Inversion, Topsy-Turvy

Inversion and topsy-turvydom can be understood as a range of processes involving the reversal of normal expectations and conventions. Inversion plays an important part in several theoretical humor models as well as in many practical examples, and it can take many forms. Folklorist Barbara Babcock (1978) defines “symbolic inversion” as “any act of expressive behaviour which inverts, contradicts, abrogates, or in some fashion presents an alternative to commonly held codes, values and norms be they linguistic, literary or artistic, religious, or social and political” (p. 14). Examples involving humor range from isolated inversions in language (e.g., spoonerisms) or situation (e.g., pratfalls) to more complex reversals of social or power relations, often associated with a ritual or carnival element.

Inversion and topsy-turvydom are best understood as a spectrum rather than as clearly delineated concepts: Whereas the former generally refers to a defined instance or to the process of reversal, the latter extends this logic to the level of a generalized state or imaginative world. The Oxford English Dictionary cites instances of the adjective topsy-turvy from the first half of the 16th century onward, meaning both literally and figuratively upside-down. The nonce word topsy-turvydom, referring to “the realm of topsy-turvy, inversion, or confusion,” appears as the title of an 1874 operetta by W. S. Gilbert and Alfred Cellier that satirized contemporary society and politics by presenting a utopian world in which everything works in the opposite way to real life. Although topsy-turvydom is sometimes associated with a particular, whimsical strand of 19th-century British humor, its roots lie in the much older trope of mundus inversus or “upside-down world,” seen in a long tradition of utopian narratives and in common images and expressions such as “the tail wagging the dog” and “putting the cart before the horse.”