Comic Noise and the Textual Surface

This essay attempts to formulate a more comprehensive comic theory by combining two models of comic incongruity: the bisociative model in which a ”serious” text, looked at from another perspective, becomes a ”comic” text, and the disruption model, which pictures the temporary disordering of an ”ordered” text. An analysis of two classical comic-theory types-Freud's incongruous or disrupted ”linguistic-mental” text, which prompts the release of excess energy as laughter and thus the return to ”normality,” and Bergson/Bakhtin's disrupted ”social” text, in which the social distance (incongruity) is comically exaggerated so that, once again, ”order” is restored-then reveals that there are in fact two kinds of comic disorder: initial disorder and a state of hyper-order (excessive repetition, redundancy) which becomes again disorder. Michel Serres's model drawn from communication theory and non-linear dynamics is used to account for this: order emerges from disorder but as hyper-order becomes again disorder. Serres interprets this in terms of the pervasive background noise which surrounds and ”grounds” order, and here it is suggested that this notion of noise may offer a way of achieving greater theoretical unity and coherence: not only can noise (via Serres's sound/noise duality) account for order/disorder bisociation (that is, virtually equivalent textual ”surfaces”), but laughter can also be understood as corporeal noise. It is further suggested that Deleuze's conception of ”humor” as a ”relation between two surfaces,” and of an inner-body noise that is finally projected onto the incorporeal ”metaphysical surface,” may allow us to more fully account for the comic problem of a textual surface that is both noisy and silent.