The Disproportionate, the Whimsical, and the Origin of Laughter
I bought a quadruplet of little socks for Sophie the dog, to protect her feet from the salt grains which easily invade the spaces between her toes. I realized afterwards that I chose this particular set on impulse, without thinking much. These little socks are made of fabric, with plastic decorations that made the covered toes re-appear in a different, stylized form. Sophie walked in them in bewilderment. One fell off in the wet slush, and all of them got completely soaked. After the walk I put the four socklets on a drying rack made for large towels and such. The hilarious disproportion between the rack and the tiny socks made me think, and the result is the subject of this blog.
There is a German phrase. “Mit Kanonen auf Spatzen schiessen,” which literally means “To shoot sparrows with cannons.” This phrase contains the sense of the disproportionate between an action and its intended results. Our immediate reaction when confronted with this situation is laughter, unless something else is at stake, a real problem revealed by the mismatch of scales.
Turning first to the origin of laughter in the whimsical, which Ze has noted in one of his blogs, it is still a mystery even though people have thought about it a lot. Let me try. Our mind, trained on physical laws and cultural rules, follows a path of reasoning set up in the antecedent of the joke, and expects this path to continue along a common-sense trajectory. The sudden departure from the expected trajectory, along with the realization that this departure is based on an incorrect application of logic, causes a bewilderment which is resolved in laughter.
What I have in mind when I said “unless” in the paragraph before is exemplified by the disproportionality between the intent of NSA’s spying operation — the hope to catch a dozen of terrorists on the one side, and the massive scale affecting the rights and dignity of every single citizen in the US and potentially on earth on the other side. This gigantic mismatch would be a reason for laughter on a cosmic scale, were it not for the fact that its consequences are frightening, and ill-boding for the future to come.
So there are situations in which the laughter, to quote another German saying, “gets stuck in our throats.”
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