David Cobb on humour in haiku

Humour in Haiku (one/two)
haiku page 1 | haiku page 2 | haiku page 3
biography and credits

Humour in Haiku

I found it easy to accept Blyth's definition of humour as one of the 13 chief characteristics of haiku, and a property of its spirit, not of its form (Haiku, Vol 1, p.312). This piece of education fitted in with a view of life which my mother had nurtured in me. Her philosophy was contained in the simple, often repeated statements, "Life is a proper lark!" and "Look on the bright side!" Her own life had been hard, but she remained positive and acceptant. We all suffer depression at times, but to have admitted to it would probably have seemed to her self-indulgent and a sin. My early attempts to adopt this approach to life earned comments in my school reports about "being capable of good solid work if he will overcome his flippancy and facetiousness." I am probably still learning to do that.

Blyth's evidence for humour in haiku is well-known to all who make any sort of study of the genre, but rather less well-known is the fact that he wrote two whole books with a lot to say about humour in senryu (Senryu — Japanese Satyrical Verses, in 1949, and Japanese Life and Character in Senryu, 1961).

We don't want to get side-tracked here into a discussion of the differences between haiku and senryu, or of what ground they have in common. Suffice to say that Blyth maintained "the secret of life consists in being always and never serious", and referred to "the Way of Senryu" as "understanding of all things by laughing or smiling at them, and this means forgiving all things, ourselves and God included." (Preface to Japanese Life and Character in Senryu)

Beyond that, the discussion is bedevilled, not least by the fact that if a poet generally known for haiku writes a senryu, as Basho and Issa sometimes did, it gets into their haiku collections. You want examples?

An old man
sucking — musing
over a fish bone

Basho (tr. Bill Wyatt)

the turnip puller
points the way to the road
with a turnip

Issa (tr. R H Blyth)

(I accept that Basho's poem can be read either as a haiku or a senryu, and that the haiku reading has a superior poignancy.)

What is really interesting about Blyth's approach to senryu, and it is the reason why I risked the diversion, is that in Japanese Life and Character in Senryu he designates 10 different types of humour that he finds in Japanese senryu. They are:

grim humour

tragic humour

irony

linguistic humour

kindly humour

Shakespearean humour

humour of exposed pretence

humour of indirectness

humour of stupidity

parody (usually senryu parodies of well-known haiku)

I venture to say there's a similar array of types of humour to be found in haiku, one or two of them overlapping the list for senryu. These, which I propose for consideration, may not be all there are, but they are unified by 'uninhibited delight'.

humour of contrast

humour of incongruity

whimsy

humour of naivety

kindly parody

tragi-comic humour

linguistic humour (but I don't want to open the door wide to wordplay)

humour of allusion

compassionate irony

humour of self-deprecation

humour of the grotesque

humour of the illogical

I will try to give examples of each of these in a moment, but first I think I need to try to explain what I mean by humour of contrast and humour of incongruity. The dynamic effect of haiku depends very much on pitting opposites against each other:

speed against slowness
darkness and shade against illumination
colour agaist chiaroscuro
the large against the small
noise against stillness
the easily overlooked and the conspicuous
and the peculiar reversal of ideas we call 'paradox'.

The form of haiku itself pits a smaller number of syllables against a larger one, with a hiatus between them, and conjures balance out of asymmetry. Some contrasts are so extreme as to seem incongruous; for example, Issa's snails — the one that was climbing Mount Fuji, for example, or the one whose face he compared to the face of Buddha.

In the quest to infuse haiku with humour I find it helpful to remember both the words of Christian evensong, familiar to me since childhood, Lighten our darkness, O Lord, and the flash that came to me at an evensong 'after my rebaptism in haiku':

during evensong
the inspiration to pray —
Darken our lightness . . .

So, let me now try to find examples of the various kinds of humour in my own haiku. You may not always agree with me — the kinds of humour aren't in watertight compartments, and we may each react to a particular text differently. In the final analysis it may be enough if we can say, yes, that's funny, and yes, that's true to life.

I believe my first example crosses several boundaries:

even here a child
looking for four-leaf clovers —
on Culloden moor

published inThe Mie Times [Japan]

(For some of my readers I may need to explain that it was at Culloden Field in Scotland, in 1746, that the last land battle was fought in Britain. British and Hanoverian troops of King George II, employing a new bayonet tactic, brought about the defeat of irregular forces of clansmen loyal to the Stuart Pretender, Bonnie Prince Charlie, and with it inflicted irreversible changes to the Highland way of life.)

To my way of reading it, that haiku exemplifies the humour of contrast — the harmless pastime of searching for lucky clovers, against the harms and misfortunes of a battlefield. We might even be sensitive to contrasting colours — the blood-soaked field and the green leaves. Where hope and despair mingle like this, we have tragi-comedy. There is also allusion, which is instrumental to the irony — irony which is compassionate, and embraces both activities, for there is a gamble involved in looking for lucky clovers as there is in war, and some kind of valour is needed to engage in both pursuits.

continued on page two

David Cobb
May 27, 2001

Humour in Haiku (one/two)
haiku page 1 | haiku page 2 | haiku page 3
biography and credits