Content
for the course digital media now — mapping contemporary conditions
supervisor — Andrea Sick
Introduction Henri Bergson in his essay Laughter written in 1900 decomposes the notion of humour, tracing its causes and patterns, determining principal categories, and reaching the origin of laughter. He claims that the vital mechanics are polar categories and the “deviation of life towards the mechanical is … the true cause of laughter.“ He uses several types of “laughter mechanisms” as metaphors for the comical in language: the jack-in-the-box, the dancing-jack, the snowball.
Bergson embeds these mechanisms in his theory of humour and uses it to explain more complex, language, position and character comedy. At the same time, humanity finds these mechanisms entertaining and hilarious by themselves, mostly, as Bergson argues, because “human attitude or expression” can be detected in them.
In this paper, I will observe the work of Digital Media artists working in the field of funny machines and disassemble the comical in their artworks. Apart from this, I will review the main theories of humour and associate them with examples from work in the field of digital media (I will use the lowercase spelling).
Apart from a biological perspective, humanity observes and conceptualises humour in various contexts, including psychological, semantic, computer modelling, philosophical, sexological, sociological, cultural and others. Some even refer to humour as a mystical experience.
Humour is the tendency of experiences to provoke laughter and provide amusement. Originally, the word humour (Latin: humor) was used as a term for the balance of fluids in the human body, which controls a person's health and emotions (The Four Humours, 2004).
Overall, humour is more determined than laughter. Laughter is the reaction itself, the process once something amusing already happened. It is an instrument to transform the feeling into the action, a mechanical process involving contractions of the diaphragm and other parts of the respiratory system.
Mikhail Lomonosov in Doctrine about three styles put satire above comedy. In satire, sarcasm, irony in addition to trying to cause laughter, there are also additional goals, such as to teach morality or to draw attention to an existing problem. In this classification comedy is considered to be the in the lowest of three styles, while other folklore genres such as ditties, anecdotes weren’t even included. These genres were considered to be too vulgar since they focus too much on a human body. Citing Knight:
“The humour of medieval carnival, according to Bakhtin, relied on the way that the body makes a mockery of the lofty purposes of the mind. Buttocks, thighs, coughs, splutters, farts, ‘the bodily lower stratum’ – all mock the spiritual solemnities of humourless bishops and other supposed guardians of morality.”
While humour is considered to be focused around proper wording and words in general, not only words can provoke laughter. Henri Bergson in the work Laughter decomposes this phenomenon and tries to define the comic. He claims that “the comic demands something like a momentary anesthesia of the heart. Its appeal is to intelligence, pure and simple” (Bergson, 1921: 5). So to laugh, first, humans need to disable empathy and become more rational.
Bergson believes that the reason for the comic is the mechanical inelasticity of people in certain situations:
“Instead of concentrating our attention on actions, comedy directs it rather to gestures. …the attitudes, the movements and even the language by which a mental state expresses itself outwardly without any aim or profit, from no other cause than a kind of inner itching” (Bergson, 1921: 143).
This proves that comedy works on many levels besides semantic: linguistic, behavioural, psychological. “The comic person is unconscious” (Bergson, 1921: 16). This point is crucial for Bergson, since it leads to the more precise outline of the comical: it is a “game that imitates life” on every level, including mechanic, which is considered to be too inferior for drama (Bergson, 1921: 69).
He analyses human face and body from the comical perspective, and observes it in a poetic passage:
“…our imagination has a very clear-cut philosophy of its own: in every human form it sees the effort of a soul which is shaping matter, a soul which is infinitely supple and perpetually in motion, subject to no law of gravitation, for it is not the earth that attracts it. ... Matter, however, is obstinate and resists. It draws to itself the ever-alert activity of this higher principle, would fain convert it to its own inertia and cause it to revert to mere automatism. ... Where matter thus succeeds in dulling the outward life of the soul, in petrifying its movements and thwarting its gracefulness, it achieves, at the expense of the body, an effect that is comic” (Bergson, 1921: 29).
This leads him to the conclusion: “deflection of life towards the mechanical is here the real cause of laughter” (Bergson, 1921: 34). And another one: “Any arrangement of acts and events is comic which gives us, in a single combination, the illusion of life and the distinct impression of a mechanical arrangement” (Bergson, 1921: 69).
In human body soul is the power which is shaping matter. But non-humanic bodies (mechanisms) also have a certain final form, perhaps not as advanced and sleek as living bodies. Is humanisation the only way to bring life into matter? What is the soul for mechanical?
Robots and their behaviour, according to the study of Dr. Astrid Rosenthal-von der Pütten, can be perceived by humans as their kind (Choi, 2013).
“Her research, published in the journal Computers in Human Behavior, suggests that we empathize with robots treated both affectionately and violently as if they were our fellow man. It gets your mind going: Might our brains operate similarly when watching unscripted robot fails?”
(Anderson, 2015).
Answering the question from the previous chapter, motion can be considered to be the soul of the mechanical. Even etymologically the words anima (soul in latin) — animal — animation are cognate. And sometimes the type of movement itself, more than the appearance, can resemble a human.
Digital mechanisms, primitive or not, can resemble humans in various actions, such as dancing. Creators of dancing Boston Dynamics robots did not try to make robots similar to people in any aspect, except for mechanical: the structure of the figure, movement. But even this is enough to make commentators call the dance “super cute and wholesome :)”. In a viral Russian meme, someone put a voice-over of mechanical voices on the Boston dynamics robots footage. Situations in the video are taken from everyday life, robots call humans skin bastards and seem to look down on them and it makes the sketch comical.
Why do humans find dancing machines so appealing? These mechanisms try to imitate human behaviour and so far they are not that advanced to fully impersonate the human being so their quirky attempts can be seen as something interesting and even cute:
“The rigid mechanism which we occasionally detect, as a foreign body, in the living continuity of human affairs is of peculiar interest to us as being a kind of absentmindedness on the part of life” (Bergson, 1921: 87).
Not only robots can resemble humans: sometimes imitate the mechanisms themselves. Early Big Dog quadruped robot testing video parody — as if showing the early prototypes of the Boston Dynamics Dog robot, while in reality it's just people pretending to be robots.
“A mechanical inelasticity where one would expect to find the wide-awake adaptability and the living pliableness of a human being” (Bergson, 1921: 10) became the inspiration for a separate genre of comedy, famous performers of which were Charlie Chaplin and Jacques Tati.
Jacques Tati
Mon Oncle
Mon Oncle
Charlie Chaplin
Feeding Machine
Feeding Machine
Bergson looked at a person from an unexpected and unpopular perspective: not as a thinking creature, a biological object, but as a mechanism. This perspective has been existing in art: while drawing a human body, the artist starts with an armature.
His theory was criticised for being too focused on mechanical aspect of comic.
“Bergson’s critics have complained that his theory of humour is too restrictive, that his repetitive characterisation of the comedic as ‘something mechanical encrusted upon the living’ becomes laughable in its own terms, trying to fit a complex and spontaneous living phenomenon under the same rigid formula” (Herring, 2020).
“No government has the might to control an entire population … When scattered titters swell into a chorus of hilarity like a nuclear chain reaction, people are acknowledging that they have all noticed the same infirmity in an exalted target. A lone insulter would have risked the reprisals of the target, but a mob of them, unambiguously in cahoots in recognising the target’s foibles, is safe.”
But why do humans laugh? As it was mentioned in Humour and laughter, many theories of humour have been developed throughout history. However, observing these theories with the help of Bergson optics, I began to notice that each of the theories remind of a certain mechanism. For example,
scales
untied deflating balloon
untied
Delving into this theory, it turns out that laughter itself is a very mechanical action (as, incidentally, Bergson wrote). laughter is reversal: as Knight writes: “when we smile, we stretch out the corners of our mouth and show our teeth”, moreover the joke also unfolds itself, the act of laughter flares up and spreads, gets more and more intense, and “leaves us peculiarly helpless and vulnerable” (Knight, 2019).
Another observation that confirms the relationship between mechanical in humans and human in mechanical is “when we find something funny, it’s often because of some incongruity between mind and body, the ideal and the real” (Knight, 2019). Only something truly human causes laughter, when we find animals or nature funny, we project some human properties onto them. Moreover, the real cause of laughter is hidden into the body, not the mind.
Quoting Bergson,
“The hero in a tragedy does not eat or drink or warm himself. He does not even sit down any more than can be helped. To sit down in the middle of a fine speech would imply that you remembered you had a body” (Bergson, 1921: 52).
So can we truly say that what causes laughter is something that resembles us of humans? And if the mechanism is funny it is mostly because its mechanical becomes too humanlike?
I will try to answer these questions by showing some examples of Digital Media artworks and combining them with how theories of laughter work, as well as comparing them to the mechanisms of the human body.Laughter as a mechanism Chris Knight (2019) in the essay Did laughter make the mind? refers to laughter
Body, mechanism, laughter: examples from Digital Media In this part I will briefly explain what mechanisms digital media works are based on, sometimes elaborating on more details about specific works. I will start with the very famous examples and go to more specific ones. Sometimes I will show the “reversed” examples, ones where comedy builds up on humans trying to imitate the machine. All mentioned works and links will be listed at the end of the article.
1. Rube Goldberg machine — laughter as a reversal There is a certain mechanism that corresponds to the reversal nature of the humour. A witty joke with its sting scrapes the surface of the area that is responsible for laughter and activates the entire “human machine”. The person giggles, and sometimes the giggle develops into laughter and even growling, eyes fill with tears, abdominal muscles ache. The joke unfolds itself in the organism, triggering one part after another. This reversal quality reminds of the domino effect: domino, triggered by finger, tilt, fall, and affect the next dominoes.
The domino effect is widely used in digital media, people are interested in watching how the whole mechanism unfolds, and its parts affect each other.
“Rube Goldberg machine is a chain reaction-type machine or contraption intentionally designed to perform a simple task in an indirect and overly complicated way” (Wikipedia, 2021).
Professor Butts and the Self-Operating Napkin (1931).
Rube Goldberg machine has many incarnations, it even appears in Tom and Jerry episode. One of the very well-known works using these mechanics is The Way Things Go by Peter Fischli and David Weiss. This artwork became so well known and influential that Honda even made an homage to this work an advertisement for their cars.
2. Slapsticks & shambles— relief theory Relief theory suggest that laughter is a “homeostatic (internal) mechanism by which psychological tension is reduced” (Wikipedia, 2021). This thesis resembles one of the examples mentioned by Bergson: jack-in-the-box or, as was suggested above, untied balloon. The trope of relief is a basis of many anecdotes: sometimes to build up suspense the narrator deliberately tells the story very slowly and in detail; the listener can't wait to hear the denouement, and the more long-awaited, the funnier it becomes.
A good, literal materialisation to this theory are works of Jan Hakon Erichsen, mostly known as a Visual Artist Pops Balloons In Oddly Satisfying Ways (quote from YouTube). Videos of Erichsen popping balloons, crushing chips, breaking spaghetti in the oddest ways, provoke a wide spectrum of emotions: from satisfaction to bewilderment and laughter.
Another, more digital, large-scaled, and exterior-based example is the works of Roman Signer. This artist explodes, detonates, forcefully moves and overall interacts with objects of everyday life. In the work “Punkt”, for example, the tension of the artist trying to draw something explodes with the detonation of petard. Or in the work “Tisch” the tension of the river breaks out from a sudden place and levitates the table.
Slapstick is the whole genre of comedy based on relief. It is one of the earliest genres of comedy as well as the earliest special effect (Wikipedia, 2021). The name of the genre originates from a literal mechanism, a slap stick that imitates the sound of a punch. The assistant slaps the slap stick at the same moment when the imitation of the slap occurs on the screen. In hierarchy suggested in this paper slapstick stands in between relief theory and juxtaposition, since the viewer is aware of the substitution, however sometimes seeing genuine non-theatrical slaps can be very entertaining, such as a very famous video of George Bush almost getting hit by a shoe.
In digital media the slapstick substitution works in differently: we know that the slapstick actor cannot feel the pain, but since its behaviour and habits remind us of humans, we still find it funny. Like a Roomba that screams when it bumps into obstacles (by Michael Reeves), or a robot that slides over a banana.
3. Function substitution — incongruous juxtaposition theory Perhaps one of the most diverse ways of creating comic is to slightly change one property of the existing, well-working phenomenon to create a small glitch in the perception. As mentioned before, if the difference is so slight that it cannot be perceived as intentional, this method can be also used to create an uncanny/scary effect.
Juxtaposition theory considers laughter to be “a response to the perception of incongruity” (Berger, 1997: 22). The best mechanic metaphor for it will be a jack (the mechanism also mentioned by Bergson). Just like a jack shifts a wheel, Incongruities shift the perception of an object. Incongruities can be achieved in different ways, as will be shown in some examples.
3.1 Incongruities of meaning: the machine exists, it is working, but its purpose is either shifted, or not obvious, or doesn’t exist. Examples: Bicycle Wheel, a ready-made by Marcel Duchamp; Jelly Wobbler, a machine by Nik Ramage, Otamatone by Maywa Denki, The Ultimate Machine by David Moises.
Maywa Denki, Otamatone
Nik Ramage, Jelly Wobbler
3.2 Incongruities of implementation: the aim is clear, but the way the object is built creates the comic effect. Either the object is built too sloppy, this phenomenon has many names: "Gambiarra", “Jury rigging", "Quick Fix", "Alternative Engineering”. This effect was originally achieved unintentionally, but nowadays is used by digital media artists, who reassemble the old mechanisms and materials (circuit bending).
Gijs Gieskes — Cappuccino Synths.
The opposite of quick fixing is creating a perfect but pointless mechanism, also known as Chindogu. Chindogu can either be perceived as ridiculous or witty and life-hacking.
Chindogu examples: portable tissues, baby mop, shoes umbrellas, noodles fan, butter stick type, eye drop funnels
Chindogu critique
Chindogu critique
Artists Simone Giertz and Marina Fujiwara are specialising in creating meaningless (or weirdly meaningful) machines as well as in testing bulky designs.
3.3 Incongruities of context: the aim and implementation do not cause questions, the comic is caused by the unusual context.
Dominic Wilcox in the “Variations on Normal” blog speculates and perceives the surroundings from a more naive view, not blinkered/constrained by bureaucracy. In 2012 he developed No Place Like Home — shoes with GPS and LED lights. The work description says:
“The progress bar starts with one red light at the beginning of the journey and ends on the green light when you arrive. The correct direction to walk is shown by the illumination of one of the LED's on the circle.”
4. The absurd — snowball Snowball mechanism was mentioned by Bergson to characterise laughter. He writes:
“The snowball mechanism is laughable even when rectilinear, it is much more so on becoming circular and when every effort the player makes, by a fatal interaction of cause and effect, merely results in bringing it back to the same spot” (Bergson, 1921: 83).
Snowball depicts the reversible nature of laughter, the ability of one little joke to grow and become absurd.
The absurd has been used to describe what is arguably the very first documented confrontation between a human and an “almost digital media” object — the battle between Don Quixote and the windmills.
The paradox of self-destructive machines lies in their name. Machines do not have free will but yet they can embody the biggest human attribute — the ability to go against their ”nature” and die. In the mind of the spectator, this attribute creates a big paradox and causes laughter. Self-destructive washing machines keep on gracefully destroy themselves and watching this can cause a wide spectrum of emotions: from existential sadness to amusement and laughter. Another example of absurdity is a Zoom Deleter, a “killer program” made to find and delete any presence of Zoom app on one’s computer.
“Compared editing between Segundo de Chomón’s “Pickpock ne craint pas les entraves” (1909) for Pathé Frères and early arcade videogames like Pacman, Bubble Bobble, Donkey Kong, Excitebike and Paperboy.”
The next step from resembling the mechanism is to become the mechanism itself, as John Edmark did in 2011 in the work “Four Legged Chair”.
Another example is the Annoying shop assistant sketch made by Brian Limond, or Limmy. In this sketch, the hesitance of the shop assistant being asked for advice turns him into a musical instrument or a robot. Been given three options to choose from he makes a certain unsure sound about each of them. At the end of the sketch, a customer quickly moves his hand above all three variants, and the shop assistant changes the sound as quickly as if he is a thereminvox.
The initial question standing behind this research was: “why human beings appreciate quick and efficient solutions but still get fascinated with bulky solutions?” This led the research towards an understanding of what funny is.
Bergson lived at a time when digital media barely existed. The first example of the artwork mentioned in this paper dates itself 13 years after his essay. However, his theory supported the idea that machines can be the source of the comic. It is outstanding how the mechanisms described in the paper were later used in digital media artworks. It is still uncertain whether this coincidence was purely accidental or deliberate.
After these inspiring coincidences, I tried to analyse the most commonly spread theories of humour and compare them to primitive mechanisms. Then I carried on with researching the corresponding artworks based on these mechanisms. These are not all examples of how laughter is created in digital media, however, this is the beginning of further reflection and research on this topic. What can be studied further is the reaction to various materials used in digital media, different perceptions on humour, not only the Western one, as well as expansion of the catalog of authors working with humour in digital media.
THE END
Literature
Anderson, B. (2015). Why We Laugh at Robot Fail Videos. VICE. https://www.vice.com/en/article/mgb588/why-we-laugh-when-robots-fail. Accessed 14.05.2021.
Bergson, H. (1921) Laughter: An Essay On The Meaning Of The Comic. New York: The Macmillan Company. Accessed May 2021 via Google Books.
Choi, C. Q. (2013). Brain Scans Show Humans Feel for Robots. IEEE Spectrum: Technology, Engineering, and Science News. https://spectrum.ieee.org/robotics/artificial-intelligence/brain-scans-show-humans-feel-for-robots. Accessed 15.05.2021.
Herring, E. (07.07.2020). For Henri Bergson, laughter is what keeps us elastic and free – Emily Herring: Aeon Essays. Aeon. https://aeon.co/essays/for-henri-bergson-laughter-is-what-keeps-us-elastic-and-free. Accessed 15.05.2021.
Lomonosov, N. V. (1758) Предисловии о пользе книг церковных в российском языке
Knight, C. (11.02.2019). Does laughter hold the key to human consciousness? – Chris Knight: Aeon Essays. Aeon. https://aeon.co/essays/does-laughter-hold-the-key-to-human-consciousness. Accessed 19.05.2021.
MacDorman, K. F.; Ishiguro, H. (2006). The uncanny advantage of using androids in social and cognitive science research. Interaction Studies. 7 (3): 297–337.
Peter Ludwig Berger Redeeming Laughter: The Comic Dimension of Human Experience (1997).
Smullyan, R. (1980). This Book Needs No Title: A Budget of Living Paradoxes New Jersey: Prentice-Hall.
Society for neuroscience (2001). Humor, laughter and the brain. Brain Briefings. http://sciencenetlinks.com/media/filer/2013/12/19/brainbriefings_dec2001.pdf. Accessed 10.05.2021.
The Four Humours. (n.d.). http://malankazlev.com/kheper/topics/typology/four_humours.html.
Wikipedia. Slapstick. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Slapstick. Accessed 24.05. 2021.
Wikipedia. Theories of humor. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Theories_of_humor. Accessed 24.05.2021.
Artworks (in order of mentioning)
Charlie Chaplin (1936). Feeding Machine: Modern Times
Jacques Tati (1958). Mon Oncle
Boston Dynamics Do You Love Me?
Early Big Dog quadruped robot testing
Rube Goldberg Machine
Peter Fischli and David Weiss —The Way Things Go
Jan Hakon Erichsen
and Visual Artist Pops Balloons In Oddly Satisfying Ways
Roman Signer
Punkt and Tisch
Michael Reeves —The Roomba That Screams When it Bumps Into Stuff
Robot Dog Slips on Banana Peel
Marcel Duchamp — Bicycle Wheel
Nik Ramage — Jelly Wobbler
Maywa Denki Nonsense Machine Concert
David Moises The Ultimate Machine aka Shannon’s Hand
Gambiarra
Jury Rigging
Gijs Gieskes
Chindogu
Chindōgu critique TikTok
Simone Giertz
Marina Fujiwara
Dominic Wilcox
and Variations on Normal
and No Place Like Home GPS Shoes
Miguel de Cervantes (1612). The Ingenious Gentleman Don Quixote of La Mancha
Self Destructing Washing Machine
Sam Lavigne —Zoom Deleter
Stunts, glitches & slapstick in digital media
John Edmark — Four Legged Chair
Limmy's Show — Annoying Shop Assistant
more