Laughter

Freud distinguished three types of laughter, but what is 3, when mankind knows 86 dishes made only from beans, and there are also beans, and these beans = beans and salt, by the way, are the solution to the problem! But what is the question?

It is natural for a practicing psychologist to consider specific psychological situations that give rise to laughter in this and that way, and there may be even more than 86 situations, and more than any number, and in each situation the nature of laughter will change. You can't keep up with situations. Naturally, a scientist seeks and finds generalizations. Vyacheslav Grizdak, for example, introduces the concept of “condensation”, which is correct in principle, but not very clear. Vygotsky speaks more clearly: in his psychology of art, he writes that the artist first separates the poles, and at some dramatic, tragic, and comic moment the poles close. And although Vygotsky takes as an example a fable belonging to the culture of laughter, he extends the principle to all art, and we will extend it much further.

But what is the actual question? The question is that no matter how many bean dishes we prepare, no matter how many laughter situations we analyze, we cannot escape the essential question: what is laughter? I want to try to answer the question within the framework of my philosophical system, and no one will do this for me, and everyone can judge from all points of view. Briefly about my philosophy:

https://docs.google.com/document/d/1Tq4yOuiMJ4Te_eYjQW5dcb9P3A45AlDVSZjdO2Gvfzs/edit?usp=sharing

So, what is the bean from which we prepare 86 dishes, what is laughter that explodes in thousands of situations, each time acquiring a different character, is it possible to define laughter, abstracting from specific situations? And since the botanical concept of a bean has already crept into our lexicon, I will say that the solution to a bean is, that is, the problem of laughter in beans. And, returning to psychology, I repeat, the solution = FA-SOL.

This, of course, requires an explanation: fa, sol in music are adjacent sounds, one might say brothers, the interval between them = a second. But when played simultaneously, these sounds create dissonance. What is dissonance? There is an acoustic explanation for this, which itself requires explanation. The problem of consonance-dissonance requires deep philosophical understanding, because this is a problem not only of music and not only of laughter - there lies a certain fundamental law of nature.

Musical dissonance is usually explained by the fact that there are no common overtones between two sounds, they are all different and again dissonant. Here we have to use the dissonance of overtones to explain the dissonance of the sounds themselves - this indicates the need for further study of dissonance-consonance. We will only say that nearby sounds in the scale that are close in the diachronic dimension are sharply dissonant in the synchronous dimension, causing a feeling of incompatibility, intolerance, repulsion from each other, and this sensation is not only in the ears, but throughout the whole body. In this regard, the word “beats” is often used - collisions of overtones, which sharpens our sense of dissonance.

In Russian there is no suitable word to describe the shock that we experience when hearing sound dissonance; in Hebrew, such a word seems to be “tsmarmoret” - its very sound speaks for itself. Why is all this important?

The fact is that the laughter to which we are going is tsmarmoret - those beatings, shaking-shocks from a sharp semantic-life dissonance, vibrations of the body from a mental-nervous shock.

Musical dissonance shows us two things: 1. In strong nervous reactions, the body seems to remember the fundamental principles of existence, and one of them is vibration: trembling from fear, from cold, tremors, laughter, but the heart also vibrates - the basis of our entire physiology. We need to remember sexual intercourse - the basis of life - also convulsive fluctuations. But we are interested in tsmarmoret - a special trembling from dissonance and a trembling of laughter from the dissonance of meaning in life. 2. The second thing musical dissonance teaches us is that in its sharpest form it occurs between close sounds, and this is a fundamental moment for laughter.

Freud begins his conversation about wit with a Heine joke, the character says that a rich relative treats him with familiarity to a poor man, but this one word carries two opposite meanings: the relative treats him as if on an equal footing, but in fact he treats him condescendingly, and this dissonance breaks this word so that the narrator is forced to distort the word itself. And this is an archetypal example: the narrator brings together two logical lines: one person is poor, the other is rich, the narrator connects them in kinship, familiarity! And suddenly this unity explodes with internal contradiction (big bang) and we burst into laughter. Let me give you another example, a brilliant joke from Soviet times: a question for the Armenian radio: how does capitalism differ from socialism? Under capitalism, man exploited man! But under socialism it’s quite the opposite! Here everything is identical and everything is opposite, just like an atomic bomb: they connect two masses, and they explode. Everything appears as a contradiction of time and space, the time line is logical: a person lives in poverty. It is no less logical that the other lives richly, but then they met, directly merged in kinship = incompatibility, dissonance, explosion. Here we need to remember Vygotsky again: he talks about the closure of the poles, but it is very different: in a love story the characters find each other this way - a happy ending, in a tragedy Shakespeare is stalling for time, only at the very end Hamlet pierces the criminal king - the death of both is of course not humor, if we return to the comparison with music, then death is the final musical tonic of T.

In humor, the closing of the poles is, in essence, the beginning of comedy, as in Heine’s joke, as in Demyanova’s ear, as in the meeting of the monkey with the mirror, as in Gogol’s auditor. The meeting between the dragonfly and the ant is tragic, but it forces us to return to the beginning and see the dragonfly's dance from a comic-critical perspective.

So “what do we have from the goose,” from dissonance? 1. We have established that it occurs in synchrony between similar notes, situations, concepts, words - despite the fact that in diachrony there is harmony. This can be extended to all of nature: why doesn’t the earth fall into the sun? Diachrony-movement interferes and the result = harmony. Stop the movement of the planet = fall - death. Why doesn’t the electron fall on the atomic nucleus, although it is strongly attracted to it, but still finds itself far away? Yes, because closer is already dissonance - disharmony, and the substance is built on a solid harmonic basis.

The collision of logical lines is also a mechanism for the emergence of chance, which plays an exceptional role in art. Without chance there is no art, the writer gives us the epic War and Peace through random people and their small destinies: Natasha, Prince Andrei, Rostov, Bezukhov... otherwise there would be history, but not a novel (big through small = metonymy, it is necessary for art, just like metaphor). But if in poetry you can talk about very general things: nature, beauty, love... then in a laughter culture, chance = the heart of humor, all jokes are built on chance. Accidents are formed at the intersection of diachronic-causal chains, and part of these intersections are dissonances. Let's say conventionally that there are no accidents or dissonances within causal chains (although all this is infinitely complex). The writer, according to Vygotsky, separates causal chains, then closes them with different consequences. And since the consequences are different, we haven’t gotten to the point of laughter yet. To get at the objective characteristics of dissonance, randomness is not enough, because there is no humor in the music that we took as a standard. Sometimes composers try to make people laugh, but it doesn’t work out very well.

To understand laughter, you need to supplement objective criteria with subjective ones.

The subject of humor will be a wit, a humorist, a satirist on the one hand, and a receiver-receiver on the other (the plural is important, because there is no laughter alone, and this is a separate problem). The comedian and the viewer can be united to some extent, since the comedian strives for unanimity with the audience, otherwise the goal is not achieved, and when it is achieved, everyone laughs! Over what? Is it possible to answer this question in general? I think so.

Dissonance in music is a contradiction, incompatibility; in life it is an absurdity. And since dissonance is also the incompatibility of closely related sounds, the comedian pushes clowns together in the circus (in the original version of The Inspector General, Dobchinsky and Bobchinsky bumped heads, and then the opposite meanings were united in one exclamation of both “Eh!”)

Heine combines opposite meanings in one word, changing it slightly (it’s like a musical interval = half a second), but the given Soviet joke generally combines the opposite in one and the same expression: “man exploited man,” while the narrator ridicules Soviet ideology, shouting that under socialism there is no exploitation, false ideology falls, and this is the moral victory of the oppressed Soviet man over the super-powerful government. Victory is the key concept of humor, because in Hamlet Shakespeare also closes the poles, pits enemies against one another, but in tragedy we are completely on the side of the main character and seem to die with him, it’s not funny. In comedy we are always with a winner! Thus, existence-biology “to be or not to be” is introduced into the situation! And this, in turn, allows for very distant associations. In the article on the natural foundations of the aesthetic, I tried to find the natural foundations of the main aesthetic categories, see.

https://docs.google.com/document/d/1RQPLwGZP3SI1IQqHZgqSwUqp_4kLtSyAzbeGvDCyUns/edit?usp=sharing About the natural prerequisites of the aesthetic

The most difficult thing was to find the natural prerequisites for the comic, because animals do not laugh. I came to the conclusion that, after all, there is a prerequisite for humor in nature - this is the struggle of life itself, in which the strong win and the weak perish. Victory means joy, fun, which people turn into holidays, and laughter. And the symbol of the comic turns out to be weakness, non-viability, and the very first model of non-viability can be considered the manege movement of sperm = vicious circle = doom, self-destruction. In Gogol's comedy there are no positive heroes with whom we could sympathize, but the very absurdity of the situation and the characters' actions is their self-destruction, to the joy and laughter of the winner of life - the viewer.

So Freud emphasizes in humor the manifestation of hidden desires and thoughts, but I reveal the motive of victory, there is no contradiction here, because Freud is talking about one of the functions of humor, and I am talking about its general structure.

It may not be superfluous to use a much more distant association: the comedian collides, connects into a point the incompatible, and the point explodes like the laughter of an unsympathetic observer, wasn’t it once God gathered matter and spirit into one point and the point exploded, creating the universe, only the singular point of humor is not creative, but destructive.

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