On Humour

what oft was thought but ne'er so well expressed

Jokes are anonymous. Good jokes show no traces of their author. They are cultural possessions. Their forms and formats persist as their content changes. One generation’s mother-in-law jokes becomes the next one’s taunts about feckless youth. Jokes thrive on cliche. Wit is a different species of humour, marked by originality and authorship. Witty remarks are original, expressing, as Pope had it, what oft was thought but ne’er so well expressed. Wit shows the mark of its author. We know a quip by Wilde or Coward as distinctly theirs, not as merely a joke of its time.

Comedians are a hybrid artist, some of them merely performers of jokes, others writers of wit,—most are a combination. When we watch a programme by Larry David or Tina Fey it often has the quality of their authorship, and the quality of their performance. Mean Girls could only have been written by Fey; 30 Rock has her imprint as author and performer. When Larry David says “Pretty good,” the humour is performative. When he tells a dinner companion he wants to elevate small talk to medium talk (when challenged about his intense conversation style), he is being witty. Witty comedians say things we recognise as true but which we wouldn’t usually say: few of us outright say we are bored by our interlocutor’s small talk. Jokes, however, tend to reflect things we all think and say, or at least frequently hear said.

This is why some people can be exceptionally funny in the pub but do not become comedians. Having an aptitude for remembering and reciting jokes, is not the same as a talent for the creation of wit. Performance is rarely enough to ensure success. The world has never lacked performers of aptitude. Wit, though, is rare. Few have Fey’s or David’s talent for turning rhetorical forms to hilarious advantage.

In a society dominated by a philistine attitude, such as we now live in, performing jokes is a lot of what we ask of our comedians. We too often demand not the newness of wit, but merely the best version of familiar jokes. True laughter is the child of daring observation, such as when Larry David said “It’s nice to be affectionate to something German. You so rarely get the chance.” Wit may not be comfortable or acceptable, which is why is offers the release of humour, the sense that we are stepping into a parallel reality, the creation of the author, as opposed to the familiarity of the joke, which is domestic and comforting. Jokes console; wit confronts.

Robin Williams was full of the exuberance of wit and transported his audiences to a fictional realm where his jokes were the reality. To watch him was to step aside from conventional life for awhile. Philistine culture lacks this otherness, because it relies on the performance of jokes that reinforce the humour we are used to, rather than discombobulating us all with the surreal, phantasmagoric sense that all aspects of life, however unexpected, might be subject to the comedian’s wit. He was a true original.

Humour is among the hardest of the arts. As Samuel Johnson observed, all other jobs have an end, but “the hapless wit has his labour always to begin, the call for novelty is never satisfied.” And thus witty comedians too often give into the temptation to tell jokes, to descend from wild, original creation to the performance of anonymous jibes.