Beauty, Humor, and the Expected Surprise

What makes something beautiful? It may be an impossible question because beauty seems to resist formulas. Ask for the most beautiful song ever written, and no answer could be definitive.

Still, consider a simple, yet lovely song like “Amazing Grace.” It probably would appear on many lists. But why? What is special about it? What makes it beautiful to many ears? That raises a more useful question: What do things we call beautiful have in common?

Years ago, I asked the writer of the Doublemint “Double Your Pleasure” song how he came up with that and other memorable tunes he had written. His answer was surprisingly simple: “Scales.”

Many popular melodies move up and down scales or use variations of musical patterns that already are deeply familiar to us. We have heard those relationships among notes thousands of times. Even when we hear a new melody, much of it therefore is not entirely new.

That familiarity seems to matter. Advertising people long have known another curious fact about music: We seldom fall in love with a song the first time we hear it. After several hearings, it “grows on us.” We learn what is coming. What initially was unfamiliar becomes predictable, and predictability itself seems pleasurable.

But complete predictability is boring. And there lies the beginning of a theory of beauty: Familiar expectation plus surprise. A memorable song often gives us a familiar musical structure and then departs from it.

The departure may be a high note that jumps unexpectedly beyond the melody. It may be a chord change. It may be a line that fails to rhyme when everything has taught us it should. It may be an unexpected word.

Popular music even has a name for the attention-catching departure: the “hook.” Bob Dylan often used relatively simple, familiar musical structures, filling them with words and images that sounded unlike conventional popular-song lyrics. The music gave the listener a familiar place to stand while the language supplied the departures.

Whitney Houston’s recording of “I Will Always Love You” offers another example. Much of the song is extraordinarily simple. That simplicity establishes expectations. Against it, the great vocal departures in the chorus become enormous events.

Singer Stevie Nicks provides still another example. Many singers can reproduce notes flawlessly. But her distinctive, somewhat masculine or husky timbre departs from the conventional expectation of the polished female singing voice. This departure makes her voice interesting and recognizable.

The principle seems to be: A familiar, regular background makes departure noticeable. Too little departure and we become bored. Too much departure and we lose the pattern entirely. Beauty seems often to occupy the territory between those extremes. So we might begin with: A familiar expectation fulfilled + surprise = beauty.

But that is not sufficient. The “expected” surprise is something peculiar that happens after we have heard a favorite song many times. The surprise is no longer surprising. We know exactly when the singer will reach that extraordinary note. We know when the chord change is coming. We know the unexpected word. We may have heard the recording hundreds of times.

Yet the departure still registers as a departure. This seems contradictory until we realize two kinds of expectation operate simultaneously. Memory says, “I know what is coming.” The underlying structure says, “That isn’t what normally should come next.”

So we can anticipate a surprise and still find it surprising. It is an “expected surprise.” That may explain one of the great pleasures of familiar music.

We don’t merely tolerate knowing what comes next. We participate in it. We wait for the departure. Part of the pleasure is thinking, “Here it comes.”

The same phenomenon occurs outside music.

Beauty and imperfection

A beautiful face usually is not perfect. It may contain symmetry, proportion and other familiar indications of regularity. But something often departs from perfection: an unusual nose, slightly asymmetric eyes, a crooked smile, a beauty mark, an unexpected proportion.

Those departures can create individuality. A perfectly regular computer-generated face might be attractive yet strangely uninteresting. The small “imperfection” gives us something to discover and remember.

Again, regularity establishes the pattern. Departure creates the interest. The Grand Canyon seems at first to contradict this idea. I once rafted through it. In one sense it was almost monotonously predictable: rock, water, cliffs, more rock, more water, more cliffs. Yet it was beautiful. Why?

The predictability existed at one level, while surprise existed at another. We knew we would see another canyon wall around the next bend, but we didn’t know what that wall would look like. They all were different. The overall structure remained familiar, while the details kept changing.

The whole was predictable. The particulars were not. In some ways, it reminded me of something I already knew was beautiful: a cathedral. The canyon walls provided a quasi-religious experience, like being in a giant cathedral. The experience itself was ethereal and beautiful.

Surprise is not enough. Suppose we take the melody of “I Will Always Love You” and replace the words with “I Ate a Spoiled Pickle.” We certainly will have introduced surprise, but we surely have not increased the beauty.

That tells us something important. The departure cannot merely be unexpected. It must somehow fit the larger experience. Meaning matters. History matters, like the “cathedral” feeling inside the Grand  Canyon.

The emotional character of “I Will Always Love You” prepares us for tenderness, separation, longing and loss. The words, melody and performance reinforce one another. “I Ate a Spoiled Pickle” violates that emotional coherence.

However, it might be funny, and suddenly humor and beauty begin to look similar.

Beauty and humor use the same formula. A joke establishes an expectation and then violates it. If the punch line is exactly what we expected, the joke isn’t funny. But if the punch line has no comprehensible relationship to the setup, the joke also isn’t funny. It merely is nonsense.

The successful punch line does something very specific: It surprises us, and immediately afterward we understand why it belongs.

We think “I didn’t expect that—but of course!” That sounds remarkably like what happens in music and other forms of beauty. Beauty and humor may use much of the same machinery while directing the surprise toward different responses.

Beauty may produce wonder, pleasure, tenderness, awe or emotional recognition. Humor produces amusement. Both beauty and humor require enough predictability to create an expectation and enough departure to violate it meaningfully.

Familiar expectation fulfilled + meaningful expected surprise = beauty. The same formula applies to humor.

In both, the audience has to help, because beauty isn’t entirely in the beautiful object, and humor doesn’t reside entirely in the joke. The observer has work to do.

One time, my family and I were in a restaurant when the song “Guantanamera” started playing. It’s a lovely song,  though none of us knew exactly what the words meant.

Then, one of the children began to sing, “One ton tomato; I ate a one ton tomato . . .” to the Guantanamera melody. There was a pause, then we all screamed with laughter and started singing, “One ton tomato . . .”

To us, it was hilarious because the English words not only were ridiculous, but also closely matched the sound of the Spanish. Little did we know that it was a patriotic Cuban song, and the Cuban people at the next table were not amused.

A comedian cannot simply make an audience laugh. The listener must understand the setup, have the necessary background knowledge, form the expected interpretation, recognize its violation and make the connection. In an important sense, the audience performs part of the joke. The comedian creates the circumstances that let the listener’s mind finish it.

Music works similarly. The composer and performer supply notes, rhythms, words, timbre and timing. But the listener supplies memories, expectations, associations and emotions. The listener must recognize the pattern before a departure from it can mean anything. That explains why music sometimes becomes more pleasurable with repeated listening. The listener is learning how to participate.

It also helps explain differences in musical taste. A listener unfamiliar with a musical tradition may hear disorder where an experienced listener hears sophisticated departures from an understood pattern. The sounds may be identical, but the listeners’ histories are not.

Still today, I cannot understand how anyone can enjoy rap music, yet it remains popular. My personal history doesn’t align with the music.

Beauty requires two histories

Every artistic encounter contains at least two histories. The artist brings a history to the work: musical traditions, language, previous art, personal experience and assumptions about the audience. The audience brings another history: previous songs, faces, stories, experiences, loves, fears and cultural expectations. For beauty to occur, those histories must overlap sufficiently.

The artist predicts what the audience expects and then departs from those expectations. The audience recognizes enough of the artist’s language to participate. An implicit agreement is: “Let’s work together to create beauty.”

The same agreement exists between comedian and audience. “Follow me. Expect what I want you to expect. Then I will take you somewhere else.”

That is why timing matters so much. A surprise delivered before you’ve established the expectation has little power. The artist first must build the platform from which the surprise can jump. Natural beauty works the same way.

The idea becomes even more interesting when there is no artist. Consider a lightning storm. I find lightning extraordinarily beautiful and fascinating — as long as I’m safely indoors.

If I am standing in an open field while lightning strikes nearby, the same physical phenomenon may cease to seem beautiful. The lightning hasn’t changed. My relationship to it has.

Here again, history matters. A storm that ends a devastating drought may be experienced differently from an identical storm that just killed someone or destroyed a home. Nature supplies the stimulus while the observer supplies memory, context, expectation and meaning. Thus even natural beauty may be a cooperative event.

No conscious artist is on the other side, but two participants remain: the world and the observer. Beauty is the result. This leads to a different way of thinking about beauty. It is not just a property of an object, like mass or temperature. Beauty is an event.

Something in the world encounters an observer whose history makes it beautiful. The same painting can produce beauty in one person and indifference in another. The same song can bring tears to one listener and irritation to another. The same thunderstorm can produce awe or terror.

That does not mean beauty is arbitrary. The stimulus matters enormously. Some patterns are far more likely than others to produce particular responses.

But the stimulus alone is insufficient. Beauty happens in the interaction. This fits my description of consciousness: History + stimulus → response.

When applied to beauty, history creates expectation; the stimulus fulfills enough of that expectation to be recognizable. It departs enough from the expectation to create interest. The departure has meaning to the observer. The resulting response may be experienced as beauty.

Humor may follow essentially the same sequence, ending in a laughter response rather than an appreciation of beauty.

The cooperation hypothesis

We therefore arrive somewhere different from where we began. We began by asking what beautiful things have in common. The better question may be, “What do beautiful experiences have in common?” The answer may involve a collaboration.

The creator supplies enough familiar structure for the observer to participate. The observer supplies enough relevant history to recognize that structure. The creator then introduces a meaningful departure. The observer recognizes the departure and completes its meaning.

Neither participant creates the final experience alone, which leaves us with two related propositions. A familiar expectation fulfilled + meaningful expected surprise = beauty.

The artist and the audience cooperate to create beauty and humor. 

Without a human creator, the world and the observer cooperate to create beauty. That is why beauty is simultaneously universal and personal. Human beings share enough history that certain patterns can move millions of us.

Yet no two people share precisely the same history, so no two people experience beauty or humor in exactly the same way. The artist does not hand us beauty or humor. The artist gives us something we can use to create it.

Rodger Malcolm Mitchell