Humor Games

“Laughter,” writes Indira Ghose, “stakes out an area of discourse as a game which follows its own rules” (Shakespeare and Laughter, 106).

She quotes Wittgenstein on game failures: “What is is like when people do not have the same sense of humour? They do not react properly to each other. It is as though there were a custom among certain people to throw someone a ball, which he supposed to catch & throw back; but certain people might not throw it back, but put it in their pocket instead” (quoted 107).

Pocketing the ball is bad play: “It is the members of society who refuse to join the game . . . who are accused of lacking a sense of humour. In the case of representations of the comic, be it in the theatre or in jesting literature, generic conventions serve as pointers that a humorous framework is being entered. Humour is only effective within a community that draws on collective, shared meanings. This is the basis for the sense of intimacy that is established through a shared response—the shared sense of being part of ‘a community of amusement’” (107).

Malvolio in Twelfth Night is one such bad Shakespearean player: “What makes Malvolio such a laughing-stock . . . is, above all, his inability to interact with other members of the community. He is really punished for being what Meredith (drawing on Rabelais) terms an agelast, a spoilsport who refuses the social game” (115).

The logic is: Join the laughter, or become the object of laughter.