Morreall, John. Comic Relief: A Comprehensive Philosophy of Humour. Wiley-Blackwell, 2009.

The latest book from a man who has made it one of his academic missions to establish the parameters of the philosophical understanding of humour. The first part of the book summarizes work he has done in the past to collect and name the three central theories of humour: 1) superiority theory, which Morreall describes as seeing humour as anti-social; 2) incongruity theory, which he describes as the view of humour as irrational; and 3) relief theory, which sees humour as a kind of pressure valve that releases social or psychic tension. He adds to these the minority view of Aristotle and Aquinas and, more recently, Robert Latta, which sees humour as playful relaxation.

In "That Mona Lisa Smile: The Aesthetics of Humour," one of the more interesting chapters in the book for the purposes of this work, Morreall describes humour as an aesthetic experience aligning it with the Kantian notion of disinterestedness (or suggesting that the goal of aesthetic humour is disinterested, focused only on providing amusement), adding to his description of the aesthetic of humour the elements of surprise or a shift in perspective, which contribute to its aesthetic appeal or pleasure (70). He distinguishes this from "non-aesthetic" humour on the basis of the motivation behind the joke, with jokes focused on superiority, for instance, falling into the latter category (72). Morreall wants to distinguish humorous amusement from similar kinds of cognitive shifts at work in tragedy, horror, the grotesque or macabre, suggesting, "humorous amusement, by contrast, is by itself a positive state with no negative emotions" (74). He also separates the fantastic or bizarre from humour, citing the Surrealists as an example and suggesting that these elicit cognitive rather than emotional shocks and thus cannot be considered humour. In his effort to delineate a unique kernel that is humour, however, one wonders at the exceptions to these rules: black humour, Holocaust jokes, killing jokes or nervous laughter, and how these would be accounted for in terms of their aesthetic function.

In the chapter, "Laughing at the Wrong Time: The Negative Ethics of Humor," Morreall goes on to describe 8 basic moral objections to humour, which he claims as the most common objections; that it is: insincere, idle, irresponsible, hedonistic, reducing self-control, hostile, anarchistic and foolish. In each case, Morreall cites examples to debunk each claim, though, equally, in each case, some example could be offered in support of the initial objection as well. Overall, however, in his effort to defuse these negative objections, Morreall wants to get past an ethical argument against humour that focuses on its phthonic element (Ronald de Sousa), or malicious attitude (98). Instead, Morreall describes humour as offering a "practical disengagement" (101), in this separating laughter and humour from emotion (101). In support of this division, he writes, "when we want to evoke anger or outrage about some problem, we don't present it in a humorous way, precisely because of the practical disengagement of humour. Satire is not a weapon of revolutionaries" (101). Though unclear on how someone like Swift fits into such a claim, Morreall moves on quickly from this claim to suggest in this context that the negative implications of humour are better viewed as stemming from this practical disengagement. He describes three such negative ethics in the bulk of the chapter: irresponsibility, the blocking of compassion and the promotion of prejudice, each of which is relatively self-explanatory.

In the following chapter, entitled "Having a Good Laugh: the Positive Ethics of Humour," Morreall counters the negative ethics of humour by describing the "intellectual virtues fostered by humour" (112). THeseinclude: fostering open-mindedness and spurring critical thinking (113). Here, he cites Jon Stewart and Bill Mahar (sic) as examples of political satirists who "encourage us to think twice before accepting any political message" (113).

The descriptions Morreall offers of both the negative and positive attributes of humour seem anecdotal and heavily tied to whichever example he chooses to illustrate his point. For instance, humour can be said to promote prejudice when the example cited is Don Imus's "joke" about the Rutgers women's basketball team, but political (perhaps even revolutionary?) when referencing Jon Stewart. While Morreall's work reinforces the idea that critical analysis should be applied to the topic of humour, his approach is largely anecdotal and relies heavily on generalizations that don't hold when applied to a range of examples.

Lewis, Paul. Cracking Up: American Humor in a Time of Conflict. Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 2006.

Lewis's main contribution in this book is his effort to delineate two prominent modes of humour in popular discourse: 1) healing humour and 2) killing jokes. The first he traces alongside the development of a view of humour and laughter as healing alongside the growth of new age and self-healing movements in the chapter "Red Noses at the Ready!" In this chapter, Lewis remains relatively sceptical of the idea that so-called "destructive" modes of humour should be disavowed (as is the call of the "positive humorists") and the concomitant idea that the healing mode of humour should be celebrated unquestionably. However, ultimately, Lewis locates positive humour as a response to a sense that existence is dark and meaningless (107). This sense of nihilism, for Lewis, elicits two responses: either the denial of pleasure or to protest this so-called "enemy" by taking "comfort in a life of simple pleasures" (107). Clearly, Lewis privledges the latter tack over the former.

The bulk of his book takes up the idea of the "killing joke," which he describes as a mode of joking in which "neither the speaker nor the creator of the joke is only kidding." Killing jokes "depict not only death but a more or less total destruction of the recognizable human identity (shape, form) or their victimized butts" (41); thus, as opposed to the positive humor folks, the killing joker uses "humor not as comic relief but as comic intensifier" (40).

Lewis summarizes his analysis of killing jokes and their cultural role in the following passage:

"By allowing us to shift from impotence to power, from victim to predator, killing jokes can provide distance from both vulnerability and guilt. By bringing audiences to the moment of danger and then adopting a playful attitude, they assume a willingness to reject or repudiate humanity. The multiplication of this humor, the resonance of these jokes through the past decades, suggests that they are performing what Frederic (sic) Jameson describes as 'transformational work' on social anxieties and what Philip Fisher has called 'cultural work,' that is, they are contributing to changes of consciousness by 'massing small patterns of feelings in an entirely new direction" (62).

He goes on to describe killing jokes "as gallows humor for a poisoned planet, killing jokes are an understandable response to the human—indeed planetary—predicament two millennia after Christ" (62).

Thus, with both positive humour and killing jokes, Lewis ends up at a similar diagnosis: seeing these as symptomatic of a late-capitalist moment he sees as existentially, ethically and morally dark, if not diseased.

Lewis's delineation of and description of "killing jokes" as a prominent feature of the current pop cultural mediascape is useful in underscoring the central role occupied by humour, particularly dark humour, in contemporary cultural production. Likewise, his recognition of the proximity of multiple "negative" emotions: fear, anxiety, cynicism alongside a mode that offers, even in its darker incarnations, pleasure and relief, complicates any easy understanding of humour as wholly negative or positive, instead pushing discussion towards the function of such a concatenation of seemingly contradictory feelings. However, his work in situating this mode of humour in terms of a broader cultural moment returns to a binary between fear and pleasure, with the latter implicitly priviledged as desirable in overcoming the former. At the same time, his suggestion that contemporary modes of humour are symptomatic of our cultural moment is a rich observation that calls for further work.

Holt, Jason, ed. The Daily Show and Philosophy

Holt, Jason, ed. The Daily Show and Philosophy. Malden, MA: Blackwell, 2007.

A fannish collection that aligns Stewart with Neil Postman, Socrates and the Greek Cynics. TDS and Philosophy is one of the ‘purest’ form of the approach that asserts, in the words of one of its contributors, that “with political satire in particular, humor can’t be disconnected from the broader social project of liberation” (Vanderheiden 206), thereby attributing to political humour an entirely critical and liberatory function. Ignores issues of political economy, medium, capitalist structures or any nuanced theory of humour. Stewart is hailed as a modern philosopher or public intellectual, and the show is lauded an exercise in unimpeachable critical thinking.

Billig, Michael. Laughter and Ridicule: Towards a Social Critique of Humour

Billig, Michael. Laughter and Ridicule: Towards a Social Critique of Humour. London: Sage, 2005.

Billig offers a fairly comprehensive historical account of the key texts of humour theory from a perspective directly at odds with that offered by conventional "humor studies." Billig goes perhaps too far in the opposite direction though, declaring all humour to be an act of aggressive social control and power with the aim to humiliate and discipline its subject (194-9). In Billig's account, humour is cruel and dominating, and he therefore can function as a useful illustration of a particular anlytic extreme.

Also useful is Billig's argument that humour has become a social obligation, and very little is now considered outside the purview of humour (11-5), such that humour should be considered a form of conformity, not rebellion. Moreover, Billig asserts that it is mistaken to make any distinction between positive and negative humour (22-5), such as those offered by Zupančič and Eco, and instead he argues that all humour is a rejection of negative and critical thinking that results in a conservative mindset (30). Such misunderstandings are argued to arise from an approach that treats humour as a cognitive and intellectual, rather than emotional, phenomenon, and which thereby abstracts humour out from the social conditions wherein it operates (64-6). Socially understood, laughter is never kind-hearted, it always arises out of a desire to ridicule and discipline (134-6). In political terms, this ridicule is always on the side of the powerful, and thus cannot constitute a rebellion of any sort: in fact, Billig asserts, any attempt to conjoin political dissent with humour, robs any radical or revolutionary action of its power (209-12). In these claims, Billig represents the other dominant strain of contemporary humour theory – opposed to the carnivalesque tradition – which regards humour as Adorno does pleasure, an acritical and disempowering force that, in addition, acts to sustain social discipline through humiliation: a profoundly conservative politics of humour. Billig thus rejects any distinction between carnivalesque positive and repressive negative humour because in his conception all humour is inherently tied into normative demonstrations of superiority and indifference for human life, and thus can only be used to reaffirm, not subvert, existing social power structures

Billig offers an interpretation that holds that the function of humour may be quite different from the humorist’s intention; thus, a joke that is intended to serve a subversive function may be revealed to function conservatively. This interpretation is supported through recourse to the Freudian notion of the “tendentious joke,” a form of humour that expresses hostile or obscene thoughts (Billig 154).