U.S. Intellectual History Blog

Wit and Intellectual History

I recently finished J. W. Burrow’s Evolution and Society: A Study in Victorian Social Theory (1966), which—though you wouldn’t know it from the meek title—is a delightfully droll… I almost want to use the word romp, although I’m not sure one romps around with Herbert Spencer. It is, however, full of genuinely snort-out-loud asides, such as this lovely bit of footnoted snark:

Harriet Martineau claimed that she frequently wept tears of joy while translating Comte—a feat of sensibility which only those who have read Comte at length can fully appreciate. H. Martineau, Autobiography (3 vols. 1877), II, 391.

The rarity of such similar effusions of wit in intellectual history is, understandably, due to the general difficulty of being witty but also more particularly to the special difficulties of being witty within the confines of the genre. Say what one likes about writing history, but it is seldom truly easy to marshal one’s facts in a coherent manner; having the presence of mind to recognize the opportunity for a mot of any quality constitutes a much higher degree of difficulty.

It helps, certainly, to be British—or at least it seems that way, though Burrow’s subject matter demonstrates amply that the English are capable of being dry in the wrong way as well as the right way, though that in itself points to one potential reason why Burrow’s study is as humorous as it is. The Victorians are a kind of special case in intellectual history: an attitude of bemusement or even causticity is broadly permitted to historians of the period without any expectation that such an attitude will thereby diminish the importance of the study’s argument. If a historian were instead to take such an attitude toward, say, mid-twentieth century social theory, their readers would wonder why the author was making light of C. Wright Mills. Is there an ulterior motive? A political implication? One can make a wry crack about the tediousness or the ponderousness or the self-seriousness of the Victorians and simply move on: their lugubriousness is such a standard part of the period’s reputation that the reader draws no further inferences about the writer’s intent.

Yet that is not quite enough to account for the humor in Burrow’s study, and the example I chose above demonstrates why. Although Burrow’s joke is at the expense of both Martineau and Comte, it is also a joke about historical research that is intended to draw in the reader by appealing to their own experiences of reading, if not Comte, then some other writer whose monotonous prose was something more than a chore but instead something became a sort of personal achievement. For most of us, I imagine, unless we are very lucky, there are sources that we feel were tests of our wills—multi-volume works or endless bundles of correspondence the tediousness of which tried our resolve and our dedication to our own project. We all make sacrifices for the good of intellectual history, is one way to put it, and even if “read[ing] Comte at length” has not been our particular form of self-sacrifice, well, we can relate.

In other words, Burrow is funny because he invokes a sense of camaraderie or esprit de corps that sweetens and lightens what might otherwise be simply a biting judgment on the dullness of the Victorians. Interestingly, the form that this takes is a statement that, prima facie, should exclude most of his readers from any true sense of shared experience: “those who have read Comte at length can fully appreciate” is a way of drawing the circle very narrowly indeed, and suggests that there are levels or grades of camaraderie, and not just a general sense of disciplinary solidarity. But overall, Burrow’s remark has the force of inclusion—we share the joke, and do not feel ourselves to be on the outside of it, even if we are not among the unhappy few who have tortured ourselves with slabs of Comte. On the other hand, the specter of exclusion—we know, or think we know, that we are in on the joke, but suspect that there are many who would not be—gives a kind of piquancy to the remark; the esprit de corps does have an outside, and we can count ourselves lucky to be in the inner circle.

Explaining why a joke is funny is usually disastrous both for the joke and for the teller, but I hope I have not spoiled either what I thought was a good bit of wit or put anyone off Burrow’s marvelous book. There is more where the crack about Comte came from.

6 Thoughts on this Post

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  1. Cool post. This inevitably makes me think of Richard Hofstadter, who peppered his work with zingers, especially The American Political Tradition. Some paraphrases from memory: John C. Calhoun had no ear for poetry. He once “began a poem with Whereas and stopped.” Or Roscoe Conkling, “it was hard to tell if he was a an actor burlesquing a Senator or a Senator burlesquing an actor,” or any number of jokes about Teddy Roosevelt’s “compensations.” I think this “being in on the joke” is exactly it. It joins and excludes at the same time. I’ve found, having taught AMPT, that students sometimes have a harder time finding the humor in cracks like these because they aren’t as familiar with the material. I also wonder about how to teach this sort of thing. I want my students to enjoy a book, and humor is a great way to draw them in. At the same time, because it excludes, it can be frustrating for them.

    So there’s also the problem of explaining a joke. It really does have the potential to ruin witty remarks, throwing off the timing, the phenomenology of laughter thing, which is interesting when thinking about jokes in footnotes or in places where you don’t necessarily see them coming. I encourage my students to make jokes in their writing, recognizing the risk, because I think it makes them better writers. It seems to me that it takes close reading and immersion for a joke to hit. I’m open to others’ ideas on that. But as you suggest, wow can it go bad quickly. Just a passing footnote of sorts: If I remember correctly, in “Laughter: An Essay on the Meaning of the Comic” (1911) Henri Bergson makes much the same sharp point you do Andy, that there’s a community of laughers, which can be powerfully exclusionary at the same time. He calls it a kind of “freemasonry” which is a neat way to put it.

  2. Snarky footnotes and deeply buried jokes are something that classicists and medievalists take great pride in, and I think that grounding one’s writing in humanistic whimsy and charm is something our field could learn from. As it is, puns and witty asides are about as rare as exclamation points.

  3. An example of wit that I happened to run across recently is in Frank E. Manuel and Fritzie P. Manuel, Utopian Thought in the Western World (Belknap/Harvard U.P., 1979), p.365, where they remark, a propos James Harrington’s Oceana: “Dullness is apparently not an inhibitory factor in the extension of a book’s influence, else Harringon’s Oceana could not have prospered so mightily.” I doubt a remark of this sort would be found in, say, Pocock’s discussion of J. Harrington in The Machiavellian Moment. But I think remarks of this kind are not all that rare in historical writing and intellectual history specifically, though I could be wrong about that. It doesn’t quite have the snarky bite of Burrow’s remark but is still amusing, even if one hasn’t read a word of Oceana.

    Re P. Kuryla above: How about telling students that they should take the feeling of exclusion as a challenge to figure out why a joke is funny (by a little research), thereby moving from outside “the circle” to inside. I suppose you could be right about students’ own jokes making for better writing (might depend on how good a writer the student is to begin with).

  4. Thanks for this Andy, it’s something I’ve always enjoyed wondering about.

    I think you are on to something about noting the frequency of jokes depending on the time period and subject; personally, I find a lot to joke about in the work of most of my subjects (mid-century white male intellectuals and political commentators), but found myself less in the mood to include them in my book manuscript than I suspected I would. I wonder how much of that was due to the fact that any such jokes would not so much joining a tradition of making fun of these people, like you see in Victorian studies, but trying to carve out a new one of doing so – after all, a key part of my argument is that it is time to stop taking figures like Moynihan, Glazer, and even Riesman and Lipset to a lesser degree, seriously. (On their terms, at least; unfortunately they remain very relevant and in that sense, “serious” subjects fo historical study.) That’s a different task altogether and I found myself swept away from my moments of silliness to a more serious mood where my tone stayed that way. I did manage to bury one very time-specific joke in the footnotes, although it pokes fun at Trump rather than my subjects.

    But on the whole I really wish historians and scholars of all persuasions felt more comfortable including jokes in their published work. It helps annihilate that fantasy model of the scholar as a removed, objective observer. It also encourages us to take ourselves less seriously, I think, which is almost always a good thing. Professionalism can be such a soul-crusher, and humor, as one of the most joyous and universal of human qualities, can really help break that up. The particular joke might draw a circle of the “in crowd,” but the act of joking itself integrates the idealized “life of the mind” to a wider human experience.

  5. Great post, Andy. I have a mothballed post on this phenomenon — I call it “the doppler affect in historical writing.” Basically, as the historian feels herself/himself closer to the events they are writing about (not necessarily temporally, but maybe even emotionally), the past roars loud in our ears and its impossible to sustain a playful distance. You can see it very clearly in Peter Novick’s That Noble Dream, and it shows up in 1) a change in tone in the footnotes as the narrative touches on the personal (e.g., his own grad student), and 2) a shift from humorous asides in the footnotes to increasingly angry asides in the body of the text (e.g., his discussion of Kissinger.)

  6. Thanks for a great post, Andy. I’ve always thought Henry Adams, Norman Cantor, and Barbara Tuchman all managed at times to inject a fair bit of play into their work. And, as Pete says above, flexing that elasticity on the page can be a real draw for readers.

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