Being Wrong: Adventures in the Margin of Error

by Kathryn Schulz

“Freedom,” Gandhi argued, “is not worth having if it does not include the freedom to make mistakes.”

No question about it: being wrong can be funny. And a cruel but indisputable corollary: other people being wrong can be very, very funny.

According to Hobbes, humor arises “from some sudden conception of some eminency in ourselves, by comparison with the infirmity of others, or with our own formerly.”

Elizabethan-era critic Sir Philip Sidney, who argued that comedy should serve as “an imitation of the common errors of our life.” Nearly a hundred years later, the great comic playwright Molière echoed that sentiment, observing of his craft that, “the duty of comedy is to correct men by amusing them.”

incongruity theory posits that comedy arises from a mismatch—specifically, a mismatch between expectation and actuality. According to this theory, funny situations begin with attachment to a belief, whether that attachment is conscious or unconscious, fleeting or deep, sincerely held or deliberately planted by a comedian or a prankster. That belief is then violated, producing surprise, confusion, and a replacement belief—and also producing, along the way, enjoyment and laughter. In other words, the structure of humor is—give or take a little pleasure—the structure of error.

Like error, art comes about because we cannot grasp things directly as they are.

Tzara implored his fellow artists, “Let us try for once not to be right.”

(The Murder of Roger Ackroyd, Our Mutual Friend,

As Picasso put it, “We all know that Art is not truth. Art is a lie that makes us realize the truth, at least the truth that is given to us to understand.”

Our desire to be right, as ego-driven as it often seems, is essentially a desire to take ourselves out of the picture. We want our beliefs to inhere in the world, not in our mind. The experience of realizing that we were wrong represents the frustration of this desire—the revelation that the self was there all along.

neither they nor any of their electronic kin can make errors on their own.

Perrys artificial stupidity

are. In our inability to get things exactly right, in the idiosyncrasies of our private visions of the world, the outline of selfhood appears.

Martun mull van gough story

Depressed people might be unhappy, but—when it comes to these big-picture, existential matters—they are generally more right than the rest of us.

Take away our willingness to overestimate ourselves, and we wouldn’t dare to undertake half the things we do.