Born to Be Good: The Science of a Meaningful Life

The perils of teasing are patently clear. “Just teasing” is invoked as a last defense by the grammar-school bully and the incorrigible sexual malfeasant at work. But what they are referring to with the claim “I was just teasing” upon closer inspection is not teasing at all but aggression and coercion, pure and simple. Bullies steal, punch, kick, spit on, torment, and humiliate. They don’t really tease. Sexual predators grope, leer, and make crude, at times threatening, passes. They’re pretty ineffectual flirts. In contrast, teasing is a mode of play, no doubt with a sharp edge, in which we provoke others. We turn to the playful provocation of teasing to negotiate the ambiguities of social living—establishing hierarchies, testing commitments to social norms, uncovering potential romantic interest, negotiating conflicts over work and resources. To understand how this is so, we must first consider a universal institution that is the close relative of the tease—the jester or fool—as well as the philosophy of language. In doing so, we will discover a register of the voice and a pattern of semantics that illuminate the brilliant ways that humans put their bodies and representational minds to use in teasing.

FOOL’S PARADISE

 

On January 19, 1449, the Scots passed the Act for the Away-Putting of Feynet Fools. This act set into law punishments—the nailing of the ear to a post, amputation of fingers—for individuals falsely posing as jesters and fools. Fools and jesters were serious business in the Middle Ages and early Renaissance. Court jesters often acted as advisors on economic and diplomatic matters. They enjoyed well-remunerated positions within the courts of kings and queens in China, the Middle East, and Europe. The prominence of the jester and fool in public life is a human universal that dates back to the Aztecs, Mayans, and Native Americans of North America.

Court jesters, as richly detailed by Beatrice Otto in Fools Are Everywhere, hailed from poor backgrounds. Jesters most often were unusual in appearance or manner: hunchbacks, dwarves, and extremely ugly individuals were more likely candidates for this essential role than the town hunk (thus placing fools outside the competition for mates and resources). They often possessed other creative talents—they tended to be gifted musicians, poets, jugglers, or dancers.

Jesters dressed in their easily identifiable absurd garb. With their riddles, pratfalls, pranks, and sharp-tongued mockery, delivered with comical expressions, they satirized the powerful—the royal court, its nepotistic hangers-on, and especially the church. Jesters pointed to alternatives to the status quo. They reversed reality, turning conventional wisdom on its head. They often did so on behalf of the downtrodden and poor (and in fact, political pamphlets were developed out of some jesters’ activities). In the words of the great court jester Nasrudin, “I’m upside down in this life.”

When I began my study of teasing some ten years ago, the field would have benefited from the insights of a medieval jester or fool. They embodied a playfully provocative mode of commentary that speaks to the essence of what a tease is. The scientific study of teasing was hampered by poorly specified definitions of this ethereal phenomenon. This often happens when scientists rely upon natural language—the words we use—to capture what is largely a nonverbal phenomenon whose multilayered meaning is discerned in the subtle timing of a laugh or the shift in the speed or register of the voice.

The consensus was that teasing is “playful aggression.” Clearly, though, teasing does not equate to all kinds of playful aggression. Unintended playful aggression—accidentally elbowing a fellow train passenger’s nose while you’re hustling money with your imitation of Harpo Marx—is clearly not teasing (at least I hope you don’t think so). More general references to play are ambiguous. Many forms of childhood play, such as role playing (children acting as princesses or ninja warriors), roughhousing, highly structured playground games like tag or four square, and the ritualized jokes and conversational games that fill the air of school buses—are not teasing. The same is true of many forms of adult play: We tell amusing stories, exchange playful repartee, and josh around in ways that are not teasing.