are massaged into modern shape simply by calling them theories of humour.19 Such peremptory reformulations might be necessary if Plato’s arguments were otherwise unintelligible, but they are not, and so it is worth outlining something of his treatment of laughter without reprocessing it through a later notion of humour. Laughter features significantly in Phaedo, the early dialogue between Socrates and his friends in his cell on the occasion of his execution in 399  bce.20 It is also prominent as mockery and self-mockery in the early Hippias Major in which the question of the beautiful is discussed in part through fear of appearing ridiculous. Plato addressed laughter most extensively, however, in his late dialogue Philebus, on pleasure. In this he presented a paradox of laughter: what appears pleasurable and (among friends) can be harmless, or physically beneficial, is largely a symptom of the disordered soul. It evidences a self-delusional and malicious sense of superiority and of passion over reason. To display such disorder on the stage is to give politically resonant force to the claims to wisdom voiced by poets and rhetors. True pleasure, he held, is thus not just experienced, it is, like so much else, fully known only by philosophers. In some dialogues, as Katarzyna Jazdzewska points out, it is laughter that Plato uses to signal resistance to philosophical truth,21 though in the Theaetetus (174 c–b), he briefly entertains the idea that philosophers are to be laughed at, sounding like Lucian avant la lettre, but harking back to the heavy Socratic irony of Hippias Major. Generally, Plato’s reliance on tropes such as irony and litotes, associated with or designed to provoke laughter, are devices employed in leading people towards rationality, a feature of many of his dialogues— The Republic explicitly defends the practice. Only by the conversion of his vocabulary into ours can he appear to trip over a contradiction, of using humour though condemning it. Similarly, Sir David Ross routinely replaced Aristotle’s γελαω (laughter) in the Nicomachean Ethics with humour, even adding a sense of humour 19  Shelley, ‘Plato on the Psychology of Humor’, 351–67; cf. Naas, ‘Plato and the Spectacle of Laughter’, 13–24; Morreall, ‘Humor and Philosophy’, on Plato’s critique of humour actually going beyond Aristotle’s objections to it, 306; Carroll, Humour, 7; Chao and Westbrook, ‘Introduction’, 1, 10–11. 20  Jazdzewska, ‘Laughter in Plato’s and Xenophon’s Symposia’, 201. 21  Plato, Philebus, 48–50; Jazdzewska, ‘Laughter in Plato’s and Xenophon’s Symposia’, 191–2.

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to the text (1128a34).22 In what is actually purported to be a historical survey, Amy Carrell tells us that comedy is Aristotle’s term for humour. Clearly, we have ways of making him humorous.23 Thus Attic comedy is misunderstood in being conflated with a putatively more general phenomenon. Aristotle’s Rhetoric elliptically discussed jests, buffoonery, the ridiculous and irony, and referred to a lost passage in the Poetics for further discussion.24 What survives from the Poetics (mainly 1449–1450) is concerned principally with distinguishing the specifically dramatic forms of comedy and tragedy, both modes of poetic imitation derived from religious festivals. Aristotle’s attention to the provocation of laughter in comedy was to the ridiculous. This he called a type of ugliness. Responsive laughter, ridicule of those on the stage, was recognition of a failing. As he states, it was to treat people as worse than ourselves. It was an understanding that made comedy close to what the Romans would call satire, and implicitly comedy was thus given the ethical purpose and rationalization of isolating and demeaning the ugly. It is little wonder that Aristophanic comedy is considered satiric. But for Aristotle’s conception of comedy, no notion of humour was really required. That is, comedy did not begin as an expression of humour but, as I shall outline, would prove vital in the formation of a concept of it. There remained, however, later understandings of comedy that are independent of humour.25 Nevertheless, scattered remarks in Rhetoric, Poetics and Nicomachean Ethics have been enough to take Aristotle as providing the archetype of the superiority theory of humour, together with hints of other major theories of incongruity and release. These are sometimes recognized as complementary,26 and so it is not surprising that they might seem variously suggested by Aristotle. For Lisa Perks, all the major conceptions of humour

22  Aristotle, Ethica Nicomachea, trans. Ross, 1128a–1128b; most recently, see also Eagleton, Humour, 80, 94; Chao and Westbrook, ‘Introduction’, quoting Aristotle as referring to ‘humour’, 10–11, rely on the translation of Roger Crisp (Cambridge University Press, 2000); cf. the Rackham translation that manages perfectly well without humour. 23  Carrell, ‘Historical Views of Humor’, also quotes him as discussing satire, 306. 24  Aristotle, Rhetoric, 1419b–1420. 25  Dante’s Commedia is a comedy because it is a narrative of redemption; on George Farquhar’s almost humourless conception of comedy, see sect. III. 26  Raskin, Semantic Mechanisms, 40; Attardo, Linguistic Theories, 46–9, recognizing them to be modern.

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are explicit in Plato and Aristotle, so modern scholars might learn to combine them as flexibly as they did.27 Each theory has also been given a later, though not necessarily more plausible, founding father. Like Greek, Latin had no direct word for the modern humour, but had a vocabulary with affinities to what in English is now subsumed by that portmanteau term. Umor referred to dampness and moisture, but as in Greek, the crucial notion, usually with the same associations of hostility, was risus (laughter). In its ambit are found facetia (jest or wit), hilaritas (cheerfulness or merriment) and sometimes the Greek loan words, comedia and ironia. This gathering of terms has proved encouragement enough to treat risus as an expression of humour. Yet both Cicero and Quintilian need creative paraphrase or modernizing translation for them to be accommodated to any theory of humour, for each remained tied to Platonic and Aristotelian concerns, explicating the use and misuse of laughter in persuasion or dramatic performance. Each assumed it to have an aggressive function requiring justification and decorum or urbanitas in its stimulation, and aware that its provocation involved some deviation from the expected. Latin terms such as hilaritas and facetia were used by them almost incidentally.28 Thus the awkwardness of Attardo’s assertion that Quintilian provides the first coherent treatise of humour, though it was not actually about humour. Even for this ambiguous accolade Quintilian’s discussion of risus has first to be rendered ‘humor’.29 Later commentators on Aristotle’s Poetics such as Giangiorgio Trissino, whom Attardo helpfully cites and quotes, exhibit no more than intimations of what we call humour in dealing with laughter, its causes and the comedic stage.30 To translate them as referring to humour is to create a theoretical focus of attention from something close to thin air. It also sits ill with Attardo’s acceptance that laughter and humour are actually distinct. 27  Attardo, Linguistic Theories of Humour, 19–25; Billig, Laughter and Ridicule, 5, for the three great theories of humour: superiority, incongruity and release; Morreall ed., The Philosophy of Laughter and Humor; Taking Humor Seriously, sets them out in chronological order; Perks, ‘Ancient Roots of Humor Theory’, 119–32; see also Chao and Westbrook, ‘Introduction’, 1. 28  Cicero, De oratore, Bk 2, sect. 58, 235–7; Quintilian, Institutia oratia, Bk 6, chap. 3; Perks, ‘Ancient Roots of Humour Theory’, for persistent paraphrases importing humour into the texts. 29  Attardo, Linguistic Theories, 29–30; Linguistics of Humor, 19; Waisanen, ‘A Funny Thing Happened’, 29–52, is not so reflective. 30  Trissino, Le Sei divisione della poetica, Sesta, 126–7.

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In the following chapter I shall outline the significance of such genealogical fabrications in the history of theorizing humour, for they help explain otherwise untenable articles of faith. In the meantime, if philosophers like Aristotle, Cicero and later even Hobbes (putatively the superiority theorist of humour par excellence) never mentioned humour, we need to reconsider previous understandings of laughter, and the stages at which humour gradually takes on the sort of modern conceptual functions that make the very idea of having a sense of humour an expressed possibility.

II Presupposing the universality of humour is, then, a condition for falsifying the record, and requires bypassing more than two millennia of reflection that treated the complexities of laughter differently. There were three principal strands to this, but I need to concentrate on outlining the first. This concerns the denigration constitutive of ‘superiority theory’, sometimes styled aggression, hostility or disparagement theory. It roughly corresponds to Berlyne’s laughter of triumph and scorn, and is what I shall call rhetorical laughter, for although it extended beyond accounts of persuasion it is in rhetorical theory that it is most discussed, and in political and religious rhetoric that it is persistently evidenced. Expressed at its simplest, such laughter helped unify an audience with the speaker by subjecting others to ridicule, isolating victims as a means to some persuasive or socially consolidating end, and in cultures like that of ancient Greece exhibiting acute sensitivity to shame, laughter was a powerful weapon of control or exclusion. As I have noted, much of its vocabulary was decidedly negative.31 Consequently, laughter might indicate argumentative success, but for centuries it was regarded with ambivalence or outright hostility. It would come to be associated with sin, folly, licentiousness and devilry.32 This ethos of denigration was effectively personified in Democritus and (especially as elaborated by Lucian) Demonax, the laughing philosophers—brutal and unsympathetic castigators of human folly.33 Heraclitus, 31  Halliwell, ‘The Uses of Laughter in Greek Culture’, 286–9; Zekavat, Satire, Humour, for a survey of the issues of identity formation. 32  See for example, Quintilian, Institutio, Bk 6, chap. 3, 7; Ghose, Shakespeare and Laughter, 1, 27–8. 33  Curtis, ‘From Sir Thomas More to Robert Burton’, 93, 90–112.

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who wept in sympathy for humanity, provided the crucial counterpoint. Michel de Montaigne (1533–92) would popularize this long-standing topos of laughter or tears for the human condition. It did little to palliate laughter’s reputation. Montaigne’s preference for the disposition of Democritus, his scornful humeur, was precisely because laughing is ­disdainful and rightly damning, ‘we laugh at the worthless [sans prix]’.34 Sir Thomas Browne (1605–82) was less severe, taking Democritus as trying to ‘laugh the times into goodness’, but thought him ‘as deeply hypochondric’ as the bewailing Heraclitus.35 Implicitly this assessment assumed a mean between the two reactions, and indeed, Aristotle had held that laughter could find an acceptable if precarious place between boorishness and buffoonery. So, from antiquity, what Rosen refers to as a fundamental cause of anxiety in Greco-Roman culture had been variously subject to the uncertain control of decorum.36 Plato, recognizing that it might have some benefit, had sought to restrict laughter to fit activities in his late dialogue, The Laws, and the mythic satyrs had provided suitable risible targets decorating Attic domestic pottery. Stephen Halliwell has stressed the importance in Greece of festive occasions on which playful laughter was shared and with luck contained.37 The theatre staging the provocation of largely rhetorical laughter was one such place of lasting importance; but so too was the assembly. The symposium with its eating and drinking was an unreliable one,38 and, according to Plutarch, the Spartan mess hall was another where youngsters went to be toughened up by insult and ridicule. Effectively it was bullying as a form of educative play.39 The very predication of some laughter as play, or a game (in one sense of παιδια), at once recognized aggressive norms and 34  Montaigne, ‘Of Democritus and Heraclitus’, Essays, 221; the French specifically refers to mocking here, not laughing, but the context makes clear that laughter is mockery. 35  Browne, Religio medici, 164. 36  Rosen, ‘Laughter’, 458; Jazdzewska, ‘Laughter in Plato’s and Xenophon’s Symposia’, 187; Aristotle, Ethica Nichomachaea, 1128a10–1128b10; Cicero, De oratore, Bk 2, sect. 58, 237–8; Parvulescu, Laughter, 29–57, following Norbert Elias; Billig, Laughter and Ridicule, 189–94; Halliwell, ‘The Uses of Laughter in Greek Culture’, 283–5. 37  The depiction of risible satyrs constitutes a large part of what Mitchell discusses as vase-­ painting humour: Greek Vase-Painting; see also Naas, ‘Plato and the Spectacle of Laughter’, at length; Halliwell, ‘The Uses of Laughter in Greek Culture’, 285, 290–1. 38  Jazdzewska, ‘Laughter in Plato’s and Xenophon’s Symposia’, 187–207, contrasting Plato and Xenophon in their attitudes to laughter. 39  Plutarch (46–119 ce?), Parallel Lives, Lycurgus, sect. 12, 237–41; Rosen, ‘Laughter’, for the uncertain restraint of the symposium.

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modified or rationalized them.40 As Jazdzewska has illustrated from Plutarch’s Convivium, the rhetorical functions of laughter could extend to mitigating or disguising hostility, sometimes signalling a potentially ­offensive comment.41 It is a possibility that further complicates the niceties of laughter and its control. Not surprisingly, Cicero and Quintilian had both given much attention to the contours of oratorical propriety as conditions for persuasive effect in a law court or assembly. Centuries later, the bedroom could also be a safe zone. Browne would have no qualms about laughing himself awake in the privacy of his bedchamber after the jests and conceits imagined within the confines of his own dreamed comedies.42 Yet even when justified, wrote George Puttenham in the sixteenth century, there remained ‘undecencie’ in laughing. The Christian emperor Philippus Arabicus (204–49), he adds, was rightly rebuked by his son for doing so in public.43 The witnessed laugh of an emperor could forewarn of tyranny. No man, Samuel Butler stated, fully laughs without barring his teeth. Jesus was commonly held never to have laughed. He was a pattern for a theologically grounded hostility to laughter among those deemed puritans, with one consequence that their opponents would resort to the provocation of laughter in derisive criticism.44 In religious iconography Jesus’ sadness is persistently reinforced, although, if only once for Leonardo (?), he is a chuckling infant, while Mary smiles enigmatically.45 Indeed, it is because we take for granted a prior or underlying sense of humour that we can treat laughing and smiling as closely aligned expressions of it. Lacking that presumption, smiling, like weeping, could provide a contrast.46 Some sort of oppositional relationship between the two seems implicit in Antonio’s reflection (Merchant of Venice, act 1, sc.2) that while 40  Παιδια and its cognate forms were much associated with the young and their education. To translate playful laughter as a play frame for humour is thus suggestive but a little forced. 41  Jazdzewska, ‘Plutarch’s Convivium’, 75, 79. 42  Browne, Religio medici, 193. 43  Puttenham, The Arte of English Poesie (1589), 291; the Emperor may not have formally converted; Samuel Butler, quoted in Farley Hills, The Benevolence of Laughter, 8. 44  Basu, ‘Levelling Laughter’, 95–113. 45  The recently attributed terracotta sculpture ca. 1465 is in the Victoria and Albert Museum, London; Nel, ‘He Who Laughs Last’, 4–6, on the contrast between the Synoptic Gospels and Gnostic texts. 46  For a discussion of the differences, Parvulescu, Laughter, 23–5; Pollio, ‘Notes towards a Field Theory’, 222; Trouvain and Truong, ‘Laughter’, 341; Attardo, Linguistics of Humor, raises a passing doubt about the relationship, but regards it as beyond the scope of a study of humour (17–18).

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some laugh ‘like parrots at a bag-piper’ others of ‘vinegar aspect’ will ‘not show their teeth in way of a smile’, no matter how laughable a jest may be (act 1, sc.1). Explicitly, and sharing persistent attitudes linking laughter to vulgarity, Lord Chesterfield (1694–1763) asserted that smiling evidenced love, laughter disdain. It was ‘illiberal and ill-bred’. A gentleman never laughed, for ‘it is the characteristic of folly’ fit for the mob.47 Certainly, amusements stimulating smiling and delight were commended from antiquity onwards. A reader, as Thomas Wilson argued, is rapidly wearied if not delighted.48 Again, however, laughter was apt to provide a negative contrast. For Sir Philip Sidney, it was close to being a contrary: ‘Delight hath joy in it’, laughter was only ‘scornful tickling’, often cruel, unfitting and sometimes painful; rarely do we hear of ‘delightful laughter’.49 Its associations with joy and simple merriment, central to what we have come to call humour are, then, the exception, not the norm. To be sure, Shakespeare has Titania in A Midsummer Night’s Dream remember joyous laughter at sails billowed by the wanton wind (act 2, sc. 1). To illustrate his unaffected nature, Don John says in Much Ado about Nothing (act 2, sc. 1) that he laughs when he is merry, but such associations are rare and Don John is a villain, made merry by villainy. Shakespeare’s Falstaff, for example, is now largely carried on wafts of benign laughter. Since the early twentieth century he has been depicted as ‘simply and naturally unmoral’, an English Bacchus of ‘broad rollicking humour’, of blissful rejoicing humour celebrating freedom.50 It is a view familiar from stage and scholarship alike.51 Certainly he carries traces of a festive fool voicing a comic inversion of important themes, but innocent good humour is a long way from Shakespeare’s hulk of riot and iniquity.52 It is unlikely that Shakespeare would have expected much sympathy for 47  Quentin Skinner has thoroughly explored this theme; see for example, ‘Why Laughing Mattered in the Renaissance’, 418–47; ‘Hobbes and the Classical Theory of Laughter’, 114–76, on Lord Chesterfield, 150, 174; see also Buckley, The Morality of Laughter, 54, quoting Chesterfield (letter dated 9 March 1748) at length; Chesterfield, Letters, 4, 1, cxii, p. 303. 48  Thomas Wilson (1525–81), The Art of Rhetoric, cited in Mack, Elizabethan Rhetoric, 84. 49  Sidney (1554–86), An Apology for Poetry (1595), 47–8. 50  Mabie, Shakespeare, 237–8; Andrew Bradley, The Rejection of Falstaff (1902) discussed by Dover Wilson, Fortunes of Falstaff, 10–14. 51  Rackin, Stages of History, 38–42; Tave, The Amiable Humorist, for more detail; cf. Cazamian, Development of English Humour, 41. 52  Dover Wilson, The Fortunes of Falstaff, 17–35; cf. Ghose, Shakespeare and Laughter, 149, 154–60; Derrin, ‘Comic Character’, 139–41, 146–7.

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Falstaff when the fat man was rebuffed by young King Henry: ‘I know thee not, old man. / Fall to thy prayers’ (Henry IV Pt 2, act 5, sc. 5); even less that the icy rejection indicated any authorial ambivalence about the new monarch.53 To have embraced Falstaff would have marked complicity in corruption and incipient tyranny, as Shakespeare makes abundantly clear.54 Corbyn Morris (1710–69), writing of wit and humour in the mid-­ eighteenth century, understood the point well enough. Our pleasure in Falstaff is distinct from Shakespeare’s character, for we can overlook the moral turpitude essential to his creation.55 Only his gaiety, wrote Dr Johnson, makes Falstaff’s malignant and contemptible licentiousness acceptable on stage.56 The confusion of our enjoyment of a riotous figure with historicity is aided by overlooking the altered resonances of laughter, and this in turn blunts the dramatic point of Falstaff’s banishment. It announces the emergence of heroic virtue from the dubious polarities of Eastcheap and the court. The confusions involved in the domestication of Falstaff were common from the late eighteenth century, and the transformed figure became a vehicle for the valorization of benign humour and benevolent laughter by the early nineteenth.57 Johnson’s sense of a mitigating mirth intimates what was to come. At the end we have Bradley’s conversion of malignant licentiousness into the celebratory laughter of liberty. We might then, better turn to other sources of delight in search of humour than to laughter that floated over time largely under a cloud. Yet the fundamental rationale of denigration gave rhetorical laughter instrumental salience as a weapon in satire, political discourse and religious polemic from antiquity onwards. So, vitriolic mirth and jests were casuistically justified in the apologia for the seven Marprelate tracts (1588–89) as necessities in a war against the evils of episcopacy, and as part of a  Ghose, Shakespeare and Laughter, 154.  On hearing of Henry’s ascent to the crown (Henry IV 2, act 5. sc. 4), Falstaff behaves in a quintessentially tyrannous way. He expects to be able to do as he pleases, and is happy to steal horses to get more quickly to the king so that his own effective reign will start the sooner. Rejoicing in cronyism, he is merry at the thought of revenge upon the Chief Justice, whose courageous integrity Henry will reward, so demonstrating his own fitness for office. The contrasts could hardly be more pointed (cf. also Cloten’s merriness at the thought of revenge in Cymbeline). 55  Morris, An Essay, 25–7, 33–4. 56  Dover Wilson, Fortunes of Falstaff, 12. 57  Tave, Amiable Humorist, 118–37. 53 54

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scaturient response, London wits were mobilized to retaliate in kind.58 During the Civil War period the Leveller Richard Overton would echo Marprelate targeting oppressive priests in general through his ‘Comick and … Satyrical stile’.59 Overall, laughter might be at once both unsavoury and an irresistible critical reaction to some aspect of the world. ‘To laugh, were want of Goodness and of Grace, / And to be grave exceeds all Pow’r of Face.’60 Second, the most obvious aspect of laughter is its often mysterious and wayward physicality that indeed can exceed ‘all Pow’r of Face’, bringing forth air and noise, a ‘corporeal involuntary affection’.61 It is at the ‘interface of biology and culture’ and has widely been accepted as physically beneficial.62 But an unhealthy side to it was also acknowledged. In antiquity, laughter could be taken to indicate insanity. It could be given variable meaning in the face of death and disease. It might ridicule the afflicted, or the affliction itself to diminish suffering, hence perhaps its reverberations around Socrates’ death cell.63 Rarely, what is now regarded as the neurological disorder of pathological laughter could occasion death. Both Chrysippus (206 bce) and Pietro Aretino (1492–1556) were held to have died from a surfeit of laughter. Predominantly, however, it was physical benefit that attracted attention. Robert Burton (The Anatomy of Melancholy, 1621) would treat laughter as a remedy for melancholia. This curative potential placed laughter at odds with its animadverted rhetorical functions, and provides some grounding for the nexus of laughter and what we now call humour. What aided health could be joyous and unabashed. The French physician Laurent Joubert was apparently the first to explore the physical benefits of laughter in his Traité du ris (1579), but it is with another physician, François Rabelais (ca. 1494–1553) with whom beneficial laughter is more famously associated. Although writing what was regarded as satire, he looked beyond denigration.64 His readers should 58  Ghose, Shakespeare and Laughter, 145–8; more generally, Murray, ‘Dissolving into Laughter’, 27–47; Morton, ‘Laughter as Polemical Act’, 107–32. 59  William Walwyn (1649), quoted in Basu, ‘Levelling Laughter’, 112–13. 60  Pope, Epistle to Dr Arbuthnot, lines 35–6. 61  Preston, Essay on Ridicule, 70–1. 62  Kozintsev, The Mirror of Laughter, 80. 63  Kazantzidis and Tsoumpra, ‘Morbid Laughter’, 273–97; Jazdzewska, ‘Laughter in Plato and Xenaphon’s Symposia’, 201. 64  Urquhart and Matteux, Works of F. Rabelais, 1, xxvii, cxxix-cxxxij; Williams, ‘Embodied Laughter’, 298–308; Rayfield, ‘Rewriting Laughter’, 80–2.

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regard laughter as a natural antidote to sorrow. The text, as Alice Williams puts it, could be a ‘therapeutic artefact’.65 But, reader be warned, Rabelais’s early translator Thomas Urquart also allegedly died of laughter on hearing that Charles II had been put back on the throne in 1660. Faith in ­laughter’s benefits was widespread, hence also a title for expanding volumes of facetiae during the seventeenth and eighteenth centuries: Laugh and be fat. Or, an antidote against melancholy.66 Early modern anatomy paid more balanced attention to muscular and pulmonary involvement and what might be inferred from them about the body’s functioning.67 Laughter was also recognized to be a reaction of spontaneous release, as when old friends unexpectedly meet, or babies chuckle.68 Third, by extension, the release was sometimes seen as also socially valuable, having a place in the ritual calendar—the slender basis for Bakhtin’s theory of the carnivalesque inversion of, or escape from, oppression. Comedy had originated in religious festivals, and the attention to fit occasions and locations for laughter in ancient Greece has already been noted. A concern with controlling laughter’s aggression persisted from Rome through to medieval Christendom. Parodic ecclesiastical and secular ceremonies survived as occasions for mockery and laughter for many generations, but to what end, if there was any singular end over such a long span of time, is another matter. Some customs seem to have been specific to élite circles, while others may have survived only because they dwindled into occasions for having fun, and might stimulate community cohesion and trade.69 Certainly, however, the theatre remained, as it had been in antiquity a location in which the laughter might be contained and relished, to the extent that attention to the commedia del arte or the theatrical history of England and France can give a disproportionate emphasis to festive laughter per se.70 Yet in this context it is worth distinguishing laughter in the plays from the sort of laughter they might have occasioned in performance. We know little about the latter, certainly not enough to merge both into evidence of one sort of, or function for, laughter.  Williams, ‘Embodied Laughter’, 305–6.  Anon., Laugh and be fat, 1700; the expression was in use throughout the century. 67  John Bulwer, Pathomyotomia, 104–26; Ghose, Shakespeare and Laughter, 52–6; Rayfield, ‘Rewriting Laughter’, 82–3. 68  Castelveltro, Poetica d’Aristotele, pt 2, pp. 34b–62. 69  Malcolm, Origins of English Nonsense, 118–20; Roud, The English Year, 237, 298–300; Hole, English Custom, 30, 83. 70  Ghose, Shakespeare and Laughter, at length. 65 66

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Nevertheless, as I shall outline below, the English stage was a crucible for the formation of an initial conception of humour, forged of comedy and laughter. In the meantime, Geoffrey Chaucer can bring together these mingled themes of laughter in the absence of a concept of humour. In the Canterbury Tales (1387–1400) he creates a pilgrimage as a moving space for moments of festive laughter intended to foster the physical and spiritual well-being of being merry,71 but the laughter provoked is largely rhetorical, isolating fictive victims to be ridiculed. ‘The Miller’s Tale’, told by a pilgrim in his cups, is the obvious case: it is a comedy in which an elderly carpenter is cuckolded by his young wife, Alison, and her lover Nicholas, and in which her surplus admirer Absolon is crudely humiliated. It is typical of what would later be seen as Chaucerian humour. But Chaucer’s Reeve, who had been a carpenter, is unimpressed by the tale and calls it ‘ribaudye’, using the recent French loan word as an abstract noun to refer to the ‘nice cas’ at which other ‘folk hadde laughen’.72 In revenge he provides more of the same in which the victim is a dishonest miller. Even passing expressions, such as The Wife of Bath’s recollection of once being as ‘joly as a pye’, seem to resonate with humour.73 Yet it is only later that ribald would become an adjective qualifying the humour for which Chaucer is now renowned, and words like jolly and merry become expressions of it. In Middle English also, cheer might refer to any mood or countenance, with Chaucer, for example, referring variously to ‘angry’, ‘pitous’, ‘drery’ and ‘ful trouble cheere’.74 Only later with its cognates cheery and cheerful would it become as firmly associated with humour as the jollity of a pie. Thus far, then, I have outlined the predominant attitudes to laughter that were established and refined from antiquity in European society. Sometimes tensile and discordant, sometimes harmonious, they lacked a cohering concept of humour. To assimilate them to one, to make them expressive of it is certainly question-begging, and at the least a remarkably simplistic abridgment of complicated and often obscure patterns of cultural practice. A fortiori, if humour is taken to be a positive phenomenon  Maddern, ‘It is full Merry in Heaven’”, 21–38, see Chap. 4.  Chaucer ‘Reeve’s Prologue’, Canterbury Tales, lines 3866, 3855, 55; ‘Introduction’ to ‘The Pardoner’s Tale’, line 324, 148. 73  Chaucer, Canterbury Tales, ‘Wife of Bath’s Prologue’, line 456, 80. 74  Chaucer, Canterbury Tales, ‘Summoner’s Tale’, line 2158, 98; ‘Clerk’s Tale’, line 141, 102; lines 514, 465, 106. 71 72

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to be celebrated—for some humour theorists it is almost by definition benign75—then it would seem imperative not to project a prior concept of humour that laughter expresses, or simply conflate the two. Overall, however, during the later seventeenth century, increasingly explicit attention was paid to innocent merriment. Importantly, however, this was sometimes independent of the possible contaminations with laughter itself.76 The word humour began to be used in conjunction with jollity, cheerfulness, jesting or newer coinages such as raillery and banter; and spasmodically, then commonly, it became associated with laughter as humour acquired the general and accommodating range it now enjoys. In this flow of semantic change, laughter’s connotations were also altered. The general shape of these shifts in usage and concept formation may be familiar but still need some unravelling. Starting at a mid-point is convenient.77

III In an essay originally published in 1709, the Earl of Shaftsbury (1671–1713) treated raillery as a kind of humour, yet did so with a casualness suggesting that the usage was familiar.78 So too, his friend Joseph Addison (1672–1719): humour is diverse and like wit difficult to define being best understood through contrast; but regardless of its guise, humour makes us laugh. He is careful, however, to differentiate a socially acceptable true from a false humour. The distinction immediately modifies any disapproval of laughter. True humour appears serious yet makes us laugh, and false humour always laughs while those around are serious. He cites Poet Laureate Thomas Shadwell (1642–92) who has ‘an empty Rake, in one of his plays … surprised to hear one say that breaking of Windows was not Humour’.79 The immediate issue is how and why this expanded meaning of humour embracing some laughter might have come about, and why the change appears to have originated in England.

75  Drever and Wallerstein, Dictionary of Psychology, 123; for a measured historical critique of benign violation theory, Derrin ‘Comic Character’, 133–50. 76  Straight, The Rule of Rejoycing, 2, 24–5. 77  See, for example, Wickberg, The Senses of Humor, at length. 78  Ashley Cooper, Sensus communis, in Characteristicks, 1. sect. 1, 40–1. 79  Addison, The Spectator, 35, 10 April 1711, 128–31; this could be a reference to William Wycherley’s The Plain Dealer (1676), act 5, sc. 2.

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We are taken to the fate of humoral medical theory and what Louis Cazamian called one of the most fascinating transformations in the history of language.80 Familiar as this is, the chronology remains imprecise. Theories of the bodily humours (blood, yellow and black bile and phlegm) date from antiquity in Greek, Latin and Arabic works, and vernacular reference to the humours as giving rise to specific dispositions proved longstanding. Chaucer was certainly familiar with some medical and humoral theory. It informs The Book of the Duchess and in ‘The Knight’s Tale’, for example, he casually refers to ‘humour malencolik’.81 By the sixteenth and early seventeenth centuries the humours are made common currency in popular books on herbal lore and medicine. They helped vulgarize the more cautious use of humoral theory in professional medical texts in which it was held that humoral balance provided only some of the explanatory possibilities for any given disposition. Girolamo Cardano (1501–76) calculated that there were thousands of explanatory variables. Sanctorius Sanctorius (ca. 1600) (mis)calculated that there were some 80,084 equiprobable combinations of explanatory potential.82 In the light of such conclusions, professional reliance on humoral theory by the early modern era may have been less than vernacular references to the humours might suggest. Nevertheless, in the popular writings of a number of European languages, humoral theory had a lively independence resulting in diverging, but sometimes conjoined, oversimplifications. The fluidity of the humours was apt to flow into the putative consequences of mood and disposition. When Montaigne contrasted the humours of Democritus and Heraclitus, he was averting the character or philosophical persona of each in giving a consistent reaction to the human condition. In contrast, humours could also designate instability of mood, hence George Chapman’s An Humerous Dayes Myrth (1597, 1599), a work that certainly associates humour with comedy and mirth, but the humour is mood, character and, initially the liquid heavy in the sky.83 Ben Jonson’s comedies Everyman in and out of his Humour (1599, 1600) are in the same idiom, explorations of mood and dominating disposition under the  Cazamian, Development of English Humour, 160.  Chaucer, Canterbury Tales, line 1375, 30. 82  Maclean, Logic, Signs and Nature, 175–6, n.120 for the miscalculations, 241–2; the humours are quite marginal to Maclean’s comprehensive study of Renaissance Latin medical theory. 83  Chapman, A Pleasant Comedy. 80 81

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rubric of the humours, quite distinct from any ad hoc eccentricity that we might find amusing.84 The word humour is also scattered throughout Shakespeare’s work. As a verb, its meaning was as it remains—to ­accommodate the foibles or character of another. As a noun, it rarely refers directly to liquid, occasionally to merriment. Predominately, however, it specifies mood, less often a fixed disposition; sometimes it may point to either, as when Brutus asks rhetorically, ‘must I stand and crouch under your testy humour?’ (Julius Caesar, act 4, sc. 3). In Cymbeline Belarius says of Cloten that ‘his humour was nothing but mutation’, though from bad to worse (act 4, sc.2). By extension, however, humour signifying dispositional stability aligns it with the unavoidable or incontrovertible nature of something, as in Nym’s favoured phrase in both Henry V and The Merry Wives of Windsor, ‘there’s the humour of it’. The partially comic character of Nym is much given to the word humour. But although the word is sometimes found in the ambit of what we see as humour, Shakespeare’s usage is at one with that of his contemporaries in perpetuating and tumbling together the vernacular remains of humoral theory on the stage. Sir Thomas Browne, as a professional physician, may have been less reliant on it in his daily round, but he too captures the double sense of humours still in play by referring to the proper humours of the multitude, ‘that is, their fits of folly and madness’.85 Shadwell, in his preface to The Humorists, would also blend the different senses, echoing Jonson by calling humours biases of the mind, one of which could be capriciousness. The play also illustrates the predominant meaning of humour’s cognate, humourist. Throughout early modernity, it was central to rhetorical laughter, as it designated an object of derision; hence John Donne’s dismissal of the ‘motly humourist’ in his first Satyre.86 It had long been accepted that there were limits to the licit scope of derision. It was held to be pointless to ridicule those whose condition was inescapable, or who were irredeemably evil, and so there could be an implicit casuistic justification for derision in censure and reform. Even in comedy amusement could be subordinated to a claimed moral responsibility in provoking laughter but 84  The Quarto title pages indicate original performances in 1598. Both were revised for the Folio edition of Jonson’s works in 1616; Attardo, Linguistics of Humor, 19 for Jonson’s use being both modern (no evidence is given) and tied to humoral theory as well. 85  Browne, Religio medici, 164. 86  Shadwell, The Humourists, ‘Preface’; Donne, ‘Satyre I’, in Poems, 129; Butler, ‘The Humourist’.

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only at fitting targets.87 It was the incubus of Aristotelian justification that could make comedy akin to satire. That people might be in or of a good humour places the potentially ambiguous word on the cusp of its modern relationship with jollity. A malleable term was open to further employment. Little more was needed than a casual collapse of a cause (mood or disposition) into its putative effect to give us something of the modern meaning. There is an early indication of a usage in Italian with the Accademia degli Umoristi, established in Rome in 1603. It was one of a number of clubs for literati (such as the Lunatici and Estravaganti) self-consciously announcing their own eccentricity.88 John Evelyn (1620–1706) noted its formalized oddities but emphasized its value in maintaining the purity of the language.89 It also had an emphasis on burlesque suggestive of humour’s later meanings. Italian (Tuscan) had been fashionable in England from the sixteenth century, and it is possible that humour and its cognates had some similarities of conceptual expansion in both languages. Robert Escarpit also notes a fugitive French distinction (1645) between humeur and l’esprit (wit), from which apparently nothing came.90 It is, then, on English vocabulary that I shall concentrate, in considering the empirical grounding for the putative universality of humour. From the late sixteenth century, English theatre, as noted, was a locus for dramatizing humoral types and fickle conduct; and in advertising uncertain shifts in humour’s meaning, it provided an institutional context for terms that were gradually being found in sufficient proximity to give a modern if limited concept of humour. William Cavendish (1593–1676) penned a play sketch (ca. 1655–60) that conjoined humour and merriment, though the humour was the consistent disposition of an otherwise protean rogue.91 His theatrically innovative The Humorous Lovers (1667) also illustrates the concentration of possibilities. It displays the risible humour of those in love, or who are victims of a ‘loving humour’—a humour with its own language, sometimes exhibiting ‘a touch of English’.92 All references to laughter are to deriding those in love. Yet, the almost  Cicero, De oratore, Bk 2, sect. 58, 237; Farquhar, Discourse Upon Comedy, 20–3.  Escarpit, L’Humor, 18. 89  Evelyn, Diaries, 1, 17 February 1645; his later reference to Sir Edward Baynton as a ‘humorous old knight’ (16 July 1654) probably only means odd. 90  Escarpit, L’Humour, 19. 91  Cavendish, A Pleasante and Merrye Humor off a Roge. 92  Cavendish, Humorous Lovers, 17, 12. 87 88

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farcical comedy in which one character, a ‘walking pyramid’, moves only under a growing mountain of clothes and blankets, makes the title redolent of humour as it was probably already beginning to be understood.93 Samuel Pepys (1633–1703), who blamed Cavendish’s wife Margaret for this silliest of plays, mostly uses the word humour in the conventional ways. It crops up more than 150 times in the Diary, predominantly referring to mood, but indicating disposition or character type some thirty times. Context does not always allow a clear distinction: ‘I do love the humour of the jade very well.’94 Rarely there is a loose medical reference, as when his eye is full of humour.95 This pattern of usage is much like that found in Shakespeare’s corpus. Occasionally, however, in recording theatrical performances, there is a further, prescient understanding of the word. The casual informality of Pepys’s style is another indication that the newer usage was already more widely spread.96 The English Monsieur is said to have ‘much mirth in it as to that particular humour’, and on an earlier staging he had found it ‘very witty’. Humour as cause has become an effect (mirth) and humour is at least associated with wit. Another play, dismissed as tedious, nevertheless has ‘many good humours in it’—where humours might just mean types of character.97 Most significant is his appreciation of Heywood’s Love’s Mistress (1640). He commended its ‘good humours’ by which he meant the range of comedic tricks and tropes that delighted him. Not least was ‘a good jeer’ (jest) that treated the Trojan myth as ‘a common country tale’.98 So, a humour is close to meaning a burlesque, and its associations are with studied performance not physiological imbalance. ‘Among other humours’, he later wrote, were verses by Mr Evelyn that for their apt play on ‘may and can … did make us all die almost with laughing’.99 ‘Among other humours’ might indicate that Pepys is using humour as a general term for whatever 93  Cavendish, Humorous Lovers, 28, 17 for the cynical Col. Boldman, a natural philosopher who claims to have squared the circle, becoming the butt of his own wit in falling for a widow; how far this is a joke at Hobbes’s expense is unclear. He had been rumoured to be getting married in 1654; see Correspondence, vol. 1, letter 67, 187, 189. 94  Pepys, Diary, March 7, 1666/7. 95  Pepys, Diary, May 23, 1666. 96  The whole work was written in Thomas Sheldon’s shorthand (tachygraphy), and the system printed in 1645 was designed for university students and became popular. Pepys’s use of it would have been for speed and convenience more than secrecy and so it is a reasonable indication of usage he could take for granted. 97  Pepys, Diary, 8 Dec. 1668, 7 April 1666; 2 May 1668. 98  Pepys, Diary, 2 March 1660/1. 99  Pepys, Diary, 10 Sept. 1665; Evelyn’s own Diary has no entry for the date.

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might amuse, but the possibility is as fleeting as the manic laughter of friends on a joyous night in the plague year. What is more certain is that here he is using humour as virtually synonymous with jest or wit. Shortly after, John Dryden (1631–1700), who had revised Cavendish’s Humorous Lovers for publication in 1677, proved determined to appropriate wit at the expense of humour in his disputes with Shadwell, Dryden’s successor as poet laureate. Dryden denied Shadwell even acquaintance with wit, tarring him with the brush of dull senselessness, and humour as a bias of the mind, which is tinted with vulgarity.100 Margaret Cavendish, however, in her eulogistic account of her ‘thrice noble’ husband twice commended his plays specifically for their wit, humour and satire. She draws no clear difference between these qualities but implicitly contradicts any exclusive association of humour with the lower orders.101 She also occasionally seems to distinguish humour from disposition. In sum, by the mid-seventeenth century, if not earlier, a subordinate meaning for humour was being established by its variable proximity to words like wit, merriment, mirth, jest and jeer. Nevertheless, it is not conceptually prominent and crucially it probably stops short of becoming a general classifier for such terms, so enabling them to function as the rough semantic field with which we are familiar. Laugh and be fat may be typical. Its subtitle at the end of the seventeenth century makes reference to comic intrigues and ‘Pleasant humours, Frolics, Fancies, Epigrams, Satyrs and Divertisements’, but it is unclear quite what the ‘humours’ are. The subtitles change and it is only in later editions, for example that of Salem 1799, that there is reference to ‘humourous jests &c’. The collocation, although indicating that not all jests were humorous, may have been because the newer meaning of humour and its cognates was not well established, at least in New England. The occasional use of ‘humour’ within the text remains true to the older meanings of disposition and mood.102 Indeed, in the seventeenth century, where we might now expect humour to be used, it can be striking by its absence.103 William Congreve  Dryden, Mac Fleckno, 238–43.  Margaret Cavendish, Life, 202, 155, 318. 102  Anon., Laugh and be fat, 1700, cf. 1799. 103  In portraying a number of characters, ‘Clown’, ‘City wit’, ‘Court wit’, ‘Buffoon’, and ‘Droll’, Samuel Butler uses the sorts of terms that would now be seen as exemplifying humour (repartee, jesting, laughing, merry-making) but does not use the word, except when discussing the ‘Humorist’ as laughable and almost lunatic; Characters 1612–1680; George Farquhar even discusses the nature of comedy by mentioning ‘wit and humour’ only once in passing, Discourse Upon Comedy, 27. 100 101

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(1670–1729) recognized that wit and humour were undifferentiated and that one problem with establishing any reliable new meaning for humour was that it was easily confused both with wit and wit’s opposite, folly. Nevertheless, he insisted, humour should be regarded as synonymous with what can be said pleasantly; it is thus accorded a greater generality than wit. The point, however, is lost as he reverted to writing of the older humours and of being in a given humour.104 Thus, to return to Shaftsbury: when only a few years later, he referred to raillery as a type of humour it was in the idiom passingly recognized by Congreve, possibly employed by Pepys, but with a greater discrimination and deliberation than for either. Humour, as Addison’s essay also illustrates, was finally becoming, in Lockean parlance, a sortal, an abstract term erratically subsuming a loosely related sector of the vocabulary: raillery, wit, comedy, jesting, jeering, facetiousness, pleasantness, mirth, drollery and irony. It might be a stretch to include the ribald and bawdy, so embracing Geoffrey Chaucer. Humour had become wider in its scope than Pepys’s term for the dramatic ploys of merriment or just another word for wit, and was assuming the general status that Congreve had briefly given to the much older notion of the pleasant. Francis Hutcheson (1694–1746) too would passingly use ‘pleasantry’ where we might use humour.105 Gradually, terms within the emerging field of humour, such as pleasant and facetious, would have their usages changed. Wit’s relationship to humour was long disputed (Chap. 4) and ridicule arguably tied more to wit, facilitating humour’s increasingly benign connotations during the later eighteenth century.106 Other words would become all but obsolescent or, like jeer, excluded from the range. It is only to be expected that even at the beginnings of such an accommodating generality, humour would need to be specified in negative and positive terms. Either way, in this elevation of status we have a precondition for humour to designate a broad area of study, although a good way short of being taken as a human faculty. Shaftsbury’s positive usage in the Characteristicks arose, however, not directly from the theatre, but from the importance he attached to the philosophic persona, a philosopher being of a good humour, of a 104  For a fine discussion, see Wickberg, ‘The Sense of Humor in American Culture, 1850–1960’, 103–10, 106; Congreve, An Essay Concerning Humour in Comedy (1695). 105  Hutcheson, Reflections, ‘Letter 2’. 106  Bricker, ‘Laughter and the Limits of Reform’, 164–5.

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questioning, undogmatic temperament. Ridicule, wit, raillery and satire as modes of humour were promoted as integral to establishing truth and maintaining virtue and sociability; humour was essential to rational or, as we might say, serious discussion—a view that is easily extended to political discourse in general.107 The enhanced standing that Shaftsbury accorded humour was even buttressed by reading it back into Aristotle, translating his commendation of derisive laughter in debate as humour—a precedent for Sir David Ross.108 Humour’s significance for Shaftsbury was augmented also by treating it as a sign of liberty. It is a refinement of Congreve’s conclusion that had illustrated the slippage between the old and the emerging meaning of the word humour. As Congreve had put it, following Sir William Temple, humour was almost of native growth because the English had greater liberty than other peoples and this allowed the expression of a wider range of humours, that is, types of character.109 Such people might well be designated humourists, those to be laughed at for their oddities and moral failings. George Farquhar elaborated in writing about comedy: just as England had a great mixture of peoples so it had a unique richness of humours, what he called ‘distempers’ to be counselled and corrected on the stage. Comedy was thus not an expression of but a remedy for humour, critique not celebration.110 The close relationship Shaftsbury made between humour and liberty arose from an older meaning of humour, but he attached it to the newer. Yet even at the end of the eighteenth century, for Mme De Staël the nexus of English eccentricity and humour remained intact; an originally censorious characterization became a compliment.111 The discussion of satire will largely be held over (Chaps. 6 and 7), although it is worth noting here that its being moved decisively into the ambit of humour is at one with the understanding of satire that has only  Rossing, ‘A Sense of Humor for Civic Life’.  Shaftsbury, Sensus Communis, Characteristicks, sect. 5, 48; Aristotle was endorsing an adage of Gorgias, Rhetoric, 1419b 7: jest at your opponent’s seriousness, treat seriously his jests; Amir, Humor and the Good Life in Modern Philosophy takes Shaftsbury’s implantation of humour into Greek as a rediscovery of Greek humour. 109  Ashley Cooper, Sensus communis, Characteristicks, 1, sects. 3–6, 42–52; for discussion see especially, Amir, Humor and the Good Life in Modern Philosophy, 11–30; also Grean, Shaftesbury’s Philosophy of Religion and Ethics, 120–32; Billig, Laughter and Ridicule, 75–82; Congreve, Concerning Humour; Tierney-Hynes, ‘The Humour of Humours’, 98–101. 110  Farquhar, Discourse Upon Comedy, 22. 111  Gifford, ‘Humour and the French Mind’, quoting Mme de De Staël, De la literature (1800), 537; Escarpit, L’Humour, 65–6. 107 108

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recently become dominant. Traditionally satire had been a matter of rebuke, and its associations with laughter as an expression of forensic pugnacity actually reinforced its severely censorious nature and exclusionary force.112 It was contiguity, of the sort indicated by Margaret Cavendish’s commendation for her husband’s plays, with their wit, humour and satire that indicates an increasing synchrony between satire and humour. Thus Swift would come to see the two as sometimes mutually compatible, some way from satire as a type of humour.113 Drawing on earlier discussions, Corbyn Morris (1710–79) provided precision for what by mid-century had come to be recognized as a closely and mutually dependent sector of the vocabulary. He is dismissive of Dryden, Addison and of Congreve, and of understanding by negative specification, a ‘Crochet’, a dress of darkness. His conception of wit echoes Locke and Hutcheson. It is elucidation by juxtaposition and a vital political virtue requiring surprise, not to amuse but to enlighten.114 Humour, however, refers only to the specific foibles of real people.115 In one way, then, humour remains close to the humours, and the humourist is a particular, despicable type, but in another we approach modern usage in what Morris calls the ‘man of humour’, one who can assume a ridiculous character, so having the self-consciousness necessary for what would be called a sense of humour. The point of raillery, he states, is to amuse, that of satire to scourge. It is both witty and severe, and thus is nothing to do with what we see as humour.116 In his attempts to fix meanings from confusion, Morris shows how we are still in a partially alien linguistic world, not just with regard to satire and humour. He hardly mentions laughter, although writing of amusement, merriment and delight. Within a few years, however, Lord Kames (1696–1782) would finesse the distinction between the humourist and man of humour. There is a difference, Kames argued, both between humour in character and in writing, and between ludicrous and humorous writing. In the former, ludicrous topics are chosen to provoke laughter; in the latter, the writer amuses by appearing serious, and is not, in his  For illustration, Morton ‘Laughter as Polemical Act’, 107–32.  Swift, Intelligencer 3 (1728), Works, 8, 234–5. 114  Morris, Essay, xxii, xx, xxvi, xx; cf. John Locke, On Human Understanding (1690), Bk 2, chap. 11, sect. 2, where wit is referred to as ‘an assemblage of Ideas’; Hutcheson, Reflections, ‘Letter 2’, discussing Addison. 115  Morris, Essay, 1–2, 12–13; 20–2. 116  Morris, Essay, 37. 112 113

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character, a humourist. This is Addison’s true humour, exemplified for Kames by John Arbuthnot, a serious man who exceeded all ‘in drollery and humorous painting’.117 Humour, in short, is a general term indicating a self-conscious craft, generating mirth and laughter—it explicates the skills of the actor in portraying the humourist, coinciding with what was necessary in Ben Jonson’s comedy of the humours. Dictionaries need treating with caution, but Samuel Johnson’s Dictionary (1755), gives a taste of how uneven the process of change had been. ‘Laugh’ and ‘laughter’ are associated with merriment (not vulgarity), and ‘to laugh’ contemptuously is relegated to a third meaning.118 Yet ‘humour’ as merriment, and ‘humorously’ as ‘merrily’, ‘jocosely’ appear still to be subordinate to the older humour as a temper of the mind, or as a morbid disposition, and capriciousness, peevishness, violent passion and illogicality akin to Morris’s depiction of the humourist.119 The new general function for humour as insisted upon by Shaftsbury, is not, on that evidence, either as common or as freed from older usages as we might expect, even in the middle decades of the eighteenth century. As I shall suggest (Chap. 5), established terms such as parody and even imitation may have inhibited its uptake. Although Kames gave humour a modern generality, his treatment of laughter remained highly conventional. Certainly, he was at pains to distinguish mirthful laughter from that of ridicule, but it is ridicule that provided the immediate context for the discussion of humour, making it still partially an expression of contempt and scorn.120 More broadly, the close alignment of the physiological notion of the humours with the new humour was sustained in the tradition of the Jonsonian comedy of the humours, what Richard Bevis treats as laughing comedy, that of wit and ridicule more than sympathy and sentiment. The staged humours remained predictable subjects of derision. They were usually suitably named, and their survival may evidence the contained acceptability of still vibrant habits of aggression and victimization.121 Even at the end of the eighteenth century, William Preston, partly concerned with  Lord Kames, Elements, chap. 12, 253–6.  Johnson, Dictionary of the English Language, 1174; cf. earlier works, on which see Shrank, ‘Mocking or Mirthful?’, 48–66. 119  Johnson, Dictionary, 1027. In some 85 entries where ‘humour’ and its cognates are present, Johnson overwhelmingly stays true to older meanings and only rarely uses the word in conjunction with wit or levity. 120  Lord Kames, Elements, 193, 274. 121  Bevis, The Laughing Tradition, 4, 7, 110; Dickie, Cruelty and Laughter, 2–8, 16–44. 117 118

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humour in its emerging sense, and addressing a fairly erudite audience, could still refer to an ‘extraordinary afflux of humours’ and their ‘evacuation’ in violent laughter—hardly a case of laughter expressing humour.122 In fact, the new and suitably refined meaning of humour became instrumental in the increasing attention given to the benign, socializing potential of laughter during the seventeenth and eighteenth centuries, so helping bring satire within humour’s range. This modulation to laughter now needs noting in its own right for it indicates a potential explanation for the concept of humour’s importance in English. Laughter had been celebrated in Henry Vaughan’s ‘A Rhapsody’ (1646), a joyous poem of good company in an inn, the painted ceiling of which directed merriment to the gods above. ‘Let’s laugh now, and the pressed grape drink / Till the drowsy Day-Star wink; / And in our merry mad mirth run / Faster, and further than the Sun.’ This is close to the harmless solipsistic laughter of Thomas Browne waking from his comic dreams, or the laughter urged by Rabelais. It was what John Straight (notably not using, or even avoiding, the word laughter) would shortly discuss as the duty of ‘holy joy’, and Isaac Barrow (mentioning laughter only in passing) treat as the Christian’s joyful duty: nothing gave legitimacy more than assimilation to office and duty. It was a duty restricted to innocent jest.123 This was the benign laughter that Pepys relished in close company, that Thomas Sheridan (1687–1738) would see as promoting ‘good fellowship’, and that Francis Hutcheson would take as an expression of an inherent benevolence in human nature. Such disparate attempts to see laughter in a positive light marked old theological fault-lines and would be gradually accepted by the end of the eighteenth century.124 The slow and erratic emergence of humour in England distinct from medical theory and comedic convention may have been initially encouraged precisely by the persisting negative connotations of laughter, the importance attached to its damaging effects and its frequent associations with vulgarity. This altered meaning should be seen, I think, not in the 122  Preston, Essay on Ridicule, 79, a departure from the four humours. As late as 1885 Samuel Maunder’s popular Scientific and Literary Treasury gave more attention to medical humours (again not the original ones)—vitreous, aqueous and crystalline—than to humour as the quality of the mind that creates ludicrous images and mirth, though lacking the brilliancy of wit. 123  Barrow, Against Foolish Talking; see Tave, Amiable Humorist, 3–6. 124  Straight, The Rule of Rejoycing; Sheridan (Tom Pun-Sibi), Ars punica, 24, 125; Tave, Amiable Humorist; for example, 43–4, 71.

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context of a rather abstract genealogical narrative of developing individu­ alism,125 but rather against the more tangible background of which people were actually aware: namely, intense political instability, religious intransigence, and social brutishness that together marked seventeenthand early eighteenth-century England. Religious confessions fragmented with their differences sharpened, civil wars fought or narrowly escaped, one monarch executed, another deposed, and another nearly assassinated, a sprawling, endemically violent capital city, sporadic risings and eruptions across the country, plots and conspiracies frequently rumoured, invasions by foreign powers feared, and one decisively accomplished. It was later to be massaged into the shape of the ‘Glorious Revolution’, but more immediately it was followed by thwarted counter-­invasions from France. All these features of seventeenth-century England, plus dangerous weather and the failed harvests suggestive of divine punishment, created a public memory engendering insecurity and making the exploration of the considerata of sociability urgent.126 Some aspects of this are familiar, such as the admonitory emphasis on politeness in periodical literature of the early eighteenth century that has even been seen as marking a change of emotional regime.127 Others have been less obvious, such as the translation of Homer’s violent epics into more civilized and acceptable forms. The assumed aggression of so much laughter was part of the problem. In a world in which people greatly depended on credit, both financial and social, reputation was capital, and to be laughed at diminished it more decisively than might be the case now.128 Thus slander was a serious crime, seen as a threat to social order, and it could be satire and ridicule by another name. What, more generally, have been called shame cultures, such as ancient Greece, already noted, and Edo Japan, to be discussed in Chap. 3, were unusually sensitive to the potency of what I am calling rhetorical laughter and the damage ridicule might do. It was augmented by aristocratic preoccupations with family name and honour, which lost through insult or ridicule might only be restored through the violence of the duel.

 This is an important theme in Wickberg, The Senses of Humor.  For an overview of this far-reaching fear of instability, the long seventeenth century, see Scott, England’s Troubles, 1–39; see also Dickie, Cruelty and Laughter, 9, 13–14. 127  Kerr, Lemmings and Phiddian, eds, Passions, Sympathy and Print Culture, 3–19. 128  Muldrew, Economy of Obligation, at length. 125 126

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Certainly, the gauntlet thrown down by Hobbes in De cive (1642) remained uncomfortably present for years after his death. He dismissed nostrums about humanity’s natural sociability, because they were explanatorily empty (there is society because we are sociable). Rather, he urged, we must presume that humans are inherently antisocial and belligerent. This paradox explains society and its fragility. It must curb our violent instincts or be destroyed by us. The aggression of laughter illustrated the point: it was contrary to the laws of nature mandating peace. Bernard de Mandeville (1670–1733), largely endorsing Hobbes’s view of laughter, exacerbated matters by arguing that civilized society actually depended on antisocial impulse.129 It is no accident that Shaftsbury’s advocacy of humour, its value for liberty and rationality, occurs in the context of discussing the dangers of religious dogmatism—and this only a few years before another confessionally driven, attempted revolution in 1715. ‘’Tis the persecuting Spirit has rais’d the bantering one: And want of Liberty may account for the want of Politeness, and for the Corruption or wrong Use of Pleasantry and Humour.’130 Similarly, almost thirty years later, there is Morris’s stridently Whig dedication to Robert Walpole: it arraigns on one side politeness, Walpole’s own political wit, his openness, generosity and care for liberty against, on the other, a threatened return to tyranny and slavery under Tory ministers, effectively an undoing of the Revolution of 1688/89 and by implication the Reformation.131 He paints the little word wit on a threatening canvass. By this time too, humour was sufficiently important to be retrojected into antiquity, as Shaftsbury had done, so giving the notion enhanced cultural kudos, a boost to its naturalization and the universality it would widely be accorded.132 Belonging and exclusion are bi-conditionals and it may be that whereas rhetorical laughter had implicitly affirmed social and political belonging by isolating and damaging the deviant, initially the potential value of some expressions of humour lay directly in the prospect they held for enhancing social cohesion, either bypassing or barely acknowledging laughter (John Straight, Isaac Burrow, Corbyn Morris), or, as Addison urged, by capitalizing on its innocent potential and thus rehabilitating it with drawn teeth.  Mandeville, Fable, 2, 134.  Shaftsbury, Sensus Communis, Characteristicks, sect 4, 46. 131  Morris, Essay, ‘Dedication’, iv–v, ix–xii, xvii (on Richard Steele’s politeness and patriotism), xiv–xv. 132  Hurd, ‘Dissertation’, 244–5. 129 130

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According to Hobbes, he remarked, to hear laughter is to witness not merriment but pride. This, he continues, is indeed largely true, but not where laughter stems from elevated wit, and presumably the true humour that helps create and sustain good company.133 It is a few years after this that Swift too suggests that humour’s laughter could be less than vicious, and so an aid to gentle forms of satire. We are close to Hutcheson’s case that laughter is an expression of benevolence.134 In commending the conjunction of wit, humour and laughter, Addison was not rehearsing a platitude, or acknowledging a universal truth. In his persistent quest to improve manners and public deportment, he might be construed as extending the reach of amicable laughter to the wider political world, easing the limits on legitimating loci such as Henry Vaughan’s inn with its ‘merry mad mirth’—turning the pub public. So, if festive occasions did something to mew up the bite of laughter, attaching a notion of humour to it provided a means of conceptual palliation, roughly analogous to the Greeks marking some laughter as a matter of play. Regardless of this possibility, Addison was certainly making a case in the context of troubled times. It was accepted only gradually: Morris’s loathsome humourist would become, as Stuart Tave has argued, increasingly congenial because of figures like a laundered Falstaff, Sterne’s Uncle Toby and Cervantes’s Don Quixote. Humour in its variable, unstable guises became an expression of that cardinal socializing virtue, sympathy; and laughter, if sufficiently benign, could be the music of affirmation.135 In short, from its uncertain and casual beginnings the firm establishment of a modern meaning for humour and its affinity with laughter had a political cause and a partially political function as cement for a fissiparous society. It is, then, less the case that humour became more kindly, as Terry Eagleton puts it, than that its invention helped moderate the worst of laughter.136

133  Addison, Spectator, 47, 24 April 1711, 174–7; Mandeville’s qualification, fittingly for a physician, relies more on the physiology of laughter, and the need for a theory to take into consideration chuckling babies and tickling (Mandeville, Fable, 2156–7, 2159). 134  Swift, Intelligencer, Works, 8, 232–3; Hutcheson, Reflections. 135  Tave, Amiable Humorist, at length. 136  Eagleton, Humour, 99–101.

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IV Therein lies one precondition for speaking of a sense of humour. Yet until the meaning of sense was also enlarged, the word humour remained a general abridgement often secondary to specifics, such as raillery or wit, and a second precondition for conceptualizing a sense of humour was absent. It would explicate what Addison had intimated, that true humour could express sensibility, self-awareness or sympathy. According to Anna Wierzbicka, the augmentation of sense’s range was, like humour, initially an English language phenomenon.137 There is also no clear watershed, but there is the much-disputed proposition at the heart of Locke’s Human Understanding (1690) that all human knowledge derives from the senses. Those who wished to defend a robust notion of innate human faculties metaphorically extended the notion of sense to reconceptualize them. Sense came to enjoy a range of meanings, and sensibility, as C.S. Lewis put it, was overburdened with them.138 Throughout the eighteenth century we find sense of, as awareness being augmented by sense as common sentient even moral capacity—an innate universal potential for understanding, appreciation and fitting conduct. Shaftsbury, no follower of Locke, wrote of a moral sense, and it was common enough to acknowledge a sense of honour or shame.139 Sense, sensibility and sympathy received considerable attention from philosophers such as Hume, Hutcheson and Smith as fundamental to social cohesion, and from the illustrative discourse of novels like Sterne’s The Sentimental Journey (1768) and Jane Austen’s Love and Freindship (1790) and Sense and Sensibility (1811). All stopped short, however, of articulating an innate sense of humour. We come close with Richard Hurd’s commentary on Horace referring briefly to a ‘sense of humour’ being analogous to pathos, but this is sense as awareness of rather than innate capacity for.140 Alexander Gerard (1728–95) begins his Essay on Taste by using sense similarly to signify awareness but then silently shifts meaning by referring to how the senses of novelty, sublimity, harmony, ridicule and virtue cooperate to form taste; a foretaste, as it were, of what is to come. But although he refers to wit and/or humour, there is no sense of either.141 Corbyn Morris and Lord Kames have been  Wierzbicka, Experience, ‘Moral Sense’, 2–8; ‘Sense of Humour’, 4–6.  Lewis, Studies in Words, 163. 139  Steele, The Spectator, 137, 30 August 1711, 2, 271–2. 140  Hurd, Dissertation, 273; Tierney-Hynes, ‘The Humour of Humours’, 102. 141  Gerard, Essay on Taste, 1–2. 137 138

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noted as drawing attention to the reflexivity that distinguishes the man of humour from the humourist; and Shaftsbury had regarded nurtured humour as necessary to the armature of philosophical discourse. William Preston was also tantalizingly close in remarking that ‘a person who laughs at his own foibles and defects is thought to show an extraordinary effort of good sense and good humour … [making] a painful sacrifice of selfish feelings’. There is, however, always ‘some political motive’.142 Such intimations might lead us to expect references to a sense of humour to be evident before the nineteenth century, but apparently not. Coleridge is sometimes misquoted in using the expression, ‘No mind is thoroughly well organized that is deficient in the sense of humour’ (italics added). The evidence is hearsay (ca. 1825), and the definite article may indicate that we are still dealing with an awareness of humour. Be this as it may, Daniel Wickberg, who has provided the most important recent study of such matters, finds substantial evidence for a sense of humour as a human attribute only from the mid-nineteenth century.143 His surprisingly late dating for a common reference to the phrase is supported by a largely contemporaneous chain shift in humour’s cognate forms. As I have noted, humourist had meant someone risible or unduly subject to changes in the humours. By the eighteenth century it included those given to whimsy, and for Morris, those of distasteful singularity. Gradually it indicated an acceptable eccentricity, occasionally someone writing to amuse.144 By the mid-nineteenth century, this latter usage is common, the earlier ones nearing obsolescence. Thackeray’s New  York lecture ‘Charity and Humour’ (1852) highlights the change: humour is an expression of charity, wit, love and human fellow feeling.145 In tandem, the adverbial form humorously is shifted from humoral imbalance to humorous performance. The increasingly marginal humoursom/humoursome had a similar process of change. The now rare neologism humoristic (ca. 1818) qualifies the new meaning of humourist and is used by Thackeray.146 The neologism humourless is in use from the 1840s (OED, 1847). Crucially it  Preston, Essay on Ridicule, 72.  Julian Young’s recollection; see Coleridge, Table Talk (i), 426n and Table Talk (ii) appendix P, 422; Wickberg, ‘The Sense of Humor’, 30–139. 144  Bailey, Dictionary; Addison, Spectator, 1, 129. Bailey does not acknowledge this newer usage. 145  Thackeray, ‘Charity and Humour’, a view at one with Jean Paul Richter’s aesthetics, as noted by Chao and Westbrook, ‘Introduction’, 14. 146  Thackeray, ‘Charity and Humour’, 196. 142 143

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provides a necessary point of contrast and helps insulate the modern humour from older usages. From the beginning, humourless is in a negative register, with a sense of humour as an affirmative feature of being properly human, or at least socially acceptable. Teddy Roosevelt might have been second-rate, puffed with vanity and garrulous platitude, but for Prime Minister Herbert Asquith he was nevertheless a good fellow applauded for a ‘passable sense of humour’.147 By the twentieth century, as Wickberg emphasizes, that sense becomes of interest in the recently established discipline of psychology, which as a new science had a universalizing momentum informing its ambitions. For Gordon Allport humour would be the hallmark of psychological maturity.148 We are witnessing a new way of understanding humanity. In becoming such a crowning glory to personality (from Locke’s conception of personal identity) it is only to be expected that for polemical purposes, whole peoples might be isolated by denying them a sense of humour—the English and Americans denigrating the Germans from the late nineteenth-century (it was all that efficiency), and the Germans diminishing the Dutch (they lived next door). Here then, between roughly 1650 and 1850, is a reconfiguration of language into what appears to have been originally an English conceptual vocabulary. Certainly, Italian shows some parallels with the self-awareness of a group of umoristi; and Samuel Johnson thought the Italians had humour in all but name, an absence that Pirandello would need to explain away.149 French, however, reinforces the general Anglo-centric point. With the principal exception of Voltaire, the French have regarded humour as distinctly English, and were slow to adopt a perplexing idiom of humour and the sense of it.150 Humouristique was sanctioned by the admittedly conservative Académie Française only in 1878, and the abstract noun had to await until 1932.151 Even if, according to Paul Gifford, the French have had trouble in understanding precisely what they have accepted, the  Brook and Brook, H.H. Asquith Letters, 15 June 1915, 87.  Wickberg, The Senses of Humor, 102–4, discussing Allport’s seminal study Personality a Psychological Interpretation, New York, 1937. 149  Johnson, Dictionary, entry for ‘peculiar’ and citing Sir William Temple, but adding that ‘the thing itself’ was not peculiar to English, but found among Spaniards and Italians (1471). He was echoing Swift; Pirandello, L’Umorismo, 45–7. 150  The belief that the English humour was taken from French does occasionally resurface but is not well supported; see for example Bouquet and Riffault, ‘L’Humour’, 21–2, note 25; cf. Escarpit, L’Humour, 64–5. 151  Escarpit, L’Humour, 67. 147 148

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language now has a greater intension than English, with both humeur in Montaigne’s meaning of disposition, or as variable mood, and humour.152 The nineteenth-century loan phrase sens de humour still carries ­anglophone connotations. It was a point to which Henri Bergson was sensitive in writing about comedy and laughter (Le Rire, 1900).153 As Gifford remarks, however, when he did touch on the English humour, he misunderstood it. French semantic equivalents for the field of terms embraced by the English sense of humour are approximate.154 In short, the universality of a sense of humour is less a simple fact than an English language achievement, facilitated by just a touch of nescient parochialism. It is a point of wider significance to which I will now turn.

 Maloumian, ‘Essai de définition’, 47–9; Gifford, ‘Humour and the French Mind’, 534–6.  Milner Davis, ‘Henri Bergson’, in Attardo, Encyclopedia, vol. 1; for a provocative discussion of the loan word in French, Gifford, ‘Humour and the French Mind’. 154   Gifford, ‘Humour and the French Mind’, 539–41; Escarpit, L’Humour, 6–9; Wierzbicka, Experience, ‘Sense of Humour’, 6–7, 9–10. 152 153

CHAPTER 3

The Universality and the Genealogy of Humour

I Words can be taken from a foreign language for different reasons, but regardless of the rationalities at play, the abstract and accommodating English humor or humour has proved a remarkably successful export, no doubt aided in Europe by a widely shared Latin derivation. Certainly, it is now found in most European tongues, as is an equivalent phrase for a sense of humour.1 In demotic Greek χιουμορ can now subsume the ancient Greek comedy (κομοιδια), and πνευμα, extended from spirit or breath, encompasses wit. Ευτραπελια has had its range of meanings narrowed to mean wit, and ευ-θυμος (cheerful and well disposed, according to Liddle and Scott, even of horses) is now a matter of merriment. Beyond Europe the adoption of humor/humour has been common but not universal. Its relatively recent entry into Mandarin (youmo) is instructive. Since the nineteenth century there have been disputed attempts at cross-cultural enrichment among Chinese intellectuals, centred on the tensions between an isolated cultural authenticity and the ominous blandishments of the West.2 In this context the linguist and philosopher 1  There are minor variations. In Dutch, for example, sense (zin) is not collocated with humour. The common expression is, I understand, gevoel voor humor, closer to a sensitivity or feeling for humour. 2  Levinson, Confucian China, for a magisterial study, esp. 2, 49–133; more specifically Chey, ‘Youmo’, 3–4.

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Lin Yutang (1895–1976) introduced youmo in 1924 as a potentially accommodating neologism. It was a considered attempt to make Chinese culture more amenable to the modern Western world, and indeed to consolidate an extant vocabulary with a strong family resemblance to humour. Adapting George Meredith’s Essay on Comedy (1877, 1897), Lin assimilated humour to comedy, as Meredith had not. This alteration facilitated the claim that youmo had autochthony that only needed recognition, a position at odds with his insistence that humour was borrowed and ultimately untranslatable.3 In further shifts from English, Lin separated youmo from huaji (course jesting) and from satire, in contrast to the increasing Western propensity to collapse satire into humour (see Chap. 6).4 The result was a Confucian true humour, restricted, as Wei He Xu puts it, to the ‘tasteful, useful and benign’.5 If the Chinese youmo exemplifies instrumental adaptation, the Japanese yumoa also displays the broader intricacies of transference and the dangers of inferring recognition of a prior concept from the presence of the word. So, a little more detail on the Japanese case is worthwhile. The grammatical structure of Japanese facilitates creative borrowing. The language has three distinct, albeit adjustable, semantic classifications.6 Chinese vocabulary forms one subclass (kango), old Japanese terms (wago) another, and mainly European adoptions the third (gairaigo). Words of this derivation are normally written in katakana, one of three functionally distinct scripts in Japanese. Initially European terms mostly came from Portuguese, then from Dutch. This became the official language for international negotiations until 1870.7 From the Meiji period (beginning 1868) Chinese prestige began to decline and English borrowings became dominant. Mori Arinori, Education Minister in 1886, even advocated that English become the national language.8 The shift, however, was not straightforward as the Japanese turned to China for vocabulary that buffered the impact of the West. Despite this, and patchy resistance, English may now constitute

 Qian Suoqiao, ‘Translating “Humor”’, 283–4.  Qian Suoqiao, ‘Translating “Humor”’, 277–82; Chey, ‘Youmo’, 3; Chen, ‘Chinese Concept of Humour’, 193–4; Chan, ‘Identifying Daoist Humour’, 73–4; see also Chey, ‘Youmo’, 13–19. 5  Xu, ‘Classical Confucian Concepts’, 49. 6  Kowner and Dalot-Bul, ‘Dialectic Relationships’, 251–3. 7  Irwin, Loanwords, 21–44. 8  Kowner and Dalot-Bul, ‘Dialectic Relationships’, 253. 3 4

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around 10 per cent of Japanese vocabulary.9 Yet with indirect and compound derivation, dialect variation and the pidgin of the ports, precise dates of entry into Japanese can be elusive. Additionally, adaptive ingenuity, careless appropriation or invention in the name of English (wasei eigo) can be striking. That the command ‘come here’ (kameya) means a Western dog should serve as notice.10 The Dutch had adopted humor around 1840 and the word may just have entered Japanese about a decade later, either as a loanword or through a guide to the pronunciation of foreign terms.11 It was, however, established as part of a later consumption of English—a practice ultimately requiring the introduction of new syllables.12 Tetsujirō Inoue (1856–1944) produced an extensive Dictionary of Philosophy (Tetsugaku jii) in 1881. It included humour along with ideology, hypothesis and the particularly complicated idealism. Humour’s place in a philosophical lexicon would have pleased Shaftsbury. It is not, however, written in katakana, so was probably yet to have been formally adopted. Instead, appropriately for a philosophical dictionary, kanji (Chinese-derived ideographs) conveyed humour’s range: seiheki (peculiarity of habit), kokkei (funny, interesting, ridiculous, lacking common sense) and kaikai (jokes, now obsolete).13 Clear if occasional use in katakana comes with the twentieth century. Shigeheko Toyama attributes the introduction to the English translator and playwright Tsubouchi Shoyo (1859–1935) in 1901, arguing that he took yumoa directly from nineteenth-century English pronunciation.14 The novelist and English scholar Natsume Sōseki (1867–1916) used what is now the more authentically British hyūmoa rather than yūmoa in lectures of 1909, based on ones given in 1903.15 It is, however, yūmoa that appears 9  Irwin, Loanwords, 44; Scherling, ‘The Creative Use of English’, 276–8; Kowner and Dalot-Bul, ‘Dialectic Relationships’, 252–4. 10  Scherling, ‘The Creative Use of English’, 276–92, on the extent and types of adaptation; Kowner and Dalot-Bul, ‘Dialectic Relationships’, 254–5. 11  This possibility has been suggested by Mon-Han Tsai. 12  Kay, ‘English Loanwords’, 69–70. 13  I am grateful to Mon-Han Tsai for drawing this work to my attention and translating its salient entry. 14  According to Mon-Han Tsai the claim is made in Toyama’s ユーモアのレッスン (Humour’s Lesson, Chuokoran-Shinsha, 2003). 15  A shift in English pronunciation over such a short time seems doubtful. It is more likely that Sōseki, who had studied at the University of London, adopted the sound patterns of the professional classes. Shoyo had spent time at Oxford, more heavily peopled by the aristocracy, apt to drop aitches and the terminal g in ing endings, so aping the Cockney of London’s East End, to avoid confusion with uncomfortably close professionals. It may be, then, that English class idioms explain humour in the Japanese lexicon.

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in newspapers before the First World War, becoming increasingly common from the mid-1920s; hyūmoa is now rare.16 Apart from yūmoa, Japanese also has farce, faasu, komedi, aironi (irony) and joke, joku, superseding kaikai. These exist alongside a discriminating indigenous set of words, such as hiniku, roughly irony or cynicism. Marguerite Wells takes haikai as indecorous or humorous, hsieh as humour or jest, and okashi as funny, elegant or humorous.17 Kigeki is now restricted to a form of comedic theatre; warai-ko is laughter but covers more than the English; fūshi and u-itto are roughly satire and wit, respectively, although Wells has found the equivalence of fūshi and satire to be forced. The restricted phonetic structure of Japanese (only 111 phonemes) makes punning a ubiquitous feature of the language, so unsurprisingly, the words for the single English pun are almost a subfield in their own right; but although sha-re (homonyms) are a common source of humour, puns are not normally treated as jokes.18 There are distinct classifications for playful poetry and comic performance, such as manzai and owarai. The ancient okashi and more recent kokkei both offer refinements on the English funny. This concentration of vocabulary cannot be expected to map neatly onto English, especially given the creativity of Japanese borrowings.19 Nevertheless, as with Mandarin, it is recognizably very similar in its scope to words subsumed by the English humour, but in both languages it also carries strong connotations of modernity lacking in English.20 Yūmoa itself has been adopted less to function as the general covering term that was exported from English than as a benign, socializing qualification to laughter.21 As was the case in early modern England with an analogous sensitivity to shaming, laughter has been socially problematic in Japan.22 Thus the loan word yūmoa may in fact function much as humour did before its elevation to generalized standing, to mark some laughter as harmless and tied to the virtue of restraint, jushuku. It is not, as I  Private correspondence with Ron Stewart. My thanks for his expertise and help.  Wells, Japanese Humour, xi. 18  Nagashima, ‘Sha-re’, 75–8; Dybala et  al., ‘Japanese Puns’, 7–13; Stewart, ‘Unlocking Verbal-Visual Puns’, 362–3. 19  The French preposition avec (with) has become abekku the term for a romantically involved couple, an ‘item’. 20  Wells, ‘Satire and Constraint’, 193–4; Milner Davis, ‘Introduction and Overview’, 2–5. 21  Wells, ‘Satire and Constraint’, 194; Wells, Japanese Humor, provides a detailed account; Milner Davis, ‘Introduction’, 8. 22  Oda, ‘Laughter’, 15–17. 16 17

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understand it, specifically collocated with sense, sensu. If so, to speak of a Japanese sense of humour is to extrapolate rather than replicate a native idiom. In discussing humour in Russian, Ksenia Shilikhina and Ekaterina Shcheglova come to parallel conclusions: the Russian transliterated term is more specific than the English, with adjacent words also having altered meaning through adaptation; and irony is a type of comedy that sometimes need to be translated as paradox. The English group of humour terms as a whole might better be seen in Russian as the field of the comic. As Christian Hempelmann has concluded, we cannot assume that humour will be the dominant or most general term when it is found in analogous linguistic fields.23 To treat it as such regardless is to export the Anglo-American. The word humour is also found in Indonesian and Javanese, via Dutch and in Maori. Unsystematically I have looked at lexicons for a number of indigenous Australian languages. All have terms for laughter, even various types of it, but I have found no words that directly translate as humour, even in Tiwi and New Tiwi, languages replete with English loanwords.24 It may be that under the impact of English extant terms for laughter have had their range extended to encompass humour, and so function in a quasi-English fashion, piggybacking the universality of humour on laughter. Overall, the success of the exported term exploits and enhances a protean adaptability; but if the word is absent from a language, or is found in a semantic context that diminishes or significantly alters its conceptual functioning, the assumption of universality needs addressing.

23  Shilikhina and Shcheglova, ‘Terminology as a Source of Misunderstanding’, 24–26; Hempelmann, ‘Key Terms’, 46–7. 24  AuSil, lexicons for Alyawarr, Burarra, Golpa, Tiwi, New Tiwi and Walpiri. Even Kriol with laf and yakyak has no humour. The extinct Dharawal and Dharug languages of N.S.W., presumably much exposed to English, had djanaba and djanaba bilya, respectively, for laughter, but apparently nothing for humour. Luise Hercus, The Paakantyi Dictionary, has only the verb forms to laugh (kinta) and to make someone laugh (kunkunmila). Glosbe, an online dictionary for Hopi and Lakota, lists the words for laughter in these languages but warns against relying on direct translations for humour.

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II Articles of faith frequently depend upon a skiagraphic under-specification to be sufficiently embracing, and their rehearsal can be close to the merely phatic; but in the light of evidence to the contrary, what can be made of the routine assertion that humour is universal? Both major components of the expression are ambiguous, but presumably the many who affirm it know what they mean. For Annarita Guidi general agreement among psychologists seems enough to make it straightforwardly true.25 Most possibilities take a simple ontological form that humour is a phenomenon prior to and independent of the specifics of conceptualization. The universality might suggest that humour is ubiquitous, possibly has always been so and may be recognized for what it is in all societies. It is, however, unlikely to mean there is universal agreement on what amuses. Regardless of universality, the assertion involves a priori reliance on some concept of humour, and so we are left with the sort of circular commitment evident in Guidi’s reposing on psychological consensus. The fundamental claim has, however, given rise to variations, that at the risk of some repetition, need disengaging before turning from the universality of humour to what might be a universal point of demarcation for it; another crux of ambiguity. Humour’s universality may appear validated because of the global reach of the varieties of English: as a form of exploded parochialism, an abstraction from linguistic dominance becomes a universal truth. Anna Wierzbicka makes this point in discussing the putative universality of the colour terms red and black, extrapolated from English. Not only, she argues, do some languages lack these basic colour terms, but also some (she discusses Nuer) have no word for colour per se. The vocabulary of seeing, she concludes, has a better case for being called universal.26 Be this as it may, humour originating recently in English is a less plausible candidate for universality than anything on the English-language palette of colour terms. It is notable that words directly for laughter are found in so many languages, perhaps it may be surmised, in all—there are still well over 7000 of them. It may indeed amount to a semantic prime. It may even be that all languages have terms for jests, or pranks, actions that might trigger laughter. Yet the jest came under the auspices of humour only relatively recently, and in  Guidi, ‘Humor Universals’, 17–20.  Wierzbicka, ‘Color Universals’, 17–20.

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China, not without controversy and redaction. The confusion, albeit often casual, that universalizes humour by association with jests and laughter creates an illusion by sleight of hand: ‘there have been no claims of cultures that do not have humor or laughter’.27 A second possibility is that humour is genetically encoded, and a function of biological evolution.28 Even if true and non-trivial, it provides no basis for reading it into societies ignorant of modern science. To do so is to conflate the ontological with the epistemological where they need to be distinguished. Cerebral activity correlated with what we identify as humour can be mapped and measured. It suggests a universal physiological grounding for humour, but the concept itself is a precondition for quantifiable conclusions. Gravity is universal but we can hardly call Aristotle’s understanding of an arrow’s flight and fall as a theory of gravitational pull. The circulation of the blood is similarly universal, but pre-Harveyan theories of the blood’s movement (ebbing and flowing, seeping) would be quite misread as theories of circulation. Yet on the basis of laughter’s ripples, we are expected to accept that humour theory is millennia old.29 A third more complicated variation is that as a universal, humour is therefore universally translatable.30 If we draw an artificial line between the formal semantic meaning of words and their practical employment, we may be able to establish referential equivalents between languages. On this basis, translation between languages can be unproblematic for limited purposes, such as establishing systems of road signs. Similarly, we can construct simplified statements in one putatively basic language that can be given close equivalence in another similarly simplified tongue. But these are not typical of translation processes between languages as a whole, or when dealing with complex discursive forms such as poetry, which typically draw on the associational fields of words specific to a language. The problem can be acute in translating humour precisely because it so often involves the exploitation of local linguistic nuance and variation. Through humour the firm distinction between semantic meaning and use can be rendered misleading. Much translation is, as Umberto Eco puts it, a matter of cultural as well as linguistic negotiation, resulting in loss as well as  Attardo, Linguistics of Humor, 300; Carroll, Humour, 4.  Attardo, Linguistics of Humor, 300. 29  That we see humour everywhere is apparently enough to attribute the same perceptions to Plato and Aristotle; Carroll, Humour, 4, 7. 30  Attardo, Linguistics of Humor, 360–4, specifically on the translatability of puns. 27 28

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gain.31 Cliff Goddard, an advocate of Basic English and its universal translatability, notes specifically with humour in mind, that it is only possible if keeping close to the semantic primes putatively shared by all languages, and by ignoring untranslatable terms.32 An illusion of universality, however, can be maintained by silently overlooking shifts in the (disputed) criteria of equivalence in translation such as force, aesthetic appeal, meaning or emotional effect.33 Semantic equivalence in particular needs treating with flexibility. Even within a given language synonymity of terms may be qualified in that no one word can replace another under all circumstances.34 The differences may often be tiny, but in translating between languages, equivalence is more likely to be compromised. In isolating a translingual sameness we rely on a more general classifier to which putatively equivalent terms belong (a and b are the same as examples of F but not the same as instances of G). Insofar as the classifier (F) is unstable or adjustable, putative sameness might mean little.35 As I have illustrated above, if meanings are circumscribed by a delineating field of words in one language, claimed equivalence will need to take into consideration the whole parallel field in another. What we call equivalence between terms, such as the meaning of humour in English, French or Russian, is almost bound to be by degrees approximate. The specific grammatical features of a language may be resources for humour and also prove to be obstacles in translation. It is difficult to see how a joke about indefinite articles in English can be translated into Japanese, which lacks this grammatical class altogether. In this light, the belief that all humour is translatable because humour is universal begins to look heroically muddled. Naturally, the difficulties are often alleviated by gloss or analogical replacement. An indication that in the source language x is intended to be funny, or is much like the humorous y in the target language, is an invaluable aid to intelligibility. Such cases, however, can mark a failure to translate specifics and may require considerable creativity.36 That is, finding  Eco, Rat of Mouse?, at length.  Goddard, ‘De-Anglicising Humour Studies’, 53–5. 33  See for example Chiaro, ‘Translation and Humour’, 7–11; ‘Humor and Translation’, 420. 34  Wittgenstein, Tractatus, 55, 302–3, p. 105; Quine, Word and Object, 47–57. 35  Wiggins, Identity, for a thorough exploration of the formal logic of being the same as. 36  Fitts, ‘The Poetic Nuance’, 32–47, esp. 42–7; Chiaro ‘Translation and Humour’, 8–14, 17–18; DuVal, ‘Translating Humour’, 431–40; for an extended instance of the need for compromise and imagination, Braund, ‘Translation as Battlefield’, 551–61. 31 32

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pragmatically analogous expressions that can justify being called humour stretches the notion of translation, and is hardly evidence that the phenomenon of humour itself is being translated. To merge modes of supplementation with the process of translation is to confuse second-order statements with a direct presentation. The belief in humour’s universal translatability may depend on this sort of conflation. It may be, however, that the very issue of whether humour per se is universally translatable is sufficiently ill-formed to generate only arguments at cross-purposes. If this were in Russian, it would not concern humour, but the universality of the comic. The presuppositions, in John Searle’s terms ‘givens’, like humour that shape a realm of enquiry are easily naturalized, that is, merged by practitioners with its subject matter, although from an external perspective the difference between the how and the what may be more readily apparent. As Wierzbicka puts it in Wittgensteinian mode, what is most familiar can be obscuring: we might not see the spectacles we wear, for others they help identify us.37 The posited universality of humour is certainly testament to the value of our conceptual vocabularies in organizing experience and the world in a given fashion. This epistemological salience is not at issue here. In the most general and synoptic terms, it is a formalized notion of humour that has enabled us to reconfigure the relationship between laughter and smiling so effectively that one is conventionally taken as an extension of the other. They can be measured on the same scale of zygomaticus major activation and so joined at the lip as variable manifestations of humour. Lacking that notion, they have been taken as expressing oppositional passions. The persistent problem lies in keeping distinct the analytic, organizational power of our general term from a descriptive integrity. Without doing so, universality is established by no more than tautological self-­ deception. Certainly, some scholars are aware of the difficult line that needs treading. Thus, according to Hannah Burrows, there are some fifty terms in Old Norse designating or strongly connoting forms of disparaging laughter. A few, such as glens, gaman and gledi,̵ were sometimes used to express joy, merriment or innocent joking. As she argues, dealing with such an extensive vocabulary under the aegis of humour is valuable as long as the modern ‘rubric’ is not mistaken for a shared concept, so converting 37  Wierzbicka, ‘Color Universals’, 217; Wittgenstein, Philosophical Investigations, proposition 129, 50.

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an aid to understanding into a ‘tyranny’.38 It is, then possible to be sufficiently careful, but routine affirmations of universality make it difficult. In the face of the contradictory evidence of language and more distant historical understandings of laughter, one response, as I have noted above, has been to accept humour as a heuristic classification with respect both to content and functionality. First, the phenomena that might be gathered under the auspices of the word humour, and identified through its subsumed and adjacent vocabulary, may vary. Thus, the word humour may be used within one language over time, or across languages by virtue of a strong family resemblance between patterns of encompassed terminology designating forms of it (see also Chap. 6). Second, humour may be seen to have distinct social, political and psychological functions. Considering these aspects of use, humour is an unstable classifier. Although resistant to definition or simple semantic substitution between languages, humour’s value is as an accommodating ‘umbrella term’, as Attardo styles it, enabling interconnection, cohesive discussion and analysis.39 This contingent conceptual porosity is now widely accepted. It has thus far been implicit and will be the starting point for the next chapter. There remains, however, a danger and a price to be paid. When we treat humour as a heuristically valuable but variable general classifier to be applied, we do have to confront the matter of overextension. Specifically, there is the danger of slipping from application to attribution that can result in historical distortion by degrees. That is, a shared component of the concept (such as laughter) is no warrant for attributing a similarly shared awareness of the concept as a whole, so giving facile support to a concept’s universal acceptance. In this way, the umbrella term, to mix metaphors, becomes the thin edge of a wedge. It is this slippage, for example, that allows the conclusion that in trading in analogously humorous statements between languages we are translating not an umbrella term but the phenomenon of humour itself. Moreover, as a capacious and variable classifier, humour per se leaves us with a notion of fairly modest predicative power, unserviceable for the weight of significant global generalization about, for example, any 38  Burrows, ‘No sense of Humour’, 43–70, quotation, 43, 64; see also Mitchell, Greek Vase-Painting, 1–2,7; Wells, Japanese Humour, xi. 39  Attardo, Linguistic Theories of Humor, 5–7; Linguistics of Humor, 7; Billig, Laughter and Ridicule, 184–6; Latta, Basic Humor Process, 4–5; Escarpit, L’Humour, 5–7, 63–4; Chiaro, ‘Translation and Humour’, 7–11; Chao and Westbrook, ‘Introduction’, 1; Derrin, ‘Introduction’, 12.

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political, moral or social functions, or humour’s constitutive importance in human identity, psychological or genetic. A lot depends on what is being sheltered under the umbrella. Indeed, the belief in humour’s being universal because genetically encoded is rendered senseless if it is to be treated consistently as an ecumenical heuristic abstraction: a genetic sequence for umbrella terms would probably look like an umbrella stand. There may be understandings of what we call humour aplenty, and as an umbrella term we can expect this of humour, but to compress them into the convenient shorthand of the concept of humour is to respecify what we are talking about to encourage the categorial error of relying on the ontologically spurious. It easily leads to a delusory embrace of incoherence: ‘Do I contradict myself?’ asked Walt Whitman. ‘Very well then I contradict myself (I am large, I contain multitudes.)’ The inclusivity of the compressed abstraction, nevertheless, offers an effective way of having one’s cake and eating it: if humour contains enough multitudes, it is bound to be everywhere, the singular universal just having different forms. Lin moved in this direction in urging that youmo was ubiquitous in Chinese culture.40 So too, Luigi Pirandello, for whom umore was protean, infinitely variable, a phenomenon unconfined by the word and to be taken broadly. The absence of the noun from Tuscan is only because the thing itself informs all its literary output. All nations have humour in some form. This was to affirm universality as both self-­deluding and close to meaningless.41 Like Pirandello, Michael Billig emphasizes the infinite variety of humour, even insisting that there is no single phenomenon, a diversity exacerbated by his insouciance about any distinction between laughter and humour. Yet, in offering a general critique of humour, he remarks that no society has been discovered without it. Just what it can he have in mind, when he insists there is no it in the first place, is something he keeps to himself.42 Thus, the more plausible the claim to universality, the less it might establish. The almost phatic affirmation might just be a plea to take the study of humour seriously. The necessary points of demarcation that give subsumed concepts more promising discrimination will similarly need to vary depending on what, as humour, we are actually talking about. In exploring specificities, it may be possible to argue that there is a common  See also Chey, ‘Youmo’, 1–29 struggles with this problem.  Pirandello, L’Umorismo, 12–13, 29, 45, 47, 68, 147. 42  Billig, Laughter and Ridicule, 184–5. 40 41

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thread cohering the notions subsumed by humour, but such a claim to universality in humour is no argument for the universality of humour. Confusing the two is unhelpful.43 This brings me directly to conceptual demarcation. It has been held, for example, that the phenomenon of humour is the benign, as opposed to the malign violation of salient norms. This may be made tautologically true, or argued to be inadequate. Either way, it requires that we jettison most discussions of laughter before the eighteenth century as theories of humour. More immediately, it presupposes a general distinction between the humorous and the serious.44 In this Alexander Kozintsev is decisively latitudinarian: only the realm of the serious provides a reliably defining contrast to humour.45 Whatever the content of humour, however benign and capacious the umbrella term, the serious provides a universal point of contrast; but as this opposition is derived from linguistic bi-conditionality, it does nothing to establish humour as independent of processes of conceptualization. It does, nevertheless, warrant specific attention. The distinction between humorous and serious can be less than clear-­ cut. As Delia Chiaro has argued, jokes explicitly depend on violating, and so highlighting, formal protocols of serious discourse, sometimes blurring or cofounding differences: ‘there was an Englishman, an Irishman and …. Bang!!!’ Riddles have typically been interstitial.46 Humour is hardly limited to jokes, so a fortiori the more inclusive or unstable the general notion of humour, the more distant the grail of a single coherent theory must become, even one relying on the apparently safe and commonplace distinction Kozintzev draws. Thus the recognition that weeping and laughing could be merged; that humour could be extolled because, according to Coleridge, it could rise to pathos; that humour was serious in bringing out the truth of a stage character, all indicate a certain permeability between humorous and serious.47 More mundanely, the presentation of television news through satire makes any such point of global demarcation insecure.48 A theological perspective might lead us further from a simple  Guidi, ‘Humor Universals’, 19.  Derrin, ‘Comic Character’, 133–8, 146–7. 45  Kozintsev, Mirror of Laughter, 195. 46  Chiaro, Language of Jokes, 48, 44–5, 65, 74–5; on riddles, 68–71. 47   Coleridge, ‘Wit and Humour’, 78; Tave, Amiable Humorist, 181–239; Hurd, ‘Dissertation’, 246, also remarking that in Chinese theatre there was no distinction between tragedy and comedy (250). 48  Caron, ‘Quantum Paradox’, 157, 162–4. 43 44

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contrast. Humour’s function can be taken as salvic in helping reveal divine truth and reconciling humanity to imperfection.49 That seems serious enough. Any global contrast is further weakened if one turns to philosophy. Both irony and its more aggressive sibling sarcasm were modes of argument characteristic of philosophy and marks of philosophical deportment long before they were brought under the umbrella of humour. A contrast is compromised also by long-standing traditions of Lucianic ridicule of intellectual pretension, and by the Wittgensteinian proposition that a ‘serious and good’ philosophy might be written in jokes.50 This is to reassert a philosophical function for that ambiguous phrase, serio ludere, to be discussed further in the context of satire (Chap. 7). Insofar as philosophy has an intellectually therapeutic dimension, jokes exploiting linguistic confusion can have a perfectly serious point. Rupert Glasgow provides illustration of a continuing slippage through his discussion of Heidegger’s reification of Nothing as a central metaphysical category (Was ist Metaphysic?, 1929). It was asserted through parodic humour directed at the seriousness and serious inadequacies of science, ignoring, Heidegger claimed, though dependent upon Nothing. Such lumbering playfulness made him in turn vulnerable to critical parody by the Berlin cabaret performer Martin Buchholst.51 Certainly, these possibilities all isolate a weighty purpose for what might be a contingent diversity of leavening means, but the distinction between means and ends is itself hardly rigid, and so does little to rescue a secure, singular contrast between the serious and humorous. John Paulos has identified structural similarities between humour and a range of logical theorems. Several writers have explored the logical mechanisms on which jokes hinge in ways that cast direct light on both humour and logic. Intriguingly, for example, Hempelmann and Attardo suggest that what distinguishes the logic of a joke from semantic paradox and formal fallacy is incompleteness in resolving incongruity. This claim clearly raises possibilities for the exploration of logic that can marginalize the distinction between serious and non-serious.52 Again, irony can be seen in the implicit  Parrott, Ontology of Humor, 19–29.  Paulos, I Think, Therefore I Laugh, 5 quoting N.  Malcolm, Ludwig Wittgenstein: A Memoir (Oxford University Press, 1958). 51  Glasgow, Comedy of Mind, chap. 5. 52  Paulos, ‘Logic of Humour’, 113–14; Hempelmann and Attardo, ‘Resolutions and Their Incongruities’, 125–49; Ritchie, ‘Logic and reasoning’, 50–60; see also Morreall, ‘Humor and Philosophy’, 315–6. 49 50

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juxtaposition of entirely serious propositions; and Shaftsbury would certainly have concurred as to the necessity of humour in philosophy and never opposed it to the serious. In short, Kozintsev’s firm, seemingly uniform delineation looks simplistic. Or perhaps it needs drawing in a different way, for some humour is better seen as an identifiable aspect of serious discourse rather than being any contained contrast with it.53 Reading humour can be like examining shot silk, for from a different angle its seriousness is perceived. Pope (and Arbuthnot’s) Peri Bathos, Or The Art of Sinking in Poetry (1728) was a rulebook guaranteed to insure writing terrible poetry. It was intended to be satirical and funny, though hardly benign, as the examples of awfulness were nearly all from contemporary poets. Yet on reflection Pope accepted that it could be taken as serious rhetoric. I have left aside a similar range of problems with the scope of the serious, only some expressions of which touch on humour. To project universally contrasting realms on the basis of the semantic bi-conditionality of the serious and non-serious may ultimately be unsatisfactory. The most obvious response to the inconvenience and sheer messiness of evidence is, I suspect, the most common one. It is simply to write as if humour is somehow culturally transcendent, thus the adoption of the word becomes less a sign of creativity than a replicated label for the phenomenon or concept just waiting to be named and disclosed. This is to gesture towards a metaphysical grounding for the more casual treatment of humour as a singular with different forms, an abstract unity fashioned from multiplicity—the Whitman affirmation. Such objectification needs a little explication in its own right as a means of tying together the threads of this discussion. It is also worthy of comment, as the academic reliance on appeals to independent conceptual realms is widespread, regardless of whether it amounts to a genuine commitment, or a convenient trope of justification for how we treat or avoid evidence. With respect to humour, there are two claims that initially need disengaging: first, that humour is universalizing in not dealing with particulars, or as J.P. Richter (1763–1825) put it, not with fools but foolishness.54 Right or wrong, this is a species of assertion about the inherent character of humour, however widespread or confined it might be.

 See also Billig, Laughter and Ridicule, 185.  Tave, Amiable Humorist, 175–6.

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It is, however, the second species of asserted universality at issue here: that humour is as old as civilization, ‘fixed to the very nature of man’;55 only the word sprang from British soil. As Wei He Xu has put it, just as there were trees before the words for them, so humour existed before its vocabulary.56 Even accepting that it is meaningful to posit objects that are accessible independently of the conceptual functioning of language (trees can always be hugged), the analogy is specious. Humour is not an object. As I have broadly outlined in the previous chapter, it is a result of conceptualizing activity in language epitomized by a word made useful by what we can understand through it. Nevertheless, once projected figuratively as independent of language, something solid as a tree trunk and signalled by the laugh or smile, humour can be transplanted into an ideational or phenomenal realm that the evidence of words more or less adequately conveys, and the absence of evidence hardly disturbs.57 Humour itself might seem to have no history, for only its presentation and modes of social control change. If we are literally encouraged to treat humour as a faculty or a seventh sense, and physicalize it in laughter, the concept itself becomes a label for the phenomenon as the word labels the concept. Words (most of the evidence) might thus be only of tertiary importance, their study trivializing pedantry. The plausibility of this relationship between words and any prior concept often depends upon unexamined metaphors, and Michael Reddy has identified a highly acclimatized group of them. Words are treated as packaging, carriers for something, the important it that pre-exists them and might only need unpacking.58 This is to obscure the process of conceptualization, the making of concepts through word use. To reify the end result of such linguistic activity and treat it as if belonging to a realm beyond language entails, in Gilbert Ryle’s expression, a category-mistake, the creation of an ontological fiction that is usually misleading. Having created the ontologically empty, a range of frequently asked questions can seem important when they stem from confusion: what comes first, word or concept? How do concepts interact with the language that might convey them? Can a writer have the concept but not the words  Swift, Intelligencer, 3, Works, 8, 321.  Cazamian, Development of English Humour, 7–8; Xu, ‘Classical Confucian Concepts’, 49. 57  Machovec, Humor: Theory, History, Applications, chap. 1; Raskin, Semantic Mechanism of Humor, 1–2; Martin, The Psychology of Humor, 2–27; Guidi, ‘Humor Universals’, 17–21. 58  Reddy, ‘The Conduit Metaphor’, 164–201. 55 56

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in which to express it? In this light, Wierzbicka concedes too much to conventional wisdom in accepting the independence of concepts from words, though she does ask the crucial question of how the presence of a concept can be proved in the absence of them.59 So, leaving aside simple confusion or carelessness, to take Quintilian’s reflections on laughter as theories of humour might seem to unpack from his language aspects of the concept, his partial recognition of the universal we now grasp. Or, for Jon Roecklein, Hobbes has a theory of laughter in particular, of humour in general—where the word ‘general’ is a euphemism for writing a theory for him, presumably because laughter is a key to humour.60 Presumably also, a faith in a shared general concept provided the rationale behind Ross’s massaging Aristotle, teaching him to speak English. It would also make sense of Attardo’s attributing to Aristotle a definition of humour, and listing Cicero, Quintilian, Trissino, Castelveltro and others as humour theorists on the basis of discussing it.61 Definition itself is problematic (see Chaps. 6 and 7), but in the meantime not one of them dealt with anything more than the imponderables and dangers of laughter. This, however, is clearly no insuperable barrier, for the concept of humour is, after all, capacious, an umbrella term. It can be opened up to include whomever and whatever seems adjacent to our interests. We are taken back to the confusion of application with attribution in which descriptive integrity evaporates. Ultimately, language matters less than the presumed concept of the prior phenomenon through which evidence is suitably reshaped and redacted. It is the world turned upside down: for it is through language used conceptually that we make sense of things in a certain way, and it is through further conceptualizing language that our understandings of the world are reconfigured, depleted or enlarged. This should not need saying.

III But it does. For, despite its incoherences, the evocation of a hypostasized realm as a home for the universal of humour can be terribly convenient and has an important genealogical function. It is to this that I want finally  Wierzbicka, ‘Color Universals’, 220.  Roeckelein, ‘Hobbesian Theory’, 340–2; but see also for example, Gruner, The Game of Humor; Billig, Laughter and Ridicule, 6; Larkin-Galiñanes, ‘Overview’, 7; Atkinson, ‘Humour in Philosophy’, 11–12; Rossing, ‘A Sense of Humor’, 10. 61  Attardo, Linguistic Theories, 26–44; for Aristotle’s definition of humour, 41. 59 60

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to turn. When they meet on the field of Troy, Diomedes asks Glaucos who he is. The response is a sixty-five-line blast of ancestors and what they had done: for Homer, Glaucos is his lineage. So too is Diomedes, and the past friendships between their houses means that they will not fight but exchange armour (Iliad 6, 119–230). The compression of past into present is rarely so absolute now, but in any genealogy a constructed principle of continuity remains intact. To be part of one is to have a vicarious, privileged place in what is metaphorically deemed a collective memory. Genealogies are functional timelines for a present identity, thus subjects for celebration or shame and freighted with implications for the future. They exemplify a form of what John Pocock has called ‘past relationships’ to which, he argued, historical study is a critical reaction, an attempt to understand the past in a way that minimizes present entanglements.62 Historical study begins as largely parasitic on genealogy. This is not to posit any simple dichotomy but to outline diverging propensities and priorities in the messy business of addressing what is left of the past, propensities that require different principles for three distinct processes: the selection of evidence, its predication and the means of interconnection to form a narrative shape. Conventionally, what is called history has, in fact, been predominantly genealogical, and the literature promoting historical study is flecked with genealogical as well as more historicist justification. The rhetorics of relevance and archaeological unearthing are jostled together as if there is no tension between them. And indeed, in practice it can be difficult to tell which propensity is ascendant, for the parasite is often embedded with its host. We are often confronted with contested accounts of the past in the political arena, with the passions that coagulate around statues and paintings of controversial figures. Similarly, we are confronted with the perceived need to adapt iconic literary works to present tastes and tolerances that are at one in their preoccupation with the moral implications and political imperatives of described and redescribed genealogies, their heroes and villains. In its most synoptic form, genealogy can become allegory: the shades of Diomedes and Glaucos regain their shape. Yet the disciplinary histories fostered in academic study are little different in paring down and mythologizing previous times to fit present imperatives. Critiques of Locke or Marx can be blows to the heart of liberalism or socialism, respectively. Knowing where the major figures sit and why is  Pocock, ‘The Origins of the Study of the Past’, 209–46.

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part of the process of induction into a community; the use of their names and their elevation to adjectival significance (Marxian, Freudian, Platonic) in the context of the discipline’s major issues, exhibits literacy and belonging. Academic histories of historiography and international relations are cases in point. Ryan Walter has recently exposed the tradition of classical political economy as a fiction of modern economics used to illustrate preoccupations quite alien to its putatively major figures like Malthus and Ricardo.63 According to Thomas Kuhn, histories of science were systemically falsifying in relating incremental steps towards consummation in the present. When contemporary orthodoxy changed, the past required rewriting.64 The paradigmatic examples of such narratives are the histories of philosophy by Kant and Hegel, where a dialectical mechanism of thesis, antithesis and synthesis explains how what was worthy in past philosophers finds a place in the triumph of rationality, that is, the author’s own doctrines. The nascent field of humour studies arguably dates only from the mid-­1970s and fits a pattern in its projection of its subject matter as an ontic invariant (humour in all its Whitmanesque forms).65 In its specification of a theoretical lineage stemming from antiquity, humour studies has relied on the confusion of laughter and humour for its voices to be heard before the eighteenth century. What Attardo refers to as the dominance of psychology may go some way to explaining a perfunctory and ahistorical treatment of the past, there being a tendency, as the psychologist Jeffrey Goldstein aptly put it, to assume the universality of any topic of psychological interest.66 Certainly, the pedigree with its trajectory of development has become part of the politics of institutional establishment. Nomenclature varies but broadly it can be put as follows: superiority theory dominated antiquity and would have its pre-eminent exponent in Thomas Hobbes; most crudely, he invented the superiority theory.67 Incongruity theory arose to

 Walter, Before Method and Models, 1–27; 219–29.  Kuhn, The Structure of Scientific Revolutions, 1–2. 65  Attardo, Encylopedia, xxxi. 66  Attardo, Encyclopedia, xxxii; the disciplinary imbalance of Chapman and Foot’s foundational compendium amply illustrates his point; Goldstein, ‘Cross Cultural Research’, 167. 67  Kozintsev, The Mirror of Laughter, 2; Holland, Psychology of Humor, 44, for one of the most famous theories of the comic; for a lucid exposition of the genealogical sequence, Morreall, Taking Laughter Seriously, chaps 2–4; Larkin-Galiñanes, ‘Overview’, 5–7. 63 64

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confront the inadequacies of superiority and has its seminal voice in Kant.68 The nineteenth and twentieth centuries, again in reaction to dominant understandings, saw the rise of theories of release (Freud) and social control through incongruity (Bergson), while the previously dominant theories continue to be used, incorporated, adapted and proffered as the best ways forward. As all the major theories are evident in antiquity, we just have to use them appropriately.69 The consummation to be desired is clearly a synthesis from theses and antitheses, or a new general theory—a paradigm, to coin a phrase. A Semantic Script Theory of Humour (SSTH), a General Theory of Verbal Humour (GTVH) and Benign Violation Theory (BVT) have already been mooted and disputed, and their compression into sets of capital letters is itself a noteworthy sign of communal endeavour.70 Naturally, there are refinements and qualifications. The major theories might supplement each other, and the names attached to each might be shuffled around. Bergson, for example, might be dealt out to incongruity, social control and then to superiority,71 and some recent theory is moving beyond the crude dichotomies hitherto informing the lineage.72 Billig, who casts a refreshingly critical eye on the celebratory ethos of humour studies, is rightly doubtful about the great theories actually forming stages in a history of humour. Yet he also wishes to insert Shaftsbury and Addison into the pantheon by arguing that they were important incongruity theorists before Kant—Schopenhauer can be offered as an alternative and Nietzsche is now looming into view. According to Eagleton, it is a scandal that Hobbes’s nemesis Hutcheson is (apparently) not better known.73 Aristotle had drawn attention to the importance of comedic trickery and the unexpected, απατη modified from more warlike and brutal modes of deceit; and incongruity and surprise were widely taken as central to  Kant, Kritik der Urteilskraft (Critique of Judgement), 203 art. 54.  See for example, Gruner, The Game of Humor, a defence of superiority theory; Perks, ‘Ancient Roots of Humor Theory’, 119–32. 70  Attardo, ‘General Theory’, 126–42, developed from Victor Raskin’s Semantic Script Theory; Linguistics of Humor, 136–56; Forabosco, Il settimo senso, chap. 10; ‘Concept of Inconguity’, 52–3, an increasingly fluid notion. 71  Chao and Westbrook, ‘Introduction’, 1; Davis, ‘Bergson’s Theory of the Comic’, 110–11. 72  See for example, Attardo, Linguistics of Humor, 57–93; Davis, ‘Bergson’s Theory of the Comic’, 111. 73  Billig, Laughter and Ridicule, 37–56, 75–8; Attardo, Linguistic Theories, 48; Eagleton, Humour, 115. 68 69

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humour whenever it was discussed during the eighteenth century. Latta claims that Kant, to his credit, was not an incongruity theorist anyway (it is a bad theory), rather he was a failed cognitive shift theorist.74 That could be worse. What the major figures share is the genealogical perspective through which they are seen as engaging with the concept of humour by helping articulate a major theory. The treatment of Hobbes is illustration enough, as his name is so rusted onto ‘superiority theory’ that it has assumed a brownish tinge.75 For Tave, it was a simplistic image of Hobbes that needed to be eradicated for amiable humour, humour as we like it to emerge.76 Hutcheson’s principal target in criticizing Hobbes was the negative conception of humanity that denied the explanatory power of inherent benevolence and sociability.77 The inadequate critique was an attempt to deflect a view of human nature that was both unedifying and theologically unpalatable. Tave accepted the shortcomings of Hutcheson’s attack, and Billig and Sheila Lintott have both voiced scepticism about what Hobbes’s theory of humour actually was. He did not have one. A case can be developed. Hobbes’s longest discussion of laughter is in The Elements of Law (1640) and it was touched on briefly in De cive (1642/1647, 1651).78 It was revised and reduced to a single paragraph in Leviathan (1651) and revisited in De homine (1658). Leviathan is by far the most cited version.79 What has stuck most is the phrase calling laughter a ‘sudden glory’, a felicity that pleased Hobbes enough for him to carry it through to the Latin Leviathan, ‘Gloriatio subita Passio illa est, quae producit Risum’.80 In The Elements this expression of joy is held to mark a nameless passion causing those facial distortions we call laughter. In The Elements and De cive, gloria (vainglory) is a cause of laughter. In Leviathan, ‘sudden glory’ is now stated to be the passion. The phrase is not used in De homine but laughter remains a passion.  Latta, The Basic Humor Process, 221–3.  Lintott, ‘Superiority in Humor Theory’, provides an honourable exception; Chiaro, ‘Translation and Humor’, elliptically associates Leviathan with incongruity (19). 76  Tave, Amiable Humorist. 77  Hutcheson, Reflections. 78  Hobbes, The Elements of Law, pt 1, chap. 9, sect. 13, 41–3; De cive, chap. 1; Philosophicall Rudiments (1651), chaps 1, 4. 79  Hobbes, Leviathan, 2 chap. 6, 88–9. 80  Hobbes, Leviathan, chap. 6, 89; ‘those Grimaces called [laughter]’ is omitted. 74 75

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In all the main statements, most laughter is held to be a matter glorying in superiority over another. It is a manifestation of meanness and ‘vainglory’ (Elements), ‘a signe of Pusillanimity’ (Leviathan), of hatred or scorn (De homine). In De cive the few words devoted to the topic state that vainglory can underlie even inoffensive (innocentum) laughter, the point being to emphasize the reach of our antisocial instincts; and indeed, Hobbes’s laws of nature, those rules summarizing the conditions for peaceful co-existence, include a prohibition on ridiculing others through laughter. There are, then, minor adjustments, but there is clearly a difference between laughter as an expression of superiority, glorying at the expense of others, and vainglory as an underlying propensity that may also produce the innocent laughter of undamaging merriment. The punning reliance on glory as both laughter itself and the more general cause of human action, gloria (De cive) indicates the need for the disambiguation Hobbes does not supply. His most detailed treatment, however, offers less a theory of laughter, per se, than a causal analysis of the whole lexicon of moral approbation and disapprobation, as evidence of the passions, and dealing inter alia with words such as love, lust and charity. The immediate point of contrast with laughter is predictably with weeping. In The Elements, this is the ‘opposite’ passion, ‘whose signs are another distortion of the face with tears’. It is ‘the sudden falling out with ourselves, or sudden conception of defect’.81 In Leviathan the passion that causes tears is, more briskly, ‘Sudden Dejection’.82 In both works, the strong contrasts echo Montaigne’s philosophical counterpoints of Democritus and Heraclitus. The theoretical context of defining a moral lexicon does not, however, exclude laughter occurring independently of aggressive intent. Just so, Hobbes’s account of human nature does not require that all humans comply with it—a few are enough to give it traction. There may only be one or two thieves in the neighbourhood, but we accuse humanity when we lock our doors on leaving home. Thus, in Leviathan it is not all but only ‘much’ laughter that arises from pusillanimity. Indeed, in every account he qualifies the explanatory reach of superiority. In The Elements, Hobbes explicitly includes self-mockery, laughter at our previous selves as a source

 Hobbes, Elements, 1, chap. 9, sect. 14, 42.  Hobbes, Leviathan, chap. 6, 88.

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of joy.83 In Leviathan we are told that laughter arises either from pleasure at our own actions or from a perceived deformity in others. His principal interest, to be sure, is in laughter as denigration, but this is recognized as the predominant part of a wider, albeit under-specified phenomenon. He returns to this elliptically in De homine (12.7), where social belonging becomes a fault line. Laughter expressive of joy in ourselves is contrasted with the laughter at strangers signifying a sense of superiority. Such laughter is a weapon that alienates. This carries the explicit corollary that we do not laugh at the indecorous conduct of friends or kindred.84 Hobbes’s repeated and nuanced qualifications allowing other explanations and functions for laughter, such as self-deprecation, are apt to be overlooked. Nowhere does he commit himself to the reductive theory commonly attributed to him. What John Morreall calls his ‘clear and radical’ superiority theory is a creature of decontextualized quotation and misleading paraphrase.85 In all cases, however, Hobbes emphasizes that laughter’s immediate cause is surprise, the suddenness in the glory. As he remarks, something does not cease to be ridiculous ‘when it groweth stale or usual’, it simply ceases to stimulate laughter.86 In the nomenclature of humour studies, laughter arises directly from perceived incongruity with our expectations, a jarring discordance with predictable and established associations. Alexander Gerard would express the synonymity by referring to ‘incongruity or a surprising and uncommon mixture of relation and contrariety in things’.87 William Preston, explicitly defending Hobbes, similarly would emphasize surprise and then discuss it as ‘incongruity’.88 As they recognized, in this element of surprise we have the focus and common denominator of Hobbes’s analysis, analogous to the suddenness of dejection that causes tears. It is akin to what Corbyn Morris would call the passport of wit, providing that shock of elucidation.

83  Reference to laughing at our previous selves is an expression of Hobbes’s belief that we live only in the present, so there is something previous about laughter at what we have just said or done. The Lockean concept of the self allows the more elegant formulation of laughing at oneself. 84  Hobbes, De homine, 12. sect. 7, 69–70. 85  Morreall, ‘Philosophy and Religion’, 220. 86  Hobbes, Elements, 1 chap. 9, sect. 13, 41. 87  Gerard, Essay on Taste, 68–70; for discussion, Tave, Amiable Humorist, 75. 88  Preston, Essay on Ridicule, 71–2, 82–7.

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Moreover, Hobbes’s argument in The Elements culminates with a different point. If laughter is not to cause offence, it must be ‘abstracted from persons’, be directed at general ‘absurdities and infirmities’, and ‘then all the company may laugh together’.89 With a different emphasis, this recognition of the benign occurs again in De cive—sometimes laughter may be innocent but it nevertheless arises more from vainglory than from delight in society.90 The explanatory relevance of vainglory is variable, like the ‘much’ laughter arising from it in Leviathan. Either way, laughter undirected at specific targets is recognized by Hobbes. It is encompassed by his insistence in Leviathan and De homine that laughter can be occasioned by our own pleasing actions. When in a social setting, it can be the innocent mirth at a general absurdity that The Elements explicitly commends. What he recognizes about laughter is close to the socially affirmative merriment Henry Vaughan celebrated, with the company’s eyes directed not at each other, but to the heavens. It is at one with Sir Thomas Browne’s laughing at his own imagined comedies and with Thomas Sheridan’s laughter of good fellowship that when he praised it was beginning to be associated with the word humour. Richter and Coleridge would eventually see such humour as universal.91 Hobbes, then, accentuates surprise, what seems tantamount to incongruity, as a necessary efficient cause for laughter that occasionally might not be an expression of superiority; and as his is principally a causal analysis, it is curious that it has not been given more attention.92 It is also worth noting that if Hobbes’s case is turned into a theory of humour, or let alone the comic, it is weakened, for surprise is less plausibly a necessary cause of humour than it might be for laughter.93 The laughter discussed by Ludovico Castelveltro of old friends meeting unexpectedly, or of parents relishing a baby’s health, can be seen as cases of surprise touching wonder. Laughter can thus mark a point at which words fail, becoming an expression of paralipsis. Hobbes’s residual classification of  Hobbes, Elements, 1 chap. 9, sect. 13, 42.  Hobbes, De cive, chap. 1; Philosophicall Rudiments, 1, 4. 91  Coleridge, ‘Wit and Humour’, 79. 92  Morreall, an incongruity theorist, even makes the Hobbesian point about not laughing at what they both call ‘stale’; but Hobbes is only associated with the superiority theory of humour (‘Humor and Philosophy’, 316, 307–10); Larkin-Galiñanes, ‘Overview’, 7 also sidesteps the point; cf. Chiaro, as noted, who recognizes the importance of incongruity in Leviathan. 93  Holland, Psychology of Humor, 43–7. 89 90

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laughter arising from our own actions would potentially include such moments of sudden joy. Conversely, stale jokes might still be recognized as expressions of humour, and indeed they often have a phatic function in discourse by virtue of their familiarity. Predictability may itself be a source of amusement. My argument is not that Hobbes has simply been placed in the wrong theoretical box—surprise as an immediate cause of all laughter is hardly opposed to the laughter expressive of superiority.94 For Hobbes, it is as entirely consistent with generally vainglorious motivation as weeping is with a sense of inferiority. Ipso facto Hobbes’s recognition of amiable laughter is quite misread if taken as an attempt to incorporate innocent joy into his theory of superiority.95 The most that can be said, drawing only on the few largely overlooked lines in De cive, is that vainglory, the natural inclination to put ourselves first, can help generate what is not offensive as well as what is designed to be.96 Origination in some degree of self-interest is therefore in no way inconsistent with a socializing rationale for laughter. In short, Hobbes’s superiority theory amounts to little more than a streamlined abstraction that slots him into a genealogy, as the “grandfather” of aggressive humour theory.97 If superiority theory as distinct from incongruity theory is important now, it requires figures shaped for the Procrustean bed. Hobbes becomes a giant in the cot, allowing Kant to be put to bed with incongruity. The genealogical imperative might do a little to explain the disproportionate presence of Leviathan’s synoptic discussion in humour study’s rough history of humour theory: such a widely known and undeniably brilliant work is an emblematic asset in the way that the lesser-known Elements of Law or the largely ignored De homine are not. Genealogies don’t need such clutter. Moreover, the very inadequacy of Hobbes’s accounts of laughter when refracted into a theory of humour carries a genealogical benefit. It underscores the need for something better. His concocted failure provides an

94  As Forabosco has insisted, incongruity is less a self-contained theory than an explanatory factor in different theories, Il settimo senso, cap. 10; ‘Concept of Inconguity’, 49–56; as noted earlier, both Raskin, Semantic Mechanism, 40, and Attardo, Linguistic Theories, 47, have insisted that the major theories are not necessarily oppositional. 95  Morreall, Taking Laughter Seriously, 6, 13. 96  Hobbes, De cive, chap. 1; Philosophicall Rudiments, 1, 4. 97  Attardo, Linguistics of Humor, 20.

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impetus for narrative development.98 For Eagleton, the superiority theory of humour is so bad, it is almost funny; its locus classicus is, of course, Leviathan, thank goodness for Hutcheson.99 The result is to mistake the ignis fatuus of later philosophy for the Gospel according to Thomas.100 The glib treatment of him, then, has fitted broader ‘past-­relational’ patterns of conceptual appropriation that sustain self-­replicating myth. Here endeth the lesson on Hobbes as a victim of genealogy. It leaves open, however, the question of his bold claim that he was the first to make clear what laughter was all about. I shall address this as a conclusion to the next two chapters, so bringing together discussion of some of the more historical difficulties in the study of humour. There remains a shimmer of uncertain light on what he has left us.

IV Humour’s putative place in a conceptual realm is no mere metaphysical conceit. It can provide a criterion for adjustment and incorporation into a lineage. By reference to it new ancestors of merit, such as Addison and Shaftsbury, can be found and even black sheep isolated (Latta on Kant). Quintilian can thus provide the first coherent theory of humour without actually doing so. Similarly, Hobbes’s theory of laughter can become, as Roeckelin reinvents bits of it, a general theory of humour. Less ventriloquistically, different writers may be deemed anticipators of the familiar, ancestors, laying the foundations, changing the direction of history (does that really make sense?). They may be ahead of their times (does that?). Such almost ubiquitous clichés of academic promotion are sequencing mechanisms of accommodation to the present, phrases of punctuation and exclamation. Wherever our concepts are salted into the evidence to be unearthed, success is assured, and the deeper down the structures are, the more impressive the recovery. As C.H.  McIlwain once apparently remarked, the easiest way to find the present in the past is to put it there first. This is what we have when laughter in the absence of a vocabulary of humour is taken to be an expression of, or key to it; and when theories 98  Bricker, ‘Laughter and the Limits of Reform’, who correctly notes that superiority theory does not really fit Hobbes, nevertheless simply follows Morreall in designating incongruity theory as post-Hobbesian (161–2). 99  Eagleton, Humour, 37–40, 111, 115. 100  Hobbes, Leviathan, chap. 47, 1110.

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about laughter are simply paraphrased or translated as discussions of humour, or the mumblingly evasive laughter-and-humour.101 Systemically anachronistic and obfuscatory as it is, such lineal manipulation has a pragmatic significance. As a universal concept, humour creates a condition for a shared pedigree, and allusion to this can help mitigate the centrifugal dynamics of humour studies, embracing disciplines as distinct as medicine, neuroscience, psychology, sociology, anthropology, history, linguistics and law. The situation is analogous to Ian Hunter’s depiction of eighteenth-century natural law as a ‘gestational matrix’ for an array of disciplines nominally cohered by reference to an abstract conception of the natural, and in addition, the authoritative names that had helped or hindered its discovery.102 So too for humour studies: the enthusiasm for interdisciplinarity notwithstanding, without some degree of cohesion provided by humour, sustaining a place in academia is difficult, and so talismanic names are emblematic of a common pursuit. That intellectual ancestors can be shared between institutionalized identities is itself a claim on membership. It may even be that a genealogy of humour theory is additionally important in the absence of a specialized vocabulary, the effective deployment of which is an overt sign of belonging and means of exclusion from an intellectual group. Given its interdisciplinary nature, the academic study of humour lies, rather, at the juncture of established argots through which a nominally shared subject matter can be variously processed.103 As the tower of Babel gets higher, its builders can at least fall back on common foundational figures. It is important that they are able to. When political science was established in universities only in the late nineteenth century, it fashioned a genealogy from classics and philosophy to display its gravitas and hallowed standing. When international relations was created in the early twentieth century, it reprocessed figures from political science to the same effect. There is precedent enough for humour studies to follow suit: any lineage that includes Plato, Aristotle, Hobbes and Kant needs taking seriously.

101  Malecka, ‘Humor in the Perspectives of Logos’, for such a persistent falsification, but as a phenomenologist, she might not see any problem in this. 102  Hunter, ‘Natural Law, Historiography, and Aboriginal Sovereignty’, 144–5. 103  On the lack of a shared conceptual vocabulary and an attempt to overcome it, see Attardo, Linguistics of Humor, 3–8.

PART II

Method and Its Limits in the Historical Study of Humour

CHAPTER 4

Context and Intention

I The mythic lineage of humour theory is sustained by the imperatives of academic politics. This raises the question of just how do we study humour historically. One answer would be to say not much before the seventeenth century; but this would be to gurgle the baby with the bathwater. As a loose classifier humour can have analytic value in helping bring together a diversity of phenomena without undue distortion. Shaftsbury and Addison noted a range of terms that might be encompassed by humour; and Attardo’s provisional mapping of the field of English words now subsumed by it gives an indication of the complexity involved. Loose, then, does not necessarily mean useless, but such an issue is not to be determined a priori. Thus my immediate purpose is to explore some of the methodological difficulties common to the historical study of humour both before and after the word’s modern meaning was impressed onto the record. This obviously gives valuable flexibility if we do not mistake the heuristic value of the general, second-order notion of humour for a concept that can simply be elicited from the distant past and treated as a simple first-order descriptor. As I have argued, it is this confusion of ex post facto usefulness with descriptive integrity that sustains the myth that the study of humour has a couple of millennia of theory behind it. The result of such methodological muddle has been an opportunity lost both to

© The Author(s), under exclusive license to Springer Nature Switzerland AG 2023 C. Condren, Between Laughter and Satire, https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-031-21739-5_4

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understand antiquity better and to map the contemporary nature of humour and its associated terms. Methodology I take as the formulation of the procedural rules furthering a given activity. As the discursive shape of historical writing is variable, so methodological considerations will have uneven sway. If writing about the past is genealogical, there is greater methodological tolerance than if it aspires to the historicist rigors of attempting to eradicate anachronism and myth-making. These scholarly priorities were increasingly evident during the nineteenth century, and arguably came to dominate historical study by the twentieth. It is, however, unlikely that most historians would want genealogy entirely to be eradicated, for it provides a means of disciplinary promotion and a repertoire of defensive rationalizations whenever the historian feels threatened or unloved or underfunded. It is fast returning to academic fashion. As the contours of present-centred genealogy have already been outlined, I want now to sketch in some of the difficulties attendant upon studying humour with a greater historical austerity. The emphasis throughout will be to indicate those areas of inferential uncertainty marking the limits of sound method in dealing with past humour. In turn, I shall address the indeterminacies of contextualization and intentionality, then, in the following chapter, those of translation and reception, but will begin with the most obvious point. Words in the immediate ambit of humour can easily have what C.S. Lewis called a ‘dangerous sense’, a specious familiarity.1 Associations and meaning we take for granted may have been marginal or absent in earlier use. The etymological derivation of the word ‘joke’ from the Latin iocus has disguised a relative modernity in meaning. In its typically pithy form and as a touchstone for the generation of humour theory, it appears to have been a nineteenth-century invention, initially regarded as American humour.2 If, for example, we take humour as benign (as in Benign Violation Theory), then to regard the joke as a sign of continuity may be unwarranted. Faced with what might have been orchestrated cruelty in joking, we might need to exclude some jokes from the range of humour, or qualify or abandon faith in benignity as a defining feature of it. More broadly, if the joke is a standard by which to assess modern humour theories, such as a Semantic Script Theory of Humour or a General Theory of Verbal Humour, any assumptions about the historical ubiquity of 1 2

 Lewis, Studies in Words, 12–13.  Derrin, ‘Introduction’, 7; Rolfe, ‘The Idea of National Humour’, 63–5.

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joking are likely to lead to distortions in their application. The colloquial meaning of joking to signal whatever is not serious or literal facilitates such historical overextension, so shaping the past to endorse modern theory. Again, as Philippa Maddern has argued, in medieval England, to be merry was to be healthy in body and soul. Mirth was accepted as medicinal, and so gradually by semantic contiguity merry acquired its modern meaning of mirthful.3 By the seventeenth century it was regularly employed as we would now expect, redolent with what we call humour. It pops up nearly 800 times in Samuel Pepys’s Diary, usually referring to the conviviality of eating and drinking—and later it could be a euphemism for drunkenness. To read such usage back into the material Maddern discusses is to fall foul of a dangerous sense, and this can also operate in reverse. It is difficult to discern how far the residue of physical and spiritual well-being continued to inform the discussions of seventeenth-century writers like Barrow and Straight extolling the virtues of merriment as a duty of holy joy. Fittingly, Lewis takes wit as a word particularly subject to ahistorical misunderstanding. As an element of semantic continuity in the study of humour, it has pitfalls for the unwary and resonances of uncertain significance. Initially, wit from Old English had referred to intelligence, consciousness and perception. The plural form is noteworthy, deriving, as Lewis argues, either from the human senses or from an awareness that people may have different forms of intelligence, not all of which were commensurable or commendable. When Anne Askew wrote of ‘moody cruel wit’ on a throne sitting in place of justice, she was insinuating royal tyranny.4 Gradually, however, wit was extended. It came to denote some exceptional capacity close to the Latin ingenium, and by the end of the sixteenth century, it could be associated with laughter in its rhetorical mode and what we would see as humour. Thus, the oft-quoted Falstaff (Henry IV pt. 2,1.2): nothing ‘intends to laughter more than I invent or is invented on me. I am not only witty in myself, but the cause that wit is in other men.’ I laugh at them because they deserve it. This instance, however, Lewis regarded as wit in its dangerous, now most familiar sense, untypical of the times and alloyed with its older meanings.5 Gradually wit came to embrace the sort of deft utterance that creates a shock of delight or wry appreciation, and by the latish seventeenth century, it is personified in people called, or congratulating each other for  Maddern, ‘It is full merry in Heaven’, 21–38.  Askew, Ballad, stanza 11, in Ford, London, 64. 5  Lewis, Studies in Words, 86–8, 98–9. 3 4

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being, wits—those given to such elegant stimulation. In MacFlecknoe (1678/82), Dryden made the point relentlessly against the hapless Shadwell, heir apparent to the kingdom of dullness and stupidity, the enemies of wit (lines 199–202). Often the point of evoking wit was to deploy its antonyms. As Cowley claimed, only by negatives could it be defined.6 Lewis saw negative delineation as a sign of polemical appropriation.7 A clearer example is in the addition of the predicate variables attached to wit such as, real, false or true. The very notion of a town wit on the stage was more than a matter of stereotypical characterization. It was an encapsulation of false, pretentious, empty and harmful wit.8 Given the word’s continuing association with intelligence, it is only to be expected that wit was often politically contentious and no innocent descriptor for what was or was not beginning to be isolated in poetry; and throughout the seventeenth and eighteenth centuries, it could be treated as an intellectual or philosophical virtue quite distinct from any association with humour. Diverging patterns of use make formal singular definition difficult, but more importantly, it was application and illustration rather than definition that revealed the word’s mobilization in dispute.9 Yet it is also the case that during the later seventeenth century wit could be opposed to the passionate exhibition of inspiration, irrationality that in some eyes tainted non-conformity and might vicariously carry intimations of Civil War rebelliousness.10 This did not, however, mean that wit was exclusively tied to political commitments, or that the party, or factional labels Whig and Tory, are reliable guides to them. Certainly, the prominence of the Tory Wits, Swift, Gay, Parnell, Arbuthnot and Pope colour expectations; but for the High Church Tory Ned Ward (1667–1731), there had been a ‘Plague of Wit’, and ‘Wits will be Madmen … And Madmen-like, Ungratefull they’ll Wound.’11 Similarly, some Whigs such as Addison openly applauded wit as a civilizing quality under the aegis of humour, while others denigrated it as a mark of Tory decadence and a barrier to poetic reform.12

 Cowley, ‘Of Wit’.  Lewis, Studies in Words, 100–1, 104–6. 8  Tave, Amiable Humorist, 12–13. 9  Gay, The Present State of Wit. 10  Williams, Poetry, 68–9. 11  Ward, Satyr, 4. 12  Williams, Poetry, 82–4. 6 7

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The status of the word wit was, then, rather like humour itself, a matter of confessionally coloured politics as much as poetics; discourse of one may well have carried a subtext of the other. Discerning the appropriate balance is something for which methodology can provide only warnings. Thus, to recall Corbyn Morris’s incisive analysis (above, Chap. 2), wit provides a vital moment of elucidation by juxtaposition, evidenced by its passport, surprise. It is fundamentally a creative quality of insight distinct from humour. His argument frees wit to be deployed as a specifically political virtue, one he attached, along with good humour (disposition) and generosity, to the Whig statesman Sir Robert Walpole (1676–1745). It is fitting that to a man of such qualities, a definition of wit should be dedicated.13 The lengthy dedication may, in short, carry the principal force of the Essay, for it was a political epitaph. It may nevertheless provide vital evidence of the way in which wit, laughter and humour were being aligned. The element of surprise to which Morris and others drew attention provided something typically shared with laughter. As humour gradually assumed a new generalized status in proximity to a relatively benign laughter, wit also came partially into its ambit. Or perhaps it was the case that the cognation of wit and laughter helped civilize the latter by virtue of the intelligence implicit in the former. I suspect wit’s early modern uses on the cusp of what we call the humorous may have been partially occasioned by familiarity with Castiglione’s Il cortegiano (1528, trans. 1561), for central to Castiglione’s work was his neologism sprezzatura.14 It designated a vital quality of lightness of style in aristocratic conduct. The extended use for wit, still carrying older meanings of deft intelligence, may have functioned as an effective translation of sprezzatura, for which there was only periphrasis in English. It also functioned as a criterion for separating unseemly from courtly, decorous laughter. Certainly, much of the meaning of the Italian overlaps with the newer, seventeenth-century connotations of wit that by the early eighteenth century had become commonplace. The artful ease of sprezzatura also indicated the striking or surprising. There is something like discordia concors in accomplishment by sprezzatura and one persistent understanding of wit is that it brings together the disparate in an unexpected fashion. This is a point stressed in related ways by Locke, Hutcheson and Morris; or, as

 Morris, Essay, iv–v, xi–xii.  Ghose, Shakespeare and Laughter, 15–26, esp. 22–6.

13 14

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Duguld Stewart (1753–1828) summarized, wit is an intellectual ­dexterity.15 It could thus be an easy bedfellow with humour and acceptable laughter, for which incongruity was an increasingly explicit notion during the eighteenth century. Wit was also capable of the widest application, from the metaphysical poets to the political insights of Sir Robert Walpole. The broad scope of wit, in turn, suggests a further significance. Conventionally in politico-religious discourse, the use of the words innovation and novelty had been highly derogatory. From the early seventeenth century such negativity had been increasingly off-set by the honorific status of such terms in natural philosophy. I shall return to this (Chap. 5) when discussing Hobbes. It may be that during the eighteenth century, the novelty and distinctiveness linked with the acumen of wit, and the surprise of unexpected and incongruous conjunctions, supported the values of philosophical discovery and originality and helped erode the anti-innovatory idioms of politics. If Morris’s contentious view of wit as a political virtue gained credence, it is difficult to see how the innovatory could automatically be condemned. In 1759 Edward Young had extolled originality as a mark of genius and, as noted (Chap. 2), Alexander Gerard took a sense of novelty to help constitute good taste. In his Essay on Wit, the physician Sir Richard Blackmore (1654–1729) touches on all these ramifying issues providing a contrast with what Shaftsbury had recently urged and Morris would argue. Blackmore insists that wit, ridicule, satire, humour and laughter put ‘reason out of countenance’.16 Recognizing the potency of the term wit that he treats in close conjunction with humour, his principal concern is with its abuse and the need to curtail its scope. This is done on the basis of a definition that stresses surprise, novelty and elegance, and like sprezzatura, a deft yet evident exhibition of intelligence. These, however, are precisely the qualities that make wit antithetical to discretion and so unfit for political judgement, philology, history and philosophical reasoning—it is hardly surprising that Pope, who would philosophize through satire, regarded Blackmore as quintessentially dull. Nevertheless, Blackmore commends John Eachard for the wit and the solidity of his reason in demolishing the ‘conceited philosopher Hobbes’.17

 Tave, Amiable Humorist, 61–8, 75.  Blackmore, Essay on Wit, 190. 17  Blackmore, Essay on Wit, 191–4, 199, 202. 15 16

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I have provided nothing more than a general and impressionistic overview of the different ways in which the word wit was jostled in contention: there were questions of meaning and attribution, implication and legitimate scope. Predictably, the word was subject to a domino effect as other terms like repartee, raillery, banter, drollery or humour might be used to replace or avoid it, with potentially damaging effects to the meaning of all. With Blackmore’s repeated but otherwise unspecified conjunction of wit and humour, we are left to guess. Indeed, the collocation of wit and humour was common during the period in which humour gradually assumed its modern meaning, and it may be that each was used, as it were, to prop up and stabilize the other. Swift, capitalizing on Addison’s valorization of true humour, seems to have a bet each way in suggesting either that humour was superior to wit, or the most agreeable species of it.18 The words would continue to have an unsettled relationship. In 1783, John Trusler listed them among those widely and wrongly considered synonymous. Humour, he asserted, relished more by the vulgar always excites laughter; wit is not and does not. Humour concerns manner, wit matter.19 Its associations with intelligence remained intact. In The Last Essays of Elia (1833), Charles Lamb would equate it with poetic genius. In providing some semantic continuity for a general notion of humour, wit, then, carries a multidimensional dangerous sense that is hardly captured in seeing the word purely in a context of poetics and English literature. It may be that the word helps clarify and accentuate, being ‘Nature to advantage dress’d, / What oft was thought but ne’er so well express’d. / Something whose truth convinced at sight we find, / That gives us back the image of our mind.’20 Or as Nietzsche more generally would state of neologisms, they are names that let us see what is already before us.21 To be sure, wit, when it came to be seen as a form of humour, was no neologism; but in taking words as labels for the pre-existing, both Pope and Nietzsche may have overlooked a more creative function, that made possible a new licit style of expression. This itself would have helped solidify humour’s untoward discursive standing during the eighteenth century. There is, then, an uncertain range of possibilities that might need to be explored whenever we come across the word in the context of humour, or  Swift, Intelligencer, 231.  Trusler, A Dictionary, 7. 20  Pope Essay, 2, lines 297–300. 21  Nietzsche, La Gaia scienza, para 26. 18 19

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whenever we use reference to wit as evidence of what we now call humour. It may not have been. So far, I have canvassed problems arising from the immediate semantic context in order to stress the gradual process of change that sees important meanings eventually established in the ambit of humour and that help illustrate that word’s own shift to an organizing category for human expression. In such processes older patterns of use easily survived. Their persistence hardly makes the historian’s task easy. Difficulties might well be eased by placing usages in the right context, but this provides no simple methodological solution. The appeal to context raises problems of its own.

II Contexts are expressions of the bi-conditional relationship between general and particular. Each is understood in interplay with the other in what the neo-Kantian philosopher Wilhelm Dilthey (1833–1911) regarded as the hermeneutic circle of understanding.22 In this broadest of senses, contextualization is a ubiquitous feature of enquiry stretching well beyond historiography. But on all fronts, it holds out the promise of solving problems of interpretation by consideration of what surrounds a focus of attention. Endowed with such talismanic potency, context itself is an evocative and disputed term, a counter to be played in claims to intellectual integrity. Because contexts consist of those surroundings that have explanatory power, they need isolating from mere background. The distinction is dependent on the sort of enquiry undertaken, and so contexts are functions of the questions we ask. Put a little differently, those questions are the criteria for the identification of a context. The upshot is that for the historian, contexts are less historical realities per se than constructions of historiographical necessity.23 In turn, contexts are shaped through the changing understanding of what we place within them, and the more detailed the examination of the identity, the more contexts it is likely to suggest. The hermeneutic circle is never quite closed. If the process of contextualization can raise as many problems as it appears to settle, humour exacerbates matters. It requires attention to both a negative and positive aspect of contextualization: negatively, 22  Dilthey, Ideas Concerning a Descriptive and Analytic Psychology; Makkreel, Dilthey, 247–73, esp. 269–71, 333–4. 23  See especially, LaCapra, ‘Rethinking Intellectual History’, 245–76.

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contrasting delineation isolates and enables focus, while positively some surroundings directly elucidate. As a general covering term, humour’s porosity entails contextual under-determination with regard to either aspect. What is subsumed or partially subsumed by humour encourages multiple lines of inquiry. The negativity of contextual isolation is most commonly expressed through the metaphor of a play-frame. This is predicated on the demarcation between humour and the serious. This is unreliable, but even where plausible it might need to be specified in different ways. In some societies the crucial distinction might be, for example, between work and play, in others play and ritual.24 In all cases, however, insofar as humour may be a distinguishable aspect of wider forms of expression, the play-frame is likely to be less than contextually decisive. Naturally there are cases enough where there is such a frame. It may simply be announced by verbal markers, such as, ‘have you heard the one about …’ or ‘I say, I say, I say ….’ It may be more physical, such as the costume of the red-nosed Auguste, or circumstantial, a performance on a stage, or in what Shôkichi Oda has dubbed the ‘laughter places’ (warai no ba) of modern Japan.25 Such examples make the functions of a play-frame sound reasonable. As everything can be said to be framed in some way, to specify the framing as one of play presupposes that we already know what is humorous, or establishes the matter tautologically: the play-frame identifies the humorous, we know what is humorous because it is in a play-frame. Moreover, even where a play-frame is manifest and relevant, the more positive aspect of contextualization is often necessary for a full understanding, to the extent that the importance of the frame may be subverted. Dario Fo’s Accidental Death of an Anarchist is a theatrically framed farce, and so a work with some insulation from political repercussions;26 but it makes sense only as a direct commentary on precise political events, staging them with heightened absurdity. For Fo and his wife, Franca Rame, there were direct political and violent consequences, even to the point of making a constraining play-frame for the work’s humour seem almost trivializing. Rame was kidnapped and badly beaten as a direct response to 24  Handelman, ‘Play and Ritual’, 189, where it is suggested that ritual framing is robust but that of humour elastic; there is a problem also of accommodating the ritual laughter events discussed by Abe, ‘Ritual Performance’, 37–50. 25  Oda, ‘Laughter’, 18–19. 26  Milner Davis, Farce, 17–18.

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the play’s pillorying of the police force. In contrast, a witty formulation, an ironic intonation in the course of discussion in the absence of any signalling play-frame, reinforces the point that there are forms of humour for which it is misleading or of negligible value. Certainly, the desire to constrain humour to what can be framed is understandable. Clear delineation of any concept from a wider environment is a great aid to analysis, and this may help explain the centrality of jokes in humour studies. Yet few humour scholars would consider the joke as somehow paradigmatic of all humour—Lin Yutang sought to exclude much joking from the range of youmo, and within European societies, as I have already noted, the word joke derived from the Latin iocus, which carries a ‘dangerous’ sense. Moreover, jokes may be absent from either conversational humour or extensive units of discourse, that are still marked by humour. The joke is nevertheless iconic and suggestive, and because of its succinctness an ideal candidate for analysis and illustration.27 Leaving aside the shaggy dog story, a form of joke about joking, the joke is a framed and manageable unit. As such it allows conclusions to operate as hypotheses for humour beyond joking. Is there necessarily any process of resolution? Does surprise have to be in the resolution? Is surprise a necessity? Is awareness of a contrasting mode of seriousness needed for comprehension? Is a joke only humorous if benign? Is Semantic Script Theory inadequate for the analysis of discursive or conversational humour beyond joking? Do jokes belong to a broader class of logical problems? What light does joking cast on the relationships between languages, social classes or gender difference? Can the challenge of joking be overcome in the mathematical modelling of artificial intelligence? Such issues have been extensively explored, and the benefits are not to be shunned by the historian.28 As recent work indicates, the metaphor of framing should be taken as less than a rigid casing, settling interpretative imponderables for what is placed within it, than a malleable and initial aid to formulating contextual relationships. Few jokes are only jokes. Their humour is frequently an aspect rather than the whole. Awareness of this is central to Giselinde Kuipers’s exploration of contemporary Dutch society that uses the joke as a key. Any joke, then, might suggest a range of contexts, from the immediately linguistic to the  Rolfe, ‘The Idea of National Humour’.  See, for example, Raskin, Semantic Mechanism; Attardo, Linguistic Theories; Forobosco, Il settimo senso; Berlyne, Conflict, 253–4; Chiaro, Language of Jokes, 77–99; Kuipers, Good Humor, at length; Hempelmann and Attardo, ‘Resolutions and Their Incongruities’. 27 28

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symbolically encoded, making implication or insinuation the silent centrepoint of the statement. A convention of specific joking styles might create the conditions for making jokes about jokes. Even the iteration of an old jest in a fresh context can give new meaning. In Russia those about Peter the Great have been reactivated under Vladimir Putin.29 If the object of study, such as what we now call a joke, or more properly a jest book, can be placed plausibly under the auspices of humour, then it initially suggests a context of the same sort, such as a tradition of published facetiae. What is contained within such works may also provide topoi for jesting found in other contemporaneous writings, and a rich resource for later times, as the 1966 film A Funny Thing Happened on the Way to the Forum creatively recycled Plautine comedy. The historical interest in the jest may, however, easily lead to patterns of ethnic or confessional division, publishing history, distribution, reading networks, patterns of political surveillance, modes of social consolidation and exclusion, as for example, when Irish jokes are recycled as Polish jokes, or when Welsh jokes all but disappear.30 The focus may even be shifted to papermaking, watermarks and print quality, contexts that can rapidly leave the jesting aside for changing priorities.31 Humour, to state the obvious but nonetheless important point, is indicative of what lies beyond it.32 The fashion for engineered bad spelling in nineteenth-century America, that made Artemus Ward (Charles Farrer Browne, 1836–68) a travelling success, only makes sense in the context of the American invention of the spelling bee and a correct standard of reformed spelling as an expression of politico-­ linguistic independence from England. This bleeding of the humorous into a wider non-humorous context applies even to something as apparently insulated from broader ramifications as nonsense poetry—a clear tradition of which existed in the early seventeenth century.33 It is a hitherto unexplored context for the use of More’s Utopia, a work whose opaque

 Arkhipova, ‘Formation of the Russian Political Anecdote’, 37–8, 40–41.  Davis, ‘Changing Stereotypes’, 311–14. 31  Some of the issues are raised in Brewer, ‘Prose Jest-Books’, 90–111; Dickie, Cruelty and Laughter, 16–44. 32  Bremmer and Roodenberg, ‘Introduction’, 3; for sustained illustration, Knights and Morton, Power of Laughter. 33  Malcolm, The Origins of English Nonsense, at length. 29 30

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seriousness is itself a partial function of nonsense—signalled in the Greek pun of the title Utopia, a neologistic homonym lost in English.34 Conversely, a broadly humorous context can become unexpectedly relevant: consider the case of Haydn’s ‘Farewell’ symphony (no. 45  F# minor, 1772). When put in the context of its reported performance, the point of its scoring and structure is shown to carry a partially jesting injunction to Haydn’s patron Prince Esterhazy: the musicians are tired and want to go home. On the autograph, the scoring annotation ‘nichts mehr’ (nothing more) refers only to final passages by oboe and horn, but in later copies it applies, seriatim, to all but two violins concluding the work alone. Circumstantial evidence indicates that this happened on the first performance, and that Prince Esterhazy got the message.35 In short, just as the humorous might demand a non-humorous context, extending as far as the conditions that make any form of jesting possible, so too the non-humorous might be enriched by a context of humour.36 Contextualization, then, is a necessity of procedure, not a panacea. Contexts are layered and by degrees permeable and can raise as many questions as they answer—they keep the historian in business. The type of context privileged is a statement as to the sort of history being written.37 In the process, to ignore humour is to squander an opportunity and distort by omission. The historian F.W.  Maitland (1850–1906) famously styled history a seamless web, but historical writing is not. Independently of the contextualization he had in mind, it involves distinct but easily confused idioms of description and of analysis and explanation, on which historians rely when described evidence becomes problematic. A historical, as distinct from a 34  The play is on the dipthongs, eu (ευ) and ou (ου) as similarly pronounced inseparable prefixes making utopia the best place or no place, respectively; a number of the nonsense poems in Malcolm’s anthology are explicit descants on Utopia and Utopian language. The short-lived phenomenon of letterism, an evacuation of all meaning from language, may be taken as a humourless reductio. 35  Webster, Haydn’s ‘Farewell’ Symphony, 1–3, 113–16, for a brilliant analysis: see also Bonds, ‘Haydn, Laurence Sterne and the Origins of Musical Irony’, 57–91, for the interplay of wit and humour between words and music. The performance possibilities of the ‘Farewell’ are suitably various. There are those in which the humour is laboured and distracting, with departing musicians arranging to meet later while on stage, and there are those in which understatement intensifies the music. Either way it is to be seen not just heard. In contrast, Mozart’s Divertimento K522 (Ein musikalischer spass, ‘The musical joke’) expresses humour about music and appears to be contained within the score. 36  Ghose, ‘Festive Laughter’, at length. 37  Hence LaCapra’s emphasis on context as rhetorical construction, ‘Rethinking Intellectual History’, 245–76.

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genealogical, description requires minimizing the imposition of later values, concepts, purposes and vocabulary, and resisting the creation of a present-centred narrative trajectory that they encourage. But this descriptive integrity might well be violated when the historian turns to explanation: modern knowledge of bacteriology needs to be used to explain the Black Death, but not to describe contemporary reactions to the pestilence. Awareness of what W.B. Gallie called the voice changes between idioms and is therefore crucial if description and explanation are not to be confused. As he argued, the use of words like because often indicate a shift from describing a state of affairs to making it more intelligible.38 Words such as therefore and consequently can function to mark a return to description. And this brings me to questions of intentionality.

III Intentionality helps blur the line between description and explanation, for it has an interstitial status between otherwise distinct idioms. On the one hand, to posit an intention in or behind something created indicates a voice change to elicitation. It is a conjectural gloss explicating something considered as purposeful and may delay a need for formal explanation signalled by a word like because. In short, given what we take to be a rational artefact, putative intention provides a reason for its being, a means of highlighting selective aspects of it and thus reconsidering what it actually amounts to. Yet on the other, unlike giving the cause of an outbreak of plague, hypothesizing an intention requires conformity with descriptive integrity. Specified intentions cannot, historically speaking, be anachronistic; and it is for this reason that they are sometimes taken as arising from some prior mental state and simply being in the evidence to be found, like invisible ink—but they are not. They remain forms of conjectural enhancement of explanatory potential.39 That is, a commitment to the belief that in a drama or painting we have a rational artefact entails positing some locus of agency as an aspect of what has been made. Hypothesizing its precise nature is a way of making better sense of what has been left, not of exorcizing a ghost. To posit some prior mental state, the mind or thought from which a specific intention might be said to arise may or may not be  Gallie, Philosophy, 105–15.  Of relevance here is a distinction between the intention to do something and the intention in doing it. This is important, but the formulation to do can create the impression of a simple inherency, whereas intention in doing may be better couched as an intention to by means of. 38 39

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helpful, but is not a matter of pointing to facts. The historian does not have access to minds. Indeed, reliance on intentionality does not require knowledge of a specific maker or author who may or may not be dead. With jokes, for example, there is often no known creator, and to seek one can be a distraction. But to identify x as a joke is to specify a certain sort of intentionality, a force to it, urging that we take the statement in a given way. This understanding of the necessity of hypothesized agency informing what survives avoids a false dichotomy. It makes sense both of the insistence that to read a text is to understand a historical authorial intention, and the opposing view that the author is only a function of the text. Although there may often be no known author, any denial of intentionality merely displaces agency to what has been created, or to some system that it is seen to manifest. There is nevertheless a reliance on some notion of inherent rationality. This is often simply presupposed and so intentions need no explication. Once attributed, however, intentions are conclusions that elucidate, decode or gloss. They may be accepted as correct, but this is as close as they get to being simple discoveries.40 Explicit statements of intention in a text are no exception, although they may have a special meta-status in providing signposts for the reader: ‘I will now show …’, ‘I do not mean to say …’ and so on.41 The distinct narrative voice in novels such as War and Peace, Tom Jones, Little Big-Man or the Chorus in Shakespeare’s Henry V are similarly orientational. Yet like any other aspect of a text, they can generate questions about intentionality—especially if there is discordance between stated intention and performance of the sort often intimating humour, through, for example, irony or litotes. The Socratic voice in Plato’s Republic, announcing apparent digressions under pressure of the interlocutors, can be decidedly tricky to assess, even if we assume that voice is a surrogate for Plato’s own. The apparent dissonances between what Shakespeare’s Chorus says in Henry V and how the play develops has caused discussion about the real meaning of the text. Not surprisingly the authenticity and reliability of the authorial voice have been subject to parody that exacerbates discrepancy, as in Lawence Sterne’s Tristram Shandy, where the explicitly female reader is asked for an opinion, and authorial guidance is given by blank pages and  Gallie, Philosophy, 115, for the historian’s causal vocabulary as a matter of glossing a text.  Such guidance is probably limited to linguistic creations, although the image of the painter in a larger composition may have a loosely analogous directional and reflexive status. Velasquez’s inclusion of himself in the much animadverted and inspirational Las Meninas (1656) certainly complicates any account of its meaning, but narrative voices purport to clarify. 40 41

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wavy lines. In Spike Milligan’s Puckoon (1963) the authorial voice and the main character Milligan are from the outset at loggerheads. The uncooperative Milligan resents his very presence in the book and moans about the knees he has been given for his participation. He is finally left stuck in a tree by the exasperated author (sorry to spoil the ending). Such disruptions raise directly the issue of intentional multivalence. It is convenient, and often enough a good starting point to assume a singular intention in writing, but a statement situated at the nexus of differing contexts may help formulate complementary or tensile patterns of intention. Put the other way around, suspected multivalence within a text can invite a corresponding diversity of contextualization. Nowhere is this more likely than when identifying a humorous aspect to a statement that had seemed bereft of it. A single extended example will make the point and serve as a prelude to dealing directly with humour in translation. A little noticed detail in Henry Neville’s (?) translation of the works of Machiavelli illustrates a number of imponderables.42 As Massimiliano Demata has argued, the work was modernizing and domesticating, bringing English political experience into alignment with Machiavelli’s texts.43 The Prince in particular was for many notorious, and so any comparisons between its doctrines and Charles II were potentially dangerous. This was not just because the Caroline regime could be oppressive and was insecure, but also because Charles had been recognized from his restoration in 1660 to be a new prince in a Machiavellian sense—precisely the type of ruler on whom Machiavelli had concentrated his advice.44 Presumably to forestall a hostile reception, the volume of translations is prefaced with a secularized pseudonymous epistle, a letter from Machiavelli. Neville and his collaborator, the printer John Starkey, were much exercised by the frauds and potential tyranny of ‘Popery’ with which Charles was being associated, so there may be more to this gesture towards Catholic pseudepigrapha than meets the eye.45 In self-justification the fabricated authorial voice of Machiavelli denies that he teaches rebellion, atheism and tyranny. On the contrary, his ‘satyr’ is only a true character of how tyrants rule. ‘I speak nothing of great and honourable Princes as the Kings of France, England, and others.’ The misreading of this claim about The Prince being a satire will be touched on when dealing directly with definitional  Neville, Nicholas Machiavel’s Letter.  Damata, ‘The Prince in England, or the English Prince?’, 338–51. 44  Cavendish, ‘Advice’. 45  Metzger, ‘Literary Forgeries’, 3–24; on Starkey’s political connections and possibly even dominant role in the letter, see Knights, ‘John Starkey’, 127–45. 42 43

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problems. More immediately, Starkey provided a fake provenance for the letter, in a play on the value of authenticity. For many years, we are told, anonymously, it had ‘lurked in the private Cabinets’ of Machiavelli’s kindred, before being brought to England and translated in 1645 (safely long before Charles became king).46 Neville’s Works was variously reprinted in the late seventeenth and early eighteenth centuries, and the letter, with its bogus provenance, was separately published as a political pamphlet (1688/9, 1691 and 1711). Neither the provenance nor the letter itself would have been likely to fool anyone, but to make sure, Machiavelli’s letter is dated as 1 April 1537, ten years after Machiavelli was known to have died.47 The dating remained in place and was reset in separate republications. It points to a context of customary jesting. In France, All Fools’ Day was established at least from the sixteenth century, but its origins in England are uncertain. John Aubrey is usually cited as providing the first reference to it as an annual festive moment in 1686.48 Neville and Starkey, however, provide earlier evidence, indicating that All Fools’ Day was imported from France during the Restoration. Ironically it may have come in with Charles II, like the fashion for periwigs: but to what point is the letter dated? It might simply be a passing and effectively unframed jest, underlined by 1537 as the year of writing, a way of indicating non-seditious intent. Yet it might also cast an air of litotic disingenuousness over the denial of hostility to princes. Was Machiavelli’s Prince translated to be read as satire directed against the new prince Charles and the Papal tyranny that men like Neville and Starkey feared he was introducing? This possibility has an intensified force with the letter’s independent reprinting during the Revolution, that saw the ousting of the Catholic James II in 1688/9, for many a tyrant or instigator of Roman tyranny. For each reprinting, then, we need to keep in mind a different set of intentional possibilities and that the All Fools’ Day dating is more than a residue of the initial jest.

 On authenticity as a value, Peiro, ‘Authenticity as an Aesthetic Value’, 215–42.  Rahe, Against Throne and Altar, 7. 48  Aubrey, Remains, 10; Roud, The English Year, 122; for later reference see, for example, Addison, The Spectator, 47, 24 April 1711, who comments on April Fools’ pranks, 175–6. 46 47

CHAPTER 5

Translation and Reception

I Translation raises difficulties overlapping with those of suspected humorous intent. It involves a voice change and a mediation of the evidence of the source text; and as a matter of juggling the relationships between texts is bound to be complicated, intentions tricky to assess, choices in language used open to various explanations. It has long been claimed by translators that they seek to provide true representations of the originals, but this has meant different things, ranging from aspiring to literality, to disclosing intentions, meaning or underlying spirit that might even be at odds with the words translated. Such assertions may also be dismissive of previous translators. What might be offered as translation could even be adaptive redaction. John Payne’s 1886 edition of Boccaccio’s Decameron was cut to fit moral preferences. Sexual explicitude disappeared (or remained untranslated) and with it attempts to generate laughter at the antics of the characters. What we see as humour could consequently be collateral damage. Thus, when dealing historically with the conversion of texts between languages, it can be mistaken to assume the relevance of modern conceptions of translation. According to Peter Burke, such conceptions, raising the question of universal translatability, only become dominant from the eighteenth century, when there was a gradual shift from translation as the domesticating assimilation of the alien to its being an attempt to retain the

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authenticity of a foreign text while making it intelligible.1 This was a demanding change of emphasis, putting translation at some odds with bowdlerized adaptation. It was also an aspect of an intensified sense of historicity, of greater consequence in practice than it might seem in theory. It is, however, illustrated by the following contrast. Arthur Hall’s now almost unknown translation of the Iliad (1581) from the French of Hugues Salel (1545, 1555) was designed to teach Homer to speak English, as Ovid had already been taught. Conversely, Francis Newman’s ‘Faithfully Translated’ version (1856) deliberately used alienating and obscure language from Middle English and Anglo-Saxon to convey a remoteness equivalent to that experienced by ancient Athenians in reading Greek that was for them archaic.2 My purpose is to outline the augmented difficulties created by positing a humorous dimension to translation, as opposed to the sacrifice of humour in the interests of acceptability. Whereas the modern narrowing of translation excludes the importation of humour into a text, earlier freer notions left room for unwarranted humorous invention. The reasons for this could be complicated and uncertain. I shall focus on the fate of Homer in early modern England, a figure we are unlikely to associate with humour and who was used to encapsulate a range of issues. In the querelle d’Homère conducted both in France and England, Homer was seen by some as virtually divine, by others as a figure of appalling impropriety. This was not simply an expression of the battle between ancients and moderns. The Jesuit René Rapin (1621–87), a committed ancient, considered Homer to be quite beyond the pale. Thomas Hobbes, a quintessential modern, loved Homer and apparently kept his epics by his bed. But as we are here dealing with poetic translation, it is worth underscoring the intellectual standing of poetry in the Renaissance and early modern world and the vital role that translation played in poetic activity.3 At once poetic translation deflected responsibility and vicariously laid claim to it, thus it opened up opportunities for nuanced adaptation, appropriation, ironic distancing or subversion and witty descant. It might be designed to show and enhance the standing of the native tongue, a problem common to developing vernacular languages, given the 1  On the late emergence of a historical rationale for translation, see Burke, ‘Cultures of Translation’, 7–38. 2  Hall, Ten Bookes of Homers Iliads, ‘Dedication’; Newman, Iliad of Homer. 3  Davis, Translation and the Poet’s Life.

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hegemony of Greco-Latin culture. More immediately, it would also advertise the capacities of the poet in refashioning an often familiar figure to contemporary concerns; for translation of Latin and French texts (less so Greek) was undertaken for those likely to know the originals, wanting enrichment rather than introduction. By the same token, poems written in imitation could be either translations, or of poets writing in the same language. Such works might emulate, or adapt, be travesties or parodies; and parody, as now could involve ridicule as much as affection. The lines between parody, travesty, burlesque, imitation and translation could be uncertain, offering opportunities for humour, even to the point of compromising any clear distinction between the humorous and serious.4 There was also the possibility of simple error or infelicity into which it is easy enough to read too much, not least an imagined humour. The extensive latitude given under the name of translation had been explicated by Vives in the early sixteenth century: if intentions and purposes are to be conveyed, he argued, a translator may need to abbreviate or expand on the original.5 This effectively allowed casuistic rationalization for departure from the written word. That is, like moral casuistry, departure from accepted standards might be held justifiable in the name of something more important. An extreme expression of this would be Anne Dacier’s French translation of the Iliad, from poetry to prose, allegorically elaborated to become a foreshadowing of Christian philosophy. It was translation as the revelation of Homer’s divine spirit: a lot had to be offered up in sacrifice to convey its full extent.6 Alexander Pope would rely heavily on Dacier for his own English Iliad. His friend Thomas Parnell (1679–1718), in his foray into Homeric translation (see below) would also privilege recovery of the spirit. In short, while an appeal to intentions or spirit could signal an attempt to make the alien intelligible, it could also be a trope legitimating inventive appropriation. It is here we find a humorous dimension as an aid to accommodation. It is particularly relevant to the uses of Homer. This possibility emerges with Arthur Hall’s emphatically domesticating version of the Iliad. Olympus is populated by knights and dames, most are prone to curse and expostulate much as sixteenth-century soldiers or tavern dwellers might; Juno spits on her hands and calls Athena her ‘friendly  Weinbrot, ‘Translation and Parody’, 434–47, 438, 443.  Vives, De ratione dicendi, III, 225–6. 6  Dacier, Iliade d’Homère, ‘Remarques’. 4 5

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mate’; and the heroes on the battlefield speak in much the same way.7 At least one word of military slang, gelpe (possibly wound), is now lost to English. The result is earthy, abbreviated and fast-moving. Hall identified his work as satirical, and a case of the blind leading the blind Homer. But intentionally or not, it can seem comic in its discrepancy with the original and the elevated French translation from which Hall worked. His efforts were dismissed as woeful by George Chapman, whose translation was directly from the Greek. This proclaimed true version was itself an epic case of sonorous elaboration and high seriousness. Its tone was to set a powerful precedent for a century, pressing Homer into the distinct causes of teaching method and even royalist propaganda. Chapman also produced an early English translation of Batrachomyomachia, The Battle of the Frogs and Mice, a work accepted as Homer’s.8 The Battle was an Aesopian parody considerably post-dating the Homeric corpus by one very familiar with it. The opening lines pointedly echo those of the Iliad, and what follows is a sustained act of tapinosis in its wit and chaotic episodes, reducing the ten years of Trojan hostilities to a day, the bloody-handed heroes to frogs, and the mice who are eventually scared off by a phalanx of crabs. Rui Carlos Fonseca has argued that the mouse Psicharpax (Graingobbler) who drowns after hitching a lift on the frog Physiognathos (Bloatface) is a precise inversion of the wily Odysseus.9 The gods bicker about taking part. Athena sulkily refuses, so they end up doing nothing. The attribution of Batrachomyomachia to Homer, though seeming to need some explanation, was enough to encourage flexibility of tone. As Thomas Parnell would remark, there is not a death of a frog or mouse that does not have a parallel in the Iliad— and this, he intimates, is warrant for treating the work as instructional: translation as solvent for humour and the serious.10 Yet whereas Chapman had taken it as written by Homer out of contempt for those unappreciative of his epics, Parnell came close to calling it a work of humour, written as a trial piece for them: it was a ‘beautifull Piece of Raillery … the Offspring

 Wright, Life and Works, 146–8; Hall Ten Bookes, i.23.  Braund, ‘Translation as Battlefield’, 548–68 on the history of the translations, which in the nineteenth century were sometimes for children. As Braund also suggests, the more literal the translation of the names, the more their poetic value is compromised. 9  Fonseca, ‘Cross Reading’, 43–50; Braund, ‘Translation as Battlefield’, 559–60, remarks on the difficulties of translating the names, requiring an imagination that is usually absent. 10  Parnell, Remarks, 148–53; Frogs and Mice, 44–66. 7 8

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of that amusing and cheerful Humour [disposition], which generally accompanies … a rich Imagination’.11 The Battle, then, provided some sanction for less than elevated, Chapmanesque treatments of the poems that are likely to seem, or be made, humorous by little more than jarring tone. James Scudamore’s (?) Homer à la Mode (1664) achieves this effect by rising to the challenge of converting Homer’s unrhymed dactylic hexameters into rhymed doggerel. Superficially, this might also seem to be the case for Hobbes, whose short alternatively rhyming lines are closer to Scudamore and Hall than they are to the imperious gravity of the original. But the matter is more complicated.12 It illustrates how a conception of humour, despite its literal absence, can be historically enlightening. Until recently, however, the possibility has been overlooked, although Hobbes explicitly distinguished his translations from his more serious work. Subsequently, his Homer has been largely dismissed as indecorous, trivializing, the work of an old man who could no longer command the language of which he had once been a master. In his youth he had translated one of the most difficult of Greek authors, Thucydides. He thus announced his own brilliance to the world, intending to do for Thucydides what the historian had done in his own work, make it pressingly immediate. Hobbes managed this in part by reading an English conceptual vocabulary into the Greek, so the polis became the state. He nevertheless produced a translation that is still treated with respect. This achievement may have helped generate the false expectations of his Homer. Initially it was popular, and being in small, cheap volumes no doubt helped. But only recently has it been argued that rather than being blunderingly inept, his versions were intentionally subversive in their homely levity and bathos, and in their employment of rhetorical tropes exhibiting wit, and what at the time might have been called humour. The general case has been put forward convincingly by both Paul Davis and Eric Nelson.13 Homer was a figure of particular cachet in Restoration clerical circles and his epics put much weight on poets as divinely inspired and priests  Braund, ‘Translation as Battlefield’, 549–50.  The rhyme scheme itself is evidence of witty interplay between writers: it is taken from William Davanant’s Gondibert, dedicated to Hobbes, who then wrote a philosophical Answer to the epic. 13  Davis, ‘Thomas Hobbes’s Translations of Homer’, 231–55; and especially, Nelson, ‘General Introduction’, at length. 11 12

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having spiritual knowledge and status independent of kings, so seriously qualifying the reach of sovereign authority. Apparent too were the flaws of monarchs, who, like Agamemnon, might be given to tyranny, yet who lacked sovereign authority: none of these prominent features of the epics was conducive to gaining Hobbes’s approval. He had, however, been unable to get his philosophical and political writings licenced for publication during the Restoration and had been asked by his own sovereign not to stir up controversy. Eric Nelson has suggested that Hobbes’s Homer was an expression of due obedience—Leviathan by other means. Nelson shows how Odysseus is wily enough to paraphrase Hobbes and with remarkable foresight voice his inflammatory views on the causes of the Civil War.14 The tone of the verse rendition is immediate, homely and often without semblance of epic gravitas. At the outset Apollo descends into the Greek camp by jogging down from Olympus; a black hulled ship becomes a tub, in context a felicitous diminution; the contending poleis are reduced to towns not states, so dispute between them becomes suggestive of civil war; the emblem of bardic inspiration, the lyre, becomes by turns a mundane fiddle or guitar. As Nelson emphasizes, unlike Homer, Hobbes was highly suspicious of any claims to inspiration and rarely attributes it to poets. On one occasion when he does, he effectively has the poet Demodocus mocking the gods Aphrodite and Mars, caught in flagrante delicto and trapped in a net by Aphrodite’s husband Hephaestus. It is all told to an appreciative and ridiculing company. Unlike the original that dwelt on Hephaestus’ humiliation and skill in exacting revenge, Hobbes’s version is comically voyeuristic. Overall, much in the way of omission and commission was needed to recast Homer as only a source of delight, but nevertheless consistent with Hobbesian sovereignty. Other translators had squarely faced Agamemnon’s tyrannical proclivities and responsibility for the disasters that befell the Greeks; not so Hobbes, who eases away crucial shortcomings by shifts of emphasis, lacunae and supplementation. He may sometimes have translated poorly, failed to find appropriate rhyme or lost his footing over scansion. Any given omission may have been for a variety of reasons. The unadorned simplicity may also have been in keeping with his conception of counsel and philosophy needing to be direct. Thus, how far what can be taken as humour in his Homer is a matter of unintended consequence or deliberation, may sometimes be moot.  Nelson, ‘General Introduction’, at length.

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To attribute a humorous dimension to the whole is one thing; to be sure about specifics is another. Nevertheless, there are occasions when it is clear enough. For Hobbes priestly manipulation of the fear of a spiritual realm had been a major cause of the late troubles in Britain, as he was not allowed to say by having Behemoth printed. At one point, Odysseus finds himself in Hades, the shades expressing misery at their fate, with two describing themselves as ‘Substances Incorporeal’ (Odysseys, line 206). This was the derisive contradiction Hobbes had used to ridicule the scholastic belief in there actually being any existence beyond materiality. Although Aristophanes had jested about Hades in The Frogs, and Lucian’s gods worried about whether they really existed if mortals didn’t believe in them, in two words Hobbes goes further. Those in the afterlife admit themselves to be fictions of later philosophical nonsense used to delude and control. Inspired access to a spiritual realm claimed by priests or poets has to be a sham. Such a mischievous paradox helps explain why Pope set about reclaiming Homer for his own, reasserting the importance of poetic inspiration because it mediated the spiritual realm, as did a priesthood so having a potent independent authority. Parnell’s Battle of the Frogs and Mice was presented as support for this weighty cause. The postulation of humour, then, can have explanatory power beyond the text itself and be difficult to disengage from the serious ends it is made to serve. Put crudely, what we can see as Hobbes’s humour helps account for Pope’s Homer. It remains the case that the strategies Hobbes employed to appropriate Homer had, despite appearances, something in common with his magisterial translation of Thucydides. They were both imaginative acts of enlistment. Sovereign authority was the only sure protection against the horrors of war, Homeric, Peloponnesian or British. It was the spiritual implication of this that neither Pope nor Parnell could swallow. Pope dismissed Hobbes as beneath contempt, and Chapman as a mere imitator. But as a serious response to Hobbes, Pope’s translation was also an emphatic evocation of Chapman’s elevated tone and an attempt to capture in heroic couplets Homer’s sublime spirit, though without, apparently, any recourse to Greek. Pope’s Iliad was extraordinarily successful, in its own right a moment in the history of printing, but almost immediately it stimulated levelling alternatives. ‘Nickydemus Ninnyhammer’ (Thomas Tooly) produced Homer in a Nut-shell, to be sung ‘to the tune of Chivy-­ Chase’ (1715). Sir Thomas Burnet and George Duckett claimed to have

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advised Pope to make Homer authentically English in more than language. As he had not, they offered the burlesque Pope should have written, Homerides: or Homer’s First Book Moderniz’d (1716).15 Shortly after, the third book of the Iliad was freely translated as burlesque by Charles Cornwall as Homeros, Homeros (1722). All of these works employ the sort of localized and diminishing vocabulary found in Hall’s Iliad, though they may have known nothing of it (only one damaged copy in the British Library is known). So, for Tooly, Achilles is a knight, his eloquence makes him a ‘ranter’; the priest Chryses is Apollo’s curate.16 Howard Weinbrot suggests that it was such free translation that generated imitation and parody, his argument also indicating that the latitude allowed to translation included the injection of jests and forms of humour into the original texts, and so blurring the distinctions between translation, imitation, parody and burlesque. He cites Burnet and Duckett as praising Charles Cotton for adding jests to his translation of Virgil.17 With Thomas Bridges’s Burlesque Translation of Homer, a sporadic tradition of treating Homer humorously has its least decorous expression. Originally printed in 1762 as written by ‘Caustic Barebones’, it was gradually enlarged to the fourth edition of 1797.18 As a satiric treatment of the gods, it is Arthur Hall fully realized, but Pope’s attempted sublimity is also a target. Bridges assimilates Homer to the local, mundane and vulgar. He wrote for the ‘jocund’ or ‘laughing tribe’ for whom the sublime was beyond reach or of no interest, and, as with a full bladder, Bridges states, he must burst it on the world.19 In the 1772 edition, Bridges had assumed the voice of the publisher to the reader (a ploy probably taken from Swift), and alluded to the characteristic claims of translators to present the truth of a work. Homer had always intended to compose a burlesque with his female deities speaking like prostitutes (Convent Garden goddesses). It was just that the dignity of Greek got in his way—a reductio ad absurdum of the casuistic scope translators allowed themselves in the name of conveying the true spirit of a text.20 A few specifics will convey the flavour of a work that occasionally keys its lines to the Greek, at once being and mocking translation. It begins by  Weinbrot, ‘Parody and Translation’, 441–2, quoting ‘Ninnyhammer’, 442.  Tooly (‘Ninnyhammer’), Homer in a Nut-Shell, 2–3. 17  Weinbrot, ‘Translation and Parody’, 442. 18  Bridges, Burlesque Translation; Parkinson, ‘Paratext as Metatext and Metafiction’, 107–22. 19  Bridges, Burlesque Translation, ‘Preface’. 20  For discussion see Parkinson, ‘Paratext as Metatext and Metafiction’, 117–18. 15 16

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invoking the aid of Mrs Muse, or Miss Muse (possibly a knowing pun on misuse). Agamemnon’s lust for the ‘plump wench’, elsewhere the ‘piece’ he has captured, alone determines his conduct. Her father, for Pope the apotheosis of priestly dignity and power, is a red-nosed parson whose laurel wreath of office has been filched from a maypole, and later he is just a ‘harmless wizard’. He may be the only priest in history not to want his daughter ‘tightly tumbled’.21 It is close to insinuating that priests are pimps. Apollo trots down from Olympus to spread the plague, as similarly Hobbes’s god had jogged; Athena rides a broomstick, also, together with cudgels the preferred weapons of the heroes; flyting Hector gives not a fart for posturing Ajax, and so forth.22 Bridges uses the word humour (and none of its cognate forms) only four times to mean mood or disposition. Yet when he wrote for the ‘laughing tribe’, laughter and humour were being brought together. As humour had some association with satire, we are confronted with what could be less than benign. In the context of translation, adaptable descriptors such as parody, travesty and burlesque did much of the work of humour, and may have aided delays in its wide use. But regardless, all of these terms plus wit, pleasantry, the jocund and the merry are reasonably gathered under humour’s umbrella. Doing so brings together a family of specific strategies to help assimilate the alien. These were largely forms of tapinosis, the diminishing comparison that in translation could be a matter of implicit counterpoint to the more elevated original. It remains the case that the resultant humour could fall flat. Bridges was apparently disinherited for his efforts.23 In the case of Hobbes, the strategies of accommodation passed without comment, but in the more obvious eighteenth-century parodies, humour became a valuable tool in the dissembling creativity of older notions of translation in making a text immediate and designed to stimulate its acceptance and appreciation. Certainly, surfeit of humour can take us a long way from what we now accept as translation, but some lien on authenticity could be maintained by the verbal separation of Homer from the writings treated as forms of dress. This was to play on Quintilian’s notion that all rhetoric is a variable means of clothing for the truth. Homer, as Charles Cornwall put it, can look as handsome dressed in burlesque as in anything else. What we see as  Bridges, Burlesque Translation, 3–8.  Bridges, Burlesque Translation, 10, 30, vol. 2, 32. 23  Parkinson, ‘Paratext as Metatext and Metafiction’, 114. 21 22

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translation could even be dismissed as servility or pedantry.24 As Hobbes had forewarned the reader of his Homer, translators should not tie themselves too superstitiously to the words of their authors. Nevertheless, humorous exuberance can raise problems of understanding. Whereas with Hobbes, what we can see as humour is the recovery of political and philosophical force, for the burlesques in the ambit of Pope the implications are less clear. He was particularly sensitive about his Iliad and this may have made him vulnerable to vicarious attack. Thomas Tickell’s translation of book 1 of the Iliad had been encouraged by Pope’s rival Joseph Addison, possibly for reasons beyond personal animosity. Pope was a Catholic and a high Tory, the Addison circle was Whig and Low-Church. Burnet and Duggett, whose Homerides was what they thought Pope should have written, were both part of it. They were intellectually aligned with the brutally acerbic Greek scholar Richard Bentley (1662–1742), permanently embattled Master of Trinity College Cambridge. According to Bentley, Pope’s Iliad was only a pretty poem: as he had translated from the French, and that of a woman too, as he knew no Greek and hardly any Latin, ‘how the Devil’, Bentley spluttered, ‘should it be Homer?’25 Tooly also alludes to wider issues, taking Tickell to be Addison’s cat’s paw and providing a waspish prefatory ode on the turncoat and rebellious fellow-traveller, the recently deceased Whig Bishop of Salisbury. He was Sir Thomas Burnet’s father. Homer’s Achilles is as mighty a rhetorician as a warrior. Tooly had reduced him to a ranter, a word then strongly suggestive of dangerous political and religious irrationality. In writing initially as ‘Caustic Barebones’, Bridges had chosen a name also redolent of the anti-­ monarchical and anti-clerical associations of the Civil Wars. How seriously he invoked them is unclear, but certainly he still had the Catholic Pope in his sights by offering a picture of the priest Chryses as the red-nosed parson that Pope could only have found deeply offensive. In effect, the possibility of political and confessional purposes pursued through translating Homer lurks evasively in the background but is obscured by the sort of humour that in the case of Hobbes has taken so long to recover. Broadly speaking, modern conceptions of translation greatly restrict the functions 24  Weinbrot, ‘Translation and Parody’, 446–8, citing Cornwall and Scudamore, 441, 436, 439. 25  Richard Bentley, A Letter to Mr Pope (1735), quoted by Levine, Battle of the Books, 222, 241–2.

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and inhibit the play of humour that itself complicates the question of just what was going on in creating one text in the name of another.

II In identifying past humour, we may be on more reliable ground with the pun, a phenomenon usually taken as a form of humour from within the broader domain of wordplay. Yet as the use of a semantic feature of a language, a pun may have other functions, or be inadvertent, as Hobbes’s double use of gloria in discussing laughter probably was (Chap. 3), as Shaftsbury’s slipping between a new and old use of humour might have been in discussing liberty (Chap. 2), as Bridges seeming play on ‘Miss Muse’ may have been. In most tongues puns are to be expected and they can be notoriously difficult to elucidate even within a single language as it mutates. Not to see Shakespeare’s puns is to be blind to a vital aspect of his work. Frankie Rubinstein illustrates the point by recovering the intricacy of the puns on holy, holes and making whole the sole of a shoe in Julius Caesar; and Indira Ghose has drawn particular attention to the thematic significance of the pun in the title of Much Ado About Nothing.26 Any work that is more than words offers a further dimension. A common rationale for conjoining word and picture has been to provide simple communicative impact. Often the point may be easily comprehended. John Heartfield’s visual and verbal pun on the Nazi slogan millionen stehen hinter mir (millions are behind him) exemplifies such accessibility: it is a montage of a saluting Hitler accepting money from a bloated and shadowy capitalist figure standing at his back.27 In the eighteenth century, a water bowl on a Scottish dining table might have been an esoteric invitation to pass a toasting glass over it, an affirmation of loyalty to the exiled Stuart dynasty, to the King over the Water. In such cases the opacity was deliberate and protective, but the gestural pun is intelligible enough. If we move beyond European culture, however, we get a taste of just how far multimodal punning can be largely inaccessible to the historian. In Edo Japan surimono were picture-poems produced by poetry clubs, usually comprising the high-ranking officials of a locality. They were commissioned often as New Year gifts to honour one of the group. The 26  Rubinstein, A Dictionary of Shakespeare’s Sexual Puns, x–xiii; Ghose, Much Ado About Nothing, 114–17. 27  Rose, Parody and Meta-Fiction, 117.

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woodblock prints were exclusive and expensively produced with three short interrelated poems making elliptical allusion to the symbolically resonant composition. The space between the poems and picture might also be significant, an expression of the relational aesthetic concept of ma. According to McKee, puns (specifically jiguchi) and the more general word/picture play of kakekotoba united sound, picture and the calligraphy of its poetic content.28 As displays of playful, riddling cleverness, surimono were designed to amuse the recipient, but probably with indifference to achieving any more general intelligibility. They were part of a wider punning tradition of mitate adapted in the late Edo and Meiji periods to the newspaper cartoon. As with the European newspaper, an immediate verbal context and integrated content can make the meanings of the multimodal image clear enough. But in Japanese there is still the augmented opportunity for punning and allusion in a language that itself has a pictorial dimension. As Hiroko Takanashi has argued through an analysis of the parodic genre of kyoka poetry, aspects of meaning and the full resonances of punning can be lost in transliteration from kanji to a syllabic script. In studying nineteenth-century Japanese cartoons, Ron Stewart has augmented the problems of reading identified by Takanashi. Both the absence of a requirement to read lineally and awareness of varying literacy levels, he argues, further complicate the relationships between chosen kanji, kana (syllabic scripts) and pictorial image.29 As I have noted in Chap. 3, the structure of Japanese makes forms of punning ubiquitous and frequently beyond what is classed as humour, and the difficulty of knowing how and where to draw the line can always arise. In sum, a universalist structural shell comprising the representation of words and images allows comparison, but does not show a universality of content, specifically of humour itself—indeed we have to presuppose that universality to see puns as confirming it.30 Irrespective of anachronism and the localized barriers created by representing intellectual content in a given language, just reading the multimodal can be historically treacherous. It hardly needs stressing that in  Stewart, ‘Unlocking Verbal-Visual Puns’, 365.  McKee, Japanese Poetry Prints, 12–13, ‘Glossary’, 188–90; Takanashi, ‘Orthographic Puns’, 246–55; Stewart, ‘Unlocking Verbal-Visual Puns’. 30  Guidi, ‘Humor Universals’, 18–20; Attardo, Linguistics in Humour, for a measured defence of the translatability of all puns (360–4). It does, however, need to collapse glosses making a pun intelligible with translating it. The difficulties touched on here point to the rubberiness of universalist claims discussed in Chap. 3. 28 29

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many societies clothes have been taken as expressive of far more than the need to keep dry and warm; sumptuary laws only make full sense if clothes are read as statements. Even without such laws, what is worn and how may display more than fashion or habit. The use of woodblock images in printed texts may in general terms provide an obvious semiotic dimension to the written word, but as these were sometimes recycled and adjusted, more precise interrelationships can be elusive, and possible humour difficult to gauge. Such methodological problems arise precisely because of our incomplete knowledge of the past; but sometimes, in a sense, we know too much. Retrospectively we may quite properly see a contrafactum as a sort of palimpsest, with the same tune being used over several generations for different possibly comic or satirical verses. Yet it can be unwarranted to infer awareness of a rich history from a versifying habit. More broadly, symbolic resonance without in any way being chronologically out of place may nevertheless exceed an author’s interest, or horizon of awareness (see below Chap. 6 on the ‘Rump’ satires). As with inference of deliberation from the presence of a pun, a paper-chase of symbolic meaning can make the scope of intention difficult to assess, and posited humour open to doubt. Assuming that a writer was fully aware of the implications of a pun may be risky, even if it is Shakespeare we are talking about. Returning to a specific punning controversy can illustrate some of the difficulties of determining how much is going on. In early eighteenth-century England there was what might seem to have been a nonce dispute about punning. Shaftsbury briefly dismissed punning as outmoded.31 Joseph Addison, apparently irritated by student punning clubs at Oxford, excoriated the practice as false wit.32 If it defied translation a pun was only noise—a tough criterion. Others took Addison’s arguments to parodic extremes or directly defended the practice.33 It is difficult to know what to make of this, partially forced as it was onto the template of ancients versus moderns debates and so by auxesis given an inflated cultural seriousness. The controversy may have been a means by which innocent laughter assumed more prominence in understanding  Shaftsbury, Sensus Communis, Characteristicks, sect. 2, 42.  Addison, The Spectator, vol. I, 61, May 1711, 228. 33  Nokes, John Gay, 231–3, discussing God’s Revenge Against Punning, and A Modest Defence of Punning (Swift), and a Defence of the Ancient Art of Punning (possibly Arbuthnot); see also, Arbuthnot and Pope, Memoirs, 125–8, 262–3. 31 32

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humour, but the tracts were not focused specifically upon understanding humour. Thomas Sheridan’s Ars Pun-ica (Dublin, 1719) does not acknowledge these immediately preceding discussions as providing any sort of context, but it illustrates contextual underdetermination and the consequent problems for elucidating intentionality. Ars pun-ica is thematically Scriblerian. It is a pseudo-philosophical argument reducing punning to rigid rules to maximize and enforce its practice. There are apparently seventy-nine rules, though we are given only thirty-four. Sheridan’s work is itself laden with puns, but how serious was he in decrying the clarification of language as a form of vulgarizing impoverishment? Ars pun-ica may just have been play, a variation on a theme for the joy of ingenuity, illustrating how activities can generate their own momentum to create traditions of endeavour. Yet he claimed to fear the eradication of the creative exuberance of punning. His response was to foster creativity by reductive regimentation and compulsion. This was to create a paradox suggestive of a wider theoretical purpose. Sheridan was a theorist of language, and he paraded the philosophical pretensions of the work. The pseudonymous author modestly hopes for a Newton to unify the science; and appropriate to the conventions of scholastic philosophy, we are given both physiological and moral definitions of the pun. The physiological exemplifies what I shall discuss as satirical definition (Chap. 7). It is a parody of natural philosophical accounts of muscular movement in laughing:34 the moral is the final cause of stimulating good fellowship. Benign Christian merriment would seem to be ascendant, specifically as laughter—what harmlessly might be re-couched as celebrating a healthy sense of humour. Yet if Sheridan is satirizing linguistic purification, and rule-mongering, a Scriblerian bête noir, perhaps not. We have, in short, a case of plausible contexts complicating a reading of a work that might just have been a belated joke at Addison’s expense, or elaborated only for amusement. Either way, although the practice of punning may have remained robust, its reputation continued to decline. That Nicholas Amhurst (1697–1742) claimed it was a long-established branch of university learning was part of a satiric campaign against Oxford.35 Lord Kames regarded it as a low form of wit, yet having a place in the 34  Bulwer, Pathomyotomia, 104–26, cited Kerby-Miller, ed., Memoirs, 277; the parodic account in the Memoirs, chap. 10, 133, may have been known by Sheridan, via Swift. 35  Amhurst, Secret History, 46–52.

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development of any language. As for Shaftsbury, its time in England had, or should have, passed with the Jacobeans.36 Wishful thinking.

III Studying the reception of a work does not always settle problems of determining intentionality. Even under relatively controlled conditions, reading responses to humour can be methodologically difficult.37 We can hardly expect inferences from fragmented and often under-contextualized evidence to be easier. Historically speaking, reception is nothing more than evidence of use or awareness, a kind of ex post facto context, a case of authority by witnesses. A squiggled line or exclamation mark in a margin is a sign of reception but may have no decipherable meaning. Indeed, what we gather under the rather passive rubric of reception can reach well beyond treating a work with respect or any willingness to essay what it was about. Reception can often be a matter of instrumental exploitation under the guise of understanding. It may be a matter of creative symbiosis or parasitic invention. It can amount to subversion, or be a simple misreading. It is like translation has been, writ large. Thus, within this net of possibilities, to conclude that something is accepted as humorous does not mean that the humour is understood. As the Earl of Shaftsbury claimed, defensive raillery is intended not to be.38 Where humour is unacknowledged, neither does it mean that it has passed unrecognized. Sheridan’s little pamphlet elicited some responses that were less than good-natured, leaving the suspicion that more was at issue than meets the eye. Swift remarked that Arbuthnot’s Art of Political Lying (1712) was too clever to be understood. Was he criticizing his friend or denigrating the capacities of the audience, or both? The pamphlet was a Lucianically elaborate and ingenious variation of the paradox of the liar. It took the form of a promotional puff for a subscription publication. As no satire had taken this form before, it lacks some obvious contextual signposts; although Arbuthnot had earlier played a practical joke on Queen Anne’s Ladies-in-Waiting, getting them to subscribe to a non-existent History of the Ladies-in-Waiting, detailing who among them had made the best wives. Did he give them their money back? There are no obvious  Home, Lord Kames, Elements, chap. 13, 273.  Kline, ‘Discussion’, 375–6. 38  Shaftsbury, Essay, 1.2. 36 37

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clues as to the bogus nature of Political Lying, for it is a bland chapter by chapter synopsis of the first volume interspersed with the occasional respectful quibble, or praise for the author’s acumen: ‘In the first Chapter of his excellent Treatise, he reasons Philosophically concerning the Nature of the Soul …’, or again, ‘The Fourth Chapter is wholly employed in this Question.’ Or ‘Here the Author makes a Digression …’39 Nothing is said of the second volume, but suggestive incompleteness would itself become a Scriblerian characteristic (hence the forty-five missing rules in Ars pun-­ ica). Arbuthnot had the book advertised, so also making his pamphlet a hoax, and listed the (genuine) coffee houses in which it would be received. It was also translated into French with tactical adjustments. In the original, transubstantiation had been listed as a proof lie, one put about to test just how much nonsense will be believed. It disappears from the French, but I am aware of no one who committed to buy the work and its reception is a black hole. The only known person apparently gulled by the enterprise was a twentieth-century American literary critic, who regretted that the two volumes had been lost in the press: jesting no doubt.40 Lack of evidence, however, may also indicate disapprobation. If people did take Swift literally in advocating that the Irish breed children for the table, it is unlikely they naively thought he meant it, just that he was nasty.41 Similarly, failure to read or refusal to acknowledge humour can be to invert the whole point of a statement. It was only when Daniel Defoe’s Shortest Way with the Dissenters (1702) was accepted as a defence of them that the author was tried and convicted for ‘seditious irony’.42 Conversely, to read in humour where none was present can be a mode of ridicule. As a curious variation of such refractions of reception, Roger Lund has pointed out that modern French linguistic theory, after Roland Barthes depicting humans imprisoned in the independent free play of linguistic abstractions, was first invented in the eighteenth century as a satiric reductio of a preoccupation with nominalization.43 A theory invented to be laughed at ends up being promoted seriously. 39  Political Lying, 7, 10, 19; a minor clue may be an arithmetical error about the number of chapters in volume 1—Arbuthnot was probably the foremost mathematician of his generation. But the pamphlet is anonymous and Arbuthnot was notoriously careless about his own writings. 40  Adams, Bad Mouth, 43–5. 41  Memoirs, 169. 42  Phiddian, Satire, 12–13. 43  Lund, ‘Res and verba’, 63–78.

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A more elaborate example is the compositional hoax of the poetry of Ern Malley. According to the instigators, James McAuley and Harold Stuart, the poems were blown together in an afternoon by randomly cutting and pasting from manuals and telephone books and by misquoting genuine authors in order to ridicule modernist poetry—the emphasis on how quick and easy it all was, added contempt to disparagement. Then, as ‘The Darkening Ecliptic’, the poems were sent by the deceased ‘Ern’s’ sister ‘Ethel’ to the modernist poetry journal Angry Penguins. Her covering letter admitted she knew nothing about poetry, but hoped Ern’s work might be of interest. The Darkening Ecliptic was published with fanfares of awe and admiration by its principal editor Max Harris. The trap was sprung when the hoax was duly announced. The magazine and its editor were damaged in reputation and pocket, Harris was fined for publishing obscenities and the magazine folded. The poems were then hailed as great poetry anyway, as Harris always insisted. The Darkening Ecliptic remains more widely read than the serious verses of its anti-modernist authors.44 Legal constraints may also be relevant in recognizing or losing a facetious dimension. In both Roman and Common Law, non-malicious intent could be a defence. Neville’s dating of the fabricated letter from Machiavelli may be explained in these terms (Chap. 4). Such protective moves, however, could always be made vulnerable in cases of defamation and slander by the forensic option of presuming that the provocation of laughter expressed hostility to the plaintiff and tended to the detriment of public order. Rhetorical laughter could be close to a legal fiction employed in the interests of social control. Nevertheless, the tricky business of plotting humorous responses may be a means of delineating audiences, just as humour within a work may be an attempt to discriminate among, or even play with them. The logical and philosophical jokes about naming and predication, empty classification, paradox, dreaming, consciousness and reality prominent in Lewis Carroll’s Alice stories, especially Through the Looking-Glass, show the author to be engaged with contemporary academic issues, and the stories to have been partially directed to a highly literate audience well 44  Brooks, The Sons of Clovis. This also explores the possibility that the hoax was itself modelled on a parody of French symbolist poetry. There is a similarity also to the ‘Sokal Hoax’, published innocently in the journal Social Text (1996), and to some of the circulated but initially unpublished work of the linguist James McCawley using the pseudonyms Quang Phuc Dong and Yuck Foo and relocating himself from The University of Chicago to the (spurious) South Hanoi Institute of Technology.

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above the heads of children. As Charles Dodgson he wrote on mathematics and symbolic logic. As Lewis Carroll he produced nonsense principally to amuse children and adults with an appreciation of that allegedly extinct creature, the pun.45 There is, however, no neat separation of his interests; for he clearly believed logic and mathematics could be taught to children by confrontation with the absurd, and that understanding why something was absurd cast light on language and the world. The voice of Alice is certainly that of an intellectually robust, occasionally impatient young girl with whom children have easily identified; but how far she would also have been recognized as encoding humorous criticism of Hegelianism; how far she might even be taken as a harbinger of Bertrand Russell’s mathematically based repudiation of idealism, and G.E.  Moore’s common-sense rejection of scepticism, are all more difficult to determine. If young Alice is a voice of philosophical critique, the targets are implicitly diminished simply by her innocent youthfulness. But given how playfully silly the stories are, to make such claims teeters on the edge of the theoretically overblown. Nevertheless, not to recognize the possibilities may equally be considered trivializing and reductive given the linked or layered audiences for whom the author wrote. I shall return briefly to the limits of theoretical appropriateness in dealing with humour in Chap. 8. The level of difficulty that the imputation of humour introduces to historical study, however, should not be conflated with the inherent significance of what we think we have found, itself an added complication. Detected humour might be little more than a grace note and quite undisruptive of a point being made. We might not quite know where we are with Lewis Carroll, the disappearing white rabbit, his pocket watch and the metaphysics of time, but Quine’s arguments about subjects, objects and translation did not have to be developed with reference to pointing sticks at rabbits, white or otherwise.46 The humour, in short, is not necessarily intellectually telling.47 Nevertheless, there are occasions when even a frisson of it can make a difference to how a text should be read.

 Wilson, Lewis Carroll in Numberland, for a fine study of this sustained interplay.  Quine, Word and Object, 29–30. 47  His argument is hypothetical, that without a secure subject–object distinction, translation is compromised; but some verb-driven languages could provide evidence. Paakantyi (a language group spoken along the Darling River in South Australia) comes close by attaching what we see as subjects and objects to verbs; see Hercus, Paakantyi Dictionary, 5. 45 46

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IV To illustrate the point and bring together the themes of these rather disparately illustrated two chapters, I shall conclude by completing my account of Hobbes on laughter. I have already suggested that his iconic role as a, or the, superiority theorist of humour, is explicable best as a genealogical convenience. Apart from equating laughter with humour, it is apt to ignore his qualifications and discussion of self-mockery and his recognition of innocent merriment. Hobbes as superiority theorist collapses two notions of superiority into one, and discounts what is consistent with both, the centrality he gives to surprise—a more plausible belief about laughter than it would be about humour. All this was to clear the ground of systemic misconception. But in the immediate context of surveying the methodological terrain of historical understanding, it is now necessary to address what he actually claimed he was doing in writing about laughter: apparently rather a lot. In The Elements Hobbes stated that before him no one had ‘declared’ the matter of laughter properly. From a genealogical perspective, Hobbes’s bold announcement has an obvious appeal, for he proceeds immediately to outline what has become his superiority theory.48 The striking claim gives a plausible reason for Hobbes’s precise location in a narrative that requires at most only tinkering adjustments to his degree of originality. As Quentin Skinner has demonstrated, however, Hobbes’s arguments were entirely commonplace and would have been familiar to any who had read Cicero and Quintilian, from whom, according to Skinner, Hobbes simply lifted his whole case about laughter.49 There is a touch of exaggeration here, as unlike Cicero and Quintilian, Hobbes had little interest in explicating a licit scope of aggressive laughter. Nevertheless, all these discussions would have been taken as broadly in agreement. In the eighteenth century, William Preston commended Hobbes’s understanding of laughter and ridicule in part because it agreed with Aristotle.50 The most Skinner is willing to concede is that Hobbes’s emphasis on surprise was

48  Hobbes, Elements, pt 1, chap. 9, sect. 13, 41–3; cf. Cicero De oratore, bk 2, sect. 58, 235; Giangiorgio Trissino in his Poetica (1529, 1729) also hinted at a certain mystery in the generation of laughter (see Attardo, Linguistic Theories, 40). 49  Skinner, ‘Hobbes and the Classical Theory of Laughter’, 151; Skinner, Reason and Rhetoric, 391–2; see also Rayfield, ‘Rewriting Laughter’, 72–8. 50  Preston, Essay on Ridicule, 70–71.

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unusual, although, he adds, it had been stressed by Vives.51 Even this was not that rare. Surprise had been isolated by Quintilian and then underlined by Giangiorgio Trissino (La Poetica) and especially by Ludovico Castelveltro in his similarly well-known critical commentary on Aristotle’s Poetics. This itself had drawn attention to the stratagems and deceits of comedy that could only work if someone is surprised by them.52 Skinner’s point is that Hobbes’s disingenuous and ‘noisy protestations’ about his own originality, his ‘remarkable effrontery’, illustrates just how out of touch he could be with an audience for whom his case about laughter would have been familiar.53 Certainly, Hobbes’s later life was marked by controversy, his own occasional incandescence being balanced by angry exasperation at his boasts and scoffs, at once recognition and dismissal of his wit.54 As The Elements was a scribal publication arising from William Cavendish’s highly literate circle, it is difficult to think that the ‘noisy protestations’ about originality would have passed unnoticed by those most likely to have been the initial readers.55 If context is restricted to a clear tradition of theorizing rhetorical laughter, and to the jangling discordances in the reception of Hobbes’s work, there the matter might rest as a foretaste of communicative mal-­ function. But an enrichment of context allows different intentional possibilities to open up. The multidimensional nature of this needs spelling out in some detail. Independence of argument, that is, the refusal to rely on authorities, was essential to Hobbes’s conception of being a philosopher. It was probably derived from Francis Bacon’s insistence in The Advancement of Learning and the Novum organon that a new philosophy demanded a new type of philosopher, one prepared to innovate and discover rather than rely upon the words of others.56 Such a case was vulnerable to accusations of arrogance and untoward boasting. Bacon had tried to head them off by distinguishing the necessity of innovation in philosophy from the

 Skinner, Reason and Rhetoric, 392.  Trissino, Sei divisioni della Poetica, sesta divisione, 127; Castelveltro, Poetica, pt 2, 34b–62. 53  Skinner, ‘Hobbes and the Classical Theory of Laughter’, 155, 151; Reason and Rhetoric, 391. 54  Parkin, The Taming of Leviathan for a valuable survey of the reception of Hobbes’s work. 55  Skinner, ‘Hobbes and the Classical Theory of Laughter’, 155, 151. 56  For discussion, Gaukroger, Francis Bacon, 101–31. 51 52

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destructive commotion it caused in politics.57 Hobbes would elaborate on what was a Baconian position in his own discussion of the nature of philosophy in Leviathan. It requires that matters be taken back to first reckonings, with arguments being built on the sure foundations of definitions and with nothing being accepted on the authority of another. Reliance upon the word ‘of an Aristotle, a Cicero, or a Thomas’ is not science but opinion. It makes the words that are wise men’s counters the money of fools.58 This famous formulation may have been glitteringly extreme and incautious, but it made independence of mind and originality of argument defining features of true philosophy. For Hobbes, only in mathematics were true philosophers dwarves, as John of Salisbury had put it, sitting on the shoulders of giants. Beyond that branch of science there was so much encrusted rubbish that the true philosopher had to start from scratch. Such an attitude led directly to Hobbes’s reputation for boastfulness and the conceit of which Sir Richard Blackmore accused him when writing about wit. Hobbes would always claim that in De cive he had invented political philosophy. He stressed his originality and was proud of the intellectual innovations that others had recognized in his work.59 Concomitantly, he was reluctant to display his learning. This was especially the case with classical authors whose authority, with few exceptions, he held to be politically toxic and philosophically worthless. Even when in agreement with the revered figures of antiquity, he was reticent in acknowledgment—an irritant to his critics who accentuated any similarity they sniffed out. Hobbes, then, in a double sense was a new philosopher, a novatore, a giant braced for shouldering dwarves.60 In this he was broadly at one with a number of his contemporaries, such as René Descartes, a little later Robert Hooke, and more immediately, with the persona of William Cavendish’s second wife, Margaret, a self-proclaimed innovator in fashion and philosophy. If Hobbes could dismiss Aristotle as absurd, repugnant and ignorant, he could easily ignore the echoes of earlier laughter theory derived from him.61 Preston’s praise of Hobbes as being in agreement with Aristotle would not have gone down well. Be that as it may, there is certainly irony in the fact that modern authors in wanting an  Bacon, Novum organon, 246–7; see also ‘Of Innovation’, Essays, 81–2.  Hobbes, Leviathan, chap. 4. 59  Hobbes, Leviathan, ‘Review and Conclusion’; Hobbes, Vita, 8. 60  Serjeantson, ‘Hobbes, the Universities and the History of Philosophy’, 114–15. 61  Hobbes, Leviathan, chap. 46. 57 58

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easy genealogy for the superiority theory of laughter-and-humour have taken his claim to origination perilously close to face value—relying literally on ‘the word of… a Thomas’. I have noted that The Elements was a scribal publication written at the behest and encouragement of William Cavendish, so a little can be reasonably inferred about the immediate audience of Cavendish and the surrounding network of friends, family, clients and protégés, sometimes called the ‘Welbeck’ Circle.62 Despite the vaunted Cavendish dismissal of book-learning (by both husband and wife), a familiarity with ancient and Renaissance writings touching laughter, as Skinner insists, can certainly be assumed; but so too can a concern with the nature of philosophy. There was also some specific interest in the philosophical satirist Lucian—Jasper Mayne (1604–72), a protégé of Cavendish’s and friend of Hobbes, would translate a selection of his dialogues, and Margaret Cavendish would admit to having read, probably via Mayne, some of them. Lucian was also one of the few ancients Hobbes himself treated with respect. This was to appreciate, above all, one wittily critical of philosophical pretension and received opinion, a suitable satiric precursor to the doctrines of the new philosophy. Hobbes himself had a reputation among those who knew him as a man of wit and of being good company, features of his character emphasized by his friend John Aubrey, supported not least by his deceptively simple translations of Homer. His letters are marked, as Noel Malcolm notes, with a ‘surprisingly gentle and self-deprecatory sense of humour’.63 Above all, the wit of Leviathan is undeniable but is enough to raise interpretative problems that on their own are worth brief comment. Skinner has provided a splendid exploration of Hobbes’s mastery of tropes such as sarcasmus, tapinosis, and his deft exploitation of puns. Much of the derisive satirical tone was removed from the Latin translation. Yet, argues Skinner, it was precisely this that upset so many of Hobbes’s contemporaries, giving him the reputation of being a mere scoffer.64 In the light of his alleged hostility to laughter, the very existence of wit in a philosophical work appears to be problematic, but according to Zakariah Black it can be explained: humour in the interests of promoting 62  Welbeck Abbey, Nottinghamshire, was William Cavendish’s principal seat, inherited from his mother, Bess of Hardwick, Countess of Salisbury. 63  Malcolm, Correspondence, vol. 1, ‘General Introduction’, xl; see also Black, ‘Laughing with Leviathan’. 64  Skinner, Reason and Rhetoric, 395–419; 394.

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peace was excusable.65 Such a casuistic justification is not unreasonable and Hobbes makes ad hoc gestures in its direction,66 but attributing to Hobbes a simple hostility theory of humour is untenable. Laughter directed only at general infirmities and absurdities needs no excuse, for being victimless it unifies a company. In keeping with this principle culminating the discussion in The Elements, much of the wit of Leviathan, not least its punning, was unspecific and can reasonably be read as intended to help a readership laugh together. The difficulty, however, was twofold. It required the bi-conditional sense of a stranger at whom we might laugh, as it would be put in De homine. Leviathan is tirelessly adversarial, and in parts 3 and 4 the Church of Rome becomes a common risible enemy. The laughter at its expense might indeed, in Hobbesian terms, be casuistically justified. Additionally, however, generalities and generalized targets, school divines, ‘Aristotlty’, ecclesiastics, democratical gentlemen, are all subject to specification by the reader, and in application the wit might be taken as doubly offensive, both derisory and disingenuous. The generalized ironic jesting at biblical exegesis could come perilously close to mocking the Gospels.67 Hobbes’s brilliantly satiric sketch of the absurdity and mutability of heathen religion cannot resist more specific barbs against Rome. It concludes by hazarding a single cause for the loss of credibility that destroys religion: ‘unpleasing priests … even in that Church that hath presumed most of Reformation’. It is a cap tossed up for any priest to think of wearing. Given these straws in the wind concerning the imponderables of his wit, the knife-edge of reception on which it was poised, and his self-­ presentation as a philosopher, it is possible to suggest that Hobbes’s untenable protestations about his own originality in The Elements may have had a double force to them. The claim to be disclosing what no one has previously understood about laughter made a predictable philosophical declaration of independence. At the same time, it graphically illustrated the very case he immediately presents about laughter being caused by surprise. It is a ‘sudden glory’. Once familiar and ‘stale’, he argued, the ridiculous no longer makes us laugh. He may, then, have aimed at generating a sudden glory by making an implausible claim to novelty about laughter itself. Certainly, the case cannot be proved, any more than that in his  Black, ‘Laughing with Leviathan’; but see also Skinner, Reason and Rhetoric, 393–4.  Skinner, Reason and Rhetoric, 393. 67  Skinner, Reason and Rhetoric, 404–5. 65 66

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Iliad a jogging Apollo initially missed his aim when firing arrows of plague at the Greeks—but such paradoxical ingenuity was hardly beyond Hobbes’s intellectual resourcefulness. This would also have made his point that people can laugh at themselves, something that would also have been familiar from Erasmus’s defence of self-mockery in Morae encomium, and something Hobbes could certainly do.68 He had apparently wanted his epitaph to read simply, ‘This is the True Philosopher’s Stone.’ If we have such a reflexive jest, it is neither pointed nor explicit. It slips by, unframed as a negative generality, and perhaps that too is appropriate, for Hobbes concludes his discussion, as I have noted, again possibly echoing the widely known Erasmus, by stating that to avoid offence, laughter should indeed be at generalities, ‘abstracted from persons’, denuded, that is, of any pusillanimity or vainglory (a.k.a. superiority), so ‘all the company may laugh together’. Perhaps they did, though the case of Leviathan suggests it could be a risky strategy. And perhaps also this sense of audience explains why the possible jest about laughter disappears: repetition would, after all, have made it stale. It is absent from the self-advertising De cive, and then from the compressed discussion in Leviathan, a work intended for a diversity of undiscerned, and as Hobbes anticipated, often undiscerning reader. Addison’s point in qualifying Hobbes’s emphasis on laughter as pride is also pertinent, that it takes a man of wit to generate true humour in a company. As an example, Addison used Shakespeare’s Falstaff, boasting of his wit at the expense of others. Might Addison have cited Hobbes’s boasting instead? Skinner’s account is not part of the genealogy of humour but is a valuably historical one, and what is offered here is not designed to replace it. Rather, this possibility of a lost Hobbesian jest may have been difficult to pick up because, despite Shaftsbury’s efforts, we are still ill-attuned to humour in philosophy. More certainly, the faint tintinnabulation of a jest illustrates the sliding nature of the relationships between context, intention and the uncertain inferences to be drawn from reception: singular patterns in one support similar conjectures in the others. Conversely, porosity of context can destabilize inferred intentions. Nothing does this more effectively than a suspicion of what we now call humour.

68  Hobbes, Correspondence, 1, letter 24 (Dec.–Jan. 1636), 41; Malcolm, ‘General Introduction’, xl–xli.

PART III

Defining Satire and Satiric Humour

CHAPTER 6

Definition by Dictionary, Origin and Implications

I Like wit, the word satire has provided an Ariadnean thread in the history of humour. The principal terms we now treat almost naturally as expressions of humour, laughter, wit, irony and satire, began reliably to be associated with it only from the seventeenth century. I have already noted that Margaret Cavendish praised her husband’s plays for their wit, humour and satire. Her casual lack of specificity is probably indicative of patterns of use already being established. Overall, however, adjustments in the range of any one term in the gradually consolidating set that would be subsumed by humour had repercussions for the others (Chap. 2). Irony had been taken in the early sixteenth century from the Latin rather than the Greek, but was little used until the eighteenth, when its indirection provided an easy link to the incongruities of humour, and the mocking rebuke of satire. So, as it were, its place was cemented in a new subfield of terms.1 Semantic interrelations as conditions for definition are taken up in more detail in the following chapter. Since antiquity, satire as critique had variably been associated with the hostility of laughter. Aristophanes and Horace had both voiced concerns about the provocation of laughter.2 It was, however, justifiable in the cause 1 2

 Muecke, Irony, 15–17.  Rosen, ‘Laughter’, 461–5.

© The Author(s), under exclusive license to Springer Nature Switzerland AG 2023 C. Condren, Between Laughter and Satire, https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-031-21739-5_6

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of censure. To paraphrase Horace, ridicule might prevail when reasons fail.3 Justified casuistically, such provocation expressed a moral office, or ethical responsibility, thus sanctioning comic drama in a way that makes it close to satire. The ancients, however, had written without the benefit of a specific concept of humour around which to concentrate their discussions. This remained the case in the Middle Ages, during which the most obvious satire was directed at priests for not adhering to the standards of their office. Sneering at them, laughing at their expense, was an affirmation of expectations that we easily translate as an expression of humour; but those condemned to one circle or another of Hell in Dante’s Commedia for sins, such as greed, hypocrisy, nepotism and murder, were no less subjected to satire than Langland’s or Chaucer’s tawdry clerics. When the word humour came into play, it initially affirmed that those of ill-humour could be the satirist’s legitimate prey.4 More narrowly, when humour’s now dominant sense was emerging, satire could easily be taken to express it, and irony add nuance or discretion. I have noted Swift’s remark that humour was satirically valuable because rather than lashing, it laughs men out of their follies.5 This, if not itself touched by irony, was arguably disingenuous, for as Robert Phiddian has recently emphasized, Augustan satire was ‘committed to the mobilization of essentially negative emotions’.6 It was also to enlist the authority of Roman justifications for exciting the censoriousness of laughter. In expressing anger, disgust, contempt and distain, satire was often enough tongue-lashing verbal violence. Ned Ward regarded the flailing lash as motivated by spite, and Joseph Addison took satire as an expression of humanity at its most ill-natured and vicious. It was a misuse of the ‘Talents of Humour’, was ‘petulant Humour’ (disposition) and a ‘Breach of Charity’.7 When Swift wrote, then, the relationship of satire to humour was unsettled, veering between the incidental, instrumental or almost oppositional. Where Margaret Cavendish had passingly aligned wit, humour and satire, Mary de la Rivière would applaud Dryden for isolating the essence and ‘very Soul of Satyre’ in scourging vice, namely in ‘Exhortation to Vetrue. Satyre is of the Nature of Moral Philosophy.’8 Echoes of this humourless didacticism rumble on into the nineteenth century. John Trusler,  Horace, Satire X, Opera, 241.  Tave, Amiable Humorist, 92–3. 5  Swift, Intelligencer, no.3, 233. 6  Phiddian, ‘Swift’s saeva indignatio’, 47; Satire, 9–31. 7  Ward, Satyr; Addison, Spectator, 23, 27 March 1711, 85, 88. 8  De la Rivière, Secret Memoirs, vol. 2, v. 3 4

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restricting satire to poetry, saw it as the proper censure of wickedness and folly, in contrast to scurrilous lampoon.9 For T.J.  Mathias satire was an office ‘by no means pleasant or desirable’ but a ‘peculiarly necessary … instrument … [of] public order’, its exercise difficult without appearing severe.10 Hence also Jane Austen’s reference to Mr Darcy’s satiric eye being likely to cause fear when he surveyed the assembly at Meryton.11 Late in the nineteenth century, Samuel Maunder insisted that satire was always castigation, but humour, he passingly remarked, could often be a vehicle for it.12 The contrast with contemporary usage in which something might be excused because it is only satire, and that good satire as a type of humour is, above all, funny, gives forewarning of the shifts in usage that make definition difficult. The purpose here, however, is not to pull a white rabbit out of the hat. What follows is a cautionary tale for anyone assuming either that satire has always been as it is now, or that definition settles differences. I offer neither a catalogue of attempted definitions of satire, nor an analysis of definitional theory and formal logic. I shall touch on such matters only in passing, for their relevance can be marginal.13 Caveats aside, the main task is to explore entanglements of both satire and definition. For if satire has a history dating back to antiquity, so too does a concern with definition. It is not everyone’s cup of hemlock, and so it may be helpful to pre-empt the general conclusion: for the historian the attempt to fix satire within a single definitional compass will be counterproductive, but historiographical priorities are not everything. Plato’s early dialogue Euthyphro provides a convenient point of departure, for it dramatically highlights aspects of definition of relevance to satire. It begins with what would prove typical of Plato’s dialogues, a motif of journeying: Socrates is tramping to the law courts to be tried for impiety and corrupting the Athenian youth. On his way he meets a young acquaintance, Euthyphro, also bound for court to accuse his father of killing a slave, who was thought to have committed murder. One travels to accuse, the other to be accused: both are in search of justice. With the confidence of youth, Euthyphro is sure he knows what it is, for he can give  Trusler, A Dictionary, 136–7.  Mathias, The Pursuits of Literature, 6–7. 11  Austen, Pride and Prejudice, vol. 1, Chap. 6. 12  Maunder, Treasury, 662, 358. 13  Toulmin, The Uses of Argument, 165–9; 36–8. 9

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examples. But how, asks Socrates, can he be certain unless he already has in mind a paradeigma (παραδειγμα), a pattern or model of virtue? The Socratic demand is for an abstract idea by which any matter can be defined and judged.14 Conversely, as Plato knew, how do you discover the paradeigma without first working from evidence of conduct? This was an early example of what has been called Meno’s paradox.15 And although the theory of forms (ideas) introduced in this dialogue was always about more than definition, that theory and that paradox still colour some understandings of what it means to define. The paradox set on its way the chicken-and-egg problem of priority between definiens (abstract definition) and definiendum (that which is defined), and established the expectation that a definition at once isolates an essence, like Rivière’s ‘very Soul of Satyre’, and provides an idealized form. Because in Greek λογος could refer to word, noun or discourse, it may also have encouraged confusion over what definitions were of, perhaps of things (like tables) or figures (like triangles), rather than of words. It helped give an authority for the definitional as a supervening and legislative process, a meta-procedure of special status. I shall touch on all of these issues, but most generally, Plato articulated a long-lasting belief that definitions are important, that without them you can hardly get started. Students who routinely begin essays with a dictionary definition, and professors who advise them that first of all they must define their terms, are both the distant progeny of the doomed Socrates and the hapless Euthyphro.

II We might, however, start with the differing directions in which dictionary definitions can lead us. Until the nineteenth century, dictionaries were selective and usually directive lists of difficult or foreign words, or the argot of society’s subgroups.16 Although there was a progenitor in Bailey’s Universal Etymological Dictionary, and more famously in Samuel Johnson’s Dictionary, it was Noah Webster’s American Dictionary of the English Language (1828) that ushered in the more far-reaching enterprise  Plato, Euthyphro 2a–6d.  Ibberson, Language of Decision, 115–16. 16  Minsheu, Ductor; Kersey, New English Dictionary; Grose, Lexicon; for discussion, Coleman, Cant and Slang Dictionaries. 14 15

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of providing lexical definitions of most words in use. Webster’s was a political as well as lexicographical ambition—to itemize an improved English for a new nation. The Dictionary was a statement of severance. Later in the century the OED would have the same encompassing determination to capture the whole tongue. It is inevitable, given the fluidity of language-­ use and the expansion of English in particular, that there will be a time-lag and that only certain sorts of utterance (for Johnson, the usage of the best authors) will be looked to for illustration.17 Lexical definitions, however, are themselves of limited value in dealing with the complex intellectual phenomena that can develop through stipulative conceptualization. The consequence is that often the modern dictionary does not give definitions but presents indications of differing patterns of established use; so it is with the OED entry on satire. Overall, its range is sufficient to reveal contradictions, yet with its omissions resulting in some oversimplification. Ridicule is listed as essential and not essential to satire. A historically misleading and Johnsonian emphasis on good authors (literature) is still evident, and the entry carries a legislative edge that compromises inclusiveness. The usage that the OED deems less correct is one that conflates satire with lampoon. It is in fact close to Pope’s admittedly self-­ serving conception of personal satire.18 Another subheading states that satire is composed of satires. Despite the unhelpful gesture towards a Whitmanesque comprehension of multitudes, there is a cohering emphasis on formal structure (under-specified) or function (narrowly conceived). That is, there is an element of censoriousness in all the itemized patterns of use. I will need to return to this as a potentially defining feature. In the meantime, the simple definition given in Bailey’s Etymological Dictionary still haunts the attempts to give the word precision: satire is any discourse in which someone is sharply reproved.19 Effectively the result has been to fall back on the justificatory rhetoric of satirists, aphoristically claiming that satire is the exposure of folly and wrongdoing. This needs treating with a pinch of salt, but is best considered in the context of rhetorical definition in the following chapter. More immediately it conjures up implied functions for satire that are easily overlooked. Not least the exposure of  The following points elaborate on Condren et al., ‘Defining Parody’, pt 1, 286–92.  Pope, Correspondence, to John Arbuthnot, [August 1735], 3, 423; Trusler, Dictionary, 136–7; Rosenheim, Swift, 28–31, comes close to regarding personal attack on a victim as a defining feature of satire. He does not discuss lampoon. 19  Bailey, Etymological Dictionary, ‘satire’. 17 18

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folly and wrongdoing facilitates the facile belief that the point of satire is to expose those in power: commendable no doubt but artificially restrictive. As Rosenheim has argued, satire can be punitive.20 This in its turn exploits some shared affront to propriety. It helps explain how easily satire, presupposing a fit object of condemnation, can have a further propagandistic end in group edification and consolidation, convenient for those in power. A surviving body of broadsides and balladic contrafacta circulating in London in early 1660 provides illustration of the vindictive aspect of what I’ve called rhetorical laughter and the fluidity of satiric function.21 The principal target was the ‘Rump’ Parliament, the remnant of the ‘Long Parliament’ that had been dissolved by Oliver Cromwell in 1653 only to be restored in 1658 by desperate generals in the chaos following his death. Broadsides and ballads were a vibrant part of English print culture, often mediating and changing stories and news in circulation,22 and a continuity of balladic, royalist satire rumbled disconsolately through the Civil War and Commonwealth period. John Evelyn, writing from exile during the Rump ascendency, concludes a guarded but partly jocular non-news letter to Thomas White with a ‘sad Elegie’ on the state of London. It is to be sung, spoken, piped or fiddled ‘to the Tune of Prag-ma-ti-cus’ for which he is not to blame (Nemo me impune).23 The derisory designation of the purged Parliament as a rump was not new, but proved protean with Cromwell’s demise.24 As Mark Jenner has argued, it was used to exploit a range of associations. It could impute the inversion of the body politic, the world turned ‘Arsy Versy’; it could suggest the monstrous and satanic (Parliament as the Devil’s peak); the alimentary and excremental (the Rump populated by ‘arse-maggots’ could only pass fundamental laws). As rumps of beef were celebratory joints, the imagery flowed into the festive and even the vicariously cannibalistic.25 Indeed, the broadsides circulated amid sponsored bonfires and roasting rumps of beef when the Parliament had fallen at the hands of General Monck. On 11 February 1660, Pepys counted nearly three dozen fires in  Rosenheim, Swift, 13–17.  Brome, ed., The Rump is a contemporaneous collection of those also in the Thomason tracts. 22  McShane, ‘Songs and Singers’, 94–118, for a recent discussion. 23  Evelyn, Letterbooks, 1, 26 March 1650, 76–7. 24  Jenner, ‘Roasting of the Rump’, 88–9. 25  Jenner, ‘Roasting of the Rump’, 85–96, 111. 20 21

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the area of Temple Bar and The Strand; so, Londoners feasted on the surrogate carcass of the defunct regime, the ‘Ruinous-rotten rosted Rump’.26 As I indicated in the previous chapter, exploring symbolic resonance can take us beyond a plausible threshold of intentional possibility and it may be that the cannibalistic implications of satirical acts of eating test the limits. What is clear, however, is that the satires sought to degrade and dehumanize through scatological redescription, and in this way were in the tradition of much Reformation religious polemic, from More and Luther to ‘Marprelate’ and his foes. It would be tedious to itemize the shits, stinks, farts and bums, comment on the piles the Rumpers suffered from sitting too long in office, or specifically on Alderman Atkins, who at the sound of a canon apparently once defecated in his breeches and whose name was noted knowingly to be an anagram of a stink.27 This abandonment or inversion of decorum, along with the quality of print and paper, passing Latinity and Lucianic allusion, has suggested an élite, or educated origin for most of the satires;28 but regardless of this, they achieved wide circulation. Samuel Pepys related that his cousin the Earl of Sandwich sung a rump song to the tune of ‘The Blacksmith’, when they were having a jolly evening on board the (shortly to be renamed) Naseby (23 April 1660).29 Earlier he had been told of a painting of a bare bottom defecating into the mouth of the republican Admiral Lawson, and went on to remark on street boys shouting ‘kiss my parliament’. Such, he concluded, was the total contempt into which the Rump had fallen.30 All this amounted to far more than the exposure of folly and wrongdoing, for there was not even a pretence of reform, and it was hardly Satire-Speaking-­ Truth-to-Power. The satires were vengeful and punitive, humiliating, popular and propagandistic. Through the incitement of scabrous laughter they aimed at a ritual shaming of the fallen and the concentration of latent, especially London hostility. A sign of deep political and religious divisions, their ridicule helped ease the way for the restoration of the monarchy that

 Anon., The Rump Ululant.  See, for example, [Brome] Arsy Versy; History of the Second Death. 28  Jenner, ‘Roasting of the Rump’, 103–4; McShane, ‘Roasting’, 262–4. 29  Pepys, Diary, 23 April 1660; the likely songs are ‘The Rump Serv’d up’ or ‘The Rump Carbonadod’, each to be sung to the same tune. The Naseby (built in Woolwich, 1655) was about to be renamed The Royal Charles, and it was later captured by the Dutch. 30  Jenner, ‘Roasting of the Rump’, 92, 99; Pepys, Diary, 7 Feb. 1659, 60. 26 27

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even in late 1659 was unexpected. Definitions of satire hardly take cognizance of them, although it would need a rather loaded, persuasive definition for their formal exclusion.

III Particularly relevant to the history of satire is definition by origin, it can amount to what Christian Hempelmann calls the etymological fallacy— departure from an early meaning is error.31 It is certainly a long-standing notion that time corrupts and an original use has a peculiar authenticity or residual power. Jacques Derrida was subject to its attractions in White Mythology, arguing that in philosophical concepts lurked an incubus of an original, often metaphorical use that continued to entrap and mislead philosophers who thought themselves in command of their own language.32 It is a point of relevance, especially to Renaissance discussions of satire. A putative origin in the Greek satyr plays that developed into Attic comedy was questioned by Julius Caesar Scaliger (1484–1558) and seemingly disproved by Isaac Casaubon (1559–1614). He effectively supported Quintilian’s claim that satire was a Roman invention.33 Casaubon argued that the word satire derived from the Latin satura, medley or stew; something of this etymology survived in English with a satira being a broad platter.34 Casaubon’s case has largely been accepted from John Dryden onwards.35 Yet, the very term connotes a richness and variety that might prove bewildering. C.J. Classon even suggests that a degree of indeterminacy helps explain why satirists so frequently justify what they are doing, as otherwise the reader might not know.36 Satire was less associated with Roman comedy, that today we might see as satiric, than with  a particular style of morally critical poetry; it was exemplified by Lucilius (180–103 bce), Horace (65–8 bce) and Juvenal (ca. 60–ca. 130 ce). This was the sort of writing that Quintilian principally had in mind and it came close to forming what would now be called a  Hempelmann, ‘Key Terms’, 35.  Derrida, White Mythology; see also Rorty, Mirror of Nature, 137–48. 33  Casaubon, De satyrica; Quintilian, Institutio 10.1.93. 34  Bailey, Etymological Dictionary; Facciolatus and Forcellinus, Lexicon, cite satura/satira as a platter for varieties of food, noting the Greek spelling σατυρα as an older form (2, 487). A large number of the Latin sat terms concern food, satiety, sufficiency, gluttony, and others seed-sowing. 35  Dryden, Discourse; Highet, Anatomy. 36  Classon, ‘Satire’, 98. 31 32

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genre. Like Euthythro on justice, Quintilian could be confident about satire by its Roman examples. The force of his claim was to lessen dependence on Greek culture, irrespective of what the Romans had done for satire. The narrowness of his specification made the case plausible— although attention to the Roman comedic stage, heavily dependent on Greek comedy, would have complicated the case for Roman independence. It might seem, then, that Roman origins circumscribed the terrain on which a definition could be mapped out and weakened associations with comedy. The matter, however, was not straightforward and etymological scholarship failed to extinguish the possibility of a Greek origin: any exclusion of Aristophanes seems odd. Petrus Nannius (1500–57) in an argument that predated Casaubon’s but was not published until 1608, suggested a dual origin from sat/σατ, a rarer root in Greek than Latin. Tantalizingly, along with variations on the mythical satyr, σατ terms are often strongly associated with the hostility that has been characteristic of satire: σατινη was a war chariot, σαττω could mean fully armed and Σαταν, Satan, taken from Hebrew meant enemy. The Dutch scholar Daniel Heinsius (1580–1655) claimed that the bowl called a satira lanx and carried by Greek satyrs evidenced a Greek origin. In Rome the lanx satura was the mixture of offerings on a dish.37 It might be concluded that although the Romans invented the term to be defined, the concept itself was originally Greek. This is superficially appealing, especially as it brings Aristophanes into the fold, and has encouraged at least one modern scholar to extend the origins of satire to include ritualized invective common to many cultures.38 We might even be tempted to convert the coincidental similarity of the roots sat and ςατ into surface clues to the underlying concept. This, however, is to overstretch inferential credulity, especially as we would need to presuppose the separation of concepts from the very words that provide the evidence for them. As noted earlier, this is best seen as a mechanism of narrative cohesion: first project the concept, then use it to join up the dots. It is nearer the truth to say that our later strong associations of satire with humour increase the range of the satiric to include the Greek rhetorical and comedic notion that laughter was ridicule of folly, ugliness, wrongdoing and misfortune. In what was akin to later justifications of satire, Aristotle had sanctioned  De Smet, Menippean Satire, 35–6, 49; Smith, Dictionary, 1008.  Elliott, The Power of Satire.

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laughter at the ugliness exhibited on stage (Chap. 2). To see this as pointing to a shared concept of satire thus helps create an overall general picture that only aides the misleading conflation of laughter with humour in antiquity. It is enough, I would have thought, to say that the Greeks had something analogous to what the Romans would call satire, most evident in Old Attic comedy. There was a common provocation of laughter at a victim, and an authorial or poetic persona proclaiming moral probity in doing so. This may help explain why Horace’s concerns with the use and abuse of laughter in satire echo Aristophanes’ similar justifications for ridicule.39 What Horace and Aristophanes share, in short, is not the concept of satire, but the need to justify the nastiness of laughter. Thus, in ridicule and its adjacent tropes, we have something that helps cohere the varying rationalities for a general conception of satire. But this does not make definition of the word satire any easier. As Feinberg notes, even if one recognizes a compound rationale for satire, not all that is deemed satiric neatly complies.40 What was also understood in the Renaissance was that definition concerned not a thing (something encouraged by the definitional function of the Platonic forms) but rather a word, its origins and range; and the scope might stretch to metaphorical migration from objects like food and pottery to complex intellectual activity. People writing in the sixteenth century had available austere and demanding notions of a definition and its necessary criteria. For the Sorbonne logician George Lokert (d. 1547), for example, a good definition required symmetry of terms, explanatory power and economy, stipulations that would have been mainstream.41 He and his contemporaries were also legatees of an important logical distinction between real and nominal definitions, established probably by William of Ockham (1285?–1347). Real definitions attempted to encompass the whole nature of something existing. They were descriptions purporting to capture an essence, discounting accidents. Nominal definitions referred to word use and so could be constructed even for what was non-existent. Although it remains possible to talk casually of defining things, a definition more rigorously understood in nominal terms only establishes protocols for word use, encourages the precision of special meanings and so  Rosen, ‘Laughter’, 461–3.  Feinberg, ‘Satire’, 6; Rosenheim, Swift, 2–9. 41  Brodie, Lokert, 33–4; Lokert, De terminis (Paris, 1524), in Brodie, 192–3; see also Attardo, Linguistics of Humor, 8–9. 39 40

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leads to stipulative definitions, often limited to a given theory or mode of discourse.42 In formal logic they are symbols standing for more extensive formulae (definienda) marked by logical operators such as ‘=’ or ‘⇒’. In the Tractatus Wittgenstein treated definitions as rules for dealing with signs. They enabled propositional translation.43 Such matters lead some way from the issues to hand, but more immediately they also take us from the notion that definition is the isolation of essences, such as Rivière’s ‘very Soul’ of satire. The retreat from definition as capturing an essence is related to the broader (Ockhamist) philosophical point, to become important in the post-Renaissance world, that truth is not a thing outside discourse to be discovered—a belief encouraged by Plato’s visual metaphors of intellection. It is, rather, recognition of propositional coherence, an argument strongly linked to writers like Hobbes and Descartes, then formalized in the distinction between analytic and synthetic truth associated with Kant and then Frege. Certainly, it would now be accepted that we do not define a chair but only how the word chair can be used in what sorts of semantic relationships and circumstances. With the exceptions of technical definitions in mathematics and chemistry, real definitions in any strict sense have been abandoned with Aristotelian doctrines of essence.44 The notion of a real definition has consequently become an indication that a definition can have a non-verbal reference function, and is in Kantian terms, synthetic. It is often of great value in stabilizing meanings by providing a criterion of use. These diverging understandings are captured in just one of the succinct abridgments of the word definition (they do not all agree) in Bailey’s Universal Etymological Dictionary: ‘Definition, a short and plain Declaration or Description of the Meaning of a Word, or the essential Attributes of a Thing.’ The OED now has to take matters much further. It has a separate entry for definition in mathematics and includes explanation, determination and decision-­ making under the verb to define.

42  Henry, Medieval Logic, 30–42; Ashworth, Traditional Logic, 143–72; Jardine, Humanistic Logic, 173–98. 43  Wittgenstein, Tractatus, 3343, pp. 32/3; 4241, at pp. 60/61. 44  Quine, The Ways of Paradox, 51–3.

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IV Definition works because it is exclusive. Thus, it is important always to consider whether that exclusivity or economy has been too abruptly circumscribed. It brings to the fore the issue of definitional implication, and the range of any given definition. Directly relevant is C.S. Peirce’s contention that the meaning of a concept is the sum of its implications.45 This draws attention to concepts as having meaning and function only within patterns of discursive convention. Yet not all implications are definitionally decisive. Consider satire and the question of agency. Paul Simpson, following Foucault, minimalizes reliance on the notion of agency, but still refers to satiric strategies, posits the satirist as a defining component in his formal model of satire, and occasionally treats satire as an agent (its being parasitic and attaching itself to forms of discourse), albeit (oddly) having no ontological status.46 Such tensions suggest that some reliance on agency is indeed inescapable in dealing with satire, but the relationship is asymmetrical.47 Intentionality may be an aspect of much beyond the satiric. A fortiori with respect to humour, even if it were true that all satire sought to be humorous, a point Simpson takes for granted, humour extends so far beyond satire that reference to it can only provide the incomplete beginnings of a definition. If implication is understood strictly, a definition that overlooks some implications will need to be expanded. Thus, as Nannius realized, but for its hexametric poetic form and the fact that the language was Latin, it was difficult to treat Roman satire as insulated from Greek theatre.48 Rome became, after all, profoundly indebted to Hellenic culture. Again, Rosenheim distinguishes persuasive from punitive satire, associating only the former with rhetoric, the latter with principles and perceptions the satirist already shares with an audience. The problem here is that persuasion necessarily depends upon the exploitation of such shared communal expectations and prejudices. For Aristotle, for example, one would have been unintelligible without recognizing the other as a strict implication; that is, accepted truths, prior judgments and prejudices are the resources needed for suasive acts. Rhetoric, then, cannot operate to delineate one type of satire from another.  Peirce, ‘What Pragmatism Is’, para. 412; Lectures, para. 18.  Simpson, Discourse of Satire, 10, 8, 14, 64–6, 81–3, 153–4. 47  Phiddian, ‘Satire’, 48–9. 48  Smet, Menippean Satire, 35–6. 45 46

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Yet, insofar as notions of implication and consequence are taken loosely, the scope of a concept is likely to be uncertain, its nature contentious. Peirce’s emphasis was on the logic of conceptual relationships, though he also insisted on the direct relevance, the ‘conceivable bearing’ that a concept might have on conduct, a qualification that undercut his insistence on formal rigor of argument.49 Through pragmatists such as William James, the latitude of conceivable bearing increasingly allowed more contingent patterns of relationship and practical effect to assume significant shape.50 One consequence of this is close to deferring the meaning of any defined concept. Ferdinand Schiller even appeared to entertain the self-defeating belief that a definition embraces its context.51 Another common outcome stems from the imperatives of appropriation, and what might amount for many to philosophical misuse. Insofar as a term is of great negative emotional resonance (genocide, racism) or positive value (democracy, rights), it is likely to be subject to promiscuous employment and the evacuation of discriminate meaning. With satire, there has always been continuing pressure for the sort of conceptual expansion illustrated by the widening meanings of pragmatism and pragmatic conceptual definition. This potential is effectively signalled in the early Greco-Roman problem of origination touched on above, for this was itself an implication of the accommodating notion of satire as a medley, a mixed mode of writing, as in the prosimetric satires of Varro (116–27 bce). But the written word may provide an undue restriction if we accept that the visual arts may be symbolically meaningful: if statues of the mighty can be put up, they can be pulled down, given red noses, spray-­ painted or relished for their perching pigeons. That ridicule could be found in art and music was stressed by Preston in the eighteenth century.52 Haydn’s ‘Farewell Symphony’ has already been cited as a work of pointed wit. There is hardly a shortage of artists who have presented paintings as statements, truths, critiques and contributions to debates usually carried on in words: from Ambrogio Lorenzetti’s frescos of Good and Bad Government in Siena (1339), to Picasso’s monumental Guernica (1937) and, a neat fifty years later, Andres Serrano’s Piss Christ (1987).

 Peirce, ‘What Pragmatism Is’, para. 412.  Peirce, Lectures, para. 2. 51  Schiller, Logic for Use (1929). 52  Preston, Essay on Ridicule, 69–70. 49 50

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In these surroundings stands the Cerne Abbas giant, a great phallic figure, 180 ft high and etched into the chalk hills of Dorset in southern England. This has long been regarded as a relic of a Romano-British fertility cult. There is, however, no reference to it until relatively modern times, and when it was first attracting antiquarian attention in the eighteenth century, a recent origin was suspected. This possibility has now been more thoroughly explored, with the conclusion that the giant is a satiric graffito depicting Oliver Cromwell as an obscene parody of Heracles/Hercules, instigated by the landowner Denzil Holles (1599–1680).53 Cromwell’s military success and political impact made him as much subject to satire as to panegyric, and a depiction of him in a Dutch cartoon of 1653 as Heracles/Hercules, complete with lion skin and ceremonial mace being used as a club, inverted the flattering associations with a complex mythic hero, a byword for similar levels of blistering, destructive energy and a long-standing subject of parody.54 Cromwell’s peremptory dissolution of ‘The Long Parliament’ in 1652 was, like ‘Pride’s Purge’ of Parliament four years earlier, a clearing of the Augean stables. The damning appellation of Cromwell as a ‘Parliamentary Hercules’ was sardonically extended to his cleansing the University of Cambridge of troublesome clerics.55 Holles, a prominent Parliamentarian and one time ally, had become increasingly hostile to Cromwell, fleeing to France in 1647. His lands were sequestered, but he returned to England, was un-reconciled to the (unusually tolerant) Protector and became instrumental in the Restoration of Charles II. It is possible, then, that he ordered the creation of the Cerne Abbas figure, before 1647, or after the return of his lands in 1660. The hillside etching is at one with his antipathies and is a dramatic visualization of a known satiric topos: a chalky Herculean Cromwell waving his great club, ready to rape the country.56 Bestial and sexual impropriety was also a noticeable symbolic theme of Royalist satiric print propaganda.57 If the Holles theory is right, the date would determine the giant’s satiric

 Darvill et al., The Cerne Giant, at length.  Mitchell, Greek Vase-Painting, 110, 219–20. 55  Heath, Flagellum, 30; there is apparently a statue of Cromwell in Herculean guise in Highnan Court, Gloucester. 56  The club is of the huge rustic sort found in the old iconography of Hercules. There may be traces of a cloak or lion skin hanging from the left arm, and the phallus was apparently mistakenly enlarged in a much later restoration. 57  Blackwell, ‘Bestial Metaphors’, 105–30. 53 54

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rationale—as a defiant castigation or a monument cut out in vengeful celebration. One contemporary imperative might be the need to add a greater diversity of non-verbal media to the satira-dish: collages, tee shirts, bumper stickers, hairstyles and jewellery, even safety pins worn for ornamentation, might all in context have a satiric purpose.58 In a word, satire illustrates a frequent tension between definiens and definiendum that threatens either to overextend any definition or, conversely, to make a definition so narrow as to exclude much of what cannot escape direct consideration.

V These general comments can be given more substance with reference to what is called Menippean satire.59 Prima facie, this should seem easier to define because it is only a subset of a more nebulous identity and, moreover, is a form of satire firmly tied to notions of wit, ridicule and humour. Yet, in fact, it provides a microcosm of the wider definitional difficulties. Menippean satire can initially be taken as satire reliant on the image of the Greek cynic philosopher Menippus of Gadera (third century bce), irascible and given to direct opinions (παρ-ρησια), where parrhesia encompasses both brutal honesty and irresponsibility of tongue. Nothing by Menippus is known and only fragments and indirect accounts of Varro’s Saturae Menippeae survive. Since these were apparently in imitation of Menippus, they add a further complication to the issue of Greek or Roman origins of satire. Perhaps it is fittingly symbolic of a medley of possibilities that a disproportionate amount of what we do have was written by Lucian of Samosata (ca. 120–180 ce), a Syrian writing in Greek during the Second Sophistic of Rome, who sometimes used Menippus to carry the burden of his mockingly critical song.60 His famous boast was to have made the philosophical dialogue laugh. Yet not all of his works refer to Menippus, and the issue immediately arises: are they to be excluded on this technicality? In addition, since Menippus is but one voice carrying the same range of Lucianic themes, there is pressure to collapse the Menippean into the broader Lucianic. Eugene Kirk, following the analysis of Northrop Frye,  Condren et al., ‘Defining Parody’, pt 1, 291–2; pt 2, 412–15; Phiddian, Satire, 53.  Condren, Hobbes, the Scriblerians, 19–27 for a more detailed discussion. 60  Relihan, Ancient Menippean Satire; Jones, Culture and Society; Robinson, Lucian. 58 59

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has written a compendious account of Menippean satire and he lists as markers of the Menippean and Lucianic, a medley of themes such as travellers’ tales, digressions, mock encomia, deliberate incoherencies, lies, fantasies and dreams.61 Not surprisingly, parrhesia or direct honesty may either be present, disingenuously paraded or absent through indirection and irony. Most of these features would be evident in the Menippean figure of Hythlodaeus in Thomas More’s Utopia (1516). Especially given the play with internal contradiction and digression, we are not presented, in any Peircian sense, with a set of mutual implications. So, how many distinct features need to be apparent to warrant using the label ‘Menippean’, and is this a sufficient basis for a definition? The butts of the satire are similarly various: priests, philosophers, rhetoricians and grammarians. Such a list gives some initial definitional purchase, because the common, though not exclusive focus is on the delusions of the mind.62 Those conventional victims of satire, politicians, might on this basis even be excluded. Seizing on intellectual failings, however, pars pro toto, has led to definitional confusion. W. Scott Blanchard defines the Menippean as prose that is at once learned and paradoxically anti-intellectual.63 Yet satire against the misuse of the intellect (consider Pope’s Dunciad) need hardly be paradoxical let alone anti-intellectual. Further, as categories like philosopher or rhetorician are themselves unstable and potentially overlapping, the excluded can always slip in by the back door: clerics, for example, were frequently satirized because they could be taken as politicians.64 Dante’s Inferno houses a few, Machiavelli and especially Guicciardini regarded the papacy as little more than a corrupt worldly polity. It had been condemned as such in medieval verse satires on papal greed. Gary Sherbert, who also overemphasizes the intellectual nature of Menippean satire, is led to refer to it as a self-consciousness of wit satirizing wit.65 Given the tricky and contested history of wit, this is closer to passing the buck than positing a definition. Howard Weinbrot in the most sophisticated and valuable discussion has taken fear of orthodoxy as definitional of the Menippean.66 Even if plausible, any fear of orthodoxy extended beyond the Menippean might well have been fear only of the wrong sort of orthodoxy. Oliver Cromwell, no  Kirk, Menippean Satire, at length.  Sherbert, Menippean Satire, 1. 63  Blanchard, Scholars Bedlam, 14. 64  Jones, Culture and Society, 33–45. 65  Sherbert, Menippean Satire, 3. 66  Weinbrot, Menippean Satire Reconsidered, 1–7, 16–19. 61 62

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great friend of orthodoxy, is difficult to picture as a Menippean. A common denominator is not a discriminator. This must all seem unsatisfactory: Menippean encompasses what has been done by whomever in the name of Menippus or Lucian; or, without reference to either, what has been done that echoes Lucianic themes and might allude to Menippus, either in prose, in poetry or in a mixture of both. Heterogeneity seems unbounded. In the sixteenth century, Petrus Nannius thought that Boethius’s Consolation of Philosophy (ca. 524) was close to being Menippean satire because of its composite modal structure.67 This anticipates the overly accommodating notion that the Menippean has become: Swift, More, Beckett, Nabokov, Pynchon and dozens of others, not least Monty Python’s Holy Grail, are, in Kirk’s terms, Menippean. Because of the strong Lucianic echoes, Rabelais in the seventeenth century was treated not as a harsh Roman satirist, but as a benign Menippean.68 It is little wonder that Bakhtin could also appropriate the term as a festive jest to his notion of the carnivalesque.69 Recalling Plato’s Euthyphro, one can see that Menippean satire means something, but lacks the paradeigma to tell us precisely what. As it comes within the larger category of satire, the possibility of a tight definition for satire as such appears to be a dish eaten away from the inside before it reaches the table. The situation might leave a logician like George Lokert both starved and distracted.70 Arguing precisely against this ecumenical messiness, Ingrid de Smet has insisted that Menippean should be restricted to its original Renaissance meaning. The satire must be prosimetric and conveyed through a dream motif in which Menippus figures.71 De Smet takes as a progenitor the Apocolocyntosis (The Gourdification of the Divine Claudius) by Seneca (4 ce–65), an account of the Emperor Claudius’s failed attempt to get into Heaven. She argues, however, that the foundational, definitive example is Justus Lipsius’s Somnium (1581), a fictional dream about the failings of modern scholarship, followed by Petrus Cunaeus’s Sadi venales (1612), in which the dream becomes a nightmare. De Smet, in effect, appeals to the authority of origins, but with some arbitrariness, beginning, or rather not beginning, with Seneca. Erasmus’s Morae Encomium/Praise of Folly  De Smet, Menippean Satire, 35.  Urquhart and Matteau, Works of F. Rabelas, 1, cxxix–cxxxij. 69  Bakhtin, Rabelais; for effective critique, Malcolm, Origins, 117–19; Guervich, ‘Bakhtin’, 54–60; Weinbrot, Menippean Satire Reconsidered, 12–15. 70  Brodie, Lokert, 33–5; Lokert, De terminis, 192–3. 71  De Smet, Menippean Satire, 23–31. 67 68

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(1515) was associated strongly enough with the Menippean to be republished with Lipsius’s and Cunaeus’s works in 1617.72 Her focus also excludes More’s Utopia and Richard Pace’s Julius Exclusus (1513), a failed attempt by a politician/pope to muscle into Heaven modelled on Seneca’s ‘Gourdification’ of Claudius. Rabelais’s Gargantua is also beyond the pale. These were all works self-consciously and explicitly written as in some way Menippean.73 Erasmus and More were both translators of Lucian. Thus, de Smet privileges a specific dream motif over the functionally very similar ones of, say, a dialogue with the dead, conversing with ghosts or a council of the gods. The result is a definition so narrow as to be helpful only for corralling a handful of neo-Latin scholars. The problem is in stark contrast to Kirk’s inclusive generosity. Like many definitions in books, de Smet’s might best be taken only as a synoptic description of the scope of the study.74 Crucially, her argument moves away from general lexical comprehensiveness to the highly stipulative. Although this is a valuable corrective to lack of discrimination, sometimes, as John Caputo has noted, the very drive to precision can create what is not in the evidence.75 Herein is the central definitional difference to which we are led: de Smet is working within the terms of a broadly Platonic ideal, the search for a cohering essence. Kirk has abandoned this quest in order to rely more on what W.B. Gallie and William Connolly have called ‘cluster concepts’.76 This alternative is derived from Wittgenstein’s elliptical remarks on ‘family resemblance’.77 The proposition runs as follows: we can identify members of the same family, not necessarily by any shared, essential feature like the Hapsburg chin, but by virtue of a contingent rather than mutually entailed range of characteristics, some of which overlap sufficiently between members of the group for a resemblance to be created. On this basis, we can simplify an abstracted image of Menippean satire (MS) as having only a small aggregated number of characteristics, such as (a) dream motifs, (b)  Matheussen and Heersekkers, Two Neo-Latin Menippean Satires, 19.  Curtis, ‘Richard Pace’, 184–260, who establishes Pace’s authorship for what has been attributed to Erasmus (despite his denials). 74  Sherbert, Menippean Satire, 1–3; Rosenheim, Swift, 31; Caron, ‘Quantum Paradox’, whose ‘working definition’ is a paragraph summary of what he is about to argue, 156. 75  Caputo, Religion, 46. 76  Gallie, Philosophy, 105–10; Connolly, Terms of Political Discourse, 10–12. 77  Wittgenstein, Philosophical Investigations, paras. 66–7. Alistair Fowler has also relied upon family resemblance in his attempt to shift the notion of literary genre away from definition towards exemplarity; see at length, Kinds of Literature. 72 73

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dialogues with the dead, (c) unreliable narration, (d) traveller’s tales, (e) inherent contradiction and (f) mock encomia, and initially schematize examples of it thus: MS1 (a, b, c); MS2 (a, c, f ); MS3 (b, d, f ); MS3 (b, d, e); MS4 …



If applicable to Menippean satire, the designation of a family resemblance may be even more fitting to the broader category of satire, and to accept the point is to move to the very edge of what a definition might be. This is especially so if these formal features are variably tied to the putative ends of satire (moral criticism E1, amusement E2, group consolidation E3, punishment E4, propagandizing E5). The possibility that some of these satires might also exhibit ridicule, irony or some form of humour adds more to the mix. The matter is complicated further if we drop the modelling convenience, that the informing ends provide us with neat exclusive answers as to what a satire is really directed towards, and dispense also with the fiction that the inherent features are all parameters, like the elements that allow a chemical compound to be defined. Most if not all descriptors are partial, giving only an incomplete identity. Certainly, traveller’s tales and mock encomia can easily enough be contradictory and are likely enough also to be unreliable. A more adequate picture of the Menippean may then look like this: MS1(a, b, c) E1; MS2 (a, c, f ) E1; MS3 (b, d, f ) E2; MS4 (a, b, c) E3; MS5(b, d, a) E1 / 2…



With few variables, we can have a highly ramified family tree that helps in ordering a potentially bewildering phenomenon. Understanding by family resemblance, however, is better seen as an argument for stopping short of a definition as traditionally understood, for being satisfied instead with a porous, unstable classifier, or what I shall call a characterization. While there are, indeed, a fair number of concepts that might be understood in these terms, not least the classifier humour, the principal consequence of stopping with a characterization is to suggest that such notions invite diverging use and disputation because they carry differing criteria of application.78 This is close to Gallie’s theory of essential contestability. It is  Toulmin, The Uses of Argument, 30–1.

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a notion easily overstated and can dwindle into a euphemism for anything goes,79 but it has enough validity to help explain some of the differences canvassed above with respect to Menippean satire. Such a conceptual characterization of satire has one crucial historiographical advantage and a theoretical disadvantage. It may capture reference to the word satire with minimal distortion and with instructive inclusiveness over the whole historical range. It has rumbled down to us as an enlarging aggregation. Conversely, this might make it insufficiently restrictive: bits need chipping off to make it usable. If the reason for charting word-use is to circumscribe a specific concept, then exploring full patterns of employment can prove irritatingly ancillary, or open to distracting dispute. What the historian might need to embrace in order to avoid the over-schematized and anachronistic, the lawyer might see as frustrating the requirements of precedent, the philosopher find tainted with irrelevance, and the literary critic might conclude distracts from isolating what is worthwhile.80 With such preoccupations, however, there is always the problem of stacking the cards, by building into the definition unstated qualitative criteria, so merging distinct definitional aims. As I have indicated, satire has been intermittently subject to precisely this. It amounts to what I shall discuss as rhetorical definition in the next chapter. It is enough here to note the prime example of it: the definitional formula that satire is the castigation of evil and folly.81 It informs Paul Simpson’s superficially global model of satire with its implicit and reductive syllogistic presupposition: humour is fundamentally good, all satire is humour, therefore ….82 Naturally, those calling themselves satirists will find this compelling. Notwithstanding, with definitional adequacy much depends on the sort of enquiry to hand, and it requires consideration of the word satire in its semantic contexts, and addressing the issue of whether all the problems thus far canvassed can be set aside if we recognize satire to be an identifiable genre.

 Mason, Explaining Political Disagreement, 47–68.  Rosenheim, Swift, 7–8. 81  Trusler, Dictionary, 136–7; L’Estrange, History of English Humour, 109. 82  Simpson, The Discourse of Satire, at length. 79 80

CHAPTER 7

Definition by Adjacent Terms, Genre and Satiric Definition

I According to Abraham Cowley, wit could only be defined negatively, it was a nebulous remainder from what it was not, and while this was to abandon an essentialist definition, it pointed to the importance of understanding in reference to any term’s adjacent vocabulary. Similarly, Sir Thomas Browne stated that he could ‘behold vice without a satire, content only with an admonition, or instructive reprehension’. He gives no more than a point of orientation, with the contrast between satire, reprehension and admonition lacking specification.1 This is a further version of Meno’s paradox, presupposing the meaning of one word to establish that of another, a fact of intellectual life. Again, analyses of this sort go back to antiquity and were explored in medieval and early modern semantics. It became something of a truism that words take on meaning only through interrelationship. As John Pym (1584–1643) put it, everything exists by way of relation.2 Aristotle’s understanding of definition by mean, to which I shall briefly return, is perhaps the most influential example. Moral categories discussed in the Nicomachean Ethics were posited as means between contrasting extremes. Thus, generosity lies between parsimony and extravagance.3 Acceptable laughter was situated  Browne, Religio medici, 165.  Pym, Speech, 131. 3  Aristotle, Nicomachean Ethics, 1107a–1109b. 1 2

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between boorishness and buffoonery. Bi-conditional semantic pairings function in a similar way: husband has traditionally stood in the bi-­ conditional relationship with wife, parent with child, up with down, virtue with vice and so on. Hegel’s ponderous dialectic of the relationship between master and slave is of a piece with what was close to a commonplace of logic.4 Take one away and the other’s meaning must be transformed or destroyed. As Browne put it, ‘They that endeavour to abolish vice, destroy also virtue; for contraries, though they destroy one another are yet the life blood of one another.’5 Yet with satire, definition by mean or bi-conditionality is difficult to achieve because its semantic neighbours are unlikely to be any more stable. If satire is a mean, what are the circumscribing forms of the non-satiric? Perhaps it lies between compliment and invective, but this still does not get us far, for a statement with no satiric intent might also occupy much the same semantic space—such as an attempt at neutral description. The element of humour is also strikingly absent, but if satire is reduced simply to humour we are no better off in identifying it as a mean. Conversely, how does satire help define a mean? I cannot think of a reliable way in which it does. Touching on the slipperiness of negative delineation is related to the diversity of specific features of and rationalities for satire that I have already outlined. Depending on what these are taken to be, we will be directed towards differing points of contrast. There is a variable relationship with lampoon. Others exist with parody, burlesque and allegory, with which satire may sometimes be collocated. These terms too have variable histories, and as noted in Chap. 5, their currency in the eighteenth century may have helped delay common reliance on a generalized notion of humour. John Jump surveys such conceptual relationships with respect to burlesque. Satire is absent but his category of the Hudibrastic could as easily have been discussed as Menippean satire.6 Moreover, if we can be satisfied with a characterization of satire, it is possible to move much closer to a formal definition of parody—an adaptive descant on a previously created artefact7; so parody of specifies a formal relationship with something and, as a distorting echo, is a more informative notion than satire of. A parody, especially in music, may express an astute knowledge of, even affection for the original whose appreciation  Zekavat, Satire, Humour, 18–20.  Browne, Religio medici, 164; see also, Milton, Areopagitica, 514, 527. 6  Jump, Burlesque, 1–2, 12–17. 7  Rose, Parody, 17–33. 4 5

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it might enhance. When combined with satire, however, it can be an open question whether the object parodied is merely a vehicle for satirizing something else or is itself a subject of satire. At one extreme, Mark Twain’s parody of Victor Hugo’s Toilers of the Sea (trans. 1866) is both parody and derisive satire of Hugo’s style. Twain’s L’Homme Qui Rit (1869), another Hugo parody, adds a political dimension by also being a scathing satire of President Lincoln’s successor Andrew Johnson (1808–75).8 Ian Reilly has argued that the parodic presentation of the news on United States television has the journalists who present conventional news stories as a principal target. He cites Jon Stewart of the satiric Daily Show holding them responsible for damaging public debate.9 At the other extreme, it is possible that what is being parodied is untainted by satiric intent. As Howard Weinbrot quotes Arthur Murphy writing in 1754, to parody is not necessarily to ‘sneer’ at the original.10 Mitchell makes such a bold claim for the parodies adorning Greek vases, on which the satyrs aping gods and heroes are isolated as risible.11 Certainly satyrs were convenient fictions, but as deities and heroes were subject to scepticism and moral critique by the fifth century bce, Mitchell’s confidence in any neat demarcation draws a long bow. Such a case, however, might be made more safely for Samuel Butler’s Hudibras (1663–78) in which the epic form seems used only to satirize the puritan enthusiast. Generally, I would suspect things are rarely so clear-cut and often enough leave a residue that may be taken as satirizing what is parodied. It is a point of relevance to the following chapter, for in being printed the Yes Minister and Prime Minister Diaries may be considered both parodic and satiric of political memoirs, something on which the co-author Antony Jay showed confusion. The satiric almanacs of the seventeenth century seem intended to subvert the authentic forms being parodied. William Hone was tried in 1817 for blasphemy, albeit unsuccessfully, for parodying the Church of England Litany and Athanasian Creed when he claimed only to be using them to satirize contemporary political corruption.12 What is held to be sacrosanct is likely to excite sensitivity, with any distinction between parody and satire being denied or ignored in the interests of insulating the  Twain, Satires, 25–30, 40–8.  Reilly, ‘Satirical Fake News’, 20–1. 10  Weinbrot, ‘Translation and Parody’, 443. 11  Mitchell, Greek Vase-Painting, 307–10. 12  Rose, Parody, 32. 8 9

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sacred at all costs. Salmon Rushdie is still subject to a fatwa. Less extreme was the hostile reception of the Pythons’ Life of Brian, a parody of the life of Christ, freely taken as a satire of Christianity and the Bible, which the Pythons denied. Private Eye suffered a sales decline and its editors abuse for satires touching on, though not of, Diana Princess of Wales at the time of her death. In practice, then, satire and parody can be hard to keep distinct.13 Allegory is also tricky. Ellen Leyburn considers its definition more difficult than that of satire but suggests that the two are easy bedfellows, because satire, like allegory, has its essence in indirection.14 We might try telling that to satirists such as Auberon Waugh, P.J. O’Rourke or even the sometimes straight-speaking Menippus. Alexander Pope thought satire should give precise examples of moral turpitude, that it should cut the animals from the herd. There is not much indirect about that. It is discouraging to reflect that the critical term to which detailed attention is given always seems to be perceived as the problematic one (it probably is), while those to which it is related are held to be more straightforward (probably they are not). Perhaps without such untoward optimism, we would not get far with defining anything. Finding an antonym for the satiric (analogous to vice for virtue, up for down) is also elusive. Leyburn’s implicit reliance on a contrast between direct and indirect fails to give an essence that defines anything. The importance that humour has assumed in modern satire might encourage the view that a crucial point of contrast is between the serious and the non-serious.15 Even if some demarcation between them is held to be reasonably reliable, to locate satire in the non-serious would privilege its associations with humour but would quite falsify or discount its functions of scourging, shaming or ridiculing in a quite humourless fashion. Conversely, to locate satire in the domain of the serious would be in keeping with justifications for satire and many dictionary definitions, but as in the OED, would eliminate much humour from consideration, and so largely exclude contemporary usage. Moreover, as I have indicated, satire can explicitly transgress any bifurcation between serious and non-serious, and can violate the derivative  Simpson, Discourse of Satire, 168–71, 120–3.  Leyburn, Satiric Allegory, 4–5, 8–9. 15  Bateson, Steps to an Ecology, 173–92; Grice, ‘Logic and Conversation’, 41–59; for discussion, see Attardo, Linguistic Theories, 271–92. 13 14

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notion of a containing ‘play-frame’ sometimes considered to be of defining importance to humour. Play has a range of meanings well beyond the frolicsome and facetious and may itself have different points of contrast. In this context, it is worth restating that the informing drive behind Lucian’s satire was, through mockery, to say what was serious. In fact, the standard English translation of serio ludere (to play seriously), so often associated with his satire, can be a touch anodyne and perhaps artificially paradoxical. Ludere and other terms from the same root had multiple meanings beyond the playful, from sex to acting and gladiatorial combat; but ludere and cognate forms when referring to satire concerned derision, ridicule and exposure of the ludicrous. This was precisely Lucian’s forensic aim and that of many who subsequently used the phrase serio ludere as emblematic of their activities, less a matter of being ludic than of exposing the ludicrous. Both Erasmus and More treated Lucian as a figure of iconic importance as each established his own satirically philosophic persona. Indeed, from the Renaissance, satire as serio ludere finds a place in philosophy, that most assiduous mode of disputation. There was nothing forced in Dryden taking satire as mode of moral philosophy. It is possible that if the conventional history of philosophy as written by philosophers was not so propositionally artificial, and hence included satiric philosophy and its tropes of what we now see as humour, the opposition between the serious and the non-serious would not have had so much weight put upon it. Be that as it may, in the present world in which satire is so heavily inflected with humour, there is still the customary and seemingly discrepant designation of Orwell’s 1984 (1949) as a satire.16 Certainly, the humorous has become increasingly important in satire, yet to read humour back as an essential feature of anything called a satire, let alone define satire in terms of it, is bound to mislead.17 When Henry Neville and John Starkey, in the voice of Machiavelli, assured the reader that The Prince was a satire, it was to argue that the purpose of the work was to expose the wicked and therefore had no bearing on virtuous rulers. When Garrett Mattingly revived the thesis of the satiric Prince, the meaning of the designation had changed. Although noting definitional difficulties, his argument depended on Cesare Borgia, a central figure for Machiavelli, being a laughing stock, with the work itself  Leyburn, Satiric Allegory, 125–34; Sutherland, English Satire, 21.  See for example, Simpson, Discourse of Satire; satire as humour is taken so much for granted that it seems even projected as lying behind the etymology of satire (4). 16 17

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a being a ‘joke’.18 What, then, of satire as the use of ridicule? Again, this is not essential. Irony stops well short of ridicule but can be sufficient to identify a satiric edge, such as the opening sentence of Jane Austen’s Pride and Prejudice (1813) with its deft pun on ‘want’: ‘It is a truth universally acknowledged, that a single man in possession of a good fortune, must be in want of a wife.’ Where ridicule is important, its relationship to humour also varies. Satire can explicitly ridicule, but ridicule can be a desired response to the satire rather than a marker of it. The given text is thus read as if governed by the trope of aposiopesis. Mattingly’s reading of Machiavelli’s Prince depends precisely on overlooking that distinction and the importance of unstated implication: Machiavelli does not ridicule, but for The Prince to be satire in a modern sense, he must have intended his audience to laugh at Cesare Borgia. As he never had the work printed, and there is little knowledge of the extent of manuscript circulation, we can only guess. Joseph Hall (1574–1656) wrote satires that presented the risible more than indulging in ridicule. His own tone, as he accepted, is sour.19 It is the dyspepsia expressive of moral affront: Hall was a young man in want of ecclesiastical advancement. The range of words adjacent to satire suggests the relevance of locating it within a semantic field of the sort Salvatore Attardo has outlined for humour and in which the word satire now has a place.20 Such overlapping fields of terms are abstractions from the patterns of use, and semantic and associational fields in natural languages that are not always mutually equivalent. In the case of humour, such asymmetry itself is a serious barrier to satire’s transcultural definition.21 As Marguerite Wells has shown, in Japanese, comedy (kigeki), satire (fushi) and farce (faasu or shōgeki), all terms that may be linked with the loan word humour (yūmoa), do not mean the same things as their English counterparts. Above all, satire’s breadth of meaning is diminished, and its presence is often elusive.22 In short field theory makes a definition that copes with the full vagaries of terminological relationships more, not less, difficult.23 As Attardo remarks  Neville (?), ‘Machiavel’s Letter’; Mattingly, ‘Machiavelli’s Prince’, 491.  Hall, Satires, xciii–xcviii. 20  Attardo, Linguistic Theories, 7. 21  Eco, Mouse or Rat?, 183–93. 22  Wells, ‘Satire and Constraint’, 193–7; Davis and Wells, ‘Farce and Satire’, 127–52. 23  Ullmann, Semantics, 243–53. 18

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of humour, so we might conclude for satire, that any essentialist definition is inadequate to the task.24 All this convolution is, no doubt, frustrating, for despite all, most of us would be able to identify much satire with a fair degree of reliability. We might not have a definitional paradeigma, but like Euthyphro we can exemplify. His father should not have killed a slave, even one suspected of murder.25 Throughout the argument I have been drawing largely on works that would unproblematically be called satiric, and it is easy on that basis to assume, fallaciously in the style of Plato, that to rely on the foremost, or most typical examples of satire (in two kindred senses of the word paradigmatic) is to rely on those that best fit a definition, a paradeigma, as conceptual model for the whole. To expect so much of a definition is bound to lead either to disappointment or to definitions tailored to fit a favoured author.26 Where it is possible to isolate a defining essence of something we are not necessarily given any guidance as to the best examples of it. Often, however, definitions may be unnecessary, the demand for them arising because of uncertainties over their application. Defining and showing can be complementary, the latter a form of elucidation.27 A formal definition of high, for example, is usually redundant because the word makes sense in its bi-conditional relationship with low. High is not low. I appreciate that this sounds a little like Baldrick of the BBC comedy series Blackadder, who in trying to rewrite Dr Johnson’s Dictionary overnight, defined ‘cat’ as ‘not a dog’—a hapless parody of negative definition. The problem, however, lies in how and where to apply a term like ‘high’ (high price, high hill, high note, highlight, high horse, high point, high church). Often enough the immediate context of use dissolves problems. Recognition of contextual application was crucial to Aristotle’s definition by mean. As he insisted, the mean is necessarily varied according to circumstances. Giving an athlete enough food is a mean between excess and insufficiency, but sufficiency for the athlete may be excess for the infirm. Thus, the mean provides a vocabulary: application is the end or reason for having such a word. As with distributive justice, judgment according to circumstance and in the light of delineating contrasts is always required.  Attardo, Linguistic Theories, 3.  This is the dramatic point of Plato’s telling us that the slave was probably a villain; it displays Euthyphro’s capacity for ethical discrimination. What he lacks is the security of judgment that, according to Plato, only a philosophical understanding can provide. 26  Rosenheim, Swift, 8–31. 27  Wittgenstein, Tractatus, 3262, pp. 24/25. 24 25

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The demand for a definition can be an expression of unwillingness to make a judgment. At this stage, it can be said that all instances of satire to which I have alluded do share moral seriousness. This intentional thread of ethical critique has been pervasive, but itself is definitionally inadequate unless we revert to the nugatory tautology that satire is any discourse in which someone or something is reproved. What is also important is that much of the evidence for the nature of satire comes from justificatory statements by satirists. The picture might be different if they were replaced by those hostile to satire such as Joseph Addison or Ned Ward, for whom satire was both fruitless and spiteful, a ‘Baneful Trade’, lunatic and destructive of honesty.28 It is not necessary for us to believe in the sincerity of satirists, or anti-satirists, to accept their values or their treatment of others; neither need we admire any artistry with which they express their putative passion.29 It is the species of claim that counts. Making some ethical point, or displaying moral seriousness, has indeed been a more reliable guide to satire than the exhibition or provocation of humour, or even related terms pre-existing it, such as wit or mockery. This aspect of satire, however, would be more helpful if the content of the ethical were stable. Yet, what in practice people have called right and wrong, rational or foolish, admirable or shameful has varied between societies and within them. Similarly, one man’s justifiable satiric rebuke, admonition or ridicule can be another’s groundless insult, defamation or slander. To acknowledge such evaluative turbulation is not to muddy waters with a metaphysical doctrine of ethical relativism, but rather to confront the flow of language and its use, as a historian must. So, to affirm the obvious, satire within a familiar society will be easier to recognize than that coming from an alien environment the ethical fissures of which are now lost or obscure, like the cosmic clash between big endians and little endians that so puzzled Swift’s Gulliver. Indeed, in our own society, satire should be even easier to define, if need be. In this light, although I shall note some of the perplexities over the contemporary meaning and proper range of satire in the penultimate chapter, it should not be necessary to confect a definition that makes the Yes Minister satires intelligible. Any simple appeal to the shared senses of rectitude and rationality that give rise to points of  Ward, Satyr, 6; Addison, Spectator, 23, as cited earlier, 85–6.  L’Estrange, History of Humour, remarked that a main difference between satire and abuse is that satire is deserved, 1, 109. 28 29

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critique over long periods of time, however, will move us towards a definition so abstract as to include a great deal we would not want to call satiric. Alternatively, it will be question-begging in passing the definitional buck to the content of morality and sound reasoning. The historian certainly cannot pre-empt questions of what counts as vice and folly by taking self-proclaiming satirists at their own word, or even by relying on a legislative definition, to exclude the ethically discomforting. To do so is to ensure that the satirist is always on the side of the angels. In this way, we may well affirm our own values but are not going to understand twentieth-century satire if we isolate that which came from Nazi Germany as just being propaganda.30 Once it is included, we can appreciate better how satire can be created and used for propagandistic purposes.31 Satires on war such as John Arbuthnot’s History of John Bull (1712), the perennially replayed television series M*A*S*H, Joseph Heller’s Catch 22, are all in one aspect propaganda for peace. This makes them neither good nor bad as satire, but is likely to make them ethically felicitous. An additional complication is the increasing use of the word satire to displace moral seriousness. In journalism at least, there is substantial evidence to suggest that the satirist is expected stay within a domain distinct from the confrontations of policy promotion and advocacy.32 As so much satire has become a mainstream form of mass entertainment, it may be that the moral edge has been blunted, or (to allude again to Pope’s distinction) is being concentrated on acceptably safe targets. The safer the target, the easier humour at its expense becomes, and insofar as satire is taken as a form of comedic entertainment, the more such targets have their attractions and affirmative functions. Ipso facto, the satirist is likely to be constrained to tread carefully around contemporary sensibilities, whether these emanate from some higher authority or from complaining sections of an audience.33 It is often the case now that a satirist is expected to apologize if found offensive. In the past, offending could be the point. Cutting the animals from the herd, as Pope had it, was indeed likely to upset them. The satirist’s duty, to recall Matthias’s argument, was often unpleasant and severe. It was a point the United States Supreme Court found it necessary to restate in its judgment on the case of Fulwell vs.  Cf. Sutherland, English Satire, 21.  Phiddian, ‘Satire’, 51–2, 54. 32  Carlson and Peifer, ‘The Impudence of Being Ernest’, 1–15. 33  Daskal, ‘When Does a Joke Cease to Amuse?’, 167–88. 30 31

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Flynn in 1988.34 The shift has been partial but significant. When satire generates outrage or distaste, we can be told that it was only satire, thus effectively it is consigned to the realm of the non-serious. Satire can contract into really being only a joke, acceptable if, of all things, fair.35 The contraction towards such innocuity has antecedents, has been a while in its erratic process and sometimes may have been a reaction to the possibility of violence. The court Jester was traditionally granted a degree of licence, although its limits were variable. As I have already indicated, in the sixteenth century a jest might be argued to come within the range of the non-malicious, ideally or potentially allowing free speech with some protection from prosecution.36 Such a safety zone was no more assured than it is today. What are often called taboos can be none the less effective for being ill-defined or limited to subgroups within a society. John Evelyn records that the University of Oxford’s licenced buffoon (Terrae Filius) once entertained a formal assembly with an ‘abusive, sarcastical rhapsody’ by shifting from facetiousness on fixed philosophical topics into personal abuse of some of the university’s senior figures for moral degeneracy. The oration was apparently ‘licentious lying and railing’—standard reactions to satire found offensive. It was a case of satire (Evelyn does not grace the ‘rhapsody’ with such an honorific) going well beyond the tolerable. The buffoon, Henry Gerard, was smartly expelled from the university, but not before his Latin text had been copied and circulated, becoming a precedent for later satires of the university.37 The case illustrates a long-standing  Simpson, Discourse of Satire, 209.  Phiddian, ‘Satire’, 54; Simpson, Discourse of Satire, 206–7, on a line of defence in Clark vs. Evening Standard Newspaper (Jan. 1988); satire is acceptable if fair, as Justice Katzmann indicated in her judgement in the Federal Court of Australia, NSW Registry (Universal Music vs. Clive Palmer, 30 April 2021; matter filed 6 Feb. 2019); Palmer’s Counsel had invoked the ‘Fair Dealing’ proviso for satire and parody in the Copyright Act. It was deemed irrelevant to the case. Fair dealing is a legal criterion. Fairness has rarely had much to do with satire. 36  Curtis, ‘Laughing Philosopher’, 90–1; Griffin, Satire, 138–40, has argued that satire is stimulated more by oppressive than by accommodating political regimes, but the categories make any generalization dangerous, or trivial; as J.S. Mill emphasized in On Liberty (1859), surrounding society can be a source of oppression as much if not more than a governmental regime. 37  Evelyn, Diary, 10 July 1669, 2, 43; Haugen, ‘Imagined Universities’, 1–31; Nicholas Amhurst would use Terrae-Filius as the title for his satiric essays on the university, Secret History. The expression meant son of the earth, denoting obscure origins euphemistic of illegitimacy. It was a suitably distancing title for an uncertain university office. 34 35

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need to exploit the latitude of formally allowed satire and an attendant malleability in the word’s meaning. This in turn may be related to a loosened understanding of sarcasm. It is often a satirical trope, one that Evelyn had found so distasteful from the University’s Buffoon. Northrop Frye’s definitional aphorism that satire is militant irony illustrates something of the slippage, for it applies better to sarcasm than to the breadth of satire.38 So, we have now what can be a confusing variability of usage. When Donald Trump retracted the claim (the preferred euphemism is ‘walking it back’) that Barack Obama founded ISIS, he stated that he had only been sarcastic.39 He may have meant satiric, or only joking, in either case he was retreating to an uncertain safety a zone of licenced invention.

II It might, then, be lamely concluded that satire is a complex, even at times incoherent genre, exhibiting the augmented heterogeneity of Menippean satire, serious or not as the occasion demands. This consideration, however, raises the question of how far the word genre is even appropriate. It has certainly been subject to unhelpful looseness. Ralph Rosen, for example, takes satire simply as a genre of comedy, one capacious enough to include Aristophanes, Lenny Bruce and Jon Stewart.40 Satire as a genre is more easily questioned if we dispense with the belief that it is fundamentally a literary phenomenon. There is increasing acceptance that we should. As Robert Phiddian and Paul Simpson have both argued from partially converging perspectives, any literary restriction has proved unhelpful and at increasing odds with the diversity of the word’s application.41 Literature in this familiar sense was largely a creature of the formal university study of English established in the nineteenth century with its attendant need to have a canon of worthy authors. Drawing on them to establish the meaning of satire has proved inadequate. The notion of a genre has strongly been associated with literary analysis in university study, and leads us to expect the presence of certain general, formal, even required properties, such as those of plot, motif and structure, all capable of definition.42 Such  For discussion, see Simpson, Discourse of Satire, 52, 58–9, 90–4, 116–18.  Paul Owen, reported in The Guardian, 12 Aug. 2016. 40  Rosen, ‘Efficacy and Meaning’, 2–4. 41  Phiddian, ‘Satire’, 44–58; Satire, 4–7; Simpson, Discourse of Satire, 47–67, 78–80. 42  Classon, ‘Satire’, 95–121; Weinbrot, Menippean Satire, 4–7. 38 39

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properties can facilitate what has also been important to literary analysis, the isolation and appraisal of quality and achievement, and adjacent to these, prototypicality. In short, placing something within a genre can be an act of immediately informative contextualization—a microcosm of the same optimism informing the quest for the correct problem-solving context (Chap. 4). Any form of creative activity that has more than one salient feature, however, invites adjustment. In fact, working within a tradition or recognizable genre usually involves adaptation. Even on the smallest scale one can see such continuities of inventive change with the subgenre of formulaic jokes. Those English jokes ending with the obligatory phrase ‘rules, O.K.’ began as aggressive graffiti scrawled as challenges by football club supporters to taunt rival teams. They spawned parodic versions designed to mock sporting tribalism. ‘Dyslexia rules, K.O.’ and ‘Apathy ru’ make sense only with awareness of the convention that had originally been anything but jesting. They gained a sharper satiric edge with ‘Poverty Rules, O.K.?”43 Almost up to the point of plagiaristic replication, any work allocated to a genre has an impact on its identity.44 It was a paradoxical possibility that fascinated Jorge Louis Borges in his short stories on the man laboriously rewriting, word for word, Don Quixote as a totally new work. Genre does not, then, provide us with a necessarily fixed classification, suggestive of an adequate definition. There are exceptions: Japanese haiku poetry has an exemplary formal rigidity allowing easy definition as a genre, but as a corollary its inflexibility requires the generation of different classifications to house variation. Consequently, it has given rise to a derivative, often-comic genre, senryū.45 The thirty-one syllabic tanka has similarly produced the parodic, even possibly mildly satiric kyōka46: both senryū and kyōka are now treated as distinct genres.47 Most genres, however, survive with a more negotiable unity and so are less subject to decisive principles of definitional exclusion. The genres of comedy and tragedy inherited from classical antiquity have proved remarkably accommodating. The necessary construct necessarily becomes flexible and survives, but identifying exemplary  Chiaro, Language of Jokes, 30, 64.  Fowler, Kinds of Literature, 23. 45  Kobayashi, ‘Senryū’, 164–70; Davis and Wells, ‘Farce’, 153–77. 46  For scepticism about the satiric in Japanese culture, see Wells, ‘Satire’; Davis and Wells, ‘Farce’, 145–50. 47  Takanashi, ‘Orthographic Puns’, 235–59. 43 44

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authors can thus become contentious. Adaptive survival and contestation are mutually dependent.48 We can understand John Gay’s play, The What D’Ye Call It (1715), but when it was written, Gay knew it did not fit any preconceived mode of writing, and helpfully (?) subtitled it ‘A Tragi-Comi-Pastoral Farce’. It was also satiric parody.49 If, as de Smet correctly claimed, the notion of Menippean satire (excepting her own stipulation) stretches the notion of genre to breaking point, the wider category of satire surely explodes it. Moreover, as Stephen Orgel has argued, our understanding of genre as somehow designating an exclusive form of creativity such as Dutch still life, sonnet or limerick, itself departs from older conceptions in which genre was much closer to an aspect of a more complex whole.50 Such an understanding has been developed in Alistair Fowler’s reappraisal of genre. For a piece of writing to belong to a given genre does not exhaust its identity, and there may be areas of indeterminacy where distinct and relevant genres appear to merge.51 At one level this is trite, for no single description exhausts an identity, yet one of Fowler’s aims is to shift attention towards exemplarity, away from definition and classification, of which there have been so many misleading expectations.52 Valuable as this is, the importance of classification remains presupposed and the exemplary is itself a classification. Even given Fowler’s nuanced qualifications to the very conception of a genre, looking at satire as a definable one over the historical range of its uses becomes fundamentally unhelpful, especially if we consider its slippery Greco-Roman expressions. The fact that for part of its history satire might be taken as a genre of hexametric moral poetry does not help. If used with a necessary flexibility, the notion of a genre can be difficult to keep distinct from a mere subject matter. Fowler suggests that identifying metaphors can help stabilize a genre, such as ‘table-talk’ or the ‘country house poem’,53 but metaphors are themselves quite often unstable and metaphorical origins may be lost or become only of etymological interest in the inventive ingenuity of creative activity. Certainly, the underlying metaphors of a stew, plated medley or hotchpotch do little to cohere satire as a genre even if it is arbitrarily restricted to literature.  Weinbrot, Menippean Satire, 4.  Nokes, John Gay, 180–9. 50  Orgel, ‘Introduction’, 4–5; ‘Shakespeare’, 10–23. 51  Fowler, Kinds of Literature. 52  Fowler, Kinds of Literature, 38, 52. 53  Fowler, ‘The Formation of Genres’, 188–97. 48 49

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Definition in terms of genre can run into obfuscating incoherence by half recognizing the inappropriateness of the concept to satire, yet clinging to the word regardless and so damaging its meaning.54 This is the case even for Paul Simpson’s analysis in which it is argued emphatically that satire is not a genre, yet stated that it interacts with other genres, or is a secondary or higher order of genre.55 In this light, it is little wonder that for a range of writers, the belief that in defining satire one is defining the finest examples of a type of literature remains intact.56 This is arguably a further residue of the Platonic project to find forms by which the world can be given cohesion. The search is for an abstract noun, λογος, to encompass the discourse, a λογος we can call satire. It is a natural feature of European languages that are dependent on a clear distinction between subject and object: we are encouraged to look for something like a thing, and treat concepts like a special class of things. The consequence is to privilege a noun. If, however, we move to an emphasis on the satiric, as Northrop Frye has suggested through his discussions of modality, and as James Sutherland has illustrated, the adjective becomes more helpful.57 This may sound odd, but there is no reason why ‘satiric’ should not become a predicate variable for a wide diversity of expression. Although this shifts the problem to the definition of an adjective, it does fit with Orgel’s and Fowler’s notions of genre as dimension, and it also helps unravel the problem of what sorts of expression might come within the ambit of the abstract rubric deemed satire. Some writings certainly announce themselves as satires, but to rely on the satiric will cover much more material that has been associated with some notion of satire without pre-empting questions of form. In other words, that to which the adjective is attached provides a rudimentary context for making usage intelligible; hence Hayden White’s characterization of Jacob Burckhardt’s historical vision as satiric because of his recognition of the irony of unintended consequence.58 Lord Kames’s diminishing explanation of bi-cameral parliaments is much the same: they are the 54  Coombe and Connery, Theorizing Satire, 5; for Marc Owen Jones, ‘Satire, Social Media’, the word is little more than a general term for satire and whatever might be produced. 55  Simpson, Discourse of Satire, 80–3; how any of this marries with the assertion that satire has no ontological status, 153–4, is unclear to me. 56  Highet, Anatomy, 3; Rosenheim, Swift, 3–34; Feinberg, ‘Satire’, 31–7. 57  Frye, Anatomy; Sutherland, English Satire, 1–22; Fowler, Kinds of Literature. 58  White, Metahistory, 244–7; Muecke, Irony, on Richard Cumberland’s similar usage in the eighteenth century, 17.

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­ nintended consequence of warrior kings being unable to cram all their u followers into the same thatched hut. There may be a satiric turn, as Rosenheim puts it in many works, including, for example, philosophical treatises, songs, operas, video clips, graffiti and political speeches.59 Dickens’s satire of the law in Bleak House is substantially more than a moment, but as Robert Phiddian remarks, this hardly makes the novel a satire.60 The relevance of the adjective will also aid recognition or invention of satiric expression beyond the written word (a fashion statement in discordant surroundings might be enough).61 The adjectival stress also makes clear how, historically speaking, the noun, rather like humour, has come to mark an aggregation cohered by family resemblance, so leaving us with something to be characterized rather than formally defined. That, however, is to confront again the question of differing discursive priorities.

III The copula ‘is’ has uses well beyond definition and in ways that usually do not lead to any confusion. To postulate an axiom, however, is trickier and has sometimes been called implicit definition. The shared feature of exclusivity was enough to get the designation ridiculed by Bertrand Russell: postulating what we want, he wrote, is like ‘theft over honest toil’. It takes, as Quine has argued, work to convert a postulated axiom into a definition.62 Nevertheless, the case of implicit definition indicates a whole family of meta-statements that might look like definitions by virtue of excluding a range of expectations from a field of attention: to claim that a formulation is a working definition may also smack of theft over honest toil, but it may simply signal a characterization by other means. A rough line drawn in the sand, it may in context be sufficient guidance. To specify working assumptions, or most obviously to provide certain restrictive conditions about word use, can be formalized as stipulative definitions. All such variables confront us with the possibility of definitional indeterminacy. It can be a moot point how seriously we should take the  Rosenheim, Swift, 9–10.  Phiddian, ‘Satire’, 46. 61  It is difficult to believe that the English fashion model Jean Shrimpton was not drawing attention to pretentious traditions in arriving hatless, loose-haired and short-skirted on Derby Day prior to the Melbourne Cup race meeting in 1965. 62  Quine, The Ways of Paradox, 133 (quoting Russell), 134–6 illustrating the conversion process. 59 60

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definitional form, as with Bismark’s statement that politics is the art of the possible. ‘Irony’, writes Paul Simpson, ‘is the space between what is meant and what is asserted.’63 If misread as a definition, presumably, sarcasm would be a bigger space, but Simpson is providing only an aphoristic compression for emphasis. Some statements maintaining the definitional form with its aura of elegance have a principally rhetorical purpose, but to consider them spurious simply because of this is to take as axiomatic that definitions can only have certain sorts of licit function excluding the encapsulation of values. In some discursive contexts, narrowing the scope of definition is no doubt defensible, but unhelpful for a value-laden notion like satire. In fact, certain rhetorical definitions are generally accorded an authority that overlooks their character and context. Abraham Lincoln’s image of democracy as government of, for and by the people was set down in the context of an exercise in epideictic rhetoric, a funeral oration in the idiom of Pericles’ speech on the first Athenian dead in Thucydides’ Peloponnesian Wars. Throughout this and the previous chapter, the lurking presence of rhetorical definition should have been apparent and finally requires more explicit comment. There is something of the rhetorical to be found in books on satire that define it in terms of literary quality. A posited definition thus helps narrow focus to commendable writing. The most relevant case in point, however, is the common acceptance that satire is the exposure of what is wrong and foolish, a nostrum codified in dictionaries and tamely followed in no shortage of academic studies. Although it would be less question-begging to say that satire is the exposure of what a satirist would have us believe is wrong or foolish, this would only be to alert to a potential source of contention. The emphasis on satiric rectitude has often carried the explicit corollary that satirists aim at moral reform, a much-­ paraded goal in the eighteenth century. It is nevertheless naïve to take it as a defining purpose or even one that was ever taken that seriously by satirists.64 Such laudatory understandings lead only to the implicit commendation of satirists for their probity. They are thus afforded the panoply of a moral office—a legitimating dress as old as satire itself. Even the manifest failure of satirists to reform their victims can consequently be construed as an attribute of ethical standing, for it shows just how courageous the  Simpson, Discourse of Satire, 90.  Bricker, ‘Laughter and the Limits of Reform’, 152–72.

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s­ atirist is, how recalcitrant the sinners really are, how corrupt the system. Regardless of how plausible this may be, it is the drift towards the praiseworthy in the name of purpose that matters here. It helps explain the common view that almost by definition satire must be directed against those in power.65 It is a fairly obvious exhibition of a commitment, narrowing a laudatory phenomenon to a specific end, and reinforcing the quite recent popular orthodoxy that politics is about power. We might well want satire to conform to our values, to be suitably selective and decorous in choice of target and to excoriate on our behalf, so use of or allusion to a definition might be mainly a matter of enlistment, successful if not appearing too forced, value laden and almost certainly un-historical, all of which it may well be. Unlike other forms of definition, an effective rhetorical one is likely to pass unnoticed for what it is. The justificatory attention paid to satire during the ‘satire boom’ in Britain during the 1960s was derived largely from and limited to such synoptic loaded definitions and will be touched on in the following chapter. Given the widely informing ethos or pretence of critique carried in words deemed to be satirical (whatever the content of morality, however safe or banal the moral posture), it is only to be expected that rhetorical definitions can themselves be satiric.66 Here we are already touching on the last feature of the Platonic definitional legacy: the presumption that definitions are always meta- or second-order statements, supervening on a problematic definiendum, somehow coming from outside, possibly from the authority of philosophy. They are rules (Regeln), as Wittgenstein emphatically put it, for the translation of sign-languages.67 Thus a definition seems to instantiate a clear distinction between practice or prior phenomenon and the theoretical reflection that guides it. This definitional preconception is relevant to the following chapter, for the Yes Minister and Yes, Prime Minister satires are widely taken to be direct exposés of a political reality and of those in power—somehow reflecting a system from the outside rather than helping shape conduct and its acceptance within it. If they are accepted as truth about power, their propagandistic success is assured. 65  For variations of this presumption, see for example, Caron, ‘Quantum Paradox’, 157, 165–9; Connolly, ‘Funny Face Videos’, for whom this is what satire is ‘supposed’ to be about (by whom?); Zekavat, Satire, Humour, 31; Lockyer and Weaver, ‘The Importance of the Dynamics of Humour’, 3. 66  Sutherland, English Satire, 5–7; Phiddian, ‘Satire’, 44, 49–50. 67  Wittgenstein, Tractatus, 3343, pp. 32/33.

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As a preliminary, then, the satiric definition that compromises the difference between definiens and definiendum is worth comment. Swift’s remark that satire is a glass in which we see everyone’s face but our own seems close to a satiric definition, ironically or cynically highlighting moral nescience as a condition for satire’s popularity.68 Arbuthnot took up the same mirror image in The Art of Political Lying by positing the distorted looking glass of the soul that shows the world as it is not. On this pseudo-­ theological basis, he set down a formal definition of politics as a rigid, if inventive, economy of mendacity: ‘The Art of convincing the People of Salutary Falsehoods, for some good end.’69 And the satire was made part of the system it satirized by being printed for the good end of advertising and selling the non-existent tomes. Ambrose Bierce’s Devil’s Dictionary is a far more elaborate example. Although owing something to earlier ad hoc satiric definition, and possibly also to the aphoristic style of La Rochefoucault’s Maxims (1665), Bierce’s work is explicitly an ambitious parodic dictionary in a tradition of scepticism about the value of dictionaries, and has remained a fruitful model for satire.70 It provides a fitting terminus, returning these two chapters on definition to their beginning. Backhandedly, Bierce’s Dictionary tells us something about how to use dictionaries and to recognize their limitations: ‘Dictionary, n. A malevolent literary device for cramping the growth of a language and making it hard and inelastic. This dictionary, however, is a most useful work.’ Satire, then, much like its recent bed-fellow humour, is not best understood through an essentialist definition. For a historian, to insist on one can amount to stacking the evidential cards and is precisely why we should be reticent about first defining our terms. Making their scope intelligible is another matter. History, however, is not everything. For the philosopher, putting up with little more than a historiographical characterization may be at once an irritant and a challenge, stopping with a job half done. Do we accept the limitations of definition and embrace philosophy as an abstract activity at some odds with the seething incoherencies of experience? Or in the name of encompassing them, do we stop short of definition? There is not, nor should there be any easy answer.

 Cf. Carpenter, A Great Silly Grin, 91 for this as a snappy definition that is also satirical.  Arbuthnot, Political Lying, 8. 70  Lyneham, Political Speak; Marks, Management Contradictory. 68 69

PART IV

Satiric Humour in Popular Culture: The Yes Minister and Yes, Prime Minister Television Satires

CHAPTER 8

Theory and the Absent Political System

I I began by questioning the hallowed history of humour theory and end by finding theory in recent cultural history where it might seem unlikely. This is to conjure with a dangerous word. In the nineteenth century some considered theory an intellectual pathogen.1 It is now closer to the COVID-19 of academia, for if only in a weakened sense, it infects almost everything the academic might look at or breathe on.2 Masks of rigid empiricism are inadequate defence, for empirical enquiry too can be construed as a form of theory—once we start talking about empiricism. Indeed, the discussion thus far has been explicitly theoretical, an exploration of the difficulties in the way of understanding humour and satire historically rather than an attempt to write a history of either. With the contagious reach of theory, there are dangers upon contact. As I have outlined in Chap. 3, disciplinary histories are mythologized by being driven by contemporary theoretical preoccupations. Humour studies is in good company with histories of political thought and classical political economy. It does, however, lack the sort of specialized vocabulary that can also help identify a theoretical domain. Such vocabularies, symptomatic of theory’s kudos are rife in the social sciences and 1 2

 Walter, Before Method and Models, 31–62.  Hunter, ‘History of Theory’, 78–112.

© The Author(s), under exclusive license to Springer Nature Switzerland AG 2023 C. Condren, Between Laughter and Satire, https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-031-21739-5_8

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humanities and are sometimes most remarkable for their obscurantist ugliness.3 They easily carry the taint of overkill, a risible lack of proportion in their deployment that adds little to understanding. As Pierre Bourdieu concluded in his analysis of French doctoral theses, about the only thing they were bound to demonstrate was a candidate’s facility in deploying the argot necessary for membership of an intellectual sect.4 As I have suggested (Chap. 5), a work like Alice through the Looking-Glass is a persistent invitation to the sort of theoretical exuberance that itself has been subject to satire. The first volume of Frederick Crews’s analyses of A.A. Milne’s Winnie-the-­Pooh stories presented them through such doctrinaire conceptual grids as the Marxist, Freudian and Leavisite. A second volume has parodied, inter alia, Derridean, new historicist, postcolonial and feminist modes of grindingly predictable reductionism.5 My aim here is to avoid falling into any such heffalumpian trap in surveying Antony Jay and Jonathan Lynn’s Yes Minister and Yes, Prime Minister satiric comedies, shifting from theory about satire to what lurks within.6 That is, I will outline the comic presence of well-digested understandings of politics, visible across the recently formed terrain of contemporary British history, on which is also the now established and common meaning for satire as a form of humour. If unrecognized, the sort of theories outlined conspire to perpetuate distorted understandings of the British political system. Eliciting a theoretical dimension should illustrate something of the variable relationships between political theory and practice as they are mediated through the looking glass of satire. Such interconnections are variable, for theories can be distinct enough to make theory per se a self-destructing virus. Some may be largely independent of a given practice, although most are likely to be derived from and directive of it. Of these, some may survive the activity they encode, while because of their arcane vocabularies, a few theories might seem insulated from the wider world. Others, however, become so accepted that they are difficult to grasp for what they are, becoming like spectacles unseen by the wearer. As  Billig, Learn to Write Badly, at length.  Billig, Learn to Write Badly, 43–4. 5  Cf. Crews, Pooh Perplex; Postmodern Pooh. A noticeable difference between the two is that the readings in the second volume are less accurate than those of the first, an obvious comment on scholarly standards. The latter volume is also replete with quotations from the relevant theoretical groups. Whether this was Crews’s attempt to be fair, or whether he was intimating that the theorists themselves were often self-parodying, is unclear. 6  These appear in print both with and without the punctuation of a comma. The survey of the satires in Wikipedia is both informed and thorough. 3 4

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J.M. Keynes presciently remarked in his General Theory of Employment, people who think they just talk common sense are usually the prisoners of some defunct economist. In this chapter I shall concentrate on the sense of an extrinsic political reality shaped through theory, before exploring in the next the presence of political language use in the programmes, and turned to satiric effect by a highly directive and censorious theory of legitimate political discourse. In this final essay, then, we confront a world in which the notions of comedy, humour and satire are readily conjoined, are complementary or are almost interchangeable. This takes us some way from antiquity and the early modern world, but in the distinct theoretical apparatus Jay and Lynn relied upon we are closer to it than we might often think.

II Although being overtly framed as situation comedies, and so in many respects removed from the political process, there are ways in which the Yes Minister and Yes, Prime Minister satires formed a part of British politics. First mooted in 1977, the idea for the Yes Minister series was held over until after the election that saw Margaret Thatcher come to power in 1979, for it was thought the comedies would be potentially contentious. Not too much should be read into this. There was little formal political censorship in Britain, but the privileged position of the BBC as the national broadcaster, with an obligation to be politically impartial made its management sensitive to perceptions of interference—a vulnerability the comedies would exploit.7 In 1964 the highly popular satirical programme That Was The Week That Was had been put on ice for an impending election.8 Overall, there were twenty regular Yes Minister episodes (1980–82, with a Christmas special, ‘Party Games’, aired 27 Dec. 1984) and fifteen episodes of Yes, Prime Minister (1986–88).9  ‘The Challenge’, first aired 18 Nov. 1982.  Carpenter, Silly Grin, 278. 9  Quotations from the individual episodes are from the published versions. These deviate from the BBC recordings at a cost to subtlety and wit, but allow page references. More general references to programmes are to the recordings and carry dates of initial television performance when first mentioned. The episodes were performed before a live audience, apparently without canned laughter, but a continuity error impossible during live performance (see below note 17) indicates editorial alterations prior to airing. A revised series, with a new cast was televised January–February 2013. There have been two stage plays, the most recent, ‘I’m Sorry Prime Minister, I Can’t Quite Remember That’ (Jonathan Lynn, 2020), concerns the twilight years of the main characters, cancelled because of the COVID-19 pandemic. These later iterations are not discussed. 7 8

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The initial expectation was shaped by the role played by popular political satire in Britain during the 1960s. The programmes were thus anticipated to be critical of ‘The Establishment’ (a coinage of the time),10 and, naturally, of the government, so the BBC was seen as taking a political risk in broadcasting them.11 Yet given that satirizing the bureaucracy was possible even in Eastern Germany,12 the main danger was that they would fall flat. Once Yes Minister was screened, the terms of praise were predictable. For Miriam Gross it provided a fresh and provocative vision of politics. For Julie Davidson it was rebellious and radical.13 To use the fatuous cliché, the image was of Satire-Speaking-Truth-to-Power, although Humphrey Carpenter, with apparent disappointment, regarded it as avoiding direct criticism of Thatcher’s cabinet.14 The production and scripting values were usually fastidious in sustaining a sense of verisimilitude and direct engagement with the political system. Threading through a number of episodes are allusions to recent debates and issues, such as gender equality, the Cross-Channel tunnel, terrorism and the sale of arms and the Miners’ Strike of 1984. There were also moments of purely adventitious topicality, as when a genuine cabinet resignation coincided with a fictitious one at the time of broadcast.15 Interviews are conducted by well-known political commentators such as the LSE psephologist Professor Bob McKenzie (1917–81) and journalist Ludovic Kennedy (1919–2009). The newsreaders would have been similarly recognizable from their normal work on television.16 The dispatch boxes were careful replicas and, despite the occasional sartorial or continuity slip, the appropriate school, college, cricket club and university ties are worn.17 In one episode, the ties become a visual joke. Members of an all-­ male committee of the highest-ranking civil servants pride themselves on  Carpenter, Silly Grin, 130–1.  Kandiah, ‘Interviews’, 506–20, 521–34, 506–8; Handelsmann, ‘Satiric Dimension’, 21–30, for a succinct survey of the background and original reception of the satires. 12  Carpenter, Silly Grin, 130. 13  Gross, ‘The Secret Life of Jim Hacker’; Davidson, ‘Tarzan out and Hacker in at No. 10’, 1986, as cited and discussed in Handelsmann, ‘Satiric Dimension’, 37–8. 14  Carpenter, Silly Grin, 322–3; for a critique of the cliché, Rolfe, ‘Populist Elements’, 37–8, 61–3. 15  Kamm, ‘Capable Servants’, 117. 16  Kamm, ‘Capable Servants’, 115–17, 131. 17  In ‘Big Brother’ (17 March 1980), Sir Humphrey Appleby (Nigel Hawthorne) wears different ties during the same discussion in a single scene. One can only assume two attempts were spliced together. 10 11

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being a cross-section of the nation. The gendered dimension of this is obvious enough, but each man also sports an exclusive institutional striped tie, one from the Brigade of Guards, most from older Oxford colleges.18 The statistics quoted in episodes were authentic, such as 20 per cent of British honours going to civil servants; a new hospital with no medical staff and 342 administrators; in 10 years, 60,000 fewer hospital beds in the National Health Service but 40,000 more administrators to tend them.19 On hearing this, Sir Humphrey Appleby, the voice of bureaucracy, remarks smugly, if only industry could match such growth.20 Moreover, the politicians, especially Margaret Thatcher, considered the programmes to be pretty realistic.21 It is a judgement widely endorsed.22 Yet it warrants further comment, for the minister Jim Hacker is hardly the sort of heroic figure with whom a politician would normally want to be associated. Understandably, such appreciation may often have been genuine: both Yes Minister and Yes, Prime Minister are beautifully crafted, acted and remarkably well sustained, points made publicly on more than one occasion by Mrs Thatcher. Yes Minister was her favourite programme: ‘Its perceptive [hand correction] portrayal of what goes on in the corridors of power have given me hours of pure joy.’23 In a letter to Jonathan Lynn, she conveyed handwritten admiration of superb dialogue and timing and

18  ‘Equal Opportunities’ (11 Nov. 1982): Sir Humphrey and the Head of the Cabinet Office, Sir Arnold Robinson (John Nettleton) wear Balliol colours. Ties from Magdalen, Oxford and Trinity College, Cambridge are also present. In several episodes the Minister’s Private Secretary Bernard (Derek Fowlds) also wears a Magdalen tie. Sir Arnold often wears what is probably an Old Etonian tie as does Bernard, ‘The Tangled Web’ (28 Jan. 1988). Striped rather than crested versions of college ties are usually worn, presumably to make identification easier for the viewers, although Jim Hacker (Paul Eddington) only wears the crested version of the LSE tie. Sir Humphrey has a Magdalen tie in ‘Patron of the Arts’ (1 Jan. 1988). Could he and Bernard share a wardrobe? There may be other minor sartorial malfunctions: in ‘The Challenge’, Bernard may even be wearing a London University tie. He is also seen in the crested tie of Trinity, Oxford. Curiously, Sir Humphrey never wears his old school tie. 19  ‘Doing the Honours’ (2 March 1981) and ‘A Compassionate Society’ (23 Feb. 1981); ‘Bishop’s Gambit’ (20 Feb. 1986) reveals the land-holdings of the Church of England; Lynn and Jay, Complete Yes Minister and Complete Yes Prime Minister. 20  ‘Compassionate Society’, 189. 21  Handelsmann, ‘Satiric Dimension’, 52–4, 76; Gerald Scarfe’s cartoon of Britannia on the closing credits of Yes Prime Minister is a caricature of Margaret Thatcher. 22  Hernándes, ‘Political Disinformation’, 23. 23  Margaret Thatcher, ‘Speech’, 1984.

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supreme perceptiveness about politicians and civil servants.24 Nevertheless, for a politician to express such enthusiasm exhibits a willingness to take oneself not too seriously and also a generosity of spirit—just as Sir Robert Walpole had been careful to be seen laughing at John Gay’s The Beggar’s Opera, an oblique commentary on Walpole’s own profound corruption.25 Even Harold Macmillan (prime minister 1957–63) once attended ‘Beyond the Fringe’, the renowned review in which he was mercilessly pilloried and impersonated. Known to be present, he had been made to suffer to the embarrassment of the audience, as he sat with his face buried in his programme. But as he later remarked, defending those who ridiculed him, better to be laughed at than ignored.26 Overt and general political appreciation followed in the wake of Yes Minister’s immediate popularity: better to be on a bandwagon than run over by it. More generally, wherever humour is seen as virtuous and humanizing, the political animal will seek an association. Hitler, an admirer of Charlie Chaplin, had advertised his own sense of humour and sanctioned a volume of cartoons critical of him.27 Yes Minister’s success was unexpected and would prove international. It was sold to eighty-five countries,28 remade for Indian and Turkish television, and in the adaptation for The Netherlands Sir Humphrey changed gender.29 It has become, as Jürgen Kamm puts it, a national institution to which a whole emulating subgenre of political satiric comedy can be traced.30 There was certainly novelty in taking situation comedy out of the familiar sphere of the mundane and domestic into the centre of politics, but the programmes also had an intellectually elevated and unpatronizing style appropriate to the cut and thrust of the highly educated political élite. The result might have been to narrow or potentially alienate a wide audience but did not.  Thatcher, ‘Letter’ to Jonathan Lynn.  Nokes, John Gay, 435; Phiddian, Satire, 41–53. 26  Carpenter, Silly Grin, 126, no date given but apparently 21 Oct. 1961. Macmillan’s comment was in a directive letter to his Post Master General (10 Dec. 1962) who had wanted to cut the treatment of him in That Was The Week That Was; see www.lettersofnote.com. 27  I am grateful to Professor Sammy Basu: see Hanfstaengl, Hitler in der Karkatur der Welt. 28  Hernándes, ‘Political Disinformation’, 14. 29  The Times, 23 March 2009; the role to be taken by Helen van Zuylen. A further localizing adaptation was to have Mohammed Azaay as the Minister’s Personal Private Secretary; the Minister was Karel Bijl. 30  Kamm, ‘Capable Servants’, 116, 132–3. 24 25

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More importantly the persistent motif of laudable political policies being thwarted by bureaucracy had long been congenial to politicians, providing (pace the misplaced expectations of Carpenter) a recurring explanation for why the best of political intentions might go astray and promises remain unfulfilled. Many a politician has had an interest in seeing this as a truth, apparent in the defensive political diaries and memoirs Jay and Lynn read by way of research.31 Indeed, the more governments wish to change, the more the truth seems self-evident. In 1940, Churchill had viewed the civil service with hostility, fearful that its very structure would stymie innovation. The Attlee government (1945–51) did not suffer systemic bureaucratic opposition of the Yes Minister satires, but the sheer ambition of its reforms made for persistent frictions and ministerial frustrations in the processes of implementation.32 It is little wonder that satirizing the bureaucracy is both safe and widespread, even in politically oppressive regimes. Speaking-truth-to (such)-power can be close to complicity. As a corollary, the Yes Minister satires could easily be seen as propaganda for Margaret Thatcher’s determination to change a civil service she saw as bloated, recalcitrant and insufficiently business-like. In ‘A Question of Loyalty’ (6 April 1981) the unseen prime minister is promoting reform through a book on management theory, highlighting waste. Financial inefficiency is a repetitive motif in the satires, at one with Thatcher’s commitment to limiting the reach of government, and used pars pro toto to convey an entrenched opposition to almost all government initiatives. For any politician, like Thatcher, who could see no real distinction between government and the state, between the government’s and the public interest, any resistance to policy must have seemed tantamount to an institutionalized rejection of democracy.33 Draw those distinctions and the independent civil service can become a bulwark against the potential tyranny of the politician. As Jim Hacker muses in ‘The Challenge’, his own interest must be in the public interest because he has been elected by the public. Sir Humphrey regards the reasoning as novel, a euphemism for entirely specious.34  Jay, ‘Informed Sources’, n.p.  Packwood, Churchill, 15–16; Barker, ‘Civil Service Attitudes’, 473–86. 33  See especially ‘Official Secrets’ (10 Dec. 1987). 34  See also, ‘The Devil You Know’, 275. As prime minister, Hacker evokes the equation of public and prime ministerial interest again in ‘Official Secrets’. 31 32

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The extreme expression of this tension helps structure most episodes, and is compressed in Thatcher’s own tiny Yes, Prime Minister sketch in which she played the prime minister, and as usual, Nigel Hawthorne was Sir Humphrey and Paul Eddington the minister Jim Hacker.35 This was performed at The National Viewers and Listeners Awards on 20 January 1984, an occasion on which the programme was receiving a major honour. After her landslide victory in the general election following the Falklands War in 1982, Margaret Thatcher was energized, confident and zealous for reform. She introduced her homage as part of her speech at the awards, presenting the sketch as a full rehearsal for a world premiere, with apologies to Jay and Lynn who ‘were not consulted’—erased and replaced by the hand annotation, ‘who are not to blame’.36 It is a five-minute descant on episodes like the ‘The Economy Drive’ (10 March 1980), ‘Writing on the Wall’ (24 March 1980) and ‘A Question of Loyalty’. The prime minister announces she has a bright idea to save money. She will abolish economists. Hacker sycophantically enthuses, but Sir Humphrey prevaricates uncomfortably about the practicalities, so she asks him directly what he read at university. He admits it was politics and economics.37 In that case, she concludes, he knows just where to start: ‘Yes, Prime Minister.’ The original MS is signed by both Eddington and Hawthorne, and carries corrections and minor alterations in Thatcher’s hand to her own lines, in 35  Thatcher’s sole authorship has been questioned but I am aware of no evidence for this; there is no support from the MS text in the Thatcher papers. The typewriter was one probably used for personal letters. Her speeches, as for many modern politicians, were at least partially drafted for her, and this may have provided the basis for the claim that the sketch was similarly co-authored. The documentary evidence shows that with speeches she determined themes, controlled content and would revise, making even late alterations. This she would have regarded as authorship. Giving the speech, as for many, was owning it. 36  Thatcher, ‘Speech’. 37  Sir Humphrey took Greats (classics), a thematically important difference, as, we are told, he was in the scholarship form of his school (Winchester College); ‘The Greasy Pole’ (16 March 1981). As a scholarship holder at Winchester, reading politics and economics rather than Greats, would have been a little like taking hospitality studies instead of pure mathematics. The fictional background, however, is less than meticulous, especially as the point of having him proudly declare himself a Wykehamist (‘The National Education Service’, 21 Jan. 1988) is to expose his double standards about parental choice in education. Entry to Winchester is only through competitive examination, and, as the archivist Suzanne Foster confirms, the school has never had a scholarship class or form. That Sir Humphrey never wears the tie suggests that perhaps Winchester was plucked out of the air without much thought. Despite the cliché, Jay and Lynn would have been better served by sending him to Eton. He could then have shared a tie with Sir Arnold Robinson.

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the manner of the emendations to her formal speeches. Thus, for example, she assures Jim Hacker that if the plan goes wrong, she will get the blame, with the interlinear addition, ‘I always do.’38 Margaret Thatcher’s co-option of the show’s format condenses into one theatrical moment politics and art, humour and the system, satire, policy promotion and reassurance, when at one point she alludes to the improving economy. This blending of comedy with political advocacy was not appreciated by the actors. Theirs was a reluctant complicity. Lynn was also uncomfortable about it, while Jay was openly complimentary.39 It has been claimed that he would shortly join Thatcher’s speech-writing team to advise on televisual matters, although solid evidence is lacking.40 Yet hitherto, perhaps a trifle innocently, neither author had wanted the programmes to be tools of political power. They had been fastidious in avoiding party labels and personal pronouns when referring to the unseen prime minister.41 They dropped the character Frank Weisel (Neil Fitzwilliam), Hacker’s initial political advisor, because he was too easily identified with the Labour Party.42 The satires’ controlled distancing enabled Thatcher to picture herself as the unnamed prime minister of whom Jim Hacker treads in fear.43 Their deliberate generality also facilitated her eager exploitation of a dramatic opportunity to add complexity to her political persona. Her sketch presented a humanity her critics sometimes doubted. The satires, however, do more than avoid party-political specificity. For all the humour at the expense of the civil service, the politicians fare little better, they are largely venal, cowardly and fickle: political interest will usually override informed policy.44 Hacker himself, in ‘A Real Partnership’ (6 Feb. 1986) is scathing about the capacities and overprivilege of backbench parliamentarians. It is a moot point who is better suited to running  Thatcher, ‘Speech’, 3.  The Wikipedia entry provides evidence, as well as citing Lynn’s own distancing comments on the quality of her efforts. 40  Kamm, ‘Capable Servants’, 133–4; Andrew Riley (Thatcher Papers archivist) confirms that there is nothing to support any formal relationship in the Thatcher papers (personal correspondence, 28 July 2021). 41  It is only in ‘Party Games’ (17 December,. 1984), after all the Yes Minister programmes had been aired, that masculine pronouns are used for the prime minister. 42  Kandiah, ‘Interviews’, 509–11, 521. 43  Thatcher, ‘Speech’, 6, explained the anonymity in the series as a concern for the possibility that she might be replaced by a man, adding ‘Oh ye of little faith.’ 44  ‘The Greasy Pole’. 38 39

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the country, those on the merry-go-round of popular politics, creatures of publicity and the (often ignorant) voter, or the permanent government of the civil service. In ‘Party Games’, Hacker is engineered into the prime ministership by civil service mandarins, precisely because they think him useless and capable of being ‘professionally guided’, manipulable.45 The writers’ claimed intention had always been principally to amuse. They were even divided as to whether the programmes were really satirical.46 Given the free-floating ubiquity of the word satire, such differences are hardly surprising. The ‘satire boom’ covered a multitude of sins. The creators of ‘Beyond the Fringe’ had been unhappy with the label. Some thought satire really came from Germany, others looked to comedians like Mort Sahl in the United States for exemplification.47 It went without saying that satire needed to be funny, and as humour it was therefore a good thing, but otherwise the implicit criteria for use of the term were variable. True satire was really vicious or Juvenalian, or it had to have a specific target. Satire had to be derived from an ideological position, or it had to present a positive vision, or perhaps most commonly, it had to be only of those in power.48 Racial humour, targeting African politicians as corrupt and linguistically inept, wit at the expense of the underprivileged and undereducated, indiscriminate attacks on ‘The Establishment’ or on a perceived British malaise of unreflective self-satisfaction, could all be satirical or not depending on the variable criteria at play in bandying the word. It might even best be avoided, or warningly mewed up in inverted commas.49 Not only did Jay and Lynn differ on whether Yes Minister was 45  This is rather like the way in which Robert Graves, in I Claudius had depicted the Emperor Claudius’s rise to power. The analogy would not have been lost on the show’s creators. Such ironies of election are hardly unknown. Cardinal Jacques d’Euse was chosen as Supreme Pontiff in 1316, because as an old man he would do little but buy time for the Curia to decide upon a better pope. He ruled with enormous if divisive energy until 1334. When the similarly aged Cardinal Roncalli chose the thus tainted name John on his election in 1958, he was sending a message of intent. Margaret Thatcher was elected the Conservative Leader as a stopgap (personal discussion with Sir Jasper More who had been on the electing ‘1922 Committee’). 46  Handelsmann, ‘Satiric Dimension’, 25–7; Kandiah ‘Interviews’, 511, 532; Handelsman also notes that the actors Hawthorne and Eddington saw the matter differently, citing comments by Hawthorne (Radio Times, 23–9 Feb. 1980) and Eddington (The Evening News, 25 Feb. 1980). 47  Carpenter, Silly Grin, 123, 128–31. 48  For such preconceptions, see at length Carpenter, Silly Grin. 49  Carpenter, Silly Grin, 179, 256, 213, 224.

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s­ atire, but also Jay, conflating satire with parody, thought it became satiric in being printed as Diaries.50 Certainly, however, for neither author was Mrs Thatcher a target, and Lynn, probably less admiring than Jay, offered rhapsodic congratulations on her ‘magnificent and excellent election victory’ in 1983.51 Any attempt to draw hard and fast lines between the comedies as mere entertainment and as propagandistic mechanisms for shaping opinion may be naïve or disingenuous—as Mrs Thatcher joyously exploited. Indeed, jumbling fiction with a supposed political reality was persistent. Paul Eddington recounted that he was often taken as an authentic politician. The Australian Prime Minister Bob Hawke played along with this in greeting Eddington in Australia. Even more remarkably, both major British parties tried to entice him to stand as a candidate.52 The satires also came to be fed back into the political environment. Lord Donoughue, a senior Labour government policy advisor, who had liaised with Jay and Lynn on matters of verisimilitude and provided them with a motif from personal experience that surfaced in ‘The Moral Dimension’ (2 Dec. 1982), also believed that the programmes had an impact on ministerial practice and expectations.53 They were taken up in Denmark to help train the Danish cabinet. In a twist of satiric fate, they were reshown out of order in the United Kingdom (1996), forming oblique commentary on the disasters then engulfing the government of Margaret Thatcher’s Conservative successor, John Major.54 Jonathan Lynn provided a fitting afterword to these confusions. Writing to the TLS (19 Nov. 2019), he recalled the difficulties of extracting royalties from The Public Lending Right, because he and Jay as editors had not provided evidence of significant input into the Diaries.55 A cat resident as an official mouser in the London prime ministerial residence of 10 Downing Street, during the periods of late Thatcher, John Major and early Tony Blair, was called Humphrey after Sir Humphrey  Kandiah, ‘Interviews’, 511, 514–15.  Lynn to Thatcher. 52  Wheatley, ‘The Man behind the Minister’; Peter Fiddick, ‘The Making of a Prime Minister’, 1986; discussed by Handelsmann, ‘Satiric Dimension’, 80–1; Kamm, ‘Capable Servants’, 132. 53  Ley, ‘Yes, Prime Minister.’ 54  Dixon, ‘The Real Lessons of “Yes Minister”’; as cited by Handelsmann, ‘Satiric Dimension’, 81. The rescreening draws on personal experience. I was in England at the time, but heard no discussion of the satiric intervention. 55  My thanks to Damian Grace for bringing this to my attention. 50 51

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Appleby. He made headline news when he went missing for a while in 1995 and, transmogrified into a scruffy puppet, appeared the following year in the television comedy Spitting Image, helping satirize John Major’s political woes. For such truth-speaking-to-power, he was duly smote with the prime ministerial frying pan. Humphrey the cat, like the later reinventions of its characters, is indicative of the wide embrace of the Yes Minister satires and of their capacity to entwine themselves in popular political culture—a culture in which satire, in some sense of the word, has since become pervasive. At this point, however, several related issues can be distinguished. How far beyond technical verisimilitude does this comic realism give us a glimpse of the system? Do the satires open a window onto the actuality of decision-making, or take us down the mouse or rabbit hole to illustrate any theory of it in which we may happen to have faith? How artificial is it to consider the British system as neatly separate from the traditions of political satire and humour that are interwoven with it? To begin with, in Sir Humphrey and Jim Hacker we are given, obviously enough, creations designed to carry plot and humour, not to embody genuine political figures. Each is a negatively portrayed persona with appropriately humanizing foibles. Hacker is callow, given to idealistically laudable intentions but ultimately a victim of his own self-interest, vanity, dishonesty, cowardice, and obsession with image and job security. These (especially vanity and insecurity)56 are the weaknesses that Sir Humphrey is able to exploit for his own ends—the aggrandizement of bureaucratic power for its own sake, personal vanity and a desire to sustain politics as nothing more than the perpetual motion of a comfortably closed élite of like-minded administrators, curbing the fools people elect.57 According to Sir Humphrey, the only ends to administrative activity are the loose ones that forever need tidying up; and indeed, he sometimes expresses a horror of change.58 His weakness lies in Hacker’s occasionally being able to turn this fear and the evidence surviving from his previous conduct against him.59

56  The insecurity becomes an easily manipulated paranoia, as shown in ‘Man Overboard’ (3 Dec. 1987). 57  See most explicitly, ‘Power to the People’ (7 Jan. 1988). 58  For example, in ‘The Ministerial Broadcast’ (16 Jan. 1986); on the ends of government being just loose ones, ‘A Skeleton in the Cupboard’ (25 Nov. 1982); ‘The Whiskey Priest’. 59  This happens in ‘Big Brother’, ‘A Skeleton in the Cupboard’, and partially in ‘The Middle-Class Rip-Off’ (23 Dec. 1982).

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Personal details accentuate the differences. Hacker, though suave and articulate, is culturally shallow, even charlatanical. His wife Annie (Diana Hoddinott) is basically supportive, but clear-eyed enough to treat his posturing with scepticism. Sir Humphrey’s wife has no name or presence except once as a somnolent heap during a late-night telephone call in ‘Big Brother’ (17 March 1980), but he is a serious opera lover, and by the occasional glimpses of objets in his office, a connoisseur of fine porcelain.60 Nevertheless, self-interest is a mighty emollient and it allows for ad hoc alliances between politician and bureaucrat. Sir Humphrey fabricates a publicity triumph for the threatened Hacker in order to retain the minister he is successfully domesticating. They join forces to sabotage an integrated transport policy. They unite, clearly in the public interest, to establish coordinated pay rises for each other.61 In ‘One of Us’ (27 Feb. 1986), mutual self-interest is even elegantly blended with blackmail when a proclivity for spying is exposed within Sir Humphrey’s closed educational élite. Moreover, the educational background of each man, exploited for running gags in the plots, perpetuates popular and rather misleading perceptions.62 Sir Humphrey, as noted above, was a Wykehamist before going up to Bailey College, Oxford (Balliol). No school is given for Hacker before he went to the London School of Economics (then a college of London University). Bailey is supposedly conservative and socially exclusive, the LSE radical and working class, with its students naturally ignorant of Latin.63 In fact, in Christopher Hill (master, 1965–78), Balliol had for many years a Marxist and ex-Communist head and a substantial African Commonwealth intake of students;64 while the LSE, with a high middle-­ class undergraduate population (most would have studied some years of Latin at grammar or public school), had resoundingly conservative 60  This is another understated touch of verisimilitude. The displayed items are unremarked upon, but they would have been costly, a taste for them sustained by high salary and privileged upbringing; but a little like interchangeable college ties, they also appear in Sir Arnold’s Office, and when Sir Humphrey succeeds him the objets are antique silver. 61  See ‘The Devil You Know’ (23 March 1980); ‘The Moral Dimension’ (2 Dec. 1982); ‘The Whiskey Priest’ (16 Dec. 1982); ‘Bed of Nails’ (9 Dec. 1982); and ‘A Real Partnership’ (6 Feb. 1986). 62  Set out in ‘Bed of Nails’, Complete Yes Minister, 424, 431–2, and ‘The Grand Design’ (9 Jan. 1986); see also ‘The Middle Class Rip-Off’. 63  It is a repeated joke in ‘A Bed of Nails’. 64  This student profile provides a theme in ‘Doing the Honours’ (2 March 1981), although the cosy and extreme conservatism of the college is depicted as otherwise unruffled.

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departments of economics and government during the 1960s and 1970s.65 Its highest-profile professor of political science was the doyen of a resurgent intellectual right, Michael Oakeshott, whom Margaret Thatcher reputedly admired and recommended for a knighthood and for The Order of Merit, both of which he declined.66 As Hacker acclimatizes to his ministerial position, the dramatic benefit of a relatively even contest with Sir Humphrey becomes apparent. Hacker has a partial victory in ‘The Official Visit’ (3 March 1980) and decisive ones in ‘Big Brother’ and ‘A Question of Loyalty’, ending with his publicly stabbing Sir Humphrey in the back (metaphorically speaking). Once Sir Humphrey has pulled the requisite strings, Hacker reveals himself as an effective operator within his own party-political environment, for example in ‘Party Games’. In this bridging episode, Sir Humphrey secures his promotion to head the Cabinet Office by sotto voce intimations of bribery, and provides the information that allows Hacker to become prime minister by low cunning and blackmail.67 Once prime minister, Hacker has a clear, if symbolic triumph in ‘The Key’ (30 Jan. 1986) and another in ‘A Victory for Democracy’ (13 Feb. 1986). Overall, however, in the cohering contest between the two, the victories on either side are only partial and often involve a trade-off that satisfies both.68 There may well be some political truth behind these indecisive outcomes, but more important is the presence of microeconomic rational-­ choice modelling that in its application to politics is often called 65  The idiosyncratic expression ‘public school’ refers to what in most countries would be called private schools. They are very expensive, exclusive and, in the case of those like Sir Humphrey’s Winchester College (founded 1382), very old and privileged. They are public in the sense that they usually began as charity schools in the public interest and some continue to sustain generous scholarship programmes and select students only on merit (e.g. Winchester, Tonbridge, Christ’s Hospital). Others, in accepting a wide range of ability, like Eton, resemble comprehensive schools. 66  Most unusually, about half the LSE student body was postgraduate, with a strong Ivy League and Oxbridge presence. Ironically, during the Vietnam War it was largely the visiting American students who helped revivify the radical public image inherited from the post-­ Second World War days of Harold Laski (1893–1950). Oakeshott, his successor, purported to be a great believer in the honours system; honours should be given to whomever most wanted them. He also declined honorary doctorates. Lord Donoughue, as noted, an advisor on verisimilitude, could hardly have been unaware of the poetic license taken. He had degrees from Oxford and had been a lecturer under Oakeshott at the LSE. 67  For demonstration of Hacker’s political cunning, see also ‘Bed of Nails’. 68  Handelsmann, ‘Satiric Dimension’, 63–4; ‘Smoke Screen’ (1 Jan. 1986).

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public-choice theory. Added to this are a couple of old and familiar theories of bureaucracy and the Westminster System that help shape an informing discomfort at the stress-ridden mutual dependency of a political regime with its administrative structures. It was a problem crystalized for Jay through engagement with the libertarian philosophies of the now defunct economist Milton Friedman, who similarly impressed and informed the policies of Margaret Thatcher.69 Friedman’s best-selling book Freedom to Choose was popularized in the year of its publication (1980) on American television (PBS) with attendant discussion moderated by Yes Minister’s Bob McKenzie.70 It was an ideological application of rational- and public-­ choice theoretical modelling in which Jay also had faith.71 Central to such theorizing was the explanatory power of interest. It is to this that I need to turn.

III Jay had already written a successful text partially informed by rational choice, Management and Machiavelli.72 As I have noted, the prime minister keenly promotes a management theory book in the pursuit of economy.73 Jay’s attempt to apply The Prince to modern management was not without a diluted plausibility and relevance that is worth outlining. Machiavelli’s advice to princes had concerned the imperatives of survival and supremacy in a dangerous world, but expressed little awareness of ruling as a responsibility. Ruling well was instrumental to survival, the necessary interest of any prince. The capacity to generate fear and love, for example, was judged in this light, and tyranny was to be avoided because it stimulated hatred, the passion most likely to result in the prince’s destruction. Doing good to others was little more than collateral benefit. Maintaining a reputation for what were taken as virtues was certainly in a  Jay, ‘Informed Sources’, n.p.; Frazer, ‘Milton Friedman’, 525–33.  Friedman and Friedman, Free to Choose; a coincidental conjunction with Yes Minister that began to be aired in the same year. 71  John Considine, ‘Yes Minister’, 55–61, though he discusses only the interest of bureaucracy. See also the Adam Curtis documentary, ‘The Trap: What Happened to Our Dreams of Freedom’, pt 1: ‘F&#k You Buddy’ (BBC Productions, at 36:07, cited Wikipedia entry on ‘Yes Minister’). 72  Jay, Management and Machiavelli; on its popularity, Jackson and Grace, Machiavelliana, 84–90. 73  ‘A Question of Loyalty’, ‘Equal Opportunity’ also canvasses a business model for reform. 69 70

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prince’s interest, but to act accordingly, excepting military virtues, was a more contingent consideration. Machiavelli became a central figure in what is sometimes called interest theory. The conception of financial interest became a metaphor prominent in assessing political conduct. It was made famous by the Duc du Rohan in 1639 in his polemical analysis of Hapsburg Spain with its Machiavellian interest in tyranny and domination, opposing the true interests of Christian polities. Thereafter, interest came to label a subgenre of political reflection and commercial analysis popular in England and Europe during the seventeenth and early eighteenth centuries.74 A confession, a country, a trading company or profession might be seen not just to have, but to be an interest to be assessed, controlled or promoted in relation to its competitors. This broad species of theory lies behind the increasingly consolidated study of politics during the nineteenth century, from which gradually arose political economy, then economics and political science, all maintaining a faith in the value of interest. Central to economics from the end of the nineteenth century was the analysis of the market, and what was modelled as its defining participant, a ubiquitous personified interest. Homo economicus was a rational creature, where rationality was self-­ interest, narrowed to be coextensive with the calculation of cost, benefit and marginal utility. We have here a general picture of linguistic circularity conforming to what I have elsewhere discussed as a prodigal’s return: a vocabulary or metaphor is exported from one area of human activity to another, and after its acclimatization is returned and not surprisingly is welcomed as a source of fresh insight or truth.75 If Management and Machiavelli sought to apply what Jay imagined to be the Florentine’s political method to companies and corporations, rational-choice theory applied the market to politics.76 The political animal was analogous to homo economicus. Rational conduct was thus the pursuit or protection of perceived interest to be calculated in terms of opportunity costs, of profit and loss, winning and losing power reified as a commodity. It was the interplay between freely choosing competitors that maintained equilibrium in the political system, just as the market remained intact only by the tensile balance of calculated 74  Rohan, De l’interest; for example, Neville, Game of Piquet (1660); see also Walter, ‘Analysis of Interest’, 129–48; ‘Slingsby Bethel’s Analysis of State Interests’, 1–18. 75  Condren, Political Vocabularies, 143–64. 76  Brennan, ‘Rational Choice Political Theory’, 89–111.

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reactions to supply and demand by homo economicus. On both scores, equilibrium was a continuity of optimal outcomes. This does not necessarily reduce politics to economics. Rather, the market analogy has enabled the analysis of a clearly circumscribed notion of the political sphere to be narrowly axiomatic, abstract and formal, much as microeconomics has become. Broadly speaking, the rational choice of one has become the public choice the other. The result has been an elegance of analysis, even dependent on algorithmic and mathematical calculation, at some cost to engagement with the untidiness of the political world, as it is usually more fully understood, with its diverging criteria for action and what often seems to be, by microeconomic standards, irrational conduct. As Geoff Brennan acknowledges in explicating the principles of public-­ choice theory, there are areas of political activity it does not accommodate.77 As a mode of political theorizing, public-choice theory was marginal to the study of politics in Britain when Jay and Lynn’s satires were being written, despite the currency of Friedmanesque free-market economics. Since then public and rational choice have had a variable impact beyond political science and economics departments in the United States, in which it was largely invented.78 It is an interesting variation on the complexities of cultural transference that satires considered to be quintessentially English should be so thoroughly informed by a popularized version of an American style of politico-economic theory.79 Indeed, public- and rational-­ choice theories are sufficiently pervasive for those persuaded of their value to regard the satires as ideal dramatized teaching aids.80 What we might learn, however, takes a lot for granted. The emphasis on equilibrium politics is perhaps disproportionately reinforced by the constitutional structure of the United States, so important as the epicentre of public-choice analysis. There are also ambiguities created by the migration of a concept of mechanical equilibrium from physics, or homeostatic equilibrium from biology to microeconomics and from thence to

 Brennan, ‘Rational Choice Political Theory’, 91–4.  Brennan, ‘Rational Choice Political Theory’, 110. 79  There is perhaps a nod of acknowledgement of this in ‘A Question of Loyalty’; the book on management that the prime minister is vicariously promoting has been written by an ex-­ British civil servant (hence with insider knowledge), now a management consultant living in the United States. 80  Considine, ‘Yes Minister’, 55–61; Hernándes, ‘Political Disinformation’, 13. 77 78

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politics.81 Equilibrium in some sense may be a theoretical requirement more than a political reality.82 The association of equilibrium with an optimal state of affairs is best seen in the same light. More generally, the conflation of any formal explanatory model with its field of application, its being taken as a simple description of realty, is bound to be schematic and given to circularity. Public-choice theory has also been dogged by accusations of conservatism, and of being, like Machiavelli himself, quite unrealistic. One counter-reaction, and again especially in the United States, has been the political theories of agonism. These have stressed what public-­ choice theory has not, or cannot deal with, namely political conflict at the points at which coherent conduct and accepted rules and norms break down, and where, as is now bewailed of the Internet, there may be few if any shared standards of rationality. It is a vision of politics on the cusp of war, for which Machiavelli has also been seen as a father figure. Yet irrespective of any theoretical commitments, there were distinct dramatic advantages to the creation of a political world that conformed to the contours of a rational- or public-choice vision of politics. In the Yes Minister/Prime Minister satires, the political domain is neatly limited to the interdependent relationships between minister, parliament or cabinet, bureaucracy and occasionally the mass media. As Sir Humphrey and Sir Arnold Robinson, the former Head of the Cabinet Office, agree, the civil service is the prime minister’s life support system.83 Political phenomena such as elections and the feared unpredictability of voter behaviour, protests and other disruptive conduct, erupt as problems for the system to deal with, intrusions necessary for plot development and the interplay of interest. Most episodes hinge on a shock of unintended consequence arising from what appears as a plausible or sensible policy, and the danger that rears up is of disruption to equilibrium. The world, as Sir Humphrey is acutely aware, is full of troublemakers, such as voters, and administrative inconveniencies, such as patients in hospitals. A little like the staged humours in eighteenth-century comedy, the main protagonists were portrayed as representing certain sorts of interest, and so could be used to personify a range of familiar and simplistic 81  Landau, Political Theory, 78–91; Kaplan, ‘Systems Theory’, 151–5 on homeostatic and mechanical equilibrium as variably applied to politics. 82  Brennan, ‘Rational Choice Political Theory’, 93–4. 83  ‘Power to the People’ (7 Jan. 1988).

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dichotomies. These express the tensile interdependence of political and administrative systems: principles versus self-interest, conscience opposed to convenience, right versus wrong, the pursuit of means rather than ends, evidence-based policy or prejudice, government or politics. Plots are developed and tensions resolved or dissolved around such binary pairings by the power of interest in a terminating affirmation of equilibrium.84 The predictability of bureaucratic and political reaction to any situation generates much of the humour and creates a vision that is a little like a set of working variations of a theoretical model. The routine closing line of most episodes, ‘Yes minister’ or ‘Yes, prime minister’, signalled this achievement: smugness is usually triumphant as a truce is agreed, a bargain struck. It is a principal, if gently outlined target of the satires, much as it had been the nebulous butt of ‘Beyond the Fringe’ and The Establishment Club. These had begun and then institutionalized the satire boom of the 1960s.85 Minor things might have changed in a given episode, but what is painted as a morally dubious status quo is ultimately affirmed in a metaphor of market negotiation. As Jay admitted, he and Lynn offered no alternative vision because they could think of none: the political world was by its nature a balance of opposing forces. The total victory of either one at the expense of the other would be democratically disastrous.86 Such an emphasis on constituent tensions that both sustain and constrain the political invites analysis with a dulled but ever-present satiric edge. We are offered what is close to the best of all worlds composed of necessary evils. It is conspectus to which I need to return in a different theoretical context. A popularized version of rational or public choice provides a dramatically tidy structural coherence to the satires. Occasionally, however, in explicitly didactic moments it surfaces as an enunciated truth. The workings of the European Economic Union and Britain’s long-term relationship with the rest of Europe are described entirely in terms of a myth of unchanging interests. For hundreds of years Britain’s has been perpetual disruption that itself is designed to maintain an equilibrium between Europe’s competing powers.87 Bernard Woolley belatedly explains to Hacker the nature of the administrative system of the country. Nothing is 84  This is also the case with the plot lines of ‘Fawlty Towers’ that lead inevitably to the humiliation of Basil. 85  Carpenter, Silly Grin. 86  Jay, ‘Informed Sources’, n.p. 87  ‘The Devil You Know’, The Complete Yes Minister, 272–5.

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as it seems: each governmental department represents the vested interest of its principal client: the Department of Education serves the National Union of Teachers, the Home Office the police, the Department of Industry serves employers, Employment the trade unions, and so forth.88 All are designed to interlock and prevent any government doing anything: ‘somebody has to’.89 Throughout, such attenuated theory can be taken as providing the grounding of Sir Humphrey’s equation of change with chaos, or innovation as even worse: to cease subsidizing the Royal Opera House will be ‘the end of civilization as we know it’.90 A persistent motif throughout the satires is his hyperbolic response to almost any mooted reform and his ingenious ploys to restrict it to the world of appearance and illusion. He serves a ‘British democracy’, after all—a country run by and for the civil service.91 There is also a more general doctrinal aspect attendant upon the public-­ choice ethos. As it narrows any distance between political and economic conceptions of organization, so positing a commercial business model as an ideal by which to judge the civil service gathers a propagandistic momentum. Antony Jay had regarded state and corporation as little different, which is why he thought he could apply what he took to be Machiavelli’s political methods to management, and why in part Friedmanesque economic theory could carry such political weight for him. As I have noted, such a process of reform was dear to Margaret Thatcher’s heart and the free-market business model as a template is repeatedly endorsed as almost self-evidently sound policy during the first two series of Yes Minister. It continues to be intimated as such in Yes, Prime Minister: business is efficient, it reduces costs and gets things done.92 Naturally, even tautologically it cuts red tape—for tape is only 88  In ‘The National Education Service’ it is explained that the Department of Education’s commitment to comprehensive education is only because the National Union of Teachers is striving for class equality within the teaching profession. It is unwanted by parents and has nothing to do with education. 89  ‘Bed of Nails’, The Complete Yes minister, 435, grammatical tense changed from television performance. 90  ‘The Need to Know’; ‘The Middle-Class Rip-Off’, 478; see also ‘The National Education Service’, to say nothing of reducing civil service numbers in ‘A Real Partnership’. 91  ‘Power to the People’, an episode in which he discovers a shared interest and conception of democracy with an extreme socialist radical leader of Houndsworth local council: what begins with mutually patronizing hostility ends with willing collaboration in stymying Hacker’s Great Reform. 92  ‘Equal Opportunities’; see also ‘A Real Partnership’.

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deemed red when it needs removing. Business has clear criteria for measuring success and its expertise would rationalize the civil service: dramatized Milton Friedman. Hacker is easily persuaded (as he is in Margaret Thatcher’s own little sketch), but predictably, policies touched by such promotional rhetoric are resisted by Sir Humphrey as damaging, or as irrelevant to the whole nature of the civil service. In terms of public-choice theory, the contrast with the later political satire The Thick of It (2005–12) is illuminating.93 This was conceived and planned by Armando Iannucci, a great admirer of Yes Minister, and as dramatic explorations of political life, they are directly comparable. In The Thick of It, however, the plot lines can be blurred, a plethora of characters come and go and often appear not to know what they are doing. They seem not to have histories beyond the bubble in which we see them. There are allusions to Etonian cliques, but there is a dearth of old school, regimental and university ties. The world of the satires is less the centre of the system than the periphery where the spin doctors rotate at speed, striving to maintain a precarious legitimacy by purveying only an illusion of order and rationality. There is an emphasis on departmental incompetence and confusion quite at odds with the cohesive, almost monolithic structures represented by Sir Humphrey and his peers. Policies are fugitive currency, a means of buying time, made in haste, abandoned or changed even on the way to announce them. Unlike Yes Minister and Prime Minister, there is no live audience to witness a series of structured scenes comprising only relevant characters, often behind or posed around desks redolent of authority, or seated in comfortable club chairs of privilege. Instead, the hand-held camera conspires to give a sense of documentary intimacy and reinforces the messiness and corruption of political processes in its own sometimes erratic and mistimed movements.94 The principal characters are generally also far more mobile than in Yes Minister, their movements less measured, suggestive of uncertainty or fragility of purpose.95 In Yes Minister, plots are laid and deals made in the ordered formality of the club over brandy or during a multi-course meal. In The Thick of It, eating is on the run or in a rush, drinks often gulped from disposable cups when ducking from the hubbub of abuse. It is with this jostling whirl that politicians  Pankratz, ‘Spin, Swearing and Slapstick’, 281–94, for a valuable overview.  Pakratz, ‘Spin, Swearing and Slapstick’, 282–5, 288. 95  ‘The Key’ provides a striking exception with Sir Humphrey’s farcical panic at being deprived of free access the prime minister. 93 94

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and voters, the dispossessed and damaged, interact in generating one unwanted outcome after another. The whole vision is of an unsavoury omnishambles, to invoke Iannucci’s neologism.96 Self-­interested the protagonists may be, but the best they can do is to keep afloat in the mire, hide, find a better scapegoat, or hope to escape. The politicians often flap across the screen like fish out of water, gasping for a policy or reassurance. The matter of language will be taken up in the following chapter. In the meantime, it is enough to note that the language of the protagonists in Yes Minister is always fitting to character and interest, and is decorous. With one character speaking at a time and addressing the others, the dialogue conveys a sense of rational engagement and is a means by which opposing positions over clear issues are set out.97 The Thick of It is full of the screaming expletive-ridden eloquence and brutality that marks confrontation with a world out of control. As characters talk over the top of each other, the dialogue can become a white noise of desperation. Each episode reinforces a vision of perpetual, agonistic disequilibrium, a premonition of omnishambolic Brexit of 2017–18. Yes Minister and Prime Minister thus illustrate a theory much dependent on the selective filtering of evidence and upon a handful of minimalist axioms. The consequence is clarity, coherence and an almost comfortable predictability from which a good deal of the humour arises. Machiavellian interest lies only distantly behind public- or rational-choice theory, for Machiavelli operated neither with a concept of a corporation nor the state and was apt to minimize the importance of wealth, so there is scant awareness of anything we might call the economy. Yet a more immediate Machiavellian presence lies in the stress on appearance, illusion and persuasive image. The topos of appearance versus reality informs almost every chapter of The Prince. It is present in almost every episode of Yes Minister and Prime Minister, as it would be in The Thick of It. Bernard’s account of the departmental structure of the civil service is in terms of illusion masking interest. The civil service policy as a whole is to appear to economize and to carry out ministerial policy. The politicians appear to be in command, and they seem to be people of integrity, loyalty, all dedicated to the public interest. Symptomatically, the  Pankratz, ‘Spin, Swearing and Slapstick’, 288.  ‘The Middle-Class Rip-Off’, The Complete Yes Minister, 478–9, makes the point by underlining an exception to courtesy and protocol. 96 97

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banker Sir Desmond Glazebrook (Richard Vernon) carries The Financial Times as part of the uniform. He only appears to read it. He has long given up trying to understand it—too much economic theory. The differences between the economists J.M. Keynes, Milton Friedman and the town of Milton Keynes he finds simply bemusing.98 Yet he appears as a figure of financial reassurance. He is confident in his knowledge of how the ‘chaps’ in the City will react to any mooted policy—the ‘chaps’ being code for his own interests. In all this, the mass media is vitally implicated in pursuit of its interests. Politicians doubt their existence without their names in the papers. A little like Lucian’s Olympian deities, they fear their own reality in the absence of believers.99 Concomitantly, there is acute sensitivity to the size of newspaper headlines and to the semiotics of television appearance. Hacker has to be seen with the right people and the right animals on a city farm, not pigs or donkeys.100 The contrived background to a television speech must be an appropriate contrast to its content. With nothing to say, the surroundings have to be busy and energetically modern, like the introductory music, probably by Stravinsky. Conversely, the announcement of a significant departure in policy needs the reassuring presence of old leather bindings. There is studied awareness of the difference between the immediate audience and the one for which a speech is actually intended. In this light, however, for all the play with the Machiavellian emphasis on appearances, of narrowly rational interest in sustaining equilibrium, the satires construct schematic representations of a posited reality that has to be taken largely on faith. To think they instantiate it is indeed, as Keynes put it, to become a prisoner of a defunct economist. Mrs Thatcher may not have been as naïve as the journalists who, with Lego brick neatness and innocent enthusiasm, commended the satires as radical and courageous exposés of reality—that, we are so often told, is what satire is all about. Although there was, I would think, nothing disingenuous about her expressed enjoyment of them, what mattered was their propagandistic potential. She was by no means the first ruling minister to see such a value in satire. Robert Harley, Earl of Oxford and Queen Anne’s chief minister (1711–14), was particularly aware of its benefits, and he befriended, patronized, worked with and used satirists, such as Defoe, Swift and  ‘Quality of Life’, The Complete Yes Minister, 299.  ‘A Question of Loyalty’, 325. 100  ‘Quality of Life’; and his arrival at the farm has to be redone for the television film crew who turned up late. 98 99

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Arbuthnot, on a range of fronts. Neither would Mrs Thatcher be the last. President Obama participated regularly in television satire in the United States advertising and defending policies and his personality.101 She, however, had a narrower interest in the promotion of an entertaining encapsulation of governmental frustration in developing sound (usually market-based) policy. It might make the electorate a little more understanding and supportive of her initiatives. This is why later she might have turned to Antony Jay for advice on television performance and writing speeches.

IV Unlike retired politicians, senior public servants have been reticent in giving accounts of their careers, so leaving Jay and Lynn with a paucity of biographical justification on which to draw. Unlike a number of politicians, they did not advise or inform them either.102 Jay and Lynn note the difference obliquely. Although Hacker’s diaries are published, there is only a manuscript archive of Appleby’s papers.103 It is, then, not surprising that the image of Sir Humphrey owes less to any bureaucratic voice than to the principal theorist of bureaucracy in the twentieth century, Max Weber. He argued that bureaucracies need to be depersonalized and strictly hierarchical in order to operate professionally—that the more they are relied upon, the more they grow—and with this develops an opacity, a culture and a distinct bureaucratic interest.104 Consequently, a mature bureaucracy is never simply the instrument the politician requires, and neither is Sir Humphrey the mere servant he disingenuously says he is.105 A bureaucracy may well see itself as a custodian of a public interest beyond the transience of political policy. That something is not in the public interest, Hacker comes to take as a euphemism for not being in the interest of the civil  Higgie, ‘Under the Guise of Humour’, 89–92.  Kamm, ‘Capable Servants’, 115. 103  ‘Writing on the Wall’, 108, citing ‘Appleby Papers 23/RPY/13c’. 104  Weber’s theories were part of a broad vision of society, adumbrated in various forms before his death in 1920 and most fully elaborated in Wirtschaft und Gesellschaft (1922), translated as Economy and Society (1978). They have been much discussed and elaborated, and the negative aspects of the bureaucracy to which Weber pointed were arguably satirized very early in Franz Kafka’s unfinished Das Schloss (The Castle), begun 1922 and published 1926. 105  ‘Big Brother’, The Complete Yes Minister, 85. 101 102

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service.106 The energies of such mature bureaucracies may easily be disproportionately diverted to their own perpetuation, with diminishing resources expended on any substantive rationale. This is a Weberian feature of development they share with other complex organizations such as charities and universities whose budgets are increasingly devoted to compliance, consultancy costs and managerial remuneration. In ‘The Compassionate Society’, we are given a parodic microcosm of this image in the absurdity of St Edward’s Hospital with its army of administrators busily working in their several departments, aided by dedicated ancillary staff, but with no nurses, doctors and lacking the inconvenience of patients.107 If such a hospital’s efficiency were judged by death rates, surgery, remediation costs or complaints, it could only stand as a paragon of success. These satires present the civil service in similar terms, with its control of information, disinformation, language and access to the minister, all orchestrated to keep the organization growing and its policies unchanged. Unlike commercial businesses that can gauge achievement by profit or market share, the only measures of civil service success are its size and budget.108 Decreasing the numbers of civil servants really means redeploying or reclassifying them. It can mean hiring more to manage the reforms. As Hacker discovers, civil service positions ‘are never lost—the only cuts are in planned recruitment’.109 To these adamantine ends, Hacker must be reduced to little more than the Department’s financial and policy advocate, its public voice—‘not a man but a mouth’, as his initial advisor Frank Weisel puts it.110 Working with the minister is a matter of house training.111 Even the mechanisms for achieving such compliance have been turned into a sort of Weberian routine, subject to formulation: five stages for stalling any policy, deemed creative inertia; three types of silence when questioned by a minister; formal codes of obfuscation and avoidance; and the expressions under consideration and under active consideration mean,  For example, in ‘Writing on the Wall’.  ‘The Compassionate Society’. There had indeed been one patient when the Deputy Chief Administrator fell over a piece of scaffolding and broke his leg (The Complete Yes Minister, 181). 108  ‘The Economy Drive’, 59; see also ‘The Middle Class Rip-Off’. 109  ‘Jobs for the Boys’, 162. 110  ‘Big Brother’, The Complete Yes Minister, 85. The witticism got no overt response from the television audience. 111  For example, ‘Big Brother’, The Complete Yes Minister, 88. 106 107

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respectively, lost and looking for it. There are similar stages for the automatic discreditation of any report: there are four stages of Foreign Office inaction,112 and there are also tried and true strategies for bringing a minster to heel, such as overburdening with information or hiding it.113 In the codification and institutionalization of duplicitous obstruction, Jay found recent precedent in the published political diaries of British politicians, but we have satires that are also strikingly at one with the rules for lying and the political system as an instrument for its practice imagined by Robert Harley’s friend Arbuthnot in his Art of Political Lying of 1712. This amorphous monster, the civil service, is effectively ‘the opposition in residence’ pitted against the politically legitimate Westminster System.114 This by contrast is democratic and open, and in which leadership is called to account by parliament and the electorate. When Hacker and some minor characters voice such justificatory claims, Sir Humphrey is apt to regard them as irrelevant, intrusive or troublemaking. In fact, much of this image of the legitimate political system, as A.H. Birch has argued, was theorized and applauded by Walter Bagehot and A.V. Dicey late in the nineteenth century, with their own contemporary circumstances in mind.115 It is what Birch has summarized as the ‘liberal language of the constitution’, a language much at one with the libertarian economic theory of Jay’s partial inspiration, Milton Friedman.116 The case of ministerial responsibility is instructive. According to Hacker’s jaundiced view, this is ‘a handy little device conceived by the Civil Service for dropping the minister in it, while enabling the mandarins to keep their noses clean. It means that the Civil Service runs everything … but when something goes wrong … the Minister takes the blame.’117 The belief is strategically endorsed by Sir Humphrey, and accepted.118 I know of nothing, however, to support the notion that the doctrine originated with the  ‘The Greasy Pole’, 258; ‘A Victory for Democracy’ (13 Feb. 1986).  ‘A Victory for Democracy’. 114  ‘Big Brother’, The Complete Yes Minister, 94. 115  Bagehot, The English Constitution (1867), and Dicey, The Law of the Constitution (1885), both with numerous editions and both used as textbooks, certainly until the 1960s. See Birch, Representative and Responsible Government, 48–81. 116  Birch, Representative and Responsible Government, 165–8. 117  ‘The Compassionate Society’ (23 Feb. 1981); The Complete Yes Minister, 177; ‘Bed of Nails’, The Complete Yes Minister, 442; see also ‘Bishop’s Gambit’, ‘Doing the Honours’ and ‘A Real Partnership’. 118  ‘Jobs for the Boys’, 166; see also ‘Bishop’s Gambit’ and ‘One of Us’ for allusions to the doctrine as fact. 112 113

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civil service, although the mid-nineteenth-century Trevelyan reforms to which that body was subjected certainly provided a condition needed for such a principle to develop. It was only after those reforms, creating what Graham Wallis called ‘the one great political invention of the nineteenth century’, that a clear and decisive relationship between a given minister and an administrative department became assured.119 Nevertheless, from 1855 to 1955, there may have been only sixteen cases in which ministers have resigned, in response at least partially to parliamentary criticism of what their departments had done.120 Birch examined some crucial cases between 1945 and 1960 and concluded (with S.E. Finer) that any minister’s relationships with the prime minister and the majority party were far more significant than a putative responsibility to Parliament for any civil service blunder. The doctrine, in short, is little more than a useful fiction underlining the burdens of office and providing a topos of oppositional critique.121 Something analogous might be said of the notion that the people elect prime ministers, a belief accepted by Hacker as prime minister. He takes the office of leading (so presupposing a following) as synonymous with ruling (which does not) despite the manner in which he assumed that office. His episodic drifts into Churchillian phraseology and intonation are usually expressions of his self-image as ruler and national leader addressing an admiring throng. That prime ministers are popularly elected is widely regarded as a feature of the Westminster System. In Australia, where that System is also held to be operational, the opposition Liberal Party leader Tony Abbott made much of the illegitimacy of a sitting prime minister being ousted by his colleagues when commiserating with Labour’s Kevin Rudd, tumbled out of office on 24 June 2010, and of the faceless grey men who were usurping democracy by putting Julia Gillard in Rudd’s 119  Wallis, Human Nature, 249; there was, however, already a tied relationship between The Mint and its minister, The Master of the Mint. When the introduction of the florin was bungled in 1849 (the letters FD specifying The Queen as Defender of the Faith were omitted) the minister, Richard Lalor Sheil, coincidentally an Irish Catholic, was held responsible and was moved by Lord John Russell to become Ambassador to the Duchy of Tuscany. 120  Birch, Representative and Responsible Government, 141. 121  Birch, Representative and Responsible Government, 141–8; concomitantly, until the anomalies of the ‘Brexit’ debates (2018–19) that saw the defeats and censuring of Prime Minister Theresa May, the responsibility of the prime minister to Parliament and engagement with it suffered a distinct decline during the twentieth century; see Dunleavy et  al., ‘Leaders’, 267–98.

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place. Much was also made of it when Abbott as prime minister was in his turn shuffled off by Malcolm Turnbull (14 Sept. 2015). Some Liberals expressed dismay that their party should behave as iniquitously as the Labour Party, but practice makes perfect. They would do it again in 2018 by getting rid of Turnbull. Margaret Thatcher had suffered a similar fate in 1990, reluctantly resigning after a challenge to her leadership. With operatic hyperbole, such changes have been likened to the turmoil of Shakespearean tragedy, with all its intimations of almost cosmic chaos.122 Yet the overwhelming focus on prime ministerial candidates at general elections has been erratic, often driven by the contingencies of personality and the convenience of the mass media. It was certainly central to the British Conservative Party election campaign in 1945, in which Churchill appeared as his Party’s only asset. In Australia, it was a feature of Robert Menzies’ re-election campaign in 1955. Despite this, it was still possible to see the electoral campaign of 1972 by Gough Whitlam as the first to introduce a decidedly American presidential style to Australian politics by turning a contest between parties into one between potential prime ministers. To the extent that a general election is predominantly a matter of choosing a prime minister, there is an enormity in MPs deciding to change horses in mid-stream. But ipso facto, this is to deny that MPs are representatives in the independent Burkean sense, of being elected to exercise judgment as to the common good or public interest. Rather, it takes them as being only elected delegates, whose job (often conveniently) is to vote in the right way when the division bell rings. As Hacker once candidly remarks on his way to vote, ‘It doesn’t matter what the debate is, I just don’t want to go through the wrong door.’123 Despite its being rarely evidenced, independence of representative status has also been deemed central to the Westminster System entailing parliamentary sovereignty, which is partially why so much time is spent debating issues in Parliament.124 And in that light, replacement of a prime minister by a body of elected members can be construed as parliamentary democracy actually working properly.125 It can similarly be construed as an oddity that on the one hand, a major reason for Britain’s leaving the European Union was to 122  Peatling (quoting an Australian Labor Party parliamentarian), ‘Shakespeare, Reshuffle Talk’, 5. 123  ‘Doing the Honours’, The Complete Yes Minister, 236. 124  See for example, the impassioned Nicholson, People and Parliament; the Brexit debates of 2018–19 provided a partial exception to the norm. 125  The Globe (editorial).

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reclaim parliamentary sovereignty, while on the other Parliament felt irrevocably bound by the results of a referendum: the leaders must follow.126 The Westminster System, an amalgam of interlocking, and not always mutually consistent conventions, is always shifting. Only in its public image and in party polemic is it fixed as an invariant standard by which to measure deleterious change. Selective evocation is an idiom of political dispute from within the system itself. As commentaries, the Yes Minister/ Prime Minister satires exploited aspects of the system that had been explicated and delineated by theoretical reflection and had become variously amenable to both opposition and governmental rhetoric, with all the necessary accompanying tensions, and sometimes contradictory implications. In the simplifying words of the series’ Sir Arnold Robinson (Secretary to the Cabinet) on the matter of making the system openly democratic, ‘you can be open—or you can have government’.127 Such a stable and stark choice between options has a cohering dramatic function—it is the precondition for repeated conflicts between the main protagonists and the aspects of government for which they stand. As I have illustrated and will again when discussing lying in politics (Chap. 9), it may even be that the satires have done as much to perpetuate half-truths and repeat convenient myths as much as they have been illuminating. That they have radically unmasked the working of the system of which voters had been insufficiently aware is itself best seen as a promotional metamyth. The situation is not unlike that confronting the historian when dealing with the satire developed during the Thirty Years War (1618–48). Purporting to expose the secret machinations of major protagonists through the publication of letters, counsels and plans, it also traded in exaggerated half-truth and plausible myth, derived from Machiavellian caricatures and fabrication. The predictable result is that sorting fact from fiction becomes unusually difficult.128 Reading satire as straightforward evidence of anything can be tricky enough. Using evidence in ignorance of a satiric dimension can be disastrous.

126  ‘I am their leader. I must follow them.’ So says Jim Hacker in ‘The Greasy Pole’, Complete Yes Minister, 266. This is a version of an adage originally and appropriately distorted from Benjamin Disraeli, also famous for the image of the greasy pole of political ambition. In fact, the need for those uncomfortable in authority to deflect responsibility to a wider community has long been an important impulse behind what is now called democracy. 127  ‘Open Government’ (25 Feb. 1980), The Complete Yes Minister, 21. 128  Malcolm, Reason of State, 30–4.

CHAPTER 9

The Satiric Presence of Political Discourse

I There is a degree of artificiality in devoting a separate chapter to political language in the Yes Minister satires. The very notion of the political is a linguistic construct, its content largely words, and some passing attention has already been paid to political discourse. A lie, an untruth and a promise are, in John Austin’s terms, all linguistic performatives strongly associated with politicians and evident throughout the satires. Information and misinformation are recognized as currencies of control. Language is used to express the differences between the political and administrative worlds. It is the most salient marker of class and education, though accents, voice tone and the attendant nuances of dress are lost in the printed versions. I want now, however, to discuss the matter of language directly as it provides a further aspect of the representation of politics through digested theory, but with an important difference that excuses a separate chapter. Some of the language of political activity, that of debate, interview, the promises of the manifesto, policy promotion, mass media reportage and electoral campaign, is directly taken into the satires, heightened and redeployed for comic and critical effect. So, rather than being an imaginative and theoretical extrapolation from posited reality, an absent system of decision-making and responsibility, the satires illustrate and shape through theory the political talk with which the viewer can be assumed to be directly familiar as a participant in political life. In John Gunnell’s terms, © The Author(s), under exclusive license to Springer Nature Switzerland AG 2023 C. Condren, Between Laughter and Satire, https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-031-21739-5_9

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this makes Yes Minister and Yes, Prime Minister second-order representations of a first-order presentational practice.1 Language use, then, is far more than a vehicle for wit and humour at the expense of the extraneous British political and administrative system. It is a satirical focus in its own right, and indeed, it is the satires’ treatment of political-speak that provides the most solid support for the notion that they are realistic. The occasional presence of authentic political commentators has a microcosmic significance. In language, as it were, the verisimilitude of the dispatch box is at one with the authenticity of its contents. What might seem to be the most obvious instance is itself an example of the preoccupation with appearance and reality. It is the play with the common belief that the political domain is inherently dishonest, perhaps second only to warfare in its disregard of the truth.2 Of all the performative verbs suggestive of political activity, lying is arguably the most pervasive. From the second episode, Gerald Scarfe’s cartoons of the main characters in the credits prefigure the theme by providing each with an excessively Pinocchio-esque nose.3 Thereafter, endemic political dishonesty provides a persistent and rather easy source of jokes for the entire series: thus, to give some almost random examples, Hacker says of Charlie Umtali (President of Buranda and a contemporary at the LSE, he wears the tie) that he is totally slippery with commitments only to himself. ‘Ah, I see’, says Sir Humphrey, ‘a politician, Minister’.4 Again, Hacker offhandedly remarks of a select committee that it ‘couldn’t be less interested in the nature of truth—they’re all MPs’.5 Once he expostulates in frustration, ‘I don’t want the truth, I want something I can tell Parliament.’ On another occasion, remarks Sir Humphrey, a good speech is not one in which a truth is established, but in which the lies cannot be proved.6 Honesty in Parliament has the advantage of surprise, and in a variation on the paradox of the liar it is presented as a general maxim that nothing should be believed until it has been officially denied.7  Gunnell, Conventional Realism, 15.  Barnes, A Pack of Lies, 30–5. 3  President Nixon suffered a similar graphic enhancement after the Watergate scandal broke. 4  ‘The Official Visit’, in Complete Yes Minister, 45. 5  ‘A Victory for Democracy’. 6  ‘Writing on the Wall’, 111; ‘A Question of Loyalty’ (6 April 1981), in The Complete Yes Minister, 332. 7  ‘The Tangled Web’; ‘Party Games’. 1 2

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The notion of a political system as the institutionalized practice of mendacity has already been noted as a satiric theory that goes back to the early eighteenth century, also entailing a variation of the paradox of the liar.8 Although it has been routinely reinforced in the public mind, it has been less sustained by evidence than by mutual political recrimination. As John Barnes remarks, the increasing prevalence of lying has been a source of political consternation for a long time, but whether things are really getting worse is ‘anyone’s guess’.9 Quoth Falstaff on the battlefield, ‘Lord, Lord, how this world is given to lying!’ (Henry IV Pt. 1, act 5, sc. 1). Within Parliament the explicit accusation is not permitted, but beyond the debating chamber contentious statements, not least unfulfilled electoral promises or tactical evasions, are often enough called lies, and by implication only liars tell them. Were politicians as bad as they say, it is doubtful any political system could really work, but in the easy accusations, the very word lie has been extended sufficiently beyond its conventional meaning to encourage easy application, blurring the differences between what is misleading, incomplete, evasive, equivocal, untrue and the promise that remains unfulfilled, all of which may or may not be the consequence of a calculated intention to deceive. This point is well, if inadvertently, illustrated in ‘The Tangled Web’, the final episode of the prime ministerial series. Fittingly, it is focused on honesty and the disclosure of the truth. In all good faith, Hacker has made an untrue, thus a misleading statement to Parliament, which, after much circumlocution, Sir Humphrey finally calls a lie. But it is not, unless, as in political-speak any untruth can be called a lie, a concept, he also remarks, that is difficult to get across to a politician. His uncharacteristic misapplication is striking, and recognized by Hacker. Thus, Jay and Lynn may have been using Sir Humphrey en passant to draw attention to the slipperiness of a political idiom. Predominantly the satires simply reinforced the sticky association of politicians with dishonesty and returned the common-sense prejudice to the audience, apt to laugh (knowingly) whenever the accusation was in the air. It continues to be reinforced. According to Antonio Hernándes, the YouTube presence of Yes Minister, and recorded reactions to its most popular clips, have become iconic of strategies of disinformation taken internationally and across generations to be endemic to politics.10

8  Arbuthnot, Art of Political Lying, see above Chap. 4; on the precise, and logically distinctive form of the paradox, Condren, Hobbes and the Scriblerians, 116. 9  Barnes, A Pack of Lies, 1. 10  Hernándes, ‘Disinformation’, 11–23.

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Forms of dishonesty might often enough be explained by, or taken to be an expression of interest and it is worth returning to this theme in the satires as it brings into occasional focus an important general but often neglected aspect of political discourse. The declared, known or often hidden interest of speakers is vital to understanding the force of what they say. Any discrepancy is suggestive of dishonesty. If Jim Hacker utters always in the voice of political self-interest, Sir Humphrey speaks for a bureaucratic one. Both do their best to present that interest as something else. More than this, however, intermittently throughout the satires the voices of technical expertise are made to confront both, seemingly as exceptions to the warping effects of interest on what is advocated. One bureaucratic fear was that expertise could lead to what Sir Arnold Robinson called ‘the squalid world of professional management’,11 but things are not always what they seem, and appearances are not only deceptive but signs of deception. More specifically, through attention to interest, Jay and Lynn pinpoint a tension between the widely accepted view that ad hominem accusation is invalid, even disreputable, and its political ubiquity as an argumentative move. The other side of precisely the same persuasive coin, however, is broadly the reliance on the authoritative standing of the speaker, having a privileged knowledge, position, office or experience that should carry weight or even entitlement to speak. What is now called identity politics is one expression of this. On either side, the same shift is made from what is said to who says it, to whom, and in what capacity either party is acting.12 In this, there may have been some acknowledgement of the linguistic philosophy of John Austin. But the more pointed question arising from the analysis of words as deeds is qui bono: who benefits from what is being done with them? Attention to interest becomes an explicit encouragement to shift to the ad hominem as a means of unmasking the disingenuous. Thomas Hobbes had commended Cicero for keeping self-seeking in mind (Leviathan, ch. 47), and it is what is actually referred to in Yes Minister as the fourth stage of discreditation in dealing with any troublesome report— cast doubt on the integrity or expertise of the authors, for which, of course, the content does not need to be read.13 The attention to qui bono never escapes Jay and Lynn as they put policies into and out of the mouths of their creations. The prime minister’s ‘Grand Design’ in the early days of  See for example, ‘The Challenge’, dealing with doomed economic expertise, Complete Yes Minister, 300. 12  See especially, ‘The Whisky Priest’. 13  ‘The Greasy Pole’. 11

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Hacker’s prime ministership is presented as nothing more than an interested strategy to stamp his own uncertain authority on his office. It involves his confrontation with a series of experts offering apparently disinterested advice on the defence of the realm, but who also represent, or are accused by each other of representing, established interests that compromise the viability of the policies urged. The fragility and arbitrariness of the difference between the ad hominem and the recognition of authority also draws attention to the shifting uncertainties of political voice, speaking as. Before he becomes prime minister, Hacker is told strictly in confidence of British arms being sold to terrorists, but is expected to breach that confidentiality by taking ministerial action. As his informant, Major Saunders (John Fortune) tells him, ‘You see, now you know personally, even if you don’t know officially, you can use your personal knowledge to start official enquiries to get official confirmation of personal suspicions so that what you now know personally but not officially you will then know officially as well as personally.’ Hacker thinks that after a year in office he understands such language, and that perhaps in a year or so he’ll be talking like that as well. He asks, ‘You’re not related to Sir Humphrey Appleby, are you?’14 Such intricate discrimination is more than an artifice of comic hyperbole, it is an expression of a pervasive aspect of political discourse, evidenced, for example in being told something on or off the record (a plot motif in its own right). As Bernard remarks in an earlier episode exploiting the same duplexity of identity, it’s ‘all a matter of hats’. The President of Buranda is about to arrive wearing his ‘Head of Government hat’ but not his Head of State hat, though he still has to be met by the Crown. But the Head of Government who finally arrives is someone else altogether, for there had been a coup. The new Head of State and Government is Hacker’s university friend Charlie Umtali, who has changed his name to Selim Mohammed as an emblem of an opportunistic assumption of Islamic identity.15

 ‘The Whisky Priest’, 449.  ‘The Official Visit’, 34–5, 41. This apparent trivialization of political identity is also an echo of problems endemic to early modern England, in which the difference between conceptually distinguishing official personae and separating them as if they were different beings caused endless trouble: as a friend Charles I expressed unwavering support for Thomas Wentworth, Earl of Strafford, but as king reluctantly ordered his execution in 1641. John Milton argued that in becoming a tyrant, Charles I had ceased to be a king, only a tyrant was executed in 1649. 14 15

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The tension generated by the need to consider both what is said and to what end by a given persona additionally makes fuller sense of the semiotic sensitivity of the satires, from the unstated importance of wearing the right ties to the problem of erecting a suitable set for a television speech. Throughout, the audience is made aware that words are actions by the staged protagonists, and what they mean can be less significant than to what ends they are used. The play throughout the satires with the very words office, official and officially encapsulates this attention to political voice, the terms signalling the attempts to assert or undermine authority, deflect responsibility or equivocate. After all, in the most general way, the satires dramatize the clash of perceptions of official responsibility, above all the long-established tensions between the offices of counsel and rule. Against this background, the recurring and self-conscious play with language is perhaps the most pronounced aspect of the satires’ intellectualism, and I can now turn to its more specific aspects. Margaret Thatcher’s own rhetorical style is echoed in ‘A Diplomatic Incident’, a satiric reworking of the problems attending the opening of the Channel Tunnel, and again in a sturdy defence of the almost indefensible British sausage (‘The Tangled Web’). Of more sustained thematic importance are the rhetorical styles of the main protagonists. We may not be encouraged to like or trust Sir Humphrey, but his wit and linguistic command are a splendid balance to Hacker’s grandiose mixed metaphors and posturing fustian. Of increasing prominence throughout the satires is the counterpoint between the language of Hacker’s Churchillian delusions, and a single set-piece sentence delivered by Sir Humphrey, as notable for its elaborate and punctilious grammar, syntax and vocabulary as it is for its circumlocutory obfuscations. As Hacker dismissively remarks, ‘some of Sir Humphrey’s sentences are longer than Judge Jeffreys’.16 At these increasingly predictable feats of nevertheless intelligible periphrasis, the audience always reacted. In its response, appreciation, relief and derision could all have been in play: evidence that surprise is not a necessary trigger for laughter. Hacker is frequently uncomprehending, so the laughter might have been at his expense also. Bernard, too, is given an increasingly prominent ‘catch sentence’ rather than catchphrase on the topos of needing to know or not know what is 16  ‘Doing the Honours’; Judge Jeffreys (1645–89) was particularly notorious in the wake of the Monmouth Rebellion (1685) when his sentences were apt to be death ones, so actually quite short. Bernard should have picked this up.

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going on, with similarly predictable laughter at the anticipated utterance. It is, however, more than a jesting motif. It highlights the theme qualifying the common view that knowledge is power, and repeatedly it seems that in ignorance can be safety and in secrecy power. Additionally, Bernard, who is sometimes rendered implausibly naïve as a means of highlighting issues, is also positioned between Appleby and Hacker as a linguistic negotiator and a sort of chorus for the audience on language and its abuse.17 But although occasionally siding with Jim Hacker, he can also be complicit in the idioms indicative of a classical Oxbridge education used to put the ill-Latinate Minister in his place.18 Institutionally speaking, Bernard is awkwardly located between two masters, his own duplexity of voice needing to adjust depending on whose authority is most pressing. He needs, as Hacker reflects, to succeed in the impossible task of being on both sides at once, and is occasionally reduced to just saying ‘um’.19 His interstitial status is thus indicative of wider problems of action and identity, and can be pivotal to the relationships between the principal protagonists. In the final episode, discussed below, he acts almost as a deus ex machina in providing a crucial means of plot resolution. Yet, Sir Humphrey and Jim Hacker can unite to make him strikingly marginal through his language, as when he strays into learned irrelevance when expounding on the translation of Greek into Latin. What begins as a correction to Hacker’s allusion to the Trojan Horse (full of Trojans), gallops off to pull-up only with masculine terminals, the second Greek declension and Greek loan words in Latin. Sir Humphrey and Jim Hacker listen with expressionless civility and then proceed as if he had never spoken.20 He particularly abominates mixed metaphors and pedantically picks them up when (usually) Hacker lets them clang to the floor. As (Sir) Bernard later reflects, ‘Hacker never really learned to conquer his mixed metaphor problem.’21 17  This is made very evident in ‘The Skeleton in the Cupboard’, The Complete Yes Minister, 492, where Hacker states that Bernard’s linguistic quibbles ‘are becoming obsessional’. The context is a doomed attempt to correct Sir Humphrey, who does not (though he might have been about to) misuse ‘recapitulate’. 18  The most sustained play with Latinity is in ‘The National Education Service’; see also ‘The Greasy Pole’, on the crucial absence of the ablative in Greek. 19  ‘The Official Visit’, 38. 20  ‘Bed of Nails’. This is recast in the printed version, which also loses much of its point and wit (430–2). The concerted act of ignoring him generated most of the laughter. If the disquisition counts as a joke, it is a successful one without a punch line or resolution. 21  ‘Doing the Honours’, The Complete Yes Minister, editorial comment, 240.

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The appreciation of dialogic intricacy and sophistication is only possible however, because political discourse is presented as rational, uninterrupted and usually courteous, as I have noted earlier. In this respect, it is less a window onto reality than a display shelf, resembling the unworldly discursive ideal of the Habermasian ‘public sphere’, populated only by rational, informed voices of equal weight. Similar theoretical ideals of political discourse, as remarkably like a well-run philosophy seminar, have been proffered by philosophers such as H.P.  Grice and John Rawls. To be sure, information is certainly not evenly shared, as Habermas’s model requires, and it is less a neutral medium than a resource for combat. But in keeping with the other Habermasian criteria of democratic legitimacy, protagonists listen, debate relevantly on a given issue and can even come to agreement on shared principles of rationality.22 Lying behind the idealization of language use are familiar attitudes powerfully summarized in George Orwell’s 1946 essay, ‘Politics and the English Language.’ Orwell eloquently popularized the dogmas that mixed metaphors are thoughtless, lazy and obscuring; that a Latinate (let alone a Greco-Latinate) vocabulary was pretentious and inappropriate to authentic English, with its plain short words. Further, that in its present corrupted state, political language itself was obscurantist and obscuring, full of euphemism that he condemned as the enemy of thought.23 Rather, political language should be direct, clear, accessible and an honest representation of reality. It leaves little room for discursive action that can vary with political identity and official responsibility. It is a theory that has become embedded as an attitude to language use in politics. It makes a little sense if a (usually unspecified) previous golden age can be taken to have existed as a standard by which the world now fails—and allusions to Thucydides or Shakespeare might serve the turn—but this is to rely on myth.24 The Orwellian image would make most sense if political reality could simply be a point of contrast by which to measure the corruptions of linguistic deviance, but it can’t. That is to posit an incoherent and naïve abstraction, one nevertheless familiar from everyday political discourse in which appeals to reality, in some sense of the word, are pervasive. Orwell 22  Basu, ‘Dialogic Ethics’, 379–83, 385–99, with especial reference to the absence of humour in the Habermasian ideal. 23  Orwell, ‘Politics and the English Language’, 143–57. 24  Similarly, Habermas’s kindred idealized model of a ‘public sphere’ was given sketchy origination in the coffee-house culture of eighteenth-century London, a standard by which capitalist democracy had since failed.

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remains an occasional touchstone for journalistic commentary and an authority for an author like Australian Don Watson, who has also been a political speechwriter.25 Before looking more closely at this broadly Orwellian picture, it should be stressed that the satires under discussion are not mere applications of a theory. Some of the linguistic humour points in a different direction. There is a sustained play throughout the series with the codes of political discourse allowing context of utterance to invert meaning, as Sir Humphrey’s elaborate and attentive courtesy is sometimes calculated rudeness—his addressing Hacker’s political advisor Dorothy Wainwright (Deborah Norton) as ‘Dear Lady’ and his selective mispronunciation of Frank Wiesel’s name being cases in point. There is exploitation of the phatic, especially in Hacker’s attempts to avoid answering questions, or his playing for time when being interviewed on television, or indeed by a young girl for her school magazine.26 The inherently redescriptive nature of political discourse is a frequent motif. At one point verbal reclassification becomes a powerful financial accounting tool.27 There is succinct illustration of the damage done to language by the sort of domino effect that was noted in Chap. 4, of changing one politically inconvenient expression for others, in the (usually futile) hope of escaping the residues of earlier contamination, and with the likely consequence of eroding once clear meanings.28 There is awareness that correct and simple vocabulary can be as misleading as the overblown and pretentious. An enquiry that finds no evidence of an intention to mislead does not exonerate. It has, as Sir Humphrey states, done just that, found no evidence.29 The gap between literality and contextualized expectation is always present. The Japanese aesthetic concept of ma, the crucial tension between line or surface with its surrounding space, has political application. As Jay and Lynn persistently illustrate, understanding both words and the sort of silences around them is imperative, as is the play with the differing capacities in which words might be uttered and understood. Their creating carefully 25  Williams, ‘What Orwell Can Teach Us’; Watson, Death Sentence; see also Billig, Learn to Write Badly, 211–15; Hernándes, ‘Disinformation’, 11–13. 26  ‘Equal Opportunities’. 27  ‘A Real Partnership’. 28  ‘The Official Visit’, 35; on the ‘domino effect’, Bolinger, Language, 74. 29  ‘The Compassionate Society’; just so, the Mueller report of July 2019 did not exonerate President Trump of collusion with Russian interference in the 2016 presidential election, as he claimed. As Robert Mueller insisted, he had simply found no evidence.

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constructed ambiguity to enable equivocation or flexibility of response, or none at all; the importance of what are often unstated implications; the strategic use of aposiopesis, irony and litotes, accentuated by gesture, all touch on important features of political discourse. Ironically, they can only be put before us with such clarity because of the dramatic artificiality of a context of rational communication. The specific insights also sit ill with the Orwellian dogmas about language that the satires also repeatedly rely upon and reinforce. The result is to cast a satirically critical net over the operations of word use in politics.30 A bridging instance lies in the treatment of journalism in the satires. I have noted that Jay and Lynn regard the mass media as part of the system, its interests existing in a symbiotic if sometimes strained relationship with those of the politician and bureaucrat—the strategic leaking of information to stymie policy proposals requires a cooperative press. The BBC cannot be bullied by government, perish the thought, but it will do whatever is required if asked in the right terms, disguising sotto voce threats. The more compliant it becomes, the more loud and uncompromising is the defence of its independence.31 The press is deliberately fed untruths to encourage headlines that enlarge them.32 Hacker, in particular, is preoccupied with his image in the press, but reportage is only satisfactory if it is in his terms and language of self-promotion—that is, if it aids the quest for votes or might bolster his position. Such coverage inevitably amounts to an interested vulgarization of public discourse and the issues of politics, especially in the tabloid press that he courts. By implication the press image that delights and reassures him arises from a dereliction of journalistic responsibility. His complicity makes the mass media a secondary object of satire. Don Watson has since acidly elaborated precisely on this Orwellian point in discussing the press treatment of the Iraq War as dumbing down propaganda for the Pentagon.33 Certainly there are idioms of political language use for which a bracingly Orwellian hostility is j­ ustifiable. Both Orwell and Watson have provided no shortage of telling illustration of something being amiss. As I have noted in a different context (Chap. 7), Jon Stewart of The Daily Show makes a directly analogous case against television news presentation in the United States. And albeit minus the  See Wilson, Politically Speaking, 1990, 45–76, on the centrality of implicature.  ‘The Challenge’. 32  ‘Party Games’. 33  Watson, Death Sentence, 6–7. 30 31

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outrage, Jay and Lynn furnish examples enough of word use of which, at the least, we should be suspicious. The informing theoretical perspective, however, is both naïve and misleading. Thus, to return to Yes Minister’s expression of some of Orwell’s concerns: in such a rich and semantically varied language as English, short simple Anglo-Saxon words are no more authentic than longer Latinate ones. Some Anglo-Saxon words are themselves derived from Greek. The short and simple words may be as subject to confusion and lack of clarity as the multisyllabic. This is a point, as has just been noted, that is deftly capitalized upon by Sir Humphrey, and Hacker certainly understands the dangers of using the simplest of words, like ‘yes’ and ‘no’, even the order in which they might be said.34 The matter of mixed metaphors and what their use shows is also more variable and complex than might be assumed. The very identification of a metaphor can be difficult, since as a translation of a term or expression from one distinct mode of discourse to another it is dependent upon discursive stability. Many modes, however, are persistently changed in relation to each other. Moreover, an extraordinary number of established political terms (consider vote, settlement, candidate and state) have metaphorical origins that may be more than just a matter of etymological curiosity: they may have figurative residues that are exploitable in use. The case of the word government will be touched on below. That metaphors are mixed may indicate nothing more than their effective acclimatization to a realm of discourse—that is, in being so well established that the meanings they carry are clear enough, especially in everyday contexts of use. They are the stuff of cliché, run together to create a general and undemanding picture.35 The more acclimatized metaphors become, the more their potential for generating differing patterns of implication is restricted.36 Thus to rely on them may also be a means of clarification. Indeed, what makes Bernard’s relentless anatomizing of metaphors such a distracting source of amusement is that the discussions he disrupts are perfectly intelligible. It is the intelligibility of blended metaphors that defines his interjections as frivolous.  ‘Writing on the Wall’, 108.  This kind of language is a sub-theme in ‘The Ministerial Broadcast’. It is paraded most obviously through the voice of the exceptionally dim Sir Desmond Glazebrook, a character whose discourse is largely a matter of clichéd mixed metaphor, in ‘Conflict of Interest’ (23 Feb. 1988). 36  Wilson, Politically Speaking, 115–16. 34 35

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Moreover, clichéd discourse with mixed metaphors bordering on the emptiness of the phatic is nevertheless vital in the political processes of reassurance, a crucial dimension of language use beyond Orwell’s horizon of interest. In a prejudicial fashion Jay and Lynn acknowledge this by what is called the law of Inverse Relevance: the less you intend to do the more you need to talk.37 Both Sir Humphrey and Jim Hacker are used to personify the maxim. But such complex language functions are often difficult to dramatize other than for critically comic effect, or they are easily overlooked or condemned in the reductive idealizations of political language as the rational unearthing of the truth, or the business of labelling reality clearly and properly. Political argument is easily fantasized as the philosophical seminar writ large—Orwell is in good company with Rawls and Habermas. It might also be asked, if it is necessary to adjust political rhetoric to its audience (as Francis Bacon and others have insisted),38 and if audiences are heterogeneous (a common feature of democratic society), why should mixing metaphors be an exception to the imperative of flexibility? Insofar as political discourse does need to be malleable, clarity and precision can actually be counterproductive, and their avoidance is not always reducible to the sort of protective obfuscation on which the satires concentrate. General terms do not need to be fixed in their reference or definitions for them to be useful.39 Put in Aristotelian terms, when the audience is large and unknown, it may be necessary to paint with a broad brush.40 So, within the confines of the rough tones and outlines provided, the audience might add its own colours and details, applying generalities that operate as modal qualifiers, so facilitating the formulation of issues with some hope of resolution, reassurance or displacement. The space the general term creates for application or engagement is another aspect of political ma, as is the trope of paralipsis, the announced failure of words to convey anything precise. This may be signalled by the laughter of wonder

37  ‘Open Government’, Compete Yes Minister, 21. Margaret Thatcher once apparently remarked that politicians were often obliged to talk when they had nothing to say. 38  Bacon, The Advancement of Learning, ‘Rhetoric’, 212. 39  Wittgenstein, Philosophical Investigations, 79; Gunnell, Conventional Realism, 124. 40  Aristotle, Rhetoric, 1414a, 5; the term used is the beautiful σκιαγραφια, a rough sketch, painting only in light and shade.

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and inviting the audience to do better.41 The systematic avoidance of specific party names in Yes Minister and Prime Minister illustrates the functioning of generalities in a way quite at odds with the broadly Orwellian prejudice that presumes the virtues of specificity, and as noted in the previous chapter, it was Jay and Lynn’s studied refusal to use any personal pronouns for the prime minister (until he was dead; ‘Party Games’) that allowed Margaret Thatcher to identify herself as that source of fear and hope. The case of euphemism, Orwell’s enemy of thought, is perhaps the best example of how misleading acceptance of his dogmas can be. Certainly, euphemism is often less than straightforward. It provides an important theme in the satires, for it exemplifies the play with appearance and reality. To identify a euphemism or equally a dysphemism requires a standard of truth or reality by which to measure deviation. To claim that something is euphemistic is to assert that the right words for things and situations are being avoided. Euphemism is thus a putative designation and an accusation. It is a token of an accuser’s commitment to how a given state of affairs should be understood with an ad hominem undercurrent—why, and in whose interest is avoidance necessary? It is this sort of situation that Jay and Lynn persistently put before us: ‘courageous decisions’ are really stupid ones; to ‘think carefully about’ means don’t do it; to ‘hush-up’ is to suppress; ‘responsible discretion’ is a cover-up; ‘diplomacy’ is appalling cynicism42; ‘morally manoeuvrable’ is untrustworthy; a ‘sound man for an enquiry’ really means bent; ‘meticulous scrutiny’ means a façade.43 For bribery, Sir Humphrey favours not ‘slush fund’ or references to brown paper bags but ‘creative negotiation’ or ‘uncontracted prepayments’: there is even a scale of

41  Toulmin, The Uses of Argument, on criteria for use and application, 30, 36, 101–2; paralipsis is closely related to aposiopesis, the pointed incompletion of a statement. On the strategic importance of paralipsis, Fitzmaurice, Humanism and America, 122–6; the Chorus in Shakespeare’s Henry V also provides an example in admitting that the reality of warfare in France cannot be conjured onto the stage, and as in other plays, the audience is invited to make creative amends through its own engagement. 42  ‘Writing on the Wall’; ‘The Need to Know’. 43  ‘The Compassionate Society’; ‘The Death List’ (9 March 1981); for a related list with translations, ‘Writing on the Wall’; ‘The Whiskey Priest’; Kamm, ‘Capable Servants’, 122 for further examples.

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euphemism calibrated to the amount of money involved.44 Once Hacker becomes prime minister, cooperation becomes obedience.45 We know what is happening in a given episode, so its plot provides a self-contained world and thus the standard by which to decode. The difficult work is done for us, thus like Orwell, we can take for granted the yardstick of authenticity by which to condemn degrees of departure and insist on precision. Even if we accept this, we are presented not with lack of thought but devious thinking. But this whole line of critique can be quite question-begging and at odds with language use in genuine political dispute. Where euphemism is agreed to be obvious, it is obviously ineffective and likely to be subject to a domino effect, as in Pentagon-speak of body counts, body bags and degrading, of cratering, collateral damage and friendly fire. Ineptitude in squirming away from the taboo of mentioning death and destruction can be risible, insulting or approach obscenity, like the uncontrolled flight into the ground: don’t use the word crash. Such extreme cases, however, deflect from the important point that euphemism in politics is likely to be more nuanced, signalling a clash of perspectives, each needing a suitably persuasive vocabulary of redescription. This may require, as it were, a vertical shift into a realm of more general and anodyne vocabulary, or a horizontal one that reconfigures the terms of debate. Appeals to reality, for example, or to the real issues, are rarely ontologically serious and are themselves arguably euphemistic. Indeed, they are usually indications that another’s vocabulary of persuasion should be rejected in favour of one’s own, its priorities (the appeal to reality) and its formulated issues (the real ones, naturally). In practice, where it is politically important, the euphemistic or dysphemistic signify contentiousness. We want spades to be called spades only when we are doing the digging. To mix metaphors, by stacking the cards for comic purposes, the satires play with and seem to endorse simplistic misunderstandings of political argument.46 And the effect may well be to help reinforce them, as when Sir Humphrey praises Hacker: ‘You’re normally so

 ‘The Moral Dimension’, The Complete Yes Minister, 412, 415.  ‘The Smoke Screen’ (23 Jan. 1986); this at least is authentically Churchillian, as Churchill acknowledged; see Brendon, Winston Churchill, 143. 46  It has been drawn to my attention that in a favourable review of the book in which I first discussed the Yes Minister satires, I was said to have nuanced Orwell’s theories of language— presumably in the sense that a vegan might nuance the offer of a plate of boiled beef; Jeanne Methieu-Lessard, in The European Journal of Humour Research 7, 2 (2019), 153–7, at 156. 44 45

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good at blurring the issue.’47 In its dramatic context, the issue is a rock of clarity in a sea of evasion. In practice, however, and beyond the television screen, just what is the issue can be precisely the issue. Establishing its nature is a persuasive battle half won with the weapons of a suitably selected and adjusted vocabulary. The accusation of euphemism is intrinsic to the process.

II By way of concluding these last two chapters, I want to address the manner in which the satires themselves end. This returns us to the centrality of equilibrium in public-choice theory but from a rather different theoretical perspective. Although the series as a whole has a chronological integrity, and specific issues may rumble on for several episodes (such as the prime minister’s ‘Grand Design’), nevertheless, the central theme of the nature of the political system remains unchanged. In this way, the narrative structure is directionless, as it is in many situation comedies. As I noted in the previous chapter, every episode ends with the world much as it was at the beginning. Superficially, this absence of a meta-narrative might encourage the notion that despite their highly structured nature, they are examples of postmodern political satire.48 More plausibly, the image or theory of politics displayed by the writers is at one with the scepticism presented by Michael Oakeshott, in his controversial vision of political activity as having no ultimate purpose. It was an activity, he argued, which amounted to nothing more than keeping things going, albeit in the pursuit of short-­ term enterprises that might even be mistaken for some overriding purpose.49 As he wrote in his inaugural lecture at the LSE in 1951 (Hacker is of the right age to have missed the occasion), politics is an activity like being in a boat on ‘a boundless and bottomless sea’ in which there is no harbour, ultimate destination or anchorage. ‘The enterprise is to keep afloat on an even keel …. A depressing doctrine, it will be said.’50 Oakeshott’s  ‘A Question of Loyalty’, The Complete Yes Minister, 331.  Caron, ‘Quantum Paradox’, for the notion of postmodern satire as rejecting meta-­ narrative, at length and 153–4; paradoxes are, however, easily created by insufficiently examined dichotomies. To posit this as a postmodern epoch may be to confuse the dominant characteristics of an age with the currency of a multivalent largely academic buzz-word. 49  Handelsmann, ‘Satiric Dimension’, refers to this as the politics of indeterminacy, 64–6. 50  Oakeshott, ‘Political Education’, 111–36, esp. 127. 47 48

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self-­consciously figurative amplification of the metaphor of helmsmanship from which the word government (κυβερνητες) stems is drawn from Plato’s Republic (488–9). Ship-of-state imagery is now commonplace and clichéd,51 but it had been transmitted via writers like George Savile (1633–95) in an interesting, even subversive way. For Savile the art of government was not a matter of the specialized theoretical expertise of the navigator who steers the ship in the direction of its destination, as Plato had urged. It was a matter of the practical art of trimming sales in a little boat in order to stay afloat.52 Savile was responding to the accusation that he was morally manoeuvrable, a ‘trimmer’, in the parlance of the time. In turning the critical imagery to his own advantage, he had nevertheless insisted on the presence of what he felicitously referred to as fixed spires, the love of God and country. By these, rather than by arcane knowledge of the stars, the little boat is navigated. Oakeshott, however, does not even recognize such reassuring landmarks of moral constancy. The sea is as boundless as it is deep, it shows not a vestige of land.53 His world is very much like Sir Humphrey’s of means rather than ends, without any sense of an overall directive purpose.54 It is doctrine that Hacker found more than ‘depressing’. As with Oakeshott’s critics, such a vision was abhorrent: Hacker clings to the view that there must be some point to political activity, some good end. Evils, such as concentration camps, are to be rejected on principle. By seeing only means, Humphrey will go to hell, to which the bureaucrat suavely replies, ‘Minister, I had no idea you had a theological bent.’55 The outrage in that episode is partly because Hacker feels persistently compromised and that, as he bemoans to his wife Annie, he is ‘no different from Humphrey and all that lot in Whitehall’; and indeed, his language use becomes at times remarkably close to Sir Humphrey’s—as he had feared it might. Annie, however, disagrees. As she comforts him over a dram, he’s really a sort of whisky priest. Unlike Sir Humphrey, he still knows what is  In ‘The Bed of Nails’ it is said to be the only ship that leaks from the top.  Savile, The Character of a Trimmer, 48–9. But metaphors of storms, sailing and helmsmanship constituted a common pattern of imagery for politics by the late seventeenth century. 53  Oakeshott was certainly familiar with Savile’s Character of a Trimmer, and may also have been more playfully alluding to the Bellman’s map of the sea in Lewis Carroll’s The Hunting of the Snark (1876). 54  See for example, ‘The Whisky Priest’. 55  ‘The Whisky Priest’, 455. 51 52

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right but only occasionally acts on it. For her there are the landmarks of right and wrong by which to navigate with a conscience. Hacker might still just be in sight of them. He comes, however, to accept Sir Humphrey’s position as the reality, in an epiphany that is a little like Winston’s coming to love Big Brother in Orwell’s 1984.56 In vino, veritas, Hacker has already said to Annie that ‘Government is about principle. And the principle is: don’t rock the boat … [or] all the little consciences will fall out.’57 The Oakeshottian keel, as it were, must be kept roughly in equilibrium, providing the necessary precondition that allows the cast of characters to keep on carrying on.58 It might seem, then, that the satires just stop.59 Certainly the ending is rather different from that other satiric exploration of entrapped survival, Blackadder IV, with its unexpected shift from comedy to disturbing verisimilitude—the frozen frame of the main protagonists finally going ‘over the top’ in the First World War. In Jay and Lynn’s satires, even where the episodes do not conclude with the same ritualized affirmative, ‘Yes Prime/ Minister’, there is at least an implicit acceptance of a fait accompli. Usually, tacit or express agreement is established with what the civil servants want, or are prepared to accept while allowing the minister the illusion of authority in directing them—a system of sotto governo. Occasionally, the concluding agreement amounts to a small victory for the politician and there is even the odd joint triumph, or trade-off. Regardless of these permutations on the force of ‘Yes’, appreciating the language leading to and facilitating the terminating affirmation is a very large part of what the satires are about. As I have suggested (Chap. 8), it is the implicit reaffirmation of a status quo in which survival requires tainted complicity, even in the acceptance of euphemistic language. Hacker himself comes to fear making a courageous decision.60 For a variety of reasons, the authors may have decided to call it a day, but the satires do not, as I had previously accepted, just stop. In the final episode there is an intimation of perpetual Oakeshottian entrapment in a cycle. Such a possibility had been aired, even foreshadowed much earlier in related ways. Politicians are said to need activity as a substitute for doing  Handelsmann, ‘Satiric Dimension’, 65.  ‘The Whisky Priest’, The Complete Yes Minister, 467, 468. 58  The theme is repeated in The Complete Yes Prime Minister, 488. 59  Handelsmann, ‘Satiric Dimension’, 65. 60  For example, as prime minister in ‘The Grand Design’. 56 57

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anything, administration is dismissed as pointless and directionless, and government is referred to as an activity that just goes round in circles.61 At the conclusion of the last series, the main characters are all as usual entangled in deceit. The themes directly echo those of the very first episode of Yes Minister that began with Hacker’s nervously awaiting a call to join the Cabinet of the un-named prime minister. The mechanism of plot resolution also returns to the beginning of Jim Hacker’s prime ministership, which itself recalls the visual jokes about answering the telephone from the initial episode. Hacker became prime minister because a complicit civil servant, Sir Humphrey Appleby, desirous of an idiot in the job, provided him with the evidence he needed to blackmail his competitors for the office. In the final episode, however, it is Bernard, the rising mandarin still trapped between his masters, who gives Hacker the incriminating tapes of a disastrously indiscrete radio interview by Sir Humphrey. Hacker uses this to blackmail Humphrey into covering up his own politically damaging statements. After being given the spooled tape, he raises it towards the camera and kisses it in relief and joy. In ancient Greece, the circle symbolized completeness, a τελος or end in itself, or a return. It is the symbolism expressed in crowns and wedding rings. So, at the risk of falling foul of a heffalumpian theory trap, we can see the reel of recorded words held before the camera as encapsulating the inescapable and unending verbal game in which Hacker is involved, pushing the same round boulder up the same steep hill of plausibility. For the moment, Sisyphus is happy, and Bernard has ensured his own continued entrapment between a rock and a hard place. This presents a view of the political strikingly different from the more familiar rhetorics of political promotion in which words like progress and vision loom large, and in which the appeals to principle and morality and pleas to be allowed to solve the problem or finish the job are the routine stuff by which politicians, even in Hacker’s idiom, hope to gain or maintain office. I suspect that those most tempted to see the satires as a window onto the inherent nature of the arcana imperii would reject the philosophical vision that seems to inform them, and results in an unlikely coincidence with a largely American body of quasi-economic political science, a species of writing Oakeshott was apt to dismiss with amused irony. Without a theoretically unalloyed standard by which to measure, it is difficult to assess the putative reality of the satires. With the exception of the play with  See for example, ‘Equal Opportunities’; ‘A Skeleton in the Cupboard’.

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ordinary political language use, such a standard is probably beyond sure grasp. Yet, commending the satires in such terms may be a confused way of paying tribute to their rhetorical power, capacity to reinforce prejudice and their entertainment value. What studying them does suggest, however, is that a firm distinction between satire and politics can be misleading, and also that, as Keynes intimated, the very distinction between theory and practice can be unclear and artificial. Sir Humphrey makes much of the virtues of obscuring the truth: obscuring conceptual differences that we might take for granted may take us closer to it than we are accustomed to think.

CHAPTER 10

Conclusion

I In 1935 Stephen Leacock looked forward to the day when humour would be taught in universities. He had in mind both understanding and training.1 Such duality of purpose still haunts the study of humour. Yet, however humour might ease our way in the world, it is intellectual stimulation, not celebration that provides the fitting passport to academia. Admission depends upon a subject matter being established for which an encompassing abstraction humour is a necessary condition. This may be obvious enough but it has attendant problems, for in the world around us we do not confront humour per se, we see a more specific dimension of all sorts of activities, happenings and situations. To understand this much presupposes reliance upon a concept of humour, irrespective of its more precise content, and irrespective also of whether we take the humour as deliberately expressed or purely circumstantial. That from which humour is taken to arise is thus a necessary if partial context for exploration, invention or appreciation. Indeed, the difficulties of studying humour in general may be the price paid for how the linguistic abstraction helps us see the world. This is to accept that there is no sharp decisive line between the facticity of humour and our comprehending it, for humour can always 1  Leacock, Humour, 174, 184; Chapman and Foot, It’s A Funny Thing, did much to announce the scope in a compendious collection.

© The Author(s), under exclusive license to Springer Nature Switzerland AG 2023 C. Condren, Between Laughter and Satire, https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-031-21739-5_10

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be understood differently. More specifically, if that understanding is historical, an attention to mutability is entailed. It does not make things easier. Indeed, an obvious casualty may be an acceptably general theory of humour. If humour is best seen as an unstable classifier, an umbrella term under which a contingent variety of phenomena may get some shelter, then it is difficult to see how we can ever be assured that to cover all possibilities a general theory does not become a triumph in vacuity. As the study of humour is interdisciplinary, any such theory is likely to be generated from within a given discipline with its distinctive preoccupations and conventions. This suggests that universal acceptance would be unlikely, its promotion probably perceived as an expression of intellectual imperialism. Any imponderables about the range and nature of the phenomena we recognize as humorous are exacerbated in the almost natural shift from working with the abstraction to giving it agency, and severing it from the diversity of its everyday moorings. According to Michael Billig, this long-­ standing propensity to nominalization is now a prominent feature of academic discourse, especially in the humanities and social sciences.2 Their output can be uncomfortably reminiscent of Swift’s floating Isle of Laputa—the homeland of the Rylean category-mistake (Chap. 3). It is in this context in particular that the falsifications of a genealogy are important, helping to solidify the very idea of humour in a distant past as an independent object of continued speculation. Modern academic study thus has its legitimacy furnished by being part of a concocted tradition. The vocabulary gathered under the auspices of humour is also hardly immune to hypostatization. Satire in particular has commonly been treated as an independent actor in the world, with an anticipated role: satire should do this and not that, it might fail to do something else; and it might thrive under some circumstances and not under others; it might transmogrify into propaganda. Comedy similarly is easily reified as a cohesive transcultural phenomenon, making the identification of humour in antiquity seem plausible. Academic shorthand, convenient and helpful as it can be, often ends up sounding like Hegelian metaphysics or Reformation demonology. As I have suggested, part of the trickiness of comprehending humour lies in the temporal and conceptual instability of its associated vocabulary (Chaps. 4 and 6). Words like wit and satire help sustain the fluidity that keeps humour in touch with its figurative origins in liquidity, while irony can add an undercurrent of uncertainty as to how far the wetlands of 2

 Billig, Learn to Write Badly, e.g. 115–37.

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humour might spread. Overall, this uncertain notion encourages easy generalizations, most of which are likely to be half-truths. Yet if the effect of this study has rendered humour more troublesome than we would sometimes like to think and less reliably informative than we might wish to claim, it has also been concerned to use the difficulties of dealing with humour to help explore other issues. Translation, an inherently complicated notion, is arguably at its most problematic when humour is the focus of attention. Conveying it may be difficult or impossible, but inventing it in the name of translation has sometimes seemed necessary (Chap. 5). What amounts to a translation can become moot. So too with humour and the limits of inferential plausibility: nothing illustrates better the multivalence of hypothesized intentionality than suspicions of humour in the evidence, suspicions that concomitantly reveal the porosity of historical contextualization. Humour pointedly illustrates the problematic nature of one of the preconditions of a plausible historical narrative—the matter of establishing the right context (Chap. 4). In relative contrast to humour, the concept of laughter has a stability afforded by its reference to a physiological reaction. Any history it has principally concerns what flows around it: changing stimulants, restrictions, reactions, functions, styles of analysis and explanation. Be these social, political, psychological, medical or chemical, they confront a natural phenomenon disruptive of the rhythms of respiration and subject to the physical laws of waves and vibrations. Laughter is recognized universally and all languages, apparently, have words for it. Humour has no such physiological anchorage or semantic ubiquity, and to tie it to laughter’s stabilizing facticity has been a means by which humour as a cohesive subject matter has been created, and long histories of it spirited from the ether. To recall Wei He Xu’s simile (Chap. 3), like trees, humour existed before its labels. Thus, in the name of the tree, we distort the shape of the wood. The analogy, in short, encapsulates the categorial error central to the genealogy with which I began.3 To merge the materiality of trees or laughter with the more fluid intellectual notion of humour, has also stimulated portentous but quite nugatory global questions about humour’s role and function in society, converting it from a complex, malleable classification of contingent origination, variable content and use to something of almost woody solidity, its shadow cast long, under which philosophers of yore could sit and contemplate. Even if we grant that humour is now 3

 Xu, ‘Classical Confucian Concepts’, 49.

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universal in some form, or is naturally treated as such by psychologists, this has not always been so. It is only, for example, by taking humour’s universality for granted that we are able to conclude that laughing and smiling are by degrees expressions of humour. Dispense with that presumption and we can see that they could be oppositional, and regarded as arising from quite different passions (Chap. 2). And there remains the lingering problem that what are now taken as manifestations of the universal are not always mutually recognizable or directly translatable between cultures. Such localized opacity makes for a universality that still needs explaining, or requires reliance on an overly accommodating understanding of translation. The conflation of laughter with humour has helped serve the turn. Yet, as I have urged, humour and its theory have histories that intersect with, but must qualitatively be unlike, those of laughter, or indeed, trees. As Stuart Tave has cogently argued, in being transformed from a risible lunatic to an approachable comic figure of fun and jollity, the humourist personified and helped carry notions of benign humour into the modern world. The emergence, however, of humour as a valuable notion was neither as easy nor automatic as we, in taking it for granted, might think. Words brought under its auspices, such as burlesque, wit, ribaldry, merriness and raillery, had established uses that may have inhibited a need to rely on it. One possible explanation for its gradual establishment lay in the need to qualify and domesticate the violence associated with laughter. The burden of humour’s development and acceptance, however, was carried by more than the amiable humourists of the novel or the stage. Shaftsbury’s attempt to reform the philosophic persona made humour and the tropes it could subsume integral to the responsibilities of the sage, to seek truth, virtue and encourage sociability. The philosopher had a sibling in an idealized political animal characterized by politeness, rationality and human sympathy. Here too, in England humour became a moral emollient to counter the return of a nightmare past of violent and destructive enthusiasm. Yet for a concept of a sense of humour to be established, the meaning of the word sense had also to be reliably extended from the physiological to the passional or psychological. This was at least encouraged by exploration of the implications of Locke’s Human Understanding, all forms of which he held were derived from the senses. Counter-affirmations of innate capacities easily led to the metaphorical designation of them as senses, such as Gerard’s postulated sense of aesthetic taste. In such processes of conceptual reconfiguration, a sense of humour appears to have

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come late. By the time it was formulated and advertised in the nineteenth century, and Thackeray was celebrating it in America, humour was a mark of true humanity. Delineated by the negative neologism of the humourless, it was exported from the English language and changed in the process. As a corollary, humour could enrich the persona of the politician, from Robert Walpole and his generous wit, his preparedness to sit in a theatre while being satirized, to Harold Macmillan suffering in silence behind his programme, and to Margaret Thatcher performing her persona from her own script on stage as the prime minister. For Herbert Asquith only a sense of humour saved Teddy Roosevelt from abject mediocrity. In such company the satirist too has been domesticated, from occupying the lonely, lofty and self-appointed office of moral censor who might use the provocation of laughter as a weapon, or laugh to express scorn or disgust, to the popular entertainer with a point to make, but who above all must be seen to be trying to amuse us. But from Aristotle’s analysis of comedy as a religiously based contrast to tragic theatre, there has always been a more or less overt emphasis on moral responsibility in the provocation of laughter and the casuistic rationalizations that came with it. If older pronouncements about the social significance and moral authority of the satirist can now sound a little self-serving and hollow, it may be that the cutting edge of rhetorical laughter has gradually been dulled. As I have indicated, during the seventeenth and eighteenth centuries people were dependent upon social credit and a good name in ways that made them vulnerable to ridicule and scorn, but even for this period in which satire was so prominent in word and image, it remains difficult to generalize about its political functions and effectiveness in shaming. “All Satyr’s Vain, and ’tis the Poet’s Curse, / To be Despis’d, and have an Empty Purse.”4 The most, for example, that can be said for certain of the ‘Rump’ broadsides is that they voiced encouragement for the restoration of the monarchy in 1660. In the modern world it is usually even harder to draw confident conclusions about the effectiveness of satire, or more fundamentally to isolate criteria by which effectiveness might be judged. Despite the occasional eruption of violence as a response to satire, the notion that satire is a courageous attempt to correct and reform is decidedly simplistic. Derived from accepting satiric self-justification, its value might be only in legitimating the satirist as a sort of moral physician. Beyond that, success might 4

 Ward, Satyr, 7, lines 115–16.

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need to be construed with the benefit of highly selective hindsight, and so much weight can be placed on the value of isolated anecdote.5 Peter Cook apparently once commended the brilliant satire of Weimar Germany for stopping the rise of Hitler, which was to presuppose a specific rationale by which satire had failed. It would be difficult to think of a United States president more subject to satirical scorn and comic derision than Donald Trump, but to what effect?6 On the one hand, the satirists who fed off him might be dismissed as only preaching to the converted. Yet, on the other, such a consolidating function might have been consoling and helped concentrate political energy. The satirist and often enough the satiric comedian as the voice of the herd might help maintain social cohesion by solidifying doctrinal differences, but even if such achievements could be shown, they would hardly have impressed Pope who saw his satiric duty as purging the herd by cutting the animals from it—the satirist less as physician than cowboy. If one difference in what might be achieved now through satire is a function of the changing salience of reputation and the uncertain effectiveness of shaming, another is certainly the variability of what we classify as satire. It can be little different from comic entertainment. It is so easy to end up at cross-purposes without any clear criteria of assessment: the English ‘satire boom’ of the 1960s was a time when the word was attached to humour in so many ways that it could mean almost anything and nothing, and might be avoided by those we think of as satirists. The arbitrary restriction of satire to exposing those in power has hardly aided understanding. There is some continuity in the laughter with which satire and comedy are associated, but it remains Janus-like, uncertainly benign and hurtful, innocent and aggressive. The only sculpture currently attributed to Leonardo is of an enigmatically smiling Mary and a laughing baby Jesus. This can be read as the chuckling face of innocence or as a foretaste of the combative rectitude of the Messiah who, according to all four Synoptic Gospels, would scourge the Temple violently enough, casting out dealers and animals and overthrowing tables and chairs.7 It was no laughing matter, but then, the adult Jesus allegedly never laughed. Yet if satire was any statement of stern rebuke, as it could be defined in the eighteenth century, 5  Phiddian, ‘Have They No Shame?’, 258–9; Rosen, ‘Efficacy and Meaning’, for a general discussion of the difficulties in assessing satiric success. 6  Phiddian, ‘Have They No Shame?’, 251–3; Satire, 11–13. 7  Matt. 21:12–17; Mark 11:15–19; Luke 19:45–8; John 2:13–16.

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he had his moments. If laughter were only innocent, positive and encouraging, expressive of a commendable sociable humanity, there would be no jokes in bad taste or beyond the limits of the acceptable. There would be no critical weight to joking and laughing either. It might even be said that satiric laughter is worth defending only if it causes offence. That was, after all, its point as a means of shaming and exposing, for the divergent ends of purification, punishment and revenge—perish the thought that these might also be seen as vindictive, slanderous, moralistic bullying. In different ways I have focused most on the conceptual instability of classification to which the continuity of laughter is variably related. The rough and tumble of the contentious use of words like satire easily enough damages or transforms a classification. Others may be altered by having to accommodate new phenomena, as the recognition that the duck-billed platypus was not a hoax jolted and enlarged the classification of the mammalian. But with humour there is, as it were, an incubus of conceptual destabilization that ensures mutability and uncertainty of range, a point I have illustrated by occasional reference to non-linguistic humour and to languages beyond the European. It has long been a commonplace that much humour depends upon the unexpected, the element of surprise to which (among others) Hobbes drew attention in discussing laughter. The point here is that the attempts to amuse through surprise, to play with and highlight incongruities, can extend to the categories we presuppose and use to isolate and organize the world of humour itself. Classification can become a challenge and its subversion a goal. Such innovating reflexivity can thus alter the very notion of humour on which we rely to understand what is going on. Certainly, lack of surprise and incongruity may be made humorous. In antiquity Lucian stretched the scope of the philosophical dialogue by, as he put it, making it laugh. This was to compromise any exclusive domain of the serious and its reliability in helping delineate what would eventually be called humour. Ben Jonson isolated the potential for destabilizing the comic in Volpone. So too, John Gay self-consciously undercut established categories with The What D’Ye Call It, his tragicomic pastoral farce. Sterne reconfigured the idea of the comic novel. The Marx brothers did something similar with the surrealistic potential of the film, the Goons with the radio drama, the Pythons with the predictable arc of the television sketch, The Daily Show with the formulaic presentation of the television news. The Yes Minister satires frequently exploited the entirely predictable.

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What are loosely called social taboos, aspects of life considered unfitting for humour, and so providing it with and highlighting some delineating point of contrast, or principle of decorum, also shift and help differentiate societies and groups within them. Scatological humour became broadly unacceptable in the nineteenth century, as it had not been beforehand. The Greeks, who, as the adage has it, had a word for everything, had none for humour or obscenity, so the lines between the permissible and unacceptable had to be drawn and tested differently. Yet once armed with some notion of humour, clear boundaries may be subverted through its exercise. Embarrassment has long been an established means of generating humour at the expense of stage or screen characters but has gradually been extended to make an audience share the discomfort. For some this comedy of cringe is recognizable as humour, for others it simply is not, and so in another way the range of humour is made variable. That is, those phenomena that we, like Euthythro, might point to in order to help show what we mean by a general term can become less than decisive. In all such cases, as I noted more broadly in Chap. 7, we find that for those working self-consciously within a tradition of activity, its conventions are at once a constraint, a resource and sometimes a provocation providing an occasion to be seized. Defining notions might be rendered mutable or negotiable from within by parody, distortion, tombeau or even satiric critique that together sustain a process of change in continuity. Such transformative reflexivity is hardly unique to humour, but if awareness of it requires that we tread with caution, it gives reason enough for taking humour seriously. Understanding it exemplifies what should be central to academic life, not the relevant and familiar but the difficult.

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Index1

A Academic vocabulary, 65–66, 151 Addison, Joseph, 22, 28, 30, 31, 34–36, 69, 72, 75, 94, 97, 108, 112 All Fools Day, 84 Allport, Gordon, 38 Aposiopesis, 136, 190 Arbuthnot, John, 99–100, 139, 148, 176 Aristophanes, 91, 111, 119–120 Aristotle, 9–13, 15, 29, 56, 59, 102, 122, 131, 137, 192, 205 Artemus Ward (Charles Farrer Browne), 79 Askew, Anne, 99 Asquith, H.H., 38 Attardo, Salvatore, 13, 50, 53, 56, 58, 69, 136 Austen, Jane, 36, 113, 136 Austin, John, 181, 184

B Bacon, Sir Francis, 104–105 Bailey, Nicholas, 114, 115, 121 Bakhtin, Mikhail, 20, 127 Barnes, John, 183 Bergson, Henri, 39, 59 Bierce, Ambrose, 148 Billig, Michael, 51, 59, 202 Birch, A.H., 176–177 Blackadder, 137, 197 Blackmore, Sir Richard, 74–75 Blanchard, Scott, 126 Boethius, 127 Borgia, Cesare, 135, 136 Bourdieu, Pierre, 152 Brennan, Geoff, 167 Bridges, Thomas, 92–94 BBC, 153–154, 190 Browne, Sir Thomas, 15, 16, 24, 32, 131, 132 Burckhardt, Jacob, 144

1  Note: Footnotes have not been indexed; passing and anaphoric references have been minimized.

© The Author(s), under exclusive license to Springer Nature Switzerland AG 2023 C. Condren, Between Laughter and Satire, https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-031-21739-5

233

234 

INDEX

Burrows, Hannah, 49 Butler, Samuel, 133 C Carroll, Lewis, 101–102 Casaubon, Isaac, 118 Castelveltro, Ludovico, 63, 104 Castiglione, Baldassare, 73 Category-mistakes, 51, 55–56, 202 Cavendish, Margaret, Duchess of Newcastle, 27, 105, 106 Cavendish William, Duke of Newcastle, 25–26, 104, 106 Cerne Abbas Giant (Dorset), 124 Chapman, George, 23, 88, 91 Chaucer, Geoffrey, 21–23 Chesterfield, Lord, Philip Stanhope, 17 Chiaro, Delia, 52 Civil Service, see Yes Minister/Yes Prime Minister Coleridge, Samuel Taylor, 52, 63 Conceptualisation, 9, 46, 49–50, 54–56 See also Definition Congreve, William, 27–29 Connolly, William, 128 Contextualisation, 76–81, 83–84, 104, 108 Cowley, Abraham, 131 Crews, Frederick, 152 Cromwell, Oliver, 116, 124 D Dante, Alighieri, 112 Definition, 111–148 application of, 137–138 by conceptual range, 122–125 criteria for, 120, 121, 129 Dictionary, 31, 114–116 family resemblance (characterization), 50–51

by genre, 141–146 implicit, 145 by origin, 118–120 real and nominal, 120–121 rhetorical and satiric, 146–148 by semantic relationships, 131–132 See also Semantic and associational fields Defoe, Daniel, 100 Delight, 17–18, 30 Domino effect, 75, 189, 194 Derrida, Jacques, 118 De Smet, Ingrid, 127–128 Dilthey, Wilhelm, 76 Donoughue, Lord Bernard, 161 Dryden, John, 27, 30, 72, 112, 135 E Eagleton, Terry, 59, 65 Eco, Umberto, 47 Erasmus, Desiderius, 108 England, seventeenth century, instability of, 33–34 Evelyn, John, 25, 116, 140–141 F Falstaff, Sir John, 17–18, 71, 183 Farquhar, George, 29 Fo, Dario, 77 Fonsecca, Rui Carlos, 88 Fowler, Alistair, 143–144 Friedman, Milton, 165, 167, 171, 176 Frye, Northrop, 125, 141, 144 G Gallie, W.B., 81, 128 Gay, John, 143, 156 Genealogy /historicity, 56–60, 64–68, 70–71, 76 Gerard, Alexander, 36, 62, 74

 INDEX 

Ghose, Indira, 9, 95 Gifford, Paul, 38 Glasgow, Rupert, 53 Goddard, Cliff, 48 Gunnell, John, 181 H Habermas, Jürgen, 188 Hall, Arthur, 86–88 Hall, Joseph, 136 Harley, Sir Robert, Earl of Oxford, 173 Haydn, Joseph, 80 Heartfield, John, 95 Hegel, G.W.F., 58, 132 Heidegger, Martin, 53 Heinsius, Daniel, 119 Hempelman, Christian, 118 Hitler, Adolf, 95, 156 Hobbes, Thomas, 34–35, 56, 58–65, 86, 89–95, 103–108, 184 Holles, Denzil, 124 Hone, William, 133 Horace, 111, 118, 120 Hugo, Victor, 133 Humoral theory, 23–25 Humorist, 24, 29, 31, 36–37, 204 Humour and its conceptualization, 7, 14, 22–29, 41–66, 207–208 as loan word, 38–39, 41–45 and merriment, 10, 13, 17, 22, 24 sense of 8, 36–39 serio-ludere/ play-frame, 77–78, 135, 184 and smiling, 7, 9, 16, 17, 49 universality (putative), 7–14, 46–56 as unstable classifier/covering term, 48–54, 145, 202–203, 208 See also Laughter; Satire Humour studies, 3–4, 8, 58–60, 65–66, 78–80, 88–90

235

contemporary theories in, 12–13, 59–60, 70–71, 75–79 Hunter, Ian, 66 Hutcheson, Francis, 28, 32, 35 I Iannucci, Armando, 171–172 Innovation, 74, 104–105 Inoue, Tetsujiro, 43 Intentionality, 81–84, 122 Interest theory, 165–174, 184–185 Irony, 11, 28, 44, 45, 111, 112, 136, 141, 146 J James, William, 123 Japanese, 42–45, 77, 95–96, 126–127, 136, 142 Ma (Japanese aesthetics) 189, 192 Jay, Anthony, 159, 161, 165, 166, 169, 170, 174 See also Lynn, Jonathan; Yes Minister/Yes Prime Minister Jenner, Mark, 116 Johnson, Dr. Samuel, 18, 114 Jokes /joking, 70–71, 78–79, 82 Jonson, Ben, 23 K Kames, Lord, Henry Home, 30–31, 98, 144 Kant, Immanuel, 58–60, 121 Kennedy, Ludovic, 154 Keynes, J.M., 152, 173 Kirk, Eugene, 125–126 Kozintsev, Alexander, 52, 54, 67 Kuipers, Giselinde, 78

236 

INDEX

L Laughter, 7–35 festive, 15, 17, 20–21, 84 innocent, 17, 32, 34–35, 49, 61, 63–64 rhetorical, 11–12, 14–19, 24–25, 33–35, 111–112, 116–117, 119–120 and smiling, 7, 16–17, 49 therapeutic, 19–20 See also Humour Leonardo, Da Vinci, 16, 206 Lewis, C.S., 70–72 Leyburn, Ellen, 134–135 Lin, Yutang, 41–42 Locke, John, 36 Lockert, George, 120 Lucian, 91, 106, 125, 127, 173, 207 Lynn, Jonathan, 155, 159, 161 See also Jay, Antony; Yes Minister/Yes Prime Minister M Machiavelli, Niccolo, 83–84, 101, 135–136, 165–166, 168, 172–173 Macmillan, Sir Harold, 156 Maddern, Phillipa, 71 Malley, Ern, 101 Mathias, T.J., 113 Mattingly, Garrett, 135–136 Metaphor, 55, 118, 143, 187–188, 191–192, 196 Methodology, 69–70 Milligan, Spike, 83 Mitchell, Alexandre, 7, 133 Monty Python, 134 More, Sir Thomas, 79, 126, 128 Morreall, John, 62 Morris, Corbyn, 18, 30, 34

N Nannius, Petrus, 119, 122, 127 Nelson, Eric, 89–90 Neville, Henry, 135, 183–184 Newman, Francis, 86 Nietzsche, F., 75 O Oakeshott, Michael, 164, 195–196 Obama, Barrack, 174 Ockham, William of, 120 OED, 115, 121, 134 Office, language of, 32, 112, 113, 146, 184–186 Old Norse, 49 Orgel, Stephen, 143 Orwell, George, 135, 188–194, 197 Overton, Richard, 19 Oxford University, satirical attack on, 140 P Paradox, 53, 114, 131 of liar, 99–100, 182–183 Paralipsis, 63, 192 Parnell, Thomas, 87–88, 91 Paulos, John, 53 Peirce, C.S., 122, 123 Pepys, Samuel, 26, 28, 32, 116, 117 Phiddian, Robert, 112, 141, 145 Philosophy, 53, 58, 74, 98, 135 philosophical persona, 23, 28–29, 104–105 Pirandello, Luigi, 51 Plato, 11, 13, 15, 113–114, 121 Pocock, J.G.A., 57 Political science/ theory, 66, 166–167, 198 See also Yes Minister/Yes Prime Minister, political language in

 INDEX 

Pope, Alexander, 54, 74, 75, 87, 91–94, 115, 134, 139 Preston, William, 31, 37, 62, 103 Punning, 44, 61, 80, 93, 95–99, 107, 136 See also Visual/multimodal symbolism Pym, John, 131 Q Quine, W v O, 102, 145 Quintilian, 13, 16, 93, 104, 118–119 R Rabelais, François, 19, 127 Reddy, Michael, 55 Reilly, Ian, 133 Ridicule, 111–112, 115, 119–120, 135–136, 138 See also Laughter, rhetorical Rivière, Mary de, 112 Rosenheim, E.W, 116, 122 Ross, Sir David, 11 Rump Broadsides, 116–118 Russell, Bertrand, 145 Ryle, Gilbert, 55 S Satire, 4, 19, 25, 27, 29–30, 32, 39, 44, 151–203 functions and acceptable limits of, 113–116, 130, 133–134 as genre, 141–145 and humour, 111–113, 115–116, 119–120, 122, 129, 134–139, 152–153 Menippean, 125–130 1960s ‘satire boom,’ 160, 169

237

semantic field of, 111, 132–136 as speaking truth to power, 117, 147, 154, 157, 162 Saville, George, Marquis of Halifax, 196 Scaliger, Julius Caesar, 118 Schiller, Ferdinand, 123 Semantic and associational fields, 10, 27, 44–48, 69, 111 Shadwell, Thomas, 22, 24, 27 Shaftesbury, Earl of, Anthony Ashley Cooper, 22, 28–29, 34, 36 Shakespeare, William, 17–18, 24, 82 Shame, 14, 33, 206 Sherbert, Gary, 126 Sheridan, Thomas, 23, 98 Sidney, Sir Phillip, 17 Simpson, Paul, 122, 130, 141, 144, 146 Skinner, Quentin, 103–104, 106, 108 Smiling, see Laughter Sprezzatura, 73–74 Starkey, John, 83, 135 Sterne, Lawrence, 36, 82 Straight, John, 32 Stewart, Jon, 133 Stewart, Ron, 96 Swift, Jonathan, 9, 30, 35, 75, 112, 148, 202 T Takanashi, Hiroko, 96 Tave, Stuart, 35, 60 Thackeray, William, 37 Thatcher, Margaret, 153–161, 164, 165, 174, 178, 186 See also Yes Minister/Yes Prime Minister Theory, 151–153 The Thick of it, 171–172

238 

INDEX

Toyama, Shigeheko, 43 Translation, 47–49, 85–87 of Homer, 87–95 Trump, Donald, 141, 206 Trusler, John, 75, 112–113 Twain, Mark, 133 V Vaughan, Henry, 32 Visual/multimodal symbolism, 16, 80, 95–97, 123–125, 145 See also Cerne Abbas Giant; Yes Minister/Yes Prime Minister W Walpole, Sir Robert, 34, 73, 156 Walter, Ryan, 58 Ward, Ned, 72, 112, 138 Watson, Don, 189, 190 Webster, Noah, 114 Weinbrot, Howard, 92, 126–127 Wells, Marguerite, 44, 136 White, Hayden, 144 Whitman, Walt, 51, 54, 58 Wickberg, Daniel, 37 Wierzbicka, Anna, 36, 46, 49, 56 Wit, 18, 22, 25–34, 72–75 Wittgenstein, Ludwig, 53, 121, 128

X Xu, Wei He, 42 Y Yes Minister/Yes, Prime Minister, 151–199, 202, 207 appearance and reality, 172–173, 182–184 Civil Service and bureaucratic theory, 157, 170–177 dishonesty of, 182–184 euphemism in, 193–195 idealization of, 188–189, 192 and journalism, 190–191 political language in, 172, 181–199 protagonists in, 162–164, 186–187 rational choice theory, 164–172 reception and success of, 153–154, 156, 158 resolution of, 195–199 verisimilitude of, 154–155, 161–162, 182 visual symbolism in, 154–155, 164, 173, 186, 198 Westminster system in, 176–179 See also Jay, Anthony; Lynn, Jonathan; Thatcher, Margaret