Critchley, Simon. On Humour. London and New York: Routledge, 2002.

Critchley's book has probably become one of the most-cited overviews of the topic of humour. He traces the three prominent theories of humour: superiority, relief and incongruity, along with descriptions of laughter from classical through to recent texts. His chapters deal with topics ranging from the question of whether humour is particular to humans, the body and humour, Bergson's notion of the mechanical and laughter, ethnic humour, the idea of humour as creating community and Freud's theories on humour. Much of the book simply and concisely outlines discussions that have occurred around these topics. For instance, in his chapter on ethnic humour, Critchley suggests that ethnic jokes reveal the repressed anxieties of the teller (75). In humour, Critchley argues that we align and differentiate ourselves with communities, both in ways we find pleasurable and positive and in ways we find uncomfortable.

Critchley offers Freud the last word on humour, focusing his final chapter on his late essay "Humor," in particular. The chapter moves from laughter and humour to a discussion of the smile. He writes, "a smile is the mark of the eccentricity of the human situation: between beasts and angels, between being and having, between the physical and metaphysical. We are thoroughly material beings that are unable to be that materiality. Such is the curse of reflection, but such also is the source of our dignity. Humour is he daily bread of that dignity" (109). The chapter finally closes with Beckett, a playwright whose humour is often not at all risible and whose smiles are rife with a range of emotions and negations. He concludes, paraphrasing Beckett between his hyphens,

For me, it is this smile—deriding the having and the not having, the pleasure and the pain, the sublimity and suffering of the human situation—that is the essence of humour. This is the risus purus, the highest laugh, the laugh that laughs at the laugh, that laughs at that which is unhappy, the mirthless laugh of the epigraph to this book. Yes, this smile does not bring unhappiness, but rather elevation and liberation, the lucidity of consolation. This is why, melancholy animals that we are, human beings are also the most cheerful. We smile and find ourselves ridiculous. Our wretchedness is our greatness. (111)

It's interesting that Critchley moves away from laughter at this moment and towards the smile. I think his focus on laughter (and smiling) stems from his interest in the bodily experience of humour, but the study of humour (as opposed to its physiological response) precludes distinctions between smiles and laughter (or smiles as laughter as this concluding quote seems to suggest) as evidence of humour's occurrence or as part of its analysis. I'm not sure that the smile in this case indicates a laughter at unhappiness, but does indicate the linkage between affect and humour, or the notion that humour acts as a microcosm of our affective relation to our existential situation. Moreover, privileging wretchedness as greatness seems a potentially problematic move without further analysis or support, though it's a provocative idea.

Nietzsche, Friedrich. The Gay Science. Trans. Walter Kaufmann. New York: Vintage Books, 1974.

While Nietzsche's Gay Science does not offer anything so comprehensive as a theory of humour, he speaks often about laughter and pleasure. More than this, his concept of eternal recurrence, elaborated in this book as well, can be figured as a kind of nihilism that Nietzsche figures as ambivalent, equally a "tale told by an idiot, signifiying nothing" and a productive site of inquiry. As Kaufmann writes in a footnote, "The absence of all purpose and meaning to which one's first reaction may well be nausea or despair, can be experienced as liberating and delightful in what Nietzsche later calls a 'Dionysian' perspective" (248). Rather than a typical annotation, I've included a series of almost aphoristic quotes from the text that voice his ideas on topics around nihilism, cynicism, laughter, comedy and humour.

 

"How the theatrical scream of passion now hurts our ears, how strange to our taste the whole romantic uproar and tumult of the senses have become, which the educated mob loves, and all its aspirations after the elevated, inflated and exaggerated! No, if we convalescents still need art, it is another kind of art—a mocking, light, fleeting, divinely untroubled, divinely artificial art that, like a pure flame, licks into unclouded skies... We know better afterward what above all is needed for this: cheerfulness, any cheerfulness" (37).

 

"To laugh at oneself as one would have to laugh in order to laugh out the whole truth—to do that even the best so far lacked sufficient sense for the truth, and the most gifted had too little genius for that. Even laughter may yet have a future. I mean, when the proposition 'the species is everything, one is always none' has become part of humanity, and this ultimate liberation and irresponsibility has become accessible to all at all times. Perhaps laughter will then have formed an alliance with wisdom, perhaps only 'gay science' will then be left" (74).

 

"For the present, the comedy of existence has not yet 'become conscious' of itself" (74).

 

"The gruesome counterpart of laughter, that profound emotional shock felt by many individuals at the thought: 'Yes, I am worthy of living!'" (75).

 

"Reflecting has lost all the dignity of its form: the ceremony and solemn gestures of reflecting have become ridiculous" (81).

 

"The greatest danger that always hovered over humanity and still hovers over it is the eruption of madness—which means the eruption of arbitrariness in feeling, seeing, and hearing, the enjoyment of the mind's lack of discipline, the joy in human unreason" (130).

 

"The lovely human beast always seems to lose its good spirits when it thinks well; it becomes 'serious.' And 'where laughter and gaiety are found, thinking does not amount to anything': that is the prejudice of this serious beast against all 'gay science'" (257).

 

"The whole pose of 'man against the world,' of man as a 'world-negating' principle, of man as the measure of the value of things, as judge of the world who in the end places existence itself upon his scales and finds it wanting—the monstrous insipidity of this pose has come home to us and we are sick of it. We laugh as soon as we encounter the juxtaposition of 'man and world,' separated by the sublime presumption of the little word 'and.' But look, when we laugh like that, have we not simply carried the contempt for man one step further? And thus also pessimism, the contempt for that existence which is knowable by us? Have we not exposed ourselves to the suspicion of an opposition—an opposition between the world in which we were at home up to now with our reverences that perhaps made it possible for us to endure life, and another world that consists of us—an inexorable, fundamental, and deepest suspicion about ourselves that is more and more gaining worse and worse control of us Europeans and that could easily confront coming generations with the terrifying Either/Or: 'Either abolish your reverences or—yourselves!' The latter would be nihilism; but would not the former also be—nihilism? –This is our question mark" (286-87).

 

"The desire for destruction, change, and becoming can be an expression of an overflowing energy that is pregnant with the future (my term for this is, as is known, 'Dionysian'); but it can also be the hatred of the ill-constituted, disinherited, and underprivileged, who destroy, must destroy, because what exists, indeed all existence, all being, outrages and provokes them" (329).

 

"romantic pessimism, the last great event in the fate of our culture. That there still could be an altogether different kind of pessimism... I can this pessimism of the future—for it comes! I see it coming!—Dionysian pessimism" (331).

Sanders, Barry. Sudden Glory: Laughter as Subversive History. Boston: Beacon Press, 1995.

Going back to ancient Hebrew, Egyptian and Greek writing, artwork and religion, this readable and accessible book traces the history of laughter in Western culture. For instance, Sanders open the book by referencing a 3^rd century Egyptian alchemical papyrus in which the Creator laughs of chaos, with bursts of laughter bringing forth all aspects of creation (1). Sanders notes that the history of laughter (in the west) and the structure of modern humour is built on a tradition that comes to us via the Greek and Latin foundation of much of western knowledge. As such, he notes that a bias towards both a white, male humorist and laugher is built into the tradition to some degree (26). At the same time, Sanders describes the modern joke as stemming from the collision of this intellectual, rhetorical world with the vernacular, oral world (26). Sanders thus situates the study of laughter (and I would argue humour as well) within cultural studies, conceived as a combination of critical and aesthetic theory with everyday experience and subjectivity.

One of the key strands in this book follows laughter's association with power. He writes, "From the point of view of the marginalized and the disenfranchised, if they cannot participate in the writing of history, they can at least try to erase it. To pull this off, however, one must realize that while a laugh can turn the subtleties of power inside out, making them suddenly visible, it can also turn power into pure brutality, for power, finally, has nothing to say to laughter—it remains dumb in the silent sense, dumb-founded in the weakest way. When it responds, it can only resort to mere physicality –torture, imprisonment, or even death" (25). This reading of power in relation to laughter, or their interplay, is interesting particularly alongside a Foucauldian notion of power as negotiated. I would argue, though, that the power he is describing is equally tied to the provocation of such laughter, or humour. In other words, something must provoke the laughing-at-power that he describes. At the same time, the violent response of the structure of power to laughter suggests that joking and humour are both forces around which both resistance and repression congeal. The orientation towards change is captured in his statement, "everyone laughs in the future tense" (32).

Sanders notes that the decoupling of the word and its usage in the modern period occurs alongside "an artistic revolution of laughter, in surrealism and dada" (31). He speculates that "joking may characterize best the breaking that postmodernists seem to relish so much" (31). These statements reinforce my idea the contemporary sense of humour can be traced to the artistic and literary movements of modernism.

Douglas, Mary. “Jokes.” Implicit Meanings: Essays in Anthropology. London: Routledge, 1975. 90-115.

The opening lines to Mary Douglas's essay on jokes and joking practices highlight a key problem in the study of humour by not only anthropologists (whom she names), but among theorists of humour more generally. She writes, "Anthropologists tend to approach ritual joking from scratch, with merely an introspective glance at the cases in which they themselves feel impelled to joke. Consequently they have treated joking rituals as if they arise spontaneously from social situations and as if the anthropologist's sole task is to classify the relations involved" (90). She positions her look at joking in terms an analysis that seeks to articulate modes of thought or expression in relation to social experience, rather than the classification of types of social experience—what she sees as the direction in which anthropology must develop in the mid-1970s. She also describes the importance of looking at joking in terms of its everyday use and its subjective character, though again tying these analyses to the consideration of larger social structures (92). Joking, for Douglas, is a "play upon form" that acts in a similar way to a kind of "ritual pollution" (92). Her essay is primarily concerned with the practices of joking in the Dogon tribe in Africa, which are scatological and based on the exchange of what western anthropologists in the past saw as "gross insults" (92). In this, Douglas pinpoints a central problem in the study of humour: its cultural specificity. She asks whether jokes can be understood outside of the culture that produces them, following this with a tantalizing question around interpretation: "When people throw excrement at one another whenever they meet, either verbally or actually, can this be interpreted as a case of wit, or merely written down as a case of throwing excrement? This is the central problem of all interpretation" (92).

Douglas explicitly separates her analysis of joking from the study of laughter: "it would be wrong to suppose that the acid test of a joke is whether it provokes laughter or not" (92)—a useful division and precedent for ongoing analyses of humour. She bases this distinction on the work of Bergson, whose essay on laughter speaks about joking and humour, but not about laughter specifically. She offers an insightful analysis of Bergson and Freud, saying that both assume a structure characteristic to humour; however, she finds it difficult to map their structure onto the joking rituals of the Dogon, and so she extrapolates from their analyses to find instead that the form of a joke lies less in the utterance alone, but "can be identified in the total social situation" (93). In Bergson's definition of humour, Douglas balks at the moral judgment implied between the "good" joke—the human—and the "bad" mechanism at which the joke pokes fun (93-94). Douglas offers a more expansive definition, saying, "A joke is a play upon form. It brings into relation disparate elements in such a way that one accepted pattern is challenged by the appearance of another which in some way was hidden in the first" (96), and in this description betrays her affinity with Freud's definition of joking.

The rest of Douglas's chapter concerns a specific analysis of Dogon joking rituals, which, though interesting is less vital to this project. However, her careful positioning of the topic, largely in order to justify it as an object of study within 1970s anthropology offers a useful framework by which to begin similar work in reference to other theorists of humour who have similarly limited or expanded the topic of humour, sometimes seemingly arbitrarily, until its limits seem not to offer any kind of useful field within which to work. Her work also offers an explicit connection between the everyday, ritual and questions of larger cultural or ideological meanings.

Bergson, Henri. Laughter: An Essay on the Meaning of the Comic.

Bergson, Henri. Laughter: An Essay on the Meaning of the Comic. Trans. Cloudesley Brereton and Fred Rothwell. Mineola, NY: Dover, 2005.

Bergson presents humour as an intellectual, rather than emotional or sensual, matter: noting that humour requires an absence of feeling, “a momentary anaesthesia of the heart” (2-3). Bergson suggests that to find humour in a fellow human’s situation it is necessary to regard them without sympathy, and pay no heed to the pain or suffering that may be inflected on them in the course of the humour. He attributes to humour a minor social function: that of gentle reprimand where laughter as a corrective “social nagging” (66) in response to inflexible, ignorant or eccentric behaviour (8-10, 89-98). In Bergson’s account, then, humour begins to carry out a basic social function, yet this is not the political aesthetic proper, because this disciplining function arises at the level of social interaction, rather than any aesthetic aspect of a text. Furthermore, humour here operates not to defamiliarise, but to ensure that unfamiliar or unexpected behaviour is curbed. This is a political function (if not an aesthetic one), but a conservative one.

At the centre of Bergson's theory of humour is an opposition to mechanical forms of being - of speech, of movement, of thought - which humour helps to correct: “the attitudes, gestures, movements of the human body are laughable in exact proportion as that body reminds us of a mere machine” (15). Bodily movements, like gestures, cannot shift and alter as living thoughts do, which is why they are comic, and why imitations are funny – because they treat the body as a machine (16). Things that are similar make us laugh because they are like mass-produced goods which are inherently mechanical (17). We cannot see the rigidity in things we are familiar with though, such as in fashion clothes. There is a distinction between comic de jure and comic de facto (19), we don’t laugh at familiar things because “the continuity of custom having deadened within them the comic quality” (19).

Incongruity does not produce laughter; it just puts us in a situation where we can recognise the rigidity of an aspect (19). There are also things that we see as artificial but that are not, which we experience as funny (20). This is not logical but rather reflects the dreaming of society (20). We laugh at the natural that is mechanically tampered with or that is understood as if it were (21). The ceremonial always contains something of the comic, and becomes comical once they lose the seriousness with which convention endows them (22). We also display our rigidity when we act in a typical way at a time when we should not (23). Materiality when we expect to find vitality is funny (24) as are situations where our attention is called to the bodily over the moral, reminding us of the physical (25). It is comical when the letter (rigid) overcomes the spirit (26) – taking metaphors literally etc. The crystallisation of the mind and the inelasticity of the body go together (28). We laugh when a person gives us the impression of being a thing (28).