How Did You Get It In?

Kant tells a story in the Critique of Judgment. An Indian at an Englishman’s table sees a bottle of beer opened and the foam pour out of its neck, and he cannot stop exclaiming. Asked what astonishes him so, he says: that it comes out is no wonder; the wonder is how you got it in. Kant takes care to add that we laugh not because we think ourselves cleverer than this ignorant man.

The story sits in the remark to §54. Kant places laughter on the side of the agreeable, alongside games of chance and music, as a kind of “play.” His definition: laughter is an affect arising from the sudden transformation of a strained expectation into nothing. He does not drive judgment out altogether: after the letdown the mind turns back to try again, swinging between two standpoints. But the understanding, he holds, gains nothing here; the real cause of the gratification is the movement it sets off in the body.

Look at the bottle again. What came to nothing? Our expectation: we assumed it was the foam that amazed him. Yet what landed was not “nothing” but something we had not thought of: getting it in. Nor did our original reading vanish. The foam still pours, “it is the foam he ought to marvel at” is still before us, set right beside his “how did you get it in?” And one more thing: the construct with the remainder is not the Indian’s but ours. “At whom one laughs” and “whose construct the remainder belongs to” come apart here.

The Overview of SAE Laughter, “Judgment and Laughter,” starts from here and holds that laughter is an expression of the power of judgment. What laughter judges is that “the construct still has such a remainder.” It parts ways with Kant at three points: whether what lands is “nothing” or a remainder; whether laughter is an affect whose gratification reaches us through the body, or the cannot-not of a judgment, felt; and whether, toward others, one imputes agreement to everyone or stays open to questioning. This essay walks through the three points, and then looks at where each of the series’ four papers goes.

Construct and Remainder

First, two words. A construct is any way of grasping that is currently in operation. The paper lists a few: “an expectation, a definition, a reading of a sentence, a set of manners, a person’s understanding of his own situation.” A remainder is “the point that this construct has not fully taken in, and that is nonetheless right there before one’s eyes.” At the moment of laughter one sees this point, and sees that it and the construct are before one’s eyes at the same time.

So the object of laughter is neither the remainder nor the construct but the relation between them. Without a line drawn there is no remainder; a remainder can only be seen as the remainder of some construct. What laughter sees is exactly this “of.” The “such a” in the formula is deliberate too: “such” means it can be identified and shown to someone else; “a” means it can be singled out. Laughter does not need to know how many remainders a construct has in all; it needs only this one to stand out. In the paper’s words: “What is required here is individuation, not enumeration.”

The position comes from the SAE (Self-as-an-End) framework. SAE takes the remainder as the core concept organizing all its domains, and holds that every construct has a remainder and that having a remainder is not a defect. Laughter is the most everyday witness to this claim: when we laugh, we are precisely seeing a remainder as a remainder, and not as the construct’s failure.

SAE’s aesthetics series has argued that a subject who has seen a construct fully unfolded along some dimension cannot not acknowledge it as beautiful. The modality of laughter is likewise cannot-not; the difference is in the object. The acknowledgment of beauty can fall on a construct’s full unfolding; laughter falls on the remainder alone. In this sense the Laughter Series is the reverse side of the aesthetics series.

It should be said what is new. “Laughter is a judgment” is new relative to Kant; relative to contemporary psychology it is not, since McGraw and Warren’s benign violation theory already grounds laughter in appraisal. What the Laughter Series sets out to explain is something else: how a construct and a remainder enter a single laugh together. The headline distinction it offers is three words: no one loses.

Three Layers of “Still”

The hardest-working word in the formula is “still.” It has at least three senses. Still present: the construct can still be called to mind, understood, looked back at. Still in use: someone still acts by it. Still valid: its original claim still holds. The three are nested; being in use and validity both presuppose presence. The Laughter Series takes the union of the three, with presence as the floor.

In a pun both readings hold; the construct is still valid, nothing is damaged, and the laugh is light. The ending of “The Emperor’s New Clothes” is different. After the child speaks out, the emperor feels inwardly that it is so, yet he walks the procession to its end, even more grandly, and the chamberlains go on carrying the train that is not there. The procession goes on, but no one believes any longer that he is clothed: the construct is still in use, no longer valid. Laughter at this layer is satire. The tale does not record who laughed; the reader’s laughter has many layers, at the emperor, at the ministers, and at the crowd that had just been pretending to see along with them.

The third layer is presence alone. Diogenes carried a plucked chicken into the lecture hall and said: here is Plato’s man. The definition “featherless biped” can still be called to mind, but it has lost its standing. According to Diogenes Laertius, “having broad nails” was then added to the definition. The text does not record the audience laughing; if anyone laughed, at the moment of laughing Plato’s definition and the chicken lay side by side. The patching of the definition came after the laugh; the Laughter Series calls it absorption.

Presence has to be stated exactly: “Presence means being before one’s eyes at this moment, not the continued existence of the construct.” Being in use and validity only record how far this particular laugh reaches; they are not conditions of laughter. “Still” always hangs on the construct, never on the remainder.

No One Loses

With presence as the floor comes the series’ most visible claim: at the moment of laughter, construct and remainder are both in view; no one is erased, and no one is declared the loser. Whether the construct afterwards carries on, is amended or is abandoned is not settled by this laugh. Judgments about whether it is still valid or still used may come before the laugh, after it, or alongside it, and the person makes them separately. “Laughter does not decide whether the construct stays or goes.”

Schopenhauer’s incongruity theory is the classic form of the route that ascribes laughter to incongruity, the route Kant is on too. Laughter, he says, arises from the sudden perception of an incongruity between a concept and the real objects thought through it; and this victory of perceptual knowledge over thought gives us pleasure. For him laughter is the outcome of a contest: perception has won, the concept has lost. The Laughter Series disagrees at one point only: whether laughter is the outcome of a contest. It says laughter does not rule on victory or defeat; the pleasure, if it comes, is an emotion that follows, not laughter itself.

The paper is restrained about Schopenhauer too. A pun can serve as a shared test case for both sides, but it is not a ready-made counterexample: Schopenhauer had already dealt with puns, and he allows that an object may be correctly subsumed under a concept in one respect while showing incongruity in another. A comparison would have to align word, concept and object item by item and then see what each description says; until that is done, neither side is declared refuted.

Kant’s own book has a passage that can be read this way. In §54 he speaks of naivety: a person’s original sincerity breaks out against the art of dissimulation that has become second nature, and seriousness and respect mix into the play. On the Laughter Series’ reading, the art of dissimulation is the construct and sincerity its remainder; the exposed dissimulation and the sincerity breaking out are both in view at this moment. Kant says what comes to nothing is the illusion; the Laughter Series says construct and remainder are in view together. The two descriptions may be speaking of different layers of the same thing.

Weeping, Fear and Laughter

The formula says what laughter judges; it remains to say how laughter differs from weeping and fear. All three can face the same construct and the same remainder; the difference lies in where attention falls. Weeping and fear focus on the construct; laughter focuses on the remainder. Weeping is the construct lost, “it’s gone”; fear is the construct threatened, it may soon be gone; in laughter the construct is still in view, but attention is drawn to this one remainder.

Hobbes, in chapter 6 of Leviathan, had already paired laughter with weeping: laughter is sudden glory; weeping is sudden dejection, caused by accidents that suddenly take away some vehement hope or some prop of one’s power. What is taken away is exactly the construct one leans on.

A case of fear is a letter the mathematician Hermite wrote to Stieltjes in 1893. He says he turns away with dread and horror from this lamentable plague of continuous functions that are nowhere differentiable. Weierstrass had presented such functions as early as 1872; the remainder had long been seen and registered, and twenty years on Hermite’s attention still fell on the threatened construct, analysis’s ordinary understanding of continuous functions. The letter does not record whether he laughed. The same remainder was later taken up by fractal geometry and became a beauty of the remainder; by then attention had turned to the remainder itself.

The distinction in focus explains something common: in one and the same situation a person may laugh or may weep, and often the two alternate. In despair, when attention falls on the conviction “there is no way left,” one weeps; when it falls on the self that is still searching, one laughs. The situation has not changed; the landing point has. Nor need attention land in only one place: laughing through tears, a laugh inside embarrassment; the laugh is the share that falls on the remainder. It also explains why the person made the butt often does not laugh: the onlookers focus on the remainder, while he may be forced to pull his attention back to his own construct and where it was damaged, and so he is embarrassed. But this is only one explanation; the outcome still depends on his own judgment, and some laugh along.

Kinds of laughter can be sorted by what the remainder costs the laugher: the free belly laugh, the costly wry laugh, the laughter of despair whose cost is very heavy. But cost cannot separate laughter from weeping; the laughter of despair faces a very heavy cost and is still laughter. The Chinese word for a wry laugh means, literally, “bitter laughter,” and it names the two layers: the bitterness is the emotion; the laugh is the jolt of cannot-not.

Seeing and Not Having Seen

“Still has” presupposes an earlier state in which the remainder was treated as absent; not that anyone asserted it was absent, only that it was not seen. So laughter judges not just a remainder but the gap between seeing and not having seen. The gap is indexed by person and moment. Within one person, the one who had not seen is me a moment ago; the gap closes in an instant, and so it is sudden: the laugh at the end of a pun is of this kind. Between persons, I have seen and the other has not; the gap stays open, and so it is persistent: what sly laughter and the laughter of love are waiting for is precisely the other’s sudden moment. Conversely, when the other has seen and I have not, I laugh at my own not having seen; this is contagious laughter.

“Suddenness” has not been abolished; it is the temporal form this structure takes within one person, and “persistence” the form it takes between two. That is why a joke told a second time often falls flat: the remainder has been seen, the gap has closed. Yet old jokes between old friends, which both have long since seen, still draw a laugh. The paper registers this as the core pressure case for this thesis and offers two candidates: what is laughed at is an outsider’s construct, which the outsider still hasn’t seen; or one stands again in the self who had not yet seen, re-enacting the original gap. The second candidate may have an observable consequence, itself only a candidate and still to be checked: if it holds, the order and the pauses of the telling still matter, and giving the punchline away first kills the laugh. The two candidates are not presumed exhaustive.

A group laughs at a joke more readily than one person alone. One candidate explanation is that “whom one is laughing at” is sometimes many-layered. The same remainder can belong to several constructs at once: that of the person in the joke; my own, into which the joke has first led me; and the one we share, so that when someone else laughs I know we were all inside it a moment ago. The third layer exists only in a crowd. The paper says plainly that this is a mechanism hypothesis that has not yet obtained empirical warrant.

In the seeing grid’s cell “I see, the other doesn’t,” two kinds of laughter must still be told apart. A reader who laughs at the man of Chu marking his boat to find his sword need not compare himself with him; this is onlooker’s laughter. If, while laughing, he says inwardly “I’d never be that stupid,” his own purpose has entered the construct laughed at; that is comparative laughter, Hobbes’s second cause: seeing some defect in another and, by comparison, suddenly applauding oneself. Kant’s Indian is the touchstone here: Kant says outright that we laugh not because we think ourselves cleverer.

The Jolt of Cannot-Not

Three claims about laughter and judgment often coexist: laughter is an expression of the power of judgment; laughter is judgment; once the judgment is made, laughter comes irresistibly. The Laughter Series holds that judgment and inner laughter are two sides of one event. Seen structurally, it is a judgment; seen from the side on which it is felt, it is laughter. “Inner laughter is the jolt of cannot-not, felt, directed at this remainder of this construct: it is felt, not an emotion.”

Gladness, relief, a warmth in the heart are emotions; they may come along or not, and the emotion may even be bitter, while the laugh is still a laugh. Outward laughter is the expression of this event, and may or may not be there. So the three claims each find their place: “laughter is judgment” means inner laughter and judgment are one event; “laughter is an expression of the power of judgment” refers to outward laughter; “irresistibly” means that once the event happens, both sides are there at once.

Here is the second divergence from Kant. Kant has the gratification handed on by way of the body; the Laughter Series says that what forms two sides of one event with judgment is not gratification but laughter itself. The body still takes part; its movement is the expression. Suppressed laughter bears witness: the laugh has already risen, and one can only strain to keep it off one’s face. The paper puts it crisply: laughter felt inwardly is laughter too, and “what can be held back is only the expression.” Polite laughter is the other side: no judgment within, a laugh put on. The Laughter Series deals only with laughter that happens inwardly.

“Cannot-not is not being forced.” Forced laughter is making someone laugh at a certain point by means of consequences, claiming a judgment in his stead; that is colonization. Cannot-not comes from the judgment itself; being forced comes from consequences added from outside.

Cannot-not follows the judgment, not the judgment’s correctness. Someone who has believed a false rumour laughs at another’s action as absurd and only later learns it was not so: the laugh has happened, and the judgment was wrong. So laughter cannot prove that it has judged correctly. The evidence is first-personal anyway; the question is “did you laugh inwardly, and at what?” And whoever does not laugh is not thereby judged to have failed to see.

Someone calmly points out a condition he missed earlier, and does not laugh; a harder pressure case is insight: a missing condition is suddenly seen, the gap closes, and yet often there is no laugh. The Laughter Series does not infer from “he didn’t laugh” that his attention was not on the remainder; it offers a classification. Once the gap has closed, attention has three destinations. On the remainder: the old construct is still in view, and that point lies there as “such a one”; this is laughter. Back on the failure or threat of the old construct, “I got that wrong just now”; this is embarrassment, fear or weeping. Forward, onto a new construct: the missing condition is taken straight into a new solution; this is absorption, and insight and calm error-correction belong here.

The three destinations can mix. Hence the familiar pattern of an “Ah!” followed by a laugh: “Why didn’t I think of that?” The first jolt is directed at the new solution working; the second at the old construct still having such a remainder. So that the classification does not become an all-purpose escape hatch, the paper also gives independent markers, what the person does and says afterwards, and states plainly the case that would falsify it.

The Laugh Goes with the One Who Laughs

With the same joke, different people laugh at different points: they laugh at different constructs, see different remainders, stand at different layers. So the Laughter Series lays down: “The layer of a laugh is set by the layer at which the laugher stands at that moment”; the layer of the construct laughed at is recorded separately. The unit of analysis is a single laugh, one person’s judgment at one moment about the remainder of some construct, not a joke. One story can hold several laughs: those of the people in it, the narrator’s, the reader’s. The stories of the man marking his boat and of Dong Shi imitating Xi Shi’s frown record no one laughing; the one who laughs is the reader, and the layer goes with the reader.

By the alignment of SAE’s psychoanalysis series, the subject is at 13DD: the position that can execute negation reflexively, that can negate its own negation. 12DD has the power of prediction but no subjectivity. Infant laughter, and the laughter of animals with no distinction yet between subject and other, are therefore registered as “laughter as tendency,” not certified as judgment: part of the structure of construct and remainder has appeared, attention already falls on the remainder, but the judgment does not yet have an owner who knows that it is he who judges. From 13DD on, laughter is judgment, and it can be corrected. Being correctable does not mean being corrected every time, nor that the laugh was already justified.

The scope begins at 12DD, with 11DD merged in, and ends at 15DD. Tickling laughter has to be split in two: before the hand touches, the child is already laughing, predicting another’s movement, a 12DD tendency; the laugh after contact is 10DD perceptual laughter, beyond the lower bound. Beyond the upper bound lies 16DD: looking at each other and laughing, when two subjects do not doubt each other. The series registers it only, without developing it.

Within the scope there are also laughs that are not judgments: polite laughter; forced laughter; laughter in conversation that merely accommodates; laughing along only because one hears laughter, without taking it as a clue to look for what one has not seen. Provine’s research shows that most laughter in everyday conversation follows remarks that are not funny; he counted outward laughter, not inner laughter. The series does not infer from this whether anyone laughed within; it simply excludes, by definition, the side that is mere accommodation.

Didn’t You Get It?

Laughter, like beauty, is not the same for everyone. With the same joke, some laugh and some do not, and those who laugh may not laugh at the same point. Our powers of judgment intersect, so laughter is often shared; but each keeps his own power of judgment, so laughter is never something allotted from above.

Laughter carries an expectation toward others; in everyday speech it is the familiar “Didn’t you get it?” In §8 Kant says that the judgment of taste does not postulate that everyone will agree, but only imputes agreement to everyone. Placing laughter on the side of judgment, the Laughter Series answers differently: what laughter expects of others is openness to being questioned. I expect you to tell me your judgment, but I do not expect in advance that yours and mine will intersect. “Didn’t you get it?” is really asking “What did you see?” The paper also cautions that the words can be mockery, and cannot by themselves certify that the speaker is really open to disagreement.

Two consequences follow. First, whoever does not laugh is not thereby judged to have failed to see: he may have seen something else, his attention may be on the construct, or he may have a judgment of his own. Second, making someone laugh at a certain point by means of consequences, claiming a judgment in his stead, is colonization. The series takes colonization in the broad sense: substituting one’s own purpose for the other’s own law. Inviting someone to take another look, or discussing whether something was misread, is not colonization. Laughing along at a powerful man’s jokes, insofar as one is forced to claim a judgment one has not made, is the other face of the same colonization; being forced only into an expression is another matter.

Power both forbids laughter and compels it. Why is satire forbidden? If laughter were merely a convulsion of the diaphragm, what would forbidding it be for? The series’ answer is that laughter is the judgment that “this construct still has such a remainder,” and this judgment cannot be ordered not to occur. The paper adds that the fact that laughter is forbidden does not, on its own, prove that laughter is judgment.

After the Overview come four papers, passing through the four layers in turn. The first treats the tendency of 12DD: what the infant is laughing at in peek-a-boo. The second treats 13DD: laughter has an owner for the first time; this judgment is mine. The third treats 14DD: one’s own purpose enters the construct laughed at, with the laughter of triumph and wry laughter, and also derision and doing things with laughter. The fourth treats 15DD: the laughter of despair and the knowing smile, and then stops before looking at each other and laughing.

Back to the bottle of beer. After the Indian’s remark the foam still pours, our original reading is still before us, and the thing he asked about lies there beside it. No one has lost. Having a remainder is not a defect; when we laugh, we are precisely seeing a remainder as a remainder.