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The campaign for Republican Sen. Marco Rubio accused Rep. Val Demings, D-Fla. Brad Sherman, D-Calif. It was never going to be the case that as Uncle Sam went limping back home Afghans were going to stand there and make things worse for themselves. The fact that the United States chooses to be the weak horse does not change the political algebra.

They became something more than an event. When the nation is insulted or attacked, then the president must respond in some symbolically satisfying way or risk losing the Mandate of Heaven. There were a couple of different stories told to justify that attack — some fiction about the facility being used to produce nerve gas and that it was connected to Osama bin Laden, who had lived in Khartoum a decade earlier — but the timing was perfectly Clintonian: two months after the film Wag the Dog opened in theaters and one week after the Monica Lewinsky matter became public.

Clinton, who had been a draft-dodging bum in the s one of the many things he has in common with Donald Trump , was intent on remaking the Democratic Party along more centrist and less McGovernite lines, and he was sensitive about looking like too much of a flower child. At the same time, anything that looked like a variation on the theme of Vietnam was, in those years, strictly off limits, especially for a Democrat. The question about U. It was a difficult question to parse politically.

The memory of Vietnam was alive for Clinton-era Democrats who had cut their political teeth in the anti-war movement, but in the most recent major U. Bush had if anything made it look too easy.

The first Gulf War left Americans with the impression — and the expectation — that U. We still operate, in no small part, under that misapprehension, failing to appreciate that our ability to impose military outcomes is insufficient to secure the political outcomes that are, in fact, our actual national-security goal.

But Clinton nonetheless was compelled to act — politically compelled, not militarily compelled. If anything, his obviously symbolic response probably emboldened Osama bin Laden and al-Qaeda, persuading them that the price of attacking the United States was, all things considered, quite tolerable, a burden they were willing to bear in the service of jihad.

Because Barack Obama had at least the good sense to more or less ignore Joe Biden out of existence for eight years, Osama bin Laden did not live to see his expectations finally come to pass. But a symbolic retaliation followed by retreat is precisely what President Biden ultimately intended to offer, at the end, in Afghanistan.

After the airport attack — the deadliest attack on U. That compulsion surely was felt all the way down the chain of command. And it resulted in taking the first opportunity to make a theatrical show of force — in this case, against a car with seven children in it. Because Congress is run by Democrats, there probably will be no serious oversight effort made to learn how that decision was made and how it went wrong.

But the political dynamics animating the administration are plain enough. George H. Bush was far from indifferent to political realities, but he was a politician of an increasingly rare kind: one who was not only a politician.

In the Gulf War, he understood what U. But by , our presidential politics already had become surreal: George H. The charge was strafing Japanese lifeboats. There has always been an element of purely symbolic exchange in our presidential politics, from George Washington on, but by the s that economy of symbols had become almost entirely unyoked from the business of being president. That is the only way to understand the madness of handing power over from the experienced and capable hands of George H.

Bush to such a man as Bill Clinton. The symbolic presidency and presidential administration remain disconnected. That makes it impossible for a president to shut up and do nothing — even when that is the best course of action.

The prevalence of symbolism over all else means that presidents are compelled to act — even when the action is pointless or destructive. Sometimes, that is an ill-considered tariff or a ridiculous promise about Mexico paying us to build a border wall. Sometimes, it is showing up at a disaster scene as though the presidential presence brought with it mystical healing powers rather than resource-consuming distraction.

Sometimes, it is the mystical laying of presidential hands upon a Skutnik during the State of the Union address. Che Guevara is an icon; Muammar Gaddafi is not, at least not outside of Libya.

An icon can stand for a nation Mohandas Gandhi , a movement Susan B. Anthony , an ideology Adolf Hitler , a sensibility Le Corbusier , an era Marilyn Monroe , an episode Abraham Lincoln , a cultural current Hugh Hefner , an ideal Mother Teresa , and, of course, religions and religious tendencies.

Like an artistic style, the iconic quality of an image is most easily detected when it is being copied: Elizabeth Holmes dressed up like Steve Jobs, not like Bill Gates, for the same reason that there have been many parodies of William F. To borrow from Gertrude Stein, a woman who knew, there has to be some there there. It is a quality that you cannot buy, engineer, or even earn — celebrities who set out to make themselves into icons Lil Nas X almost always fail.

They end up like the ironically named Madonna, who is a kind of vampire that has fed on a series of genuine icons, derivative to such an extent that her considerable originality is obscured by the enduring looks and personas which, in layers of pastiche, compose her image. A reader, apparently not entirely familiar with your obedient correspondent, writes in with a sports-related question.

But, it seems to me, the player in question will always have been a first round pick — it simply happened a while ago. In other words, previously. There is something to that. Surely it matters when a player was a first-round draft pick: I would imagine that the bidding starts higher for first-round picks than it does for first-round picks. Literally means literally — describing a thing that actually happened. As opposed to metaphorically. NM: Well, that does bother me. They told me what a writer she [Dunham] was.

In it, you will discover 60 words for heroin and some very sad stories involving those words. By faith he forsook Egypt, not fearing the wrath of the king. Pharaoh was very much on the pilgrim mind. Welcome to the Tuesday, a semi-fortnightly vexation. To subscribe to the Tuesday and receive it in your in-box, which I hope you will do, please follow this link. There are two kinds of people who support single-payer health care in the United States: Those who point to the British system as a successful example, and those who know something about the British system.

Apples-to-apples comparisons are difficult to make, because both countries have multiple taxing jurisdictions high-income New Yorkers pay more than high-income Texans, and high-income Scots pay more than high-income Englishmen and tax things like investment income and profits from selling a residence differently. That being said: Middle- to upper-middle-income Britons do pay higher national income taxes than do their American counterparts, but when state and local taxes are taken into consideration, the math looks different, with middle-income households in New York State, for example, liable in at least some cases to pay higher income taxes than they would in the United Kingdom.

By way of comparison, taxpayers in Denmark typically pay nearly twice the income tax they would in the United States. Overall, British income taxes are slightly but not radically higher than American taxes. So, comparable income-tax rates and all that sweet free health care — it looks like the British are getting a great deal, no?

But, of course, it is more complicated than that. One in four NHS patients say that working with the state-run system has harmed their mental health. Meanwhile, residential and at-home care for the elderly, a growing concern in aging nations such as the United Kingdom , can be outrageously expensive. In some cases, those expenses can run into six figures. Mental-health care in the United Kingdom is poor though not as poor as it is in the United States and getting poorer as the number of available treatment spots are cut.

There is a reason that, contrary to what you hear from American progressives, few countries in Europe or elsewhere actually have national single-payer systems. Health care in Switzerland happens in an entirely private but highly regulated market. The new surcharge and the related reforms are meant to get social-care costs under control.

And while the government of Boris Johnson is not always obviously competent, this is not a Johnson problem: British governments have been grappling with social care since the s.

The timelines there are always kind of interesting to me: The welfare state in the United Kingdom took its modern form in , and, less than 30 years later, the country was a wreck. But now as we approach a half a century since the crisis that brought Margaret Thatcher to power, many of the basic problems with that welfare state remain unaddressed. Tony Blair tried, and largely failed, to reform the system. Bush administration did when it tried to reckon with the financial imbalances of Social Security.

Of course, a very rich country such as the United Kingdom has the resources to provide care for the indigent and the elderly. The British also want to have a private economy with lots of investment and trade, and enough left over for the occasional Spanish holiday. Choices have to be made. The NHS is chronically underfunded for the same reason U. Real investments require real money, but promises are free.

And so money goes to where the votes are. As it turns out, many of the key features of the ACA were never implemented. We see the same dynamic at work in areas other than health care; e.

Canada has similar problems. These shortcomings are endemic. None of this is to say that the U. There are several different good ways to do health care. Many American progressives profess to admire the German way of doing things.

But what the German model and the Swiss model have in common is a ruthlessly enforced individual mandate to purchase private health insurance; i. And that points to the fundamental issue that we never seem to get around to really thinking about. The case for single-payer health care, like the more general case for a health-care system with a larger role for government, is not at its foundation about economic efficiency, quality of care, or even access to care.

Some largely public systems perform pretty well on the efficiency and access criteria, and so do some largely private systems. Our health-care debate is not based in economics but in temperament — mainly risk-aversion. The great sources of stress in the American system are the threat of losing coverage and then incurring some massive medical costs, and the related issue of general price opacity.

If you want LASIK eye surgery, you can get a quote, you can get three competing quotes, you can arrange financing if needed, etc. The same for many kinds of cosmetic surgery, some kinds of dentistry, and some other services. Of course, not everything can be priced that way. But the lack of transparency, prices, and accountability is, I think, the root of our anxiety about health insurance and health care.

A single-payer system such as the NHS is attractive to some people because it promises — often falsely — to relieve that anxiety. A single-payer system also introduces new problems and new sources of anxiety. And so much of our debate ends up being a comparison between the British system and the U. Politically, that means exaggerating or emphasizing the defects of the system you like less and waving away the defects of the system you prefer.

That is an unprofitable use of time and energy. What would be more productive, I think — especially for proponents of more liberal and market-oriented solutions on such issues as health care — is to understand and appreciate the stress and anxiety that some Americans believe could be alleviated with an NHS-style monopoly or similar system, and develop reforms that speak to these concerns — which are legitimate concerns and deserve to be treated as such — in a way that is more consistent with our values and with American practice.

Local norms and culture matter enormously in these things: I am a great admirer of the Swiss model of government, but I think it would be catastrophic to attempt it in the United States. I am not much of an admirer of the NHS, which I also think would go simultaneously up in smoke and down in flames, Hindenburg -style, if attempted in the United States. Often the Answer Is No. As you might have guessed, the headline says the opposite of what the article says.

The report, by Shaila Dewan, notes that the police often are not prosecuted but does not argue that they should not be prosecuted. In fact, the author seems to believe the opposite. This is one of the problems of getting news reporting too mixed up with agenda-driven opinion writing: Should is a word for opinion columnists, not a word for reporters. This sense of fast is, in fact, older than the sense of speedy.

One idea is that fast in the sense of fixed came by extension to mean disciplined or resolved , a sense that fast maintains in English, and from resolved on to vigorous or energetic. A religious fast , then, would be a demonstration of resolve, while running fast would be running with vigor and energy. The theme running through all these is commitment , but, as far as I can tell, no one really knows beyond a very vague sense how all these words fit together. A reader writes in with a classic: evacuate , which has come up repeatedly in the case of Afghanistan.

This is one of the many things people learned from watching The Wire. RIP Michael K. Afghanistan was evacuated, the Americans and Afghan allies there were rescued.

Some of you have heard me tell the story of my first being offered a job by the Atlantic. I warned the editor, Jeffrey Goldberg, that there would be howls of protest, and not just howls but blubbering and ululations and hoots, all of them in protest. He scoffed. The more important half is still being carried out. Apparently, they listened. If you are curious about what some of those disaffected young men mentioned above are up to, you can find out therein.

But the sobering — and terrifying — truth is that these horrific acts were not performed by uncivilized people from some barbaric backwater. Osama bin Laden himself was an educated man he studied for a time at Oxford and valued education in others: Two of his wives had doctorates. Osama bin Laden was not raised in an environment of fanaticism — he helped to construct one.

In that famous picture of him and his family on vacation in the s , there are plenty of bellbottoms and not a burqa in sight. These acts were not performed by barbarians — they were performed by intelligent men, in many cases by educated men, and by sincerely if perversely devout men, with the full consent of their consciences. When we encounter people with radically different values from our own, we sometimes think of them as somehow less than human, as closer to animals than to us.

That has led us to many mistakes in the Muslim world and will lead us to similar mistakes regarding China and other challengers to Western liberal values. To subscribe to The Tuesday, follow this link. To subscribe to the Tuesday, and I hope you will, please follow this link.

And now Rolling Stone has done it again. The venerable pop-music magazine, which not long ago had to retract a splashy story about a vicious gang rape that never happened, has now been obliged to issue a correction — this should be a prelude to retraction — for a story about how gunshot victims wheeled into hospitals in rural Oklahoma are being left to bleed and groan in agony because the emergency rooms are overrun by cases of ivermectin poisoning.

As with the infamous rape case, this is a culturally electric event that. Oklahoma-specific ivermectin overdose figures are not available, but the count is unlikely to be a significant factor in hospital bed availability in a state that, per the CDC, currently has a 7-day average of 1, Covid hospitalizations.

The story turns out to have been based on the claims of one doctor — claims that Rolling Stone never checked. Because the story is about 1 ivermectin, and, more important, 2 Oklahoma.

The doctor is affiliated with a medical staffing group that serves multiple hospitals in Oklahoma. Another journalistic Hindenburg goes down in flames at Rolling Stone — oh, the buffoonery. Like most of the phony hate crimes and fabricated racial and sexual insults that have for years been an epidemic among young Americans, especially on college campuses, the Rolling Stone rape hoax was a neurotic casserole of familiar ingredients: social and romantic disappointment, weaponized envy, prejudice, mental-health problems, and a progressive-activist culture in which the effort to discredit and abominate cultural enemies — more often than not dishonest — takes the place of argument.

These things follow a pattern: When Lena Dunham made up a story about being raped while a student at Oberlin, her fictitious villain was not a member of the chess team or the president of the campus Sierra Club chapter but a swaggering College Republican; when North Carolina Central University student Crystal Mangum made up a story about being gang-raped, the malefactors were the Duke lacrosse team; the UVA hoax author, Jackie Coakley, falsely claimed that she was gang-raped by members of the Phi Kappa Psi fraternity as part of an initiation ritual.

When feminist activist Judy Munro-Leighton made up a story about being raped, she chose as her assailant Brett Kavanaugh, who was at the time a Supreme Court nominee in confirmation hearings. Jussie Smollett alleged that he was assaulted in the wee hours by. None of those fabricated rapes was presented as a mere crime of sexual violence — a crime that happens every day in these United States, disproportionately affecting not college women who are, in fact, less likely to suffer rape than are women the same age who are not in college or well-heeled activists but poor women in isolated urban and rural communities, women with little education, women on Indian reservations, illegal immigrants, etc.

The stories and the data associated with some of these places are shocking. Not really. In reality, the kind of women our newspaper editors and magazine publishers care about are college students, white tourists abroad, and celebrities. But the most important variable in these hoaxes is not any of the personal qualities of the fictitious victims but the cultural resonance of the fictitious attackers.

If you want to see a Native American leading the nightly news, put him in front of some white high-school kids wearing MAGA hats. Magazines such as Rolling Stone , the major newspapers, the academic establishment, and the professional-activist class are not staffed in the main by people who grew up on Indian reservations or in dysfunctional mountain villages, people who dropped out of high school, people who have been incarcerated, or other people from the margins.

Their interests, anxieties, and obsessions are those associated with their class. And so these made-up rape stories are not stories about rape — they are indictments of fraternity culture, or jock culture, or Southern institutions, or Republicans, or anybody else who wanders into the cultural crosshairs of the hoax artists.

The Oklahoma ivermectin story works in the same way, fitting into a prefab politico-cultural narrative that is not strictly speaking connected to the facts of the case at hand. No one questions tales of victimization involving people they assume to be, always and everywhere, victims. No one questions tales of depravity discrediting people they believe to be depraved.

Of course the corpses of those rubes in Oklahoma are piling up like cordwood — Joe Rogan has to be stopped! This reflexive prejudice deforms journalism in ways that are not limited to seeing the occasional work of pure fiction published as news.

As I have written before, this same tendency is why the same media kingpins who claim to be the tribunes of the poor and the forgotten will publish about 53 articles on the admissions policies at Harvard or the University of Texas law school for every one article they put out about the high-school dropout rate in Milwaukee.

Rolling Stone is not alone in this. Writing about the problems of the unionized public-sector work force in big Democrat-run cities does not push the right buttons for your average Washington Post reporter or editor — it does not lower the status of a perceived enemy but instead threatens a perceived ally.

Only a minority of Americans are college graduates, but the people who run Rolling Stone and the rest of the major media are in large part people who have powerful emotional connections to campus life. It is obvious enough. For progressives who see those who do not share their political priorities not as having different views but as enemies , publishing a made-up story about deranged gang-rapists at UVA pushes all the right buttons: white privilege, rich-jerk privilege, male privilege, Southern brutality, maybe even Christian hypocrisy if you can figure out a way to shoehorn it in there.

You can be sure that if someone had come forward with an unsubstantiated, loosey-goosey story about having been gang-raped by the staff of Rolling Stone , that claim would have received a good deal more scrutiny — not only at Rolling Stone , but at any mainstream-media outlet.

Not because they are personally connected to Rolling Stone staffers, but because they live in the same world as Rolling Stone staffers.

Southern fraternity members and college athletes are natural bogeymen to the media-staffer demographic, and so claims about them, however outrageous, are treated sympathetically. Oklahoma, on the other hand, inspires more fear among big-city progressives than the terrifying prospect of. The Rolling Stone story got picked apart in about five minutes as soon as it encountered the lightest skepticism. The Duke lacrosse story required a criminal investigation. These people simply must have the best of everything, including the pleasure of congratulating themselves on how far they have come and the adversity they have overcome.

That is the emotional foundation of our victimization Olympics. This is a problem of political bias, but political bias is part of a larger cultural bias, a particular social orientation. Rolling Stone has always been left-leaning, but it also was for many years the home of great writing from conservatives, notably P. But we have closed ranks, socially, in recent years, for a variety of reasons , many of them just blisteringly stupid. This has coincided with certain social and economic changes that have undermined the quality of American journalism.

The test of a political claim in our time is not whether it is true or false but whether it raises or lowers the status of our enemies. It is, of course, a little bit amusing that those at the commanding heights of our media are so blinded by prejudice that they cannot see the plain evidence that they are blinded by prejudice.

Class prejudice is a bigger part of that than is generally appreciated, but there are other kinds of prejudice at play. It is complicated, because many other kinds of prejudice are intertwined with class prejudice: religious prejudice, notably, but also racial prejudice and linguistic prejudice.

Making our media even more of a monoculture — more intellectually and politically homogeneous — is going to make this even worse. You do not have to be of a certain background to write about people from that background, and you do not have to have personal experience with any particular social situation to write intelligently about it. But you have to do the work, which is a lot more difficult and a lot less enjoyable than simply indulging your own prejudices and hatreds. Unhappily, our so-called journalists are by the day less willing to do that work — and have fewer incentives to do it — which is why they keep getting snookered by interchangeable lies from a cast of interchangeable liars.

A note to our progressive friends: This is your version of Q-Anon — falling for obvious, ridiculous lies because you want to believe the worst about people you hate.

Where I come from, a shoehorn is not a shoehorn — it is a shoe spoon. But, depending on where you are, it may be a shoehorse , shoespooner , shoe schlipp , or shoe tongue. It is a damned interesting word: Shoe horn in its literal sense dates back to at least the 15th century, but its modern metaphorical sense goes back only to the 19th century. For some period of time between the coining of the word and the emergence of the modern metaphorical senses, shoehorn had a different metaphorical sense: cuckold.

My guess is that the horn part explains that. The connection between horns and sex has been around a lot longer than English has, and the popular tradition connecting horns and cuckolds goes way back into the history, and the pre-history, of the British isles.

But the connection is not exclusive to the Western world: Horns have been used for centuries in folk medicine as aphrodisiacs — as the rhinoceros horn still is in China, among other places. Simmons and Elias Koteas works magnificently to deliver a moody and complex mystery with juicy twists.

Don Johnson. Introducing was a little joke, but also an announcement of his intention of reviving his career. Which he did. An old friend of mine who got by for some years as a semi-professional golf hustler said he used to caddy for Don Johnson, who was, according to my source, a gentleman and an excellent tipper.

We are going to have vaccine mandates, at least narrowly tailored ones for medical personnel and those in similar work. So, we are going to need a secure and reliable system for monitoring vaccinations. The one we have is kind of a joke. Shoe-schlipping kept to a minimum. We'll notify you here with news about. Turn on desktop notifications for breaking stories about interest?

Latest Entertainment Video. Latest Entertainment Headlines. Queen Elizabeth II attends christening of 2 great-grandsons Queen Elizabeth II has attended a double christening for two of her great-grandchildren. Saudi critic's fiancee urges Justin Bieber to cancel F1 show The fiancee of slain Saudi critic Jamal Khashoggi joined a chorus of voices calling on pop star Justin Bieber to cancel his concert in Saudi Arabia next month.

The Lord who sits enthroned in heaven laughs them to scorn; then he rebukes them in anger, he threatens them in his wrath Psalm —5. In the Bible, mockery is so offensive that it may deserve death, as when a group of children laugh at the prophet Elisha for his baldness:.

Bringing together negative assessments of laughter from the Bible with criticisms from Greek philosophy, early Christian leaders such as Ambrose, Jerome, Basil, Ephraim, and John Chrysostom warned against either excessive laughter or laughter generally. Sometimes what they criticized was laughter in which the person loses self-control.

Other times they linked laughter with idleness, irresponsibility, lust, or anger. John Chrysostom, for example, warned that. Laughter often gives birth to foul discourse, and foul discourse to actions still more foul. Often from words and laughter proceed railing and insult; and from railing and insult, blows and wounds; and from blows and wounds, slaughter and murder. If, then, you would take good counsel for yourself, avoid not merely foul words and foul deeds, or blows and wounds and murders, but unseasonable laughter itself in Schaff , Not surprisingly, the Christian institution that most emphasized self-control—the monastery—was harsh in condemning laughter.

One of the earliest monastic orders, of Pachom of Egypt, forbade joking Adkin , — The Rule of St. The monastery of St. The Christian European rejection of laughter and humor continued through the Middle Ages, and whatever the Reformers reformed, it did not include the traditional assessment of humor.

Among the strongest condemnations came from the Puritans, who wrote tracts against laughter and comedy. That makes us alert to signs that we are winning or losing. The former make us feel good and the latter bad. If our perception of some sign that we are superior comes over us quickly, our good feelings are likely to issue in laughter. In Part I, ch. Sudden glory, is the passion which makes those grimaces called laughter; and is caused either by some sudden act of their own, that pleases them; or by the apprehension of some deformed thing in another, by comparison whereof they suddenly applaud themselves.

And it is incident most to them, that are conscious of the fewest abilities in themselves; who are forced to keep themselves in their own favor by observing the imperfections of other men. And therefore much laughter at the defects of others, is a sign of pusillanimity.

For of great minds, one of the proper works is, to help and free others from scorn; and to compare themselves only with the most able. He says that laughter accompanies three of the six basic emotions—wonder, love, mild hatred, desire, joy, and sadness. Derision or scorn is a sort of joy mingled with hatred, which proceeds from our perceiving some small evil in a person whom we consider to be deserving of it; we have hatred for this evil, we have joy in seeing it in him who is deserving of it; and when that comes upon us unexpectedly, the surprise of wonder is the cause of our bursting into laughter… And we notice that people with very obvious defects such as those who are lame, blind of an eye, hunched-backed, or who have received some public insult, are specially given to mockery; for, desiring to see all others held in as low estimation as themselves, they are truly rejoiced at the evils that befall them, and they hold them deserving of these art.

With these comments of Hobbes and Descartes, we have a sketchy psychological theory articulating the view of laughter that started in Plato and the Bible and dominated Western thinking about laughter for two millennia. In the 20 th century, this idea was called the Superiority Theory.

Simply put, our laughter expresses feelings of superiority over other people or over a former state of ourselves. Feelings of superiority, Hutcheson argued, are neither necessary nor sufficient for laughter. In laughing, we may not be comparing ourselves with anyone, as when we laugh at odd figures of speech like those in this poem about a sunrise:.

If self-comparison and sudden glory are not necessary for laughter, neither are they sufficient for laughter. A gentleman riding in a coach who sees ragged beggars in the street, for example, will feel that he is better off than they, but such feelings are unlikely to amuse him. To these counterexamples to the Superiority Theory we could add more. Sometimes we laugh when a comic character shows surprising skills that we lack.

In the silent movies of Charlie Chaplin, Harold Lloyd, and Buster Keaton, the hero is often trapped in a situation where he looks doomed. But then he escapes with a clever acrobatic stunt that we would not have thought of, much less been able to perform. Laughing at such scenes does not seem to require that we compare ourselves with the hero; and if we do make such a comparison, we do not find ourselves superior.

At least some people, too, laugh at themselves—not a former state of themselves, but what is happening now. If I search high and low for my eyeglasses only to find them on my head, the Superiority Theory seems unable to explain my laughter at myself.

While these examples involve persons with whom we might compare ourselves, there are other cases of laughter where no personal comparisons seem involved. In experiments by Lambert Deckers , subjects were asked to lift a series of apparently identical weights. The first several weights turned out to be identical, and that strengthened the expectation that the remaining weights would be the same. But then subjects picked up a weight that was much heavier or lighter than the others.

Further weakening the dominance of the Superiority Theory in the 18 th century were two new accounts of laughter which are now called the Relief Theory and the Incongruity Theory. Neither even mentions feelings of superiority. The Relief Theory is an hydraulic explanation in which laughter does in the nervous system what a pressure-relief valve does in a steam boiler.

John Locke , Book 3, ch. The natural free spirits of ingenious men, if imprisoned or controlled, will find out other ways of motion to relieve themselves in their constraint; and whether it be in burlesque, mimicry, or buffoonery, they will be glad at any rate to vent themselves, and be revenged upon their constrainers.

Over the next two centuries, as the nervous system came to be better understood, thinkers such as Herbert Spencer and Sigmund Freud revised the biology behind the Relief Theory but kept the idea that laughter relieves pent-up nervous energy. When we are angry, for example, nervous energy produces small aggressive movements such as clenching our fists; and if the energy reaches a certain level, we attack the offending person. In fear, the energy produces small-scale movements in preparation for fleeing; and if the fear gets strong enough, we flee.

The movements associated with emotions, then, discharge or release the built-up nervous energy. Laughter releases nervous energy, too, Spencer says, but with this important difference: the muscular movements in laughter are not the early stages of larger practical actions such as attacking or fleeing. Unlike emotions, laughter does not involve the motivation to do anything.

The nervous energy relieved through laughter, according to Spencer, is the energy of emotions that have been found to be inappropriate. Reading the first three lines, we might feel pity for the bereaved nephew writing the poem.

But the last line makes us reinterpret those lines. Far from being a loving nephew in mourning, he turns out to be an insensitive cheapskate. So the nervous energy of our pity, now superfluous, is released in laughter. If still more energy needs to be relieved, it spills over to the muscles connected with breathing, and if the movements of those muscles do not release all the energy, the remainder moves the arms, legs, and other muscle groups In the 20 th century, John Dewey — had a similar version of the Relief Theory.

In der Witz , that superfluous energy is energy used to repress feelings; in the comic it is energy used to think, and in humor it is the energy of feeling emotions. Der Witz includes telling prepared fictional jokes, making spontaneous witty comments, and repartee.

In der Witz , Freud says, the psychic energy released is the energy that would have repressed the emotions that are being expressed as the person laughs. According to Freud, the emotions which are most repressed are sexual desire and hostility, and so most jokes and witty remarks are about sex, hostility, or both.

In telling a sexual joke or listening to one, we bypass our internal censor and give vent to our libido. In telling or listening to a joke that puts down an individual or group we dislike, similarly, we let out the hostility we usually repress. In both cases, the psychic energy normally used to do the repressing becomes superfluous, and is released in laughter. Here it is the energy normally devoted to thinking. An example is laughter at the clumsy actions of a clown. Our laughter at the clown is our venting of that surplus energy.

These two possibilities in my imagination amount to a comparison between the observed movement and my own. His example is a story told by Mark Twain in which his brother was building a road when a charge of dynamite went off prematurely, blowing him high into the sky.

Having sketched several versions of the Relief Theory, we can note that today almost no scholar in philosophy or psychology explains laughter or humor as a process of releasing pent-up nervous energy. There is, of course, a connection between laughter and the expenditure of energy. Hearty laughter involves many muscle groups and several areas of the nervous system. Laughing hard gives our lungs a workout, too, as we take in far more oxygen than usual.

But few contemporary scholars defend the claims of Spencer and Freud that the energy expended in laughter is the energy of feeling emotions, the energy of repressing emotions, or the energy of thinking, which have built up and require venting.

Funny things and situations may evoke emotions, but many seem not to. Consider P. These do not seem to vent emotions that had built up before we read them, and they do not seem to summon emotions and then render them superfluous. So whatever energy is expended in laughing at them does not seem to be superfluous energy being vented. In fact, the whole hydraulic model of the nervous system on which the Relief Theory is based seems outdated.

To that hydraulic model, Freud adds several questionable claims derived from his general psychoanalytic theory of the mind. He says that the creation of der Witz —jokes and witty comments—is an unconscious process of letting repressed thoughts and feelings into the conscious mind. This claim seems falsified by professional humorists who approach the creation of jokes and cartoons with conscious strategies.

If Freud is right that the energy released in laughing at a joke is the energy normally used to repress hostile and sexual feelings, then it seems that those who laugh hardest at aggressive and sexual jokes should be people who usually repress such feelings. The difference between the two packets is surplus energy discharged in laughter.

More generally, the Relief Theory is seldom used as a general explanation of laughter or humor. The second account of humor that arose in the 18 th century to challenge the Superiority Theory was the Incongruity Theory. While the Superiority Theory says that the cause of laughter is feelings of superiority, and the Relief Theory says that it is the release of nervous energy, the Incongruity Theory says that it is the perception of something incongruous—something that violates our mental patterns and expectations.

It is now the dominant theory of humor in philosophy and psychology. Although Aristotle did not use the term incongruity , he hints that it is the basis for at least some humor. In the Rhetoric 3, 2 , a handbook for speakers, he says that one way for a speaker to get a laugh is to create an expectation in the audience and then violate it. Cicero, in On the Orator ch. This approach to joking is similar to techniques of stand-up comedians today.

They speak of the set-up and the punch line. The set-up is the first part of the joke: it creates the expectation. The punch line is the last part that violates that expectation. The first philosopher to use the word incongruous to analyze humor was James Beattie Immanuel Kant [], First Part, sec. In everything that is to excite a lively convulsive laugh there must be something absurd in which the understanding, therefore, can find no satisfaction. Laughter is an affection arising from the sudden transformation of a strained expectation into nothing.

This transformation, which is certainly not enjoyable to the understanding, yet indirectly gives it very active enjoyment for a moment. Therefore its cause must consist in the influence of the representation upon the body, and the reflex effect of this upon the mind. An Indian at the table of an Englishman in Surat, when he saw a bottle of ale opened and all the beer turned into froth and overflowing, testified his great astonishment with many exclamations. A joke amuses us by evoking, shifting, and dissipating our thoughts, but we do not learn anything through these mental gymnastics.

In humor generally, according to Kant, our reason finds nothing of worth. The jostling of ideas, however, produces a physical jostling of our internal organs and we enjoy that physical stimulation. For if we admit that with all our thoughts is harmonically combined a movement in the organs of the body, we will easily comprehend how to this sudden transposition of the mind, now to one now to another standpoint in order to contemplate its object, may correspond an alternating tension and relaxation of the elastic portions of our intestines which communicates itself to the diaphragm like that which ticklish people feel.

In connection with this the lungs expel the air at rapidly succeeding intervals, and thus bring about a movement beneficial to health; which alone, and not what precedes it in the mind, is the proper cause of the gratification in a thought that at bottom represents nothing.

On this point, Kant compares the enjoyment of joking and wit to the enjoyment of games of chance and the enjoyment of music. Music and that which excites laughter are two different kinds of play with aesthetical ideas, or of representations of the understanding through which ultimately nothing is thought, which can give lively gratification merely by their changes.

Thus we recognize pretty clearly that the animation in both cases is merely bodily, although it is excited by ideas of the mind; and that the feeling of health produced by a motion of the intestines corresponding to the play in question makes up that whole gratification of a gay party. While Kant located the lack of fit in humor between our expectations and our experience, Schopenhauer locates it between our sense perceptions of things and our abstract rational knowledge of those same things.

We perceive unique individual things with many properties. But when we group our sense perceptions under abstract concepts, we focus on just one or a few properties of any individual thing. Thus we lump quite different things under one concept and one word.