As I asked in the previous post, can we make an argument that there should be such a thing as “solid ground” in a culture—unjustified, but immovable points? Interestingly, I think there is. For two reasons. One is cultural, and one is humorous.

First, from a cultural standpoint, the reason that a culture is coherent and functional is because it says that particular things are important—so important that people cannot violate them. This helps establish social order. When you study any culture, you will always find taboos—pieces of solid ground. They often look silly from outside the culture, and rarely do they have any logical foundation, but they serve a structural purpose. If the taboos disappeared, the culture would disperse.

Second, the humorous argument. The fact of the matter is, humor relies on solid ground in order to be funny. Humor relies on incongruence, on surprise. If there were no solid ground for the humor to pull against, its jokes would not be very good. When we look at it from this perspective, a community makes a joke, not a person. And a community gets a joke, not a person. This is because there has to be a set of shared knowledge and a set of shared values in order for the humorist to concoct a surprise or an incongruence. If Mormons didn’t have an understanding that it is odd for a general authority to used coarse language, most J. Golden Kimball jokes would not be funny.

And then there is the fact that humor’s function is to dismantle. Humor is always taking things apart and comparing them for their contrast. (Now, it’s true that we can use humor to establish solid ground, but this kind of humor is usually insider/outsider humor. In other words, we establish our values as being the good ones and then show how dumb the other people are for espousing different values. We look at the incongruence between their values and our values and we laugh. So, in that case, humor dismantles outsiders’ values while affirming our own values.) But if you let humor go to its logical conclusion, it will dismantle everything—until everything is dismantled. That’s its pure function.

You can see how this works when thinking about romantic comedies. You start out the story with lots of incongruence and dismantling of social expectations. But the point of the movie is to get some people into a romance. So at some point, solid ground needs to be established. You will see that romantic comedies get less and less funny as they proceed. This is because there needs to be a reason why we’re glad to see the protagonists form a relationship. This often happens in just plain old comedies as well. If a character learns or grows in the story, then it wasn’t pure comedy.

But consider Monty Python and the Holy Grail and The Life of Brian. These are pure comedies. They dismantle everything that they come across. But what this means is that there is no significant plot line. Every scene is its own thing, without any thematic resonance with anything that has come before or after it. These movies are basically two-hour-long Flying Circus episodes.

So, when you get to the end of the Holy Grail, the movie dismantles itself by showing modern-day police breaking up the filming and arresting the cast members.

Something similar happens at the end of The Life of Brian when everybody who is dying on a cross cheerfully sings “Always look on the bright side of life.”

What this means is that, when we’re interacting with a culture, we never follow humor to its logical conclusion. Otherwise, we would dismantle the entire culture. We’d descend into chaos.

But something interesting happened at Sunstone that overturned its rules about humor. I’ll talk about that in the next post.