Dear Unknown Friends:

We are very glad to present here a portion of a lecture that Eli Siegel gave in August 1952 on the great subject of Humor. Twenty-seven years later, in 1979, that discussion, The Laughable, Seriously, was published in TRO under the editorship of Martha Baird. And now, as the centerpiece of this month’s issue, it can reach people of our present time—who need it immensely.

In keeping with the revised title of our journal itself—The Rightness of Aesthetic Realism: A Periodical—one of the things Aesthetic Realism is magnificently right about is this large and everyday matter of humor.

Humor is something Eli Siegel loved. He had it, mightily, in ever so many ways. Certainly, he was serious—no one was more so—and his humor was part of and because of his seriousness. Further, as Martha Baird writes, “His humor was never sarcastic or mean; it was warm.”

Always—the Opposites

Humor, when it’s the real thing, is in the field of art and sometimes is art definitely. This Aesthetic Realism principle is true about it: “In reality opposites are one; art shows this.” Take, for instance, a famous maxim of La Rochefoucauld (1613-80), which belongs to the humor and literary art of the world. I’ll quote it first in French, then translate it into English:

Dans l’adversité de nos meilleurs amis, nous trouvons toujours quelque chose qui ne nous déplaît pas.

 

In the misfortune of our dearest friends, we find always something that does not displease us.

Order and disorder, opposites that Mr. Siegel speaks about in the 1952 talk on humor, are eminent in this famous maxim. To get a pleasure from the trouble of someone dear to us is certainly with disorder, the non-fitting, the askew. Yet La Rochefoucauld puts the idea so tidily, and has his statement murmur so sweetly, that we feel an order is present too.

La Rochefoucauld is describing, in musical yet biting French, a form of contempt. Contempt, Aesthetic Realism explains, is the ugliest, most dangerous thing in the human self. It is the “disposition in every person to think we will be for ourselves by making less of the outside world.” La Rochefoucauld did not understand contempt, but he was an observer of it, and often described aspects of it. The contempt this maxim tells about is the relishing of another’s weakness because that weakness makes us feel superior. A dear friend is floundering and in grief; we sympathize of course; but we’re not entirely displeased, because this friend’s floundering has us feel that we’re more orderly than he, more in command of our life—and even, perhaps, that we’re more favored by reality. La Rochefoucauld hints at this with succinctness and nuance.

In Eli Siegel’s Definitions, and Comment, there is a definition of humor, and it certainly goes along with what he describes in The Laughable, Seriously. “Humor,” he writes in his definition, “is the feeling that the ugly is beautiful, while it is still seen as ugly first.” I love that definition. We have, for instance, in the La Rochefoucauld maxim, an ugly way of seeing felt inseparably from the beautiful prose telling of it. Yet it is the ugly way of seeing that strikes us most obviously.

True and False Humor

At this time, people in America and elsewhere are thirsty for humor. Often, as persons feel distressed, shocked, weighed down in various ways, they look for that release which is in laughter. Yet there are millions of people who yesterday laughed at some jokes, smirked at some quips—and then felt rather sick and empty later. Why did they feel bad?

The answer is in what Aesthetic Realism shows to be the two big purposes fighting in every person. One is that desire, terrific, to have contempt. But in each of us too, Aesthetic Realism explains, is our deepest desire: to like the world, see meaning in it, respect it. These two desires have given rise to humor of two kinds. One kind, which is fake humor, is essentially contempt and appeals to contempt. The other, the real thing, is humor which (even while it may fiercely make fun of injustice and conceit) encourages respect for what’s real. That distinction between two kinds of humor is explained by Aesthetic Realism alone, and people have longed to know it these many centuries.

Further, Aesthetic Realism makes the following all-important contribution to the understanding of humor and to our lives. Eli Siegel showed that every instance of true humor gives evidence that the world itself can be liked. That is because all authentic humor—from a good joke to Jonathan Swift’s great, fierce, almost unbearable satire “A Modest Proposal”—has us feel that the opposites in reality are one. All true humor puts together such opposites as hope and fear, emptiness and fullness, awryness and form. And a world in which opposites are one is a world we can see as a friend.

Hearing a good joke is not, of itself, going to have us like the world. But people have, unknowingly, felt the world as friendlier when hearing or seeing or reading an instance of true humor. And now, through Aesthetic Realism, what all beauty (including comedy) shows about the world’s opposites, and therefore about the possible friendliness of the world itself, can be studied and really seen at last.

Justice and Comedy in a Poem

Included in this TRO, to follow The Laughable, Seriously, is a poem by Eli Siegel. “To a Slushy Pear” is published in his collection Hail, American Development. And with it here too is his note to the poem.

The poem has humor, and it has grandeur. The music of its lines has a reach, wonder—and has matter-of-factness.

The object that the poem is about is felt to be at once lowly and noble, to be impermanent and yet have with it science and world thought.

The last three lines of this poem move me immensely. And I think I can quote them now without “giving away” anything—without interfering with the poem’s effect as you read it later. These lines stand so much for how Eli Siegel saw—objects, happenings, people, reality itself. He was true always to the way of seeing in the lines; and it was a tremendous happiness to witness that and be affected by it. —Those final verses are:

—Ellen Reiss, Aesthetic Realism
Chair of Education

The Laughable, Seriously

By Eli Siegel

According to Aesthetic Realism, what is in reality itself is what we see in humor. It is what we see in poetry, what we see in every art.

There are many jokes uttered every day in America. People make jests, they utter gags, they give forth with wisecracks, and also they tell stories. The question is whether one thing we can see, in both a good jest and a bad jest, is the world operating.

There have been ever so many ponderous theories of humor, and any person who begins talking of the “philosophy” of humor is looked at somewhat askance: you’ve taken the poor laughable joke and made it look so serious that what you’ve got is a lot of philosophy and no humor. Well, Aesthetic Realism sees philosophy itself as humorous. And I’d like people to feel that, really, a joke shows what the world is up to.

James Thurber Is Quoted

The book I am going to use is Bennett Cerf’s quite popular Try and Stop Me, of 1944. It is a very useful book, and you get lots of literary information in it. There is hardly any attempt in the book to show what humor is, but Cerf does see fit to quote James Thurber on the nature of humor. It’s useful to read that definition. Mr. Cerf likes it, and I like it, kind of, too. I think it’s too wordy. —But here is Cerf quoting it with approval:

Thurber’s definition of humor will do until a better one comes along: “Humor is a kind of emotional chaos told about calmly and quietly in retrospect.”

If we look at the definition we find this: humor is something which is in disorder, which is rough, which is “emotional” (an adjective most often associated with disorder); and Thurber uses the word “chaos.” All this would mean humor has a lot of motion and disorder. But then—this disorder is “told about calmly and quietly in retrospect.” I submit: that part sounds a little more orderly. So the first half of the definition is disorder; the second half is order. Thurber’s definition means that humor is the disorderly made orderly; or, as Aesthetic Realism has said pretty often, humor is the ugly, while seen as ugly, given form which is beautiful.

We have, in humor, motion made rest, difficulty made ease; even difference made sameness; and emotion given the form of intellect or at least something like repose. We have, in other words, opposites made one.

I think the definition of Thurber is pretty true; but it represents one aspect. Humor isn’t only “chaos,” and there are other aspects to it than something “emotional.” And then, it doesn’t have to be told “calmly”: sometimes a person can be very humorous when he or she isn’t calm. Some of the most humorous things have been said in terms of great excitement.

But the definition is pretty much in accord with some other definitions, even the Hegelian idea that the uncertainty of the momentary is resolved by the quietude of the absolute. I think Hegel and Thurber agree. Or, Hegel might say, humor is where the concrete specific is subsumed under the existential permanent ground. I think Hegel is right and Thurber is right.

But we want to see specific instances of all this happening. First of all, as I said, this book is not just a collection of jokes. It is, in fact, an index to the civilization of the ’40s and even now. It was printed during the last year of the war, and many people were fond of it. Cerf is not just a gag man; after all he publishes Proust and Havelock Ellis, and he had lunch at least twice with Gertrude Stein.

There’s Sir Walter Raleigh (c. 1553-1618)

To give a notion of this book, there is an anecdote here that has been used very often seriously by people to show the difficulty of history. It is an anecdote about Sir Walter Raleigh, and this is the way it is told by Bennett Cerf:

When Sir Walter Raleigh was imprisoned in the Tower of London, he decided to while away the interminable hours by writing a history of the world. He had covered about two hundred pages of foolscap when, one morning, he was interrupted by a great noise in the prison courtyard. Two prisoners, working there, had become involved in a violent argument. Blows were struck. Inmates clung to the barred windows of their cells and yelled gibes and encouragement until the guards tore the men apart just in time to avoid mayhem.

When the prisoners were assembled for mess that noon, nobody talked about anything else. Eight prisoners gave the attentive Sir Walter their version of the fracas. No two stories were the same.

As soon as he was back in his prison apartment, Sir Walter took the manuscript of his history of the world, tore it into pieces, and threw it into the fire.

Now, I don’t know where Cerf got this version of the story—because it so happens that one of the few folios on these premises is a History of the World by Sir Walter Raleigh, so it seems that Raleigh didn’t tear the manuscript apart. But Cerf is impelled by the gag: he feels he has to give that conclusion. The story as I remember it is that Raleigh was sad and humble—because the fact that everyone’s account of the fracas was different shows it is difficult to write history. But somehow, maybe because he was in the Tower of London, he went on writing his history anyway. At least there is a book—it’s very big—History of the World, by Sir Walter Raleigh.

But the anecdote itself, told by Cerf, is still funny: it has to do with the discrepancy of things. The fact that this fight of the moment, in the prison courtyard, is related to history of all the years, means that something momentary and disorderly is related to something much larger, and in a way quieter. It is a relation of the small, the moment, to the large, and of the disorderly to the orderly. There are other relations, the kind of relations that we find in poetry.

The Momentary and the Permanent

This matter has to do with emotion in the following way. Our emotions are made up of two tones. If a man loses his hat for a moment, the meaning of religion, the meaning of time, the sanctity of marriage, the family relation, the future of humanity, all go by until he gets that hat. Or if a person in eating ice cream has dropped her spoon, the agony she goes through until she can either get a new spoon or perhaps furtively pick up the spoon that was dropped—that agony for the while takes precedence also over the future of woman, the future of the world, the nature of man, the sanctity of marriage, the permanence of the family relation, and Lord knows what else. Where the momentary and the permanent are brought together, we sometimes have poetry, but we can also have humor.

These two things are the staples of emotion, because our emotion is always made up of what is concrete, which may seem trivial, and something that is wide and permanent. Thomas Carlyle said that every human being is in touch with the infinite, faces the immensities and the infinities, and has also given up his or her birthright for another portion of ham—or something of the sort.

It is pretty clear that a person meets the immeasurable and the trivial. This is humor. It is emotion. It is reality.

To a Slushy Pear

By Eli Siegel

Author’s note to the poem. A slushy pear is one of the many things instancing the carelessness and shape of existence. (I could have used a wet shirt, also, to present reality as sloppy and shaped; or a book on which rain has fallen.) A slushy pear, however, tells of existence, abandoned and formed, in a way only it can. Certain functions of the slushy pear are unparalleled in a world of resemblance.

To be noticed about the slushy pear now present is its radiance, its effulgent, spotty brown. The sun worked within the slushy pear—just as the poem says. And a slushy pear has the pear contour—notable in horticulture and botanical sculpture—notable in visual recurrence and possibility.

The slushy pear has land as a cause—the way other kinds of pears have and boulders have.

Sadness is in the slushy pear, for it looks so undecided. Compared to other growing or grown things, its look is shiftless. The slushy pear is one of the few things that, clearly, can be called transitional. A slushy pear and a long stay are not about the same thing. Transition is of the very being of the slushy pear; in the universe, transition is always to be discerned, but as something findable in something else, not something itself. The slushy pear seems to announce: I am transition.