For some reason, tragedy seems to be something that is universally understood. It transcends time and culture. From the works of Shakespeare, we study Hamlet and Macbeth, Romeo and Juliet, or the love sonnets. We can watch a foreign film, and the themes of love and loss and betrayal resonate with us, even if we don’t fully comprehend their context. The books that survive the test of time, get translated into sixteen languages, almost always fall into those categories. It seems fair to say that we all, as humans, experience love and longing and despair in more or less the same way.
But comedy is different. Comedy, for some reason, we experience very differently. Jokes are notoriously hard to translate. And not just puns, which depend upon the rhythm and sound of the language. Pretty much every joke is hard to translate — from one language to another, and from one century to another. It’s one of the most reliable markers of linguistic fluency: do you get the jokes? Because most humour relies upon the violation of expectations. The setup leads you to expect one thing, and the punchline delivers something else. So to get the joke, you need to understand the context of the setup, to know what the expectation is. And you need to understand in what way the punchline violates that expectation. Otherwise, you don’t “get” the joke.
But once you do “get” the joke, it doesn’t get funnier with repetition (usually). Because now you know what to expect from it. And it’s true not just for individual jokes, but for whole genres or styles of humour. Once the joke no longer violates the convention, but becomes the convention, it ceases to be funny. Jokes just don’t age well, the way that tragedy does. Which unfortunately becomes apparent while reading The Thurber Carnival. Thurber is remembered as one of the great American essayists, cartoonists, and humorists. But as humour, today, it just isn’t that funny. Some of it provokes a wry smile, and some of it is just sort of inexplicable, because the context of it is lost. You can only do satire if the reader knows that it is that you’re satirising. Otherwise, you’re just talking to the walls.
If the Buddhists are right, and suffering is the product of desire, then marketing geniuses must be among the most evil beings on earth. They’re in the business of creating and stimulating desire. And not just any desire, but desire that can’t be quenched. Their products can’t be wholly satisfying, because if they were, we wouldn’t want more. Successful marketing must always leave an edge of discontent — a quick sugar rush when we buy, followed by a crash that makes us want to buy more. Have an iPad? Buy an iPad 2! Have a 2010 Lexus? Trade it in for a 2012! Have a copy of Influence from the library? But the revised edition with all-new appendix!
A lot of us would like to believe that we’re fairly immune to marketing. Sure, other people are easily persuaded. But we’re smarter than that. We use our free will, make our own choices. Which is pure nonsense, of course. Open your refrigerator. What’s in it? Did you buy it? Why that milk carton instead of the others? Why those particular carrots? Why that frozen pizza, organic cheese, bottled beer? Was it cheaper? Is it pitched as being healthier? Did it have a convenient place on the supermarket shelf? Did your friends recommend it?
Lots of things influence our purchase decisions, create desires in us. In Influence, Cialdini reduces those factors to six: reciprocity, commitment and consistency, social proof, liking, authority, and scarcity. Reciprocity says that if I do something for you, you feel obligated to do something for me. I send you a “free gift” in the mail, so you feel obligated to donate to my charity. Commitment and consistency says that once I get you to think of yourself as a certain kind of person, you feel you have to do certain things to stay consistent. I spoke to a political campaign organizer who would use this to good effect. The idea was to call registered Democratic voters, and poll them about their opinions on key democratic issues. Once you had gotten them to verbally affirm the party line, then you ask them to help out with the campaign phone bank. Because they had just verbally affirmed themselves as “good democrats”, they felt compelled to comply in order to seem consistent. Social Proof says that if all your friends are doing it, you should do it, too. The Internet is full of it these days — entire marketing agencies exist to pay people to write positive product reviews in massive astroturf campaigns. Liking means pretty much what it says — the classic car salesman stereotype who sends Christmas cards to his customers year after year so they’ll buy from him again, because he’s just so sincere and likable. Authority also means what it says: four out of five dentists recommend this book. Finally, scarcity: if an item is seen as being scarce, it’s also seen as being more valuable.
Of course, these principles don’t apply just to marketing products. As the title says, it’s about the psychology of persuasion, and the principles are the same no matter what we’re trying to persuade someone to do. Whether we’re arguing for a political cause or trying to get a date, the methods work. They work partly because of how we’re socialized, and partly because of how we socially evolved as a species. Cialdini wisely appends a section to the end of each chapter entitled “How to Say No”, giving instructions for how to recognize when a particular technique is being used against us, and how to diffuse the influence without grossly violating social contracts.
There are very few points in The Count of Monte Cristo in which the titular Count doubts his judgment. He has no reason to. The world Dumas creates is one in which the villains are thoroughly villainous, and the righteous are entirely pure of motive. As an adventure tale, it keeps the story tidy. The Good Guys all get their rewards, and the Bad Guys all are struck down, to a man. And as a moral tale, it works just as well. Even in those rare moments in which The Count wavers in dispensing divine justice, doubts whether his path is true, one of the Bad Guys does something especially bad, or one of the Good Guys does something especially good, and his resolve is steeled once again. Let the smiting continue!
One interesting side note is that Dumas manages not to take sides in the conflict between the Royalists and the Bonapartists. Against that backdrop, The Count of Monte Cristo could easily have conflated a moral tale with a political one, but it doesn’t. While individual characters are thoroughly good or thoroughly bad, it isn’t because of their Royalist or Bonapartist leanings. Dumas is careful to separate their moral failings from their political persuasion. The enemies are enemies because of thirst for wealth or power at the expense of others, and those failings cut across political lines. Was Dumas hedging his bets? Probably. While his father was a general in Napoleon’s army, the young Alexandre worked in the office of Louis Philippe, and participated in the revolution that would install him as the last king of France. Which almost certainly contributed to the antipathy toward Dumas held by Napoleon III when he came to power as the first President and last Emperor. Time for a long vacation in Russia!
Moral ambiguity makes politics complicated, and if you’re a politician trying to sway public opinion, complexity is a bad thing. So we create heroes and villains where there were none. Saddam Hussein: Bad! Crazy! Osama Bin Laden: Bad! Crazy! George Washington: Good! Wise! Ronald Reagan: Good! Wise! Because it makes for a better Monte Cristo-esque narrative, and then we can all cheer when the Bad Guy takes a bullet in the eye, knowing that Justice Has Been Served. We would do well to pay more attention to those narratives, to the stories as stories — which isn’t to say that they’re entirely untrue, but that they are moral tales carefully crafted to serve a purpose. Because there are always other stories that could be told. People who are Bad! Crazy! don’t amass hundreds or thousands of followers willing to give their lives. They have attributes, causes, passions that people relate to and believe in. But we have to vilify them in order to make enemies of them. And we have to reduce their adherents to mindless drones to feel OK about destroying them. Star Wars doesn’t work as well if you take the helmets off all the Stormtroopers and realize that they’re all individuals just trying to earn a living.
Like David Sedaris and so many other unfortunate children, I endured speech therapy in the first grade. For me, it wasn’t a lisp that landed me there. It was the letter R. I pronounced it much like a W, saying fowk instead of fork, sowwy instead of sorry, chuwch instead of church. I also had some trouble slurring multi-syllable words with soft consonants in the middle. (I now over-correct this. My former partner used to give me a hard time for pronouncing all three syllables of the word cabinet.)
One of my best friends was a kid named Stewart. The friendship was doomed from the start. My parents and teachers heckled me because I would run Stewart together into Stort, except the pesky R would mash it still further into something like Stowt. I remember conversations with my mother about him, and she would interject with “Stew-wart”, to which I would reply, “Yeah, Stowt”. Eventually, it was just easier to stop talking about him, and then to stop being friends with him. It occurs to me now that I should have just nicknamed him “Stu”, and we probably would have been fine.
My school was too small for a full-time speech therapist, so a couple of times a week a yellow van would park out in front of the school. The van served as a mobile speech lab, where those of us with poorly-disciplined tongues and lips would actually have to exit the school, trudge down the sidewalk, and get into the van to have our consonants sharpened. It must have worked, because my diction seems pretty socially acceptable these days, if a bit too rigid at times.
In my defense, the letter R must be the least-agreed-upon consonant in the Western world. With the exception of the Castilians, everyone seems to agree as to what an S should sound like. Nobody agrees upon R. The Brits round it out, not entirely unlike I did as a child. The French swallow it, as if it were a dirty thing not to be let loose into the world. The Italians roll the R deliciously to the front of the mouth, a gentle tease as compared to the Mexican trill which thrusts its way to the tip of the tongue with unashamed abandon.
As for me, I learned French. While I can hatchet out an acceptable American R (as much a growl as a consonant), I’m perfectly happy to choke it to the back of the throat in the French fashion. The Mexican trill will be forever lost to me. When I try it, I sound not like a dangerous Zapatista, but much like a drowning woodpecker.
But Me Talk Pretty: I bought it in an airport, read most of it on a plane, and liked all of it. I suppose Sedaris finally solved his lisp, or at least made peace with it. I’ll never know what became of Stewart. Hopefully he went on to make new friends, ones who could pronounce his name magnificently.
Human beings are pattern-seeking and pattern-seeing organisms. It’s a fundamental trait of the species. It’s because of patterns that we were able to develop language, categorize the things of this world, create tools, develop social structures. Every word that we speak contains a category of phenomena — “dog” isn’t a specific dog, but a class of all dog-like things of all shapes and sizes. “Run” isn’t a specific event, but a characterization of a huge range of activities undertaken by a huge range of creatures. Without those categories, we couldn’t speak; we couldn’t function. Like Funes the Memorious, we would be trapped in a world where every sensation was utterly unique and couldn’t be connected or communicated.
But those categories also betray us. They allow us racism, they allow us sexism, they allow us to talk about “those people” in a way that is different from our people. While we can’t operate without categories, we need to take care that those categories remain flexible. We need to allow for individual needs and habits and desires; we need to allow people to choose to exist outside of the categories assigned to them.
You Just Don’t Understand: Men and Women in Conversation skirts dangerously close to abusing our categories of “men” and “women”. Tannen’s central premise is as follows: in communication, men seek to establish status and heirarchy, whereas women seek to establish rapport and community. Misunderstandings between men and women occur when men interpret a conversation as being about heirarchy, while women interpret the same conversation as being about rapport-building. Tannen wisely leaves alone the issue of why this is. She implies that it’s a cultural by-product (rather than a biological one), but mostly leaves that question alone. Instead, she provides illustration of her premise by way of excerpts from short stories and child development research papers.
What Tannen argues is, for the most part, consistent with our stereotypes of men as competitors and women as caregivers. As with most stereotypes, there’s good reason that the stereotypes exist. In the broad sense, they’re accurate — men are raised to be competitive, and women are raised to be caregivers. In the broad sense. And in the broad sense, stereotypes can be useful. It’s helpful to know, for example, that women are less likely to participate in public meetings, because it give us an idea of how better to conduct public meetings to encourage everyone to participate. The categories and pattern-recognition can certainly do us some good.
But, as with other stereotypes, they also can do us harm. When we enter a conversation with someone with a pre-conceived expectation of how they should fit into our communcation categories of “men” and “women”, we can make some pretty offensive mistakes. If I invite an African-American to my house for basketball and fried chicken, I’d be rightfully labeled a racist. Whether those are or are not statistical preferences of African-Americans isn’t the point. The point is that I’ve treated an individual as if they were a category, without bothering to address them as a person.
I often felt that way reading Tannen’s book. Maybe “men”, as a category, statistically do approach conversation with a mind toward status and heirarchy. I don’t know if they do, but they may. But I do know that if someone tried to relate to me by appealing to my sense of status or my place in a social heirarchy, or tried to appeal to my sense of “masculine competitiveness”, I would distance myself pretty quickly from that person, because it’s so antithetical to how I structure my experience of the world. And there are plenty of women — particularly those whom I encounter in my professional life — who would take serious offense if they felt I were trying to establish a rapport with them instead of respecting a professional status that they’ve worked so hard to achieve.
Tannen would disagree with none of this, I’m sure. Her project is primarily explanatory, rather than prescriptive. The danger is while taking apart some stereotypes of men and women, her explanation bolsters many more. And many — perhaps most — of her readers will read that as prescriptive, something that tells us how we should interact with “men” and “women” rather than just a description of how we do interact. It’s a subtle but important difference. Whether her categorical descriptions of “men” or “women” are accurate, I don’t know. But whether they are or not, we need to take care to use those categories as one of many tools to understand the people that we meet, rather than using the categories as shortcuts to excuse ourselves from having to make the effort.
The Thurber Carnival
But comedy is different. Comedy, for some reason, we experience very differently. Jokes are notoriously hard to translate. And not just puns, which depend upon the rhythm and sound of the language. Pretty much every joke is hard to translate — from one language to another, and from one century to another. It’s one of the most reliable markers of linguistic fluency: do you get the jokes? Because most humour relies upon the violation of expectations. The setup leads you to expect one thing, and the punchline delivers something else. So to get the joke, you need to understand the context of the setup, to know what the expectation is. And you need to understand in what way the punchline violates that expectation. Otherwise, you don’t “get” the joke.
