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Herausgeber: John Wiley & Sons
Kategorie: Geisteswissenschaft
Serie: New Directions in Aesthetics
Sprache: Englisch

Beschreibung

Comic Relief: A Comprehensive Philosophy of Humor develops an inclusive theory that integrates psychological, aesthetic, and ethical issues relating to humor * Offers an enlightening and accessible foray into the serious business of humor * Reveals how standard theories of humor fail to explain its true nature and actually support traditional prejudices against humor as being antisocial, irrational, and foolish * Argues that humor's benefits overlap significantly with those of philosophy * Includes a foreword by Robert Mankoff, Cartoon Editor of The New Yorker

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Seitenzahl: 371

Veröffentlichungsjahr: 2011

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Leseprobe

Contents

Foreword

Preface

Acknowledgments

1 No Laughing Matter: The Traditional Rejection of Humor and Traditional Theories of Humor

Humor, Anarchy, and Aggression

The Superiority Theory: Humor as Anti-social

The Incongruity Theory: Humor as Irrational

The Relief Theory: Humor as a Pressure Valve

The Minority Opinion of Aristotle and Thomas Aquinas: Humor as Playful Relaxation

The Relaxation Theory of Robert Latta

2 Fight or Flight – or Laughter: The Psychology of Humor

Humor and Disengagement

Humor as Play

Laughter as a Play Signal

3 From Lucy to “I Love Lucy”: The Evolution of Humor

What Was First Funny?

The Basic Pattern in Humor: The Playful Enjoyment of a Cognitive Shift Is Expressed in Laughter

The Worth of Mirth

4 That Mona Lisa Smile: The Aesthetics of Humor

Humor as Aesthetic Experience

Humor and Other Ways of Enjoying Cognitive Shifts: The Funny, Tragic, Grotesque, Macabre, Horrible, Bizarre, and Fantastic

Tragedy vs. Comedy: Is Heavy Better than Light?

Enough with the Jokes: Spontaneous vs. Prepared Humor

5 Laughing at the Wrong Time: The Negative Ethics of Humor

Eight Traditional Moral Objections

The Shortcomings in the Contemporary Ethics of Humor

A More Comprehensive Approach: The Ethics of Disengagement

First Harmful Effect: Irresponsibility

Second Harmful Effect: Blocking Compassion

Third Harmful Effect: Promoting Prejudice

6 Having a Good Laugh: The Positive Ethics of Humor

Intellectual Virtues Fostered by Humor

Moral Virtues Fostered by Humor

Humor during the Holocaust

7 Homo Sapiens and Homo Ridens: Philosophy and Comedy

Was Socrates the First Stand-up Comedian?

Humor and the Existentialists

The Laughing Buddha

8 The Glass Is Half-Empty and Half-Full: Comic Wisdom

Notes

Bibliography

Index

New Directions in Aesthetics

Series editors: Dominic McIver Lopes, University of British Columbia, and Berys Gaut, University of St Andrews

Blackwell’s New Directions in Aesthetics series highlights ambitious single- and multiple-author books that confront the most intriguing and pressing problems in aesthetics and the philosophy of art today. Each book is written in a way that advances understanding of the subject at hand and is accessible to upper-undergraduate and graduate students.

1. Interpretation and Construction: Art, Speech, and the Law by Robert Stecker

2. Art as Performance by David Davies

3. The Performance of Reading: An Essay in the Philosophy of Literature by Peter Kivy

4. The Art of Theater by James R. Hamilton

5. Cultural Appropriation and the Arts by James O. Young

6. Photography and Philosophy: Essays on the Pencil of Nature ed. Scott Walden

7. Art and Ethical Criticism ed. Garry L. Hagberg

8. Mirrors to One Another: Emotion and Value in Jane Austen and David Hume by Eva Dadlez

9. Comic Relief: A Comprehensive Philosophy of Humor by John Morreall

Forthcoming:The Art of Videogames by Grant Tavinor

Blackwell Publishing was acquired by John Wiley & Sons in February 2007.Blackwell’s publishing program has been merged with Wiley’s global Scientiflc,Technical, and Medical business to form Wiley-Blackwell.

Registered OfflceJohn Wiley & Sons Ltd, The Atrium, Southern Gate, Chichester, West Sussex,PO19 8SQ, United Kingdom

Editorial Offlces350 Main Street, Malden, MA 02148-5020,USA 9600 Garsington Road, Oxford, OX4 2DQ, UKThe Atrium, Southern Gate, Chichester, West Sussex, PO19 8SQ, UK

For details of our global editorial offlces, for customer services, and for information about how to apply for permission to reuse the copyright material in this book please see our website at www.wiley.com/wiley-blackwell.

The right of John Morreall to be identifled as the author of this work has been asserted in accordance with the Copyright, Designs and Patents Act 1988.

All rights reserved. No part of this publication may be reproduced, stored in a retrieval system, or transmitted, in any form or by any means, electronic, mechanical, photocopying, recording or otherwise, except as permitted by the UK Copyright, Designs and Patents Act 1988, without the prior permission of the publisher.

Wiley also publishes its books in a variety of electronic formats. Some content that appears in print may not be available in electronic books.

Designations used by companies to distinguish their products are often claimed as trademarks. All brand names and product names used in this book are trade names, service marks, trademarks or registered trademarks of their respective owners. The publisher is not associated with any product or vendor mentioned in this book. This publication is designed to provide accurate and authoritative information in regard to the subject matter covered. It is sold on the understanding that the publisher is not engaged in rendering professional services. If professional advice or other expert assistance is required, the services of a competent professional should be sought.

Library of Congress Cataloging-in-Publication Data

Morreall, John, 1947–Comic relief : a comprehensive philosophy of humor / John Morreall ; foreword byRobert Mankoff.p. cm. — (New directions in aesthetics)Includes bibliographical references and index.ISBN 978-1-4051-9612-3 (alk. paper)1. Wit and humor–Philosophy. I. Title.PN6149.P5M67 2009809′.7—dc222009007420

For Jordan, who’ll probably cure cancer and Alzheimer’s before all these issues get resolved

Foreword

Robert Mankoff

People tell me I have the best job in the world. They’re wrong, because actually I have the best jobs in the world. For my day job, I’m cartoon editor of The New Yorker magazine, which means I get to see over one thousand cartoons, every week, from the best cartoonists there are. From those thousand, I get to pick the best of the best–the crème de la crème, de la crème de la crème, if you will. I also moonlight as a cartoonist for The New Yorker, contributing over nine hundred cartoons to the magazine since 1977. By the way, as a cartoonist, I use the pen name Mankoff, which, coincidentally, is the same as my real name.

However, as much fun as these jobs are, I take cartoons, and the humor they represent, very seriously–or, at least, very semi-seriously. I have to, because surveys done by The New Yorker magazine show that 98 percent of its readers view the cartoons ﬁrst and the other 2 percent are lying.

Now, that last statement is itself a lie, but you didn’t think of it as a lie, because you knew it was a joke, which, in this case, though not literally true, expresses through exaggeration (“98 percent of its readers”) and fabrication (“2 percent are lying”) a truthful insight. Further analysis of this joke might classify it as a certain type, a “one liner” that has the structure of a “set-up” and a “punch line.” Still further analysis might bring to mind the famous quip of E. B. White: “Analyzing humor is like dissecting a frog. Few people are interested and the frog dies of it.” Well, he was joking too, but was he also on to the truth?

Perhaps he was, back then, some 60 years ago, but times have changed. In the ﬁrst place, a search on Google brings up 196,000 results for “frog dissection,” so a lot of people are interested in the topic, plus, there are even virtual frog dissection kits online, which means, mirabile dictu, the frog lives!

Secondly, as fascinating as frog dissection is, and with all due respect to its legion of pithy devotees, the search results it brings up are quite meager when compared to the staggering 25,000,000 you get for “humor analysis.”

So, compared to the frog, interest in humor is deﬁnitely an elephant. Unfortunately, in the past, it has been the proverbial elephant in the room of human experience, ignored by the social sciences, whose attention was focused on the twin 800-pound gorillas of aggression and depression. Lately that has changed with a growing understanding that attention must be paid to positive feelings like humor that not only make life enjoyable, but endurable and comprehensible as well.

Of course, this turn of events has enraged the 800-pound gorilla of aggression, and caused his depressive twin to go into such a deep funk that even the antics of the funny elephant couldn’t alleviate it–that is, until he accidentally stepped on the frog, which caused everyone to burst into laughter, except the frog, who was already burst.

The hilarity quickly came to an end, however, when a bunch of glum blind men wandered in from another proverb by way of the department of social sciences to examine the elephant. Each glumly sought to explain it from within their particular discipline, which they did to their own satisfaction, but not to each other’s, or, I might add, to someone like myself, for whom humor pays the rent.

What they, and I, and you need is an interdisciplinary approach. Fortunately we have it in this book, Comic Relief: A Comprehensive Philosophy of Humor, by that interdisciplinarian nonpareil, John Morreall.

John is a philosopher by training who combines the temperament of a scholar with the timing of a stand-up comedian. This book entertains as it educates us in what we ﬁnd funny and why. It is both comprehensive and comprehensible. I guarantee you’ll ﬁnd it interesting and informative. If you don’t, then, well, I’ll warrantee it, and if that doesn’t work for you, there’s always the fascinating ﬁeld of frog dissection to explore.

Preface

In college I stumbled into the philosophy of laughter and humor while looking for Aristotle’s Politics in the stacks. Where it should have been was his Problems. Opening that book at random, I lighted on the question, “Why is it that no one can tickle himself?” A few seconds later I moved on to, “Why are drunks more easily moved to tears?” but the Tickle Question had lodged in my brain. Ten years later, as an assistant professor looking for a new research topic, Aristotle’s question came back to me, triggering many more about laughter and humor. The big one was why humor is so important in ordinary life, but so neglected or frowned upon in traditional philosophy.1In Taking Laughter Seriously (1983), I wrestled with that and a dozen other questions about laughter and humor. That book is still in print and has been translated into Japanese and Turkish.

I went on to collect what traditional philosophers have said about laughter and humor, and put it together with contemporary essays, in The Philosophy of Laughter and Humor (1987). That book brought some media attention, which led to invitations from medical and business groups to talk about the beneﬁts of humor. So, printing up 500 business cards, I became a humor consultant to the likes of AT&T, IBM, and the IRS. That led to a practical book, Humor Works (1997). Then, following my wife’s career, I joined a department of religion, where I started off with a course on humor in Zen. That got me thinking about humor as a world-view, and its competitors, especially what literary people call the Tragic Vision. So I wrote Comedy, Tragedy, and Religion (1999).

This book returns to the philosophy of humor. The philosophy of X asks what X is and how X ﬁts into human life; it describes X and assesses it. We’ll be asking some standard questions such as whether humor has an essence and when it’s wrong to laugh. But we’ll also consider neglected questions such as why humor is associated with the odd facial expressions and breathing patterns known as laughter; why laughter is contagious; and whether comedy is as valuable as tragedy. While most academic treatments of humor concentrate on ﬁctional texts such as jokes, I will favor humor that we create spontaneously, as in conversation, and that we ﬁnd in real situations. And to make sure my descriptions and assessments are reasonable, I will test them against lots of real examples.

The central idea of this book is that in humor we experience a sudden change of mental state – a cognitive shift, I call it – that would be disturbing under normal conditions, that is, if we took it seriously. Disengaged from ordinary concerns, however, we take it playfully and enjoy it. Humans, along with the apes that have learned a language, are the only animals who can do this, I argue, because we are the rational animals.

We’ll focus on the playful disengagement in humor as we explore issues in psychology, aesthetics, and ethics. In psychology, comic disengagement differentiates amusement from standard emotions. In aesthetics, it explains why humor is so often an aesthetic experience, and it helps us contrast comedy with tragedy. In ethics, comic disengagement is the key to understanding both harmful humor and beneﬁcial humor. In a chapter on philosophy and comedy, I’ll argue that most philosophers have been either obtuse or perverse in not recognizing the value of comic disengagement, since they advocate a similar kind of disengagement.

Early in the writing of this book, I put “Comprehensive” in the subtitle to remind myself that I was aiming for at least three kinds of explanations. First, I wanted to clarify the concepts of laughter, amusement, and humor. Secondly, I wanted to provide two causal explanations: a psychological account of what causes what in amusement, and an evolutionary account of what in early humans led to humor, and how it then developed. That evolutionary explanation, being based on the survival value of humor, would lead to a third kind of explanation – an evaluation of the beneﬁts humor has had for our species. To what extent I’ve succeeded in any of these explanations, I leave to you to determine.

Acknowledgments

Figure 3.1: “Thin crust, no onions, with extra zebra and wildebeest” Drawing © John Morreall 2008

Chapter 1

No Laughing Matter

The Traditional Rejection of Humor and Traditional Theories of Humor

Humor, Anarchy, and Aggression

Of all the things human beings do or experience, laughing may be the funniest–funny strange, that is, not funny ha-ha. Something happens or someone says a few words, and our eyebrows and cheeks go up, as the muscles around our eyes tighten. The corners of our mouths curl upward, baring our upper teeth. Our diaphragms move up and down in spasms, expelling air from our lungs and making staccato vocal sounds. If the laughter is intense, it takes over our whole bodies. We bend over and hold our stomachs. Our eyes tear. If we had been drinking something, it dribbles out our noses. We may wet our pants. Almost every part of our bodies is involved, but none with any apparent purpose. We are out of control in a way unmatched by any other state short of neurological disease. And–funniest of all–the whole experience is exquisitely pleasurable! As Woody Allen said of stand-up comedy, it’s the most fun you can have with your clothes on.

Not only is laughter biologically odd, but the activities that elicit it are anomalous. When we’re out for a laugh, we break social conventions right and left. We exaggerate wildly, express emotions we don’t feel, and insult people we care about. In practical jokes, we lie to friends and cause them inconvenience, even pain. During the ancient Roman winter festival of Saturnalia, masters waited on servants, sexual rules were openly violated, and religious rituals were lampooned. Medieval Europe saw similar anarchy during the Feast of Fools and the Feast of Asses, which were organized by minor clerics after Christmas. The bishop was deposed, and replaced with a boy. At St. Omer, they wore women’s clothes and recited the divine office mockingly, with howls. At the Franciscan church in Antibes, they held their prayer books upside-down, wore spectacles made from orange peels, and burned soles of old shoes, instead of incense, in the censers.1 Today, during Mardi Gras and Carnival, people dress in outlandish costumes and do things forbidden during the rest of the year, sometimes leading to violence.

In everyday humor between friends, too, there is considerable breaking of social conventions. Consider five of the conversational rules formulated by Paul Grice:

1. Do not say what you believe to be false.

2. Do not say that for which you lack adequate evidence.

3. Avoid obscurity of expression.

4. Avoid ambiguity.

5. Be brief.2

Rule 1 is broken to create humor when we exaggerate wildly, say the opposite of what we think, or “pull someone’s leg.” Its violation is a staple of comedians like George Carlin:

Legal Murder Once a Month

You can talk about capital punishment all you want, but I don’t think you can leave everything up to the government. Citizens should be willing to take personal responsibility. Every now and then you’ve got to do the right thing, and go out and kill someone on your own. I believe the killing of human beings is just one more function of government that needs to be privatized. I say this because I believe most people know at least one other person they wish were dead. One other person whose death would make their life a little easier … It’s a natural human instinct… . Don’t run from it.3

Grice’s second rule is violated for laughs when we present fantasies as if they were reasonable hypotheses. If there are rumors at work about two colleagues having an affair, we might say, “Remember on Monday when nobody could find either of them–I bet they were downstairs making hot monkey love in the boiler room.”

We can create humor by breaking Rule 3 when someone asks us an embarrassing question and we give an obviously vague or confusing answer. “You want to know why my report contradicts the Census Bureau? Well, we used a new database that is so secret I’m not at liberty to reveal its name.”

Violating Rule 4 is the mechanism of most jokes, as Victor Raskin showed in Semantic Mechanisms of Humor.4 A comment, a story, or a question-and-answer exchange starts off with an assumed interpretation for a phrase, but then at the punch line, switches to a second, usually opposite interpretation. A simple example is Mae West’s line, “Marriage is a great institution–but I’m not ready for an institution.”

Rule 5 is broken in comic harangues, such as those of Roseanne Barr and Lewis Black.

Not only does humor break rules of conversation, but it often expresses contempt or even hostility toward someone, appropriately called the “butt” of the joke. Starting in childhood, we learn to make fun of people by imitating their speech patterns, facial expressions, and gestures in ways that make them look awkward, stupid, pompous, etc. To be mocked and laughed at can be taken as seriously as a physical attack would be, as the 2006 worldwide controversy over the Danish cartoons about the Prophet Muhammad showed.

The Superiority Theory: Humor as Anti-social

With all the ways in which laughter and humor involve the loss of self-control and the breaking of social rules, it’s not surprising that most societies have been suspicious of them and have often rejected them. This rejection is clear in the two great sources of Western culture: Greek philosophy and the Bible.

The moral code of Protagoras had the warning, “Be not possessed by irrepressible mirth,” and Epictetus’s Enchiridion advises, “Let not your laughter be loud, frequent, or unrestrained.”5 Both these philosophers, their followers said, never laughed at all.

Plato, the most influential ancient critic of laughter, saw it as an emotion that overrides rational self-control. In the Republic, he said that the Guardians of the state should avoid laughter, “for ordinarily when one abandons himself to violent laughter, his condition provokes a violent reaction.”6 Plato was especially disturbed by the passages in the Iliad and the Odyssey where Mount Olympus was said to “ring with the laughter of the gods.” He protested that “if anyone represents men of worth as overpowered by laughter we must not accept it, much less if gods.”7

The contempt or hostility in humor, which Ronald de Sousa has dubbed its phthonic dimension,8also bothered Plato. Laughter feels good, he admitted, but the pleasure is mixed with malice towards those being laughed at.9

In the Bible, too, laughter is usually represented as an expression of hostility.10 Proverbs 26:18–19 warns that, “A man who deceives another and then says, ‘It was only a joke,’ is like a madman shooting at random his deadly darts and arrows.”

The only way God is described as laughing in the Bible is scornfully: “The kings of the earth stand ready, and the rulers conspire together against the Lord and his anointed king… . The Lord who sits enthroned in heaven laughs them to scorn; then he rebukes them in anger, he threatens them in his wrath.” (Psalms 2:2–5)

God’s prophet Elijah also laughs as a warm-up to aggression. After he ridicules the priests of Baal for their god’s powerlessness, he has them slain (1 Kings 18:27). In the Bible, ridicule is offensive enough to carry the death penalty, as when a group of children laugh at the prophet Elisha for being bald:

He went up from there to Bethel and, as he was on his way, some small boys came out of the city and jeered at him, saying, “Get along with you, bald head, get along.” He turned round and looked at them and he cursed then in the name of the lord; and two she-bears came out of a wood and mauled forty-two of them. (2 Kings 2:23)

Early Christian thinkers brought together these negative assessments of laughter from both Greek and biblical sources. Like Plato and the Stoics, they were bothered by the loss of self-control in laughter. According to Basil the Great, “raucous laughter and uncontrollable shaking of the body are not indications of a well-regulated soul, or of personal dignity, or self-mastery.”11 And, like Plato, they associated laughter with aggression. John Chrysostom warned that,

Laughter often gives birth to foul discourse, and foul discourse to actions still more foul. Often from words and laughter proceed railing and insult; and from railing and insult, blows and wounds; and from blows and wounds, slaughter and murder. If, then, you would take good counsel for yourself, avoid not merely foul words and foul deeds, or blows and wounds and murders, but unseasonable laughter itself.12

An ideal place to find Christian attacks on laughter is in the institution that most emphasized self-control and social harmony–the monastery. The oldest monastic rule–of Pachom of Egypt in the fourth century–forbade joking.13 The Rule of St. Benedict, the foundation of Western monastic codes, enjoined monks to “prefer moderation in speech and speak no foolish chatter, nothing just to provoke laughter; do not love immoderate or boisterous laughter.” In Benedict’s Ladder of Humility, Step Ten was a restraint against laughter, and Step Eleven a warning against joking.14 The monastery of Columban in Ireland assigned these punishments: “He who smiles in the service … six strokes; if he breaks out in the noise of laughter, a special fast unless it has happened pardonably.”15 One of the strongest condemnations of laughter came from the Syrian abbot Ephraem: “Laughter is the beginning of the destruction of the soul, o monk; when you notice something of that, know that you have arrived at the depth of the evil. Then do not cease to pray God, that he might rescue you from this death.”16

Apart from the monastic tradition, perhaps the Christian group which most emphasized self-control and social harmony was the Puritans, and so it is not surprising that they wrote tracts against laughter and comedy. One by William Prynne condemned comedy as incompatible with the sobriety of good Christians, who should not be “immoderately tickled with mere lascivious vanities, or … lash out in excessive cachinnations in the public view of dissolute graceless persons.”17 When the Puritans came to rule England under Cromwell, they outlawed comedy. Plato would have been pleased.

In the seventeenth century, too, Plato’s critique of laughter as expressing our delight in the shortcomings of other people was extended by Thomas Hobbes. For him, people are prone to this kind of delight because they are naturally individualistic and competitive. In the Leviathan, he says, “I put for a general inclination of all mankind, a perpetual and restless desire for Power after Power, that ceaseth only in Death.”18 The original state of the human race, before government, he said, would have been a “war of all against all.”19 In our competition with each other, we relish events that show ourselves to be winning, or others losing, and if our perception of our superiority comes over us quickly, we are likely to laugh.

Sudden glory, is the passion which makes those grimaces called laughter; and is caused either by some sudden act of their own, that pleases them; or by the apprehension of some deformed thing in another, by comparison whereof they suddenly applaud themselves. And it is incident most to them, that are conscious of the fewest abilities in themselves; who are forced to keep themselves in their own favor by observing the imperfections of other men. And therefore much laughter at the defects of others, is a sign of pusillanimity. For of great minds, one of the proper works is, to help and free others from scorn; and to compare themselves only with the most able.20

Before the Enlightenment, Plato and Hobbes’s idea that laughter is an expression of feelings of superiority was the only widely circulated understanding of laughter. Today it is called the “Superiority Theory.” Its modern adherents include Roger Scruton, who analyses amusement as an “attentive demolition” of a person or something connected with a person. “If people dislike being laughed at,” Scruton says, “it is surely because laughter devalues its object in the subject’s eyes.”21

In linking Plato, Hobbes, and Scruton with the term “Superiority Theory,” we should be careful not to attribute too much agreement to them. Like the “Incongruity Theory” and “Relief Theory,” which we’ll consider shortly, “Superiority Theory” is a term of art meant to capture one feature shared by accounts of laughter that differ in other respects. It is not, like “Sense Data Theory” or “Dialectical Materialism,” a name adopted by a group of thinkers consciously participating in a tradition. All it means is that these thinkers claimed that laughter expresses feelings of superiority.

Discussing a philosopher under the “Superiority Theory,” furthermore, does not rule out discussing them under “Incongruity Theory” or “Relief Theory.” As Victor Raskin notes, the three theories “characterize the complex phenomenon of humor from very different angles and do not at all contradict each other–rather they seem to supplement each other quite nicely.”22 Jerrold Levinson explains how the accounts of laughter in Henri Bergson, Arthur Schopenhauer, and Herbert Spencer all had elements of both the Superiority and the Incongruity Theory, and how Immanuel Kant’s account, which is usually discussed under the Incongruity Theory, also has elements of the Relief Theory.23

We should also be careful in talking about theories of laughter and humor to distinguish different kinds of theories. Plato, Hobbes, and other philosophers before the twentieth century were mostly looking for the psychological causes of laughter and amusement. They asked what it is about certain things and situations that evokes laughter or amusement. Advocates of the Superiority Theory said that when something evokes laughter, it is by revealing someone’s inferiority to the person laughing.

Today, many philosophers are more concerned with conceptual analysis than with causal explanation. In studying laughter, amusement, and humor, they try to make clear the concepts of each, asking, for example, what has to be true of something in order for it to count as amusing. Seeking necessary and sufficient conditions, they try to formulate definitions that cover all examples of amusement but no examples that are not amusement. Of course, it may turn out that part of the concept of amusement is that it is a response to certain kinds of stimuli. And so conceptual analysis and psychological explanation may intertwine.

In this chapter I will discuss the three traditional theories mostly as psychological accounts, which is how they were originally presented. But we will also ask whether they could provide rigorous definitions of amusement and humor. Now back to the first of the three, the Superiority Theory.

If the Superiority Theory is right, laughter would seem to have no place in a well-ordered society, for it would undermine cooperation, tolerance, and self-control. That is why when Plato imagined the ideal state, he wanted to severely restrict the performance of comedy. “We shall enjoin that such representations be left to slaves or hired aliens, and that they receive no serious consideration whatsoever. No free person, whether woman or man, shall be found taking lessons in them.”24“No composer of comedy, iambic or lyric verse shall be permitted to hold any citizen up to laughter, by word or gesture, with passion or otherwise.”25

Those who have wanted to save humor from such censorship have followed two general strategies. One is to retain the claim that laughter expresses feelings of superiority, but to find something of value in that. The other is to reject the Superiority Theory in favor of one in which laughter and humor are based on something that is not anti-social.

The first approach has been taken by defenders of comedy since Ben Jonson and Sir Philip Sidney in Shakespeare’s time. Against the charge that comedy is steeped in drunkenness, lechery, lying, cowardice, etc., they argued that in comedy these vices are held up for ridicule, not for emulation. The moral force of comedy is to correct mistakes and shortcomings, not to foster them. In Sidney’s Defense of Poesie, the first work of literary criticism in English, he writes that, “Comedy is an imitation of the common errors of our life, which he [the dramatist] representeth in the most ridiculous and scornful sort that may be, so as it is impossible that any beholder can be content to be such a one.”26

A modern proponent of the view that laughter, while based on superiority, serves as a social corrective, was Henri Bergson in Laughter. His ideas about laughter grew out of his opposition to the materialism and mechanism of his day. In his theory of “creative evolution,” a nonmaterial “vital force” (élan vital) drives biological and cultural evolution. We are aware of this force, Bergson says, in our own experience–not in our conceptual thinking but in our direct perception of things and events. There we realize that our life is a process of continuous becoming and not a succession of discrete states, as our rational intellect often represents it. Real duration, lived time, as opposed to static abstractions of time, is an irreversible flow of experience. Now Bergson admits that abstract knowledge is useful in science and engineering, but when we let it dominate our thinking, we handle our daily experience in a rigid, repetitive way, treating new events as mere instantiations of concepts. “What life and society require of each of us is a constantly alert attention that discerns the outlines of the present situation, together with a certain elasticity of mind and body to enable us to adapt ourselves.”27

It is here that laughter comes into play. For Bergson, the essence of the ridiculous is “mechanical inelasticity”–someone acting in a rigid, repetitive way instead of a flexible, context-sensitive way. When we laugh at persons who are acting like machines, we do feel superior to them, and we are humiliating them, but that humiliation spurs them to think and act more flexibly, less like a machine. So, while laughter stings, it brings the ridiculed person back to acting like a human being.

Another way to save humor from being banned for undermining social order, as I said, is to reject the Superiority Theory of laughter. In the eighteenth century, this happened in two ways. First, Francis Hutcheson presented a systematic critique of the theory. Secondly, philosophers developed two alternative theories in which laughter was not anti-social: the Incongruity Theory and the Relief Theory.

In “Reflections Upon Laughter,” Hutcheson argued against Hobbes’s claim that the essential feature of laughter is expressing feelings of superiority.”28 If Hobbes were right, he said, two conclusions would follow: (1) there can be no laughter where we do not compare ourselves with others or with some former state of ourselves; and (2) whenever we feel “sudden glory,” we laugh. But neither of these is true. We sometimes laugh at an odd metaphor or simile, for example, without comparing ourselves to anyone. Hutcheson cites these lines about a sunrise:

The sun, long since, had in the lap

Of Thetis taken out his nap;

And like a lobster boil’d, the morn

From black to red began to turn.

Contemporary psychology offers support for Hutcheson’s claim that we do not need to compare ourselves with anyone in order to laugh. In an experiment by Lambert Deckers, subjects were asked to lift a series of weights that looked identical. The first several did weigh the same, but then the unsuspecting subjects picked up one that was much heavier or lighter, whereupon they laughed. In laughing, they did not seem to compare themselves with anyone.29

Not only are feelings of superiority not necessary for amusement, Hutcheson argued, but they are not sufficient, either. We have feelings of superiority toward people we pity, for example, without laughing at them. If a well-dressed gentleman riding through London in a coach sees ragged beggars, the realization that he is much better off than they are is not likely to amuse him–“we are in greater danger of weeping than laughing.”30

The Incongruity Theory: Humor as Irrational

After the Superiority Theory was shown to be faulty, two other accounts arose to compete with it, the Incongruity Theory and the Relief Theory. As with “Superiority Theory,” these are terms of art and not names adopted by thinkers consciously participating in traditions. We’ll discuss these accounts one at a time.

While the Superiority Theory says that what causes laughter is feeling superior to someone, the Incongruity Theory says that it is a perception of something incongruous.31 This approach was taken by James Beattie, Immanuel Kant, Søren Kierkegaard, Arthur Schopenhauer, and many later philosophers and psychologists. It is now the dominant theory of humor in philosophy and psychology.

As Robert Latta and others have pointed out, the words “incongruous” and “incongruity” are used sloppily in many versions of the theory.32 The dictionary says that incongruous things are “characterized by a lack of harmony, consistency, or compatibility with one another.” Congruere in Latin means “to come together, to agree.” In geometry, congruent triangles have the same shape and size; one fits exactly over the other. The prefix in means “not.” So incongruous things “do not go together, match, or fit in some way,” to use Latta’s words.33 He offers an example from the Roman poet Horace:

If a painter chose to join a human head to the neck of a horse, and to spread feathers of many a hue over limbs picked up now here now there, so that what at the top is a lovely woman ends below in a black and ugly fish, could you, my friends, if favored with a private view, refrain from laughing?34

Applying the word “incongruity” to this painting fits the dictionary definition. But consider Paul McGhee’s explanation of “incongruity” in which he says that he uses the term “interchangeably with absurdity, ridiculousness, and the ludicrous.” These words, Latta points out, are not equivalent to “incongruity.” To make matters worse, McGhee offers a second definition: “something unexpected, out of context, inappropriate, unreasonable, illogical, exaggerated, and so forth.”35 As Latta says, these words do not mean, “having parts that don’t fit together.”

Latta attacks several more theorists’ uses of “incongruity” for straying from the dictionary. That can be justified, of course, if the extended meaning is determinate. And so I would like to present a core concept that is shared by most standard versions of the Incongruity Theory. Some of Latta’s criticisms of incongruity theories may still have force, but at least the theory will have specifiable content.

The core concept in incongruity theories is based on the fact that human experience works with learned patterns. What we have experienced prepares us to deal with what we will experience. When we reach out to touch snow, we expect it to be cold. If a chipmunk is running toward us, we expect it to avoid us, not leap up and bite our jugular vein. If someone begins a story about George Washington, they may describe him as having faults, but we do not expect to hear that Washington plotted to murder all 56 signers of the Declaration of Independence.

Most of the time, most experiences of most people follow such mental patterns. The future turns out like the past. But sometimes we perceive or imagine a thing whose parts or features violate our mental patterns, as in the painting of a woman/fish that Horace imagined. Events, too, may not fit our mental patterns. It begins to rain heavily, but suddenly the clouds blow away and the sun shines brightly. A state attorney general establishes a reputation for being tough on prostitution; then as governor he is found to be a regular client of a call-girl agency.

The core meaning of “incongruity” in standard incongruity theories is that some thing or event we perceive or think about violates our normal mental patterns and normal expectations. Once we have experienced something incongruous, of course, we no longer expect it to fit our normal mental patterns. Nonetheless, it still violates our normal mental patterns and our normal expectations. That is how we can be amused by the same thing more than once.

Without using the word “incongruity,” Aristotle hints at a connection between humor and this violation of mental patterns and expectations. In the Rhetoric, 3.2, he says that one way for a speaker to get a laugh is to set up an expectation in the audience and then violate it. He cites a line from a comedy: “And as he walked, beneath his feet were–chilblains [sores on the feet].” Similarly, Cicero, in On the Orator, says that, “The most common kind of joke is that in which we expect one thing and another is said; here our own disappointed expectation makes us laugh.”36

Immanuel Kant’s explanation of laughter is more complicated but also based on the violation of expectations:

In everything that is to excite a lively convulsive laugh there must be something absurd (in which the understanding, therefore, can find no satisfaction). Laughter is an affection arising from the sudden transformation of a strained expectation into nothing. This transformation, which is certainly not enjoyable to the understanding, yet indirectly gives it very active enjoyment for a moment. Therefore its cause must consist in the influence of the representation upon the body, and the reflex effect of this upon the mind.37

For Kant, humorous amusement is primarily a physical pleasure arising from the “changing free play of sensations” that accompanies the play of thought.

The first philosopher to use the word “incongruity” to analyze humor was James Beattie, a contemporary of Kant. He sticks closest to the original meaning of incongruity when he says that laughter “seems to arise from the view of things incongruous united in the same assemblage.”38 The object of laughter is “two or more inconsistent, unsuitable, or incongruous parts or circumstances, considered as united in one complex object or assemblage.”39

Schopenhauer has a more sophisticated version of the Incongruity Theory in which the cause of amusement is a discrepancy between our abstract concepts and our perceptions of things that are instantiations of those concepts. In organizing our sense experience, we ignore many differences between things that fall under one concept–as when we call both Chihuahuas and Great Danes “dogs.” Amusement is being struck by the mismatch between a concept and a perception of the same thing, and enjoying the mental jolt that gives us. “The cause of laughter in every case is simply the sudden perception of the incongruity between a concept and the real objects which have been thought through it in some relation, and laughter itself is just the expression of this incongruity.”40 As an example, Schopenhauer tells of the prison guards who let a convict play cards with them, but when they catch him cheating, they kick him out. He comments, “They let themselves be led by the general conception, ‘Bad companions are turned out,’ and forget that he is also a prisoner, i.e., one whom they ought to hold fast.”41

Kierkegaard uses the word “contradiction” much as others use “incongruity,” for the violation of one’s expectations. He cites the story of the baker who said to a poor woman, “No, mother, I cannot give you anything. There was another here recently whom I had to send away without giving anything, too: we cannot give to everybody.”42

Except for Beattie, none of these thinkers wrote even an essay about laughter or humor: their comments arise in discussions of wider topics. Kierkegaard, for example, had a nuanced view in which humor is distinguished from irony, and both represent worldviews.43 Furthermore, these “Incongruity Theorists” disagreed on several details about incongruity, disappointed expectation, absurdity, discrepancy, or contradiction, such as how they are related to laughter. So we have to be careful in talking about the Incongruity Theory. Nonetheless, the name has stuck and today, as mentioned, the Incongruity Theory is the most widely accepted account of humor in philosophy and empirical psychology.

In the late twentieth century, one serious flaw in several older versions of the theory came to light: they said or implied that the mere perception of incongruity is sufficient for humor. That is clearly false, since negative emotions like fear, disgust, and anger are also reactions to what violates our mental patterns and expectations. Coming home to find your family murdered, for example, is incongruous but not funny. Experiencing something incongruous can also evoke puzzlement or incredulity: we may go into a problem-solving mode to figure out how the stimulus might actually fit into our conceptual frameworks.

A recent attempt to carefully lay out necessary and sufficient conditions for humorous amusement is that of Michael Clarke. He sets out three defining features of humor:

1. A person perceives (thinks, imagines) an object as being incongruous.

2. The person enjoys perceiving (thinking, imagining) the object.

3. The person enjoys the perceived (thought, imagined) incongruity at least partly for itself, rather than solely for some ulterior reason.44

While this version of the Incongruity Theory is clearly an improvement on theories in which amusement consists simply in the perception of incongruity, it still seems not specific enough. As Mike Martin points out, we often enjoy incongruity in the arts without being amused.45 In Sophocles’ Oedipus the King, for example, Oedipus vows to do whatever it takes to bring the killer of King Laius to justice. Knowing that he is himself that killer, we in the audience may well enjoy the incongruity of such a self-threatening vow, but that isn’t humor. Other aesthetic categories, too, involve a non-humorous enjoyment of some violation of our mental patterns and expectations: the grotesque, the macabre, the horrible, the bizarre, and the fantastic. In Chapter 4 we will discuss the enjoyment of incongruity in humor and contrast it with these other ways of enjoying incongruity.

Even assuming that the Incongruity Theory can be made specific enough concerning the enjoyment of incongruity, however, there is a more general problem with the very idea of enjoying incongruity. Put bluntly, how could anyone enjoy the violation of their conceptual patterns and expectations? Such enjoyment looks psychologically perverse or at least irrational. That is why, although the Incongruity Theory freed humor from the traditional stigma of being anti-social, it has not improved philosophers’ assessments of humor much over the last three centuries. It answered some of the older objections to humor, but made way for a new one that may be more compelling for philosophers: the Irrationality Objection.

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