A counter-Leavisite snack
Some quotables in Hitchens’s review of Clive James’s memoir.
James’s strenuous test of the De Vriesian proposition was to try to demonstrate that one could be simultaneously cerebral and on television…I can only say, as someone who doesn’t watch much television, that when Clive James invited me on to one of his shows…I did actually feel that I wasn’t under orders to be stupider than I really am.
It’s irksome, being under such orders. There’s always (or often) that lurking dread when writing books, that some faceless publisher or editor or agent will swear that no no a thousand times no, this book will never make it past your poxy little computer unless you make it readily understandable to the pearly-cheeked virginal four-year-old. (There is also of course the corresponding but rather different dread that one will be under orders to be cleverer than one in fact is. Happily those orders are impossible to fulfill, so there is no conflict; one simply falls on one’s sword. So I imagine, at any rate.)
Of a certain Friday lunchtime group, which now threatens to become a pseudo-legend on an almost Bloomsbury-like scale…, James makes the correct observation that it started out as a self-consciously counter-Leavisite snack, where little if any career-smoothing or back-scratching could even have been attempted. One of the “stars” of that snack, Martin Amis, once rebuked someone for being in want of a sense of humour, and added that by saying this he meant very deliberately to impugn the man’s seriousness.
There – if I’m not mistaken, there is the ‘no truly intelligent’ thing again. To ruin an epigram by explaining it, I would suggest that Amis meant something like what I’ve been claiming: that the want of a sense of humour constitutes such a serious and disabling blind spot that it really is incompatible with (proper, full, complete) intelligence.
Anyway, it’s a great line.
“proper, full, complete” = “no true Scot”? Now, now.
Are there, for example, demonstrable examples of either Wittgenstein’s or Godel’s senses of humor? If not, I suppose neither can be said to have been “truly” intelligent.
But that is not to say that a sense of humor is not a delight.
I believe there were examples of Gödel’s humour.
Wittgenstein, no, but I’m not so sure he was that bright – just very obsure.
Well, fair point, but then again – Wittgenstein did have his faults. There was that little matter of beating his secondary-school students, for instance. I’m not saying he should have been more ‘normal’ and well-rounded and like everyone else (or if I am, I repudiate myself), but I am saying there’s a price to pay. I think my basic idea is the fairly obvious one that there’s a connection between sense of humour and sense of proportion. I think obsessiveness and lack of sense of proportion can be good things, but – they come at a price.
In other words I don’t think it’s loony to say that Wittgenstein was stupid in certain ways. I’m not sure he didn’t think that himself.
Martin Amis was on Radio 4 today (Open Book) saying:
“There’s a great suspicion of comedy in general because comedy is not politically correct. I mean, by definition because every joke has a butt. Every joke expresses superiority in some way and this runs against the democratising culture and I can well imagine a time when a committee humourlessly decide that the end of humour has come and everyone is so dying to take offence that humour will be something you can do at home but can’t do in public.” Some of the big opposition to the Religious Hatred bill was from comedians like Rowan Atkinson.
“a time when a committee humourlessly decide that the end of humour has come and everyone is so dying to take offence that humour will be something you can do at home but can’t do in public.”
Well that time has already arrived, surely. Certain cartoons, not permitted; pope jokes, no no; Jerry Springer, get thee hence. Jokes are of course permitted but it is impermissible to offend anyone, say the serried ranks of lickspittles.
It’s permissible to make nasty jokes white working classes / underclass,as poisonous b@stards like the BNP keep pointing out. Also, it seems permissible to be very nasty about gypsies accross large parts of Northern and Central and Eastern Eureope, in optherwise very pc company. But I get the point.,
“Martin Amis, once rebuked someone for being in want of a sense of humour, and added that by saying this he meant very deliberately to impugn the man’s seriousness.”
I don’t know how universally applicable that line is. I would say Melanie Phillips is totally humourless but I would never dare impugn her seriousness. I might impugn her sense of proportion. I would like to know who Martin Amis was referring to.
http://www.melaniephillips.com
I might impugn her sanity KB.
I agree that she looks like she chews soap for gum, so much foam is around her lips. But she is serious. And she is humourless.
Well, but clearly Amis’s remark is paradoxical; he has a non-obvious version of seriousness in mind. I think we have to dig a bit deeper to get at what he meant. Humourless seriousness is the wrong kind of seriousness; something like that. Another no true Scotsman move, in fact, but possibly suggestive all the same. That’s the trouble – the no true Scotsman move may be bad logic but it can be quite suggestive. I find myself very reluctant to get rid of it.
I think I have been a little heavy on an epigram – breaking the butterfly on the wheel. To be humorously serious and seriously humorous does sound like an ideal in polemical and critical writing.
“I believe there were examples of Gödel’s humour.
Wittgenstein, no, but I’m not so sure he was that bright – just very obsure.”
I’m a bit late to the party, but, for what it’s worth, I think that examples of Wittgenstein’s humour do exist. This is from Ray Monk’s biography, pages 266-7:
“Wittgenstein’s correspondence with Patisson consists almost entirely of ‘nonsense’. In nearly every letter he makes some use of the English adjective ‘bloody’, which, for some reason, he found inexhaustibly funny. (…) Patisson would send him photographs cut out from magazines, which he called his ‘paintings’, and to which Wittgentein would respond with exaggeratedly solemn appreciation: ‘I would have known it to be a Patisson immediately without the signature. There is that bloodiness in it that has never before been expressed by the brush.’ In reply, Wittgensein would send ‘portraits’, photographs of distinguished-looking middle-aged men, ripped of of newspaper advertisments for self-improvement courses. ‘My latest photo’, he announced, enclosing one such picture. ‘The previous one expressed fatherly kindness only; this one expresses triumph’.”
Monk doesn’t think he was particularly funny (“Some of the jokes contained in Wittgenstein’s letters to Pattison are, indeed, astonishingly feeble”), but it’s pretty clear that W liked to crack a gag or two.
Mike G – is it better to have no sense of humour or a bad sense of humour? Having a friend who sends you bad jokes would be as taxing as having a friend who reads you their bad poetry.
“Having a friend who sends you bad jokes would be as taxing as having a friend who reads you their bad poetry.”
KB, I agree completely, and only posted the bit from the Monk book because G. Tingey seemed to take it for granted that W didn’t have a sense of humour. I think the quoted passage shows this to be untrue.
Whether or not W was actually funny is a different issue, and one not relevant to the discussion as I had understood it. The question was whether a person could be considered truly intelligent if they lacked a sense of humour, not whether they could be considered so if they weren’t funny.
“is it better to have no sense of humour or a bad sense of humour?”
This depends what you mean by bad sense of humour. Personally, I found W’s joke about the postcard quite funny.
Ah – but trying to be funny and failing is the same thing as having no sense of humour. Having a sense of humour means knowing what’s funny and what isn’t. Thinking something is funny when it isn’t is indeed having no sense of humour.
Surely this is obvious?
OB,
I think that a distinction can be made between having a sense of humour, and having the ability to be funny. One is about the ability to recieve information in a certain way, the other is about the ability to produce similar information.
By analogy, being a good reader of poems (having a ‘sense of poetry’) doesn’t necessarily make one a good writer of them.
I agree that there will be a fairly strong correlation between the extent to which individuals possesses the two abilities, but not that it will be anything like perfect.
Mike,
Hmmm. In theory, maybe – but in practice? I’m not so sure. Doesn’t there seem to be a connection between people who can’t tell that their own jokes aren’t funny and people who can’t tell what’s funny in general? Doesn’t that seem to be one faculty?
I mean, it’s a recognizable type, isn’t it? The crashing bore who thinks he (is it always a he? oh surely not – and yet…) is hilarious? Doesn’t he tend to have a generally defective humour-sense? Well, maybe not, maybe that’s just my quirky experience. And yet…