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).

Cohen, Ted. Jokes: Philosophical Thoughts on Joking Matters. Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1999.

In a book that includes more jokes than many on the topic, Cohen offers an accessible and readable a description and analysis of joking, with chapters entitled, "Jokes Are Conditional," "When Jokes are Assymetrical," "Problems and Occassions for Joke-Making," "Jewish Jokes and the Acceptance of Absurdity," and "Taste, Morality, and the Propriety of Joking." In his introduction, Cohen limits his object of study to two specific joke forms: short story jokes and formula jokes. Though in a less specific manner, he reinforces Douglas's point that jokes work because their audience brings certain awareness or assumptions to the joke (3). Unlike some others, Cohen begins by asserting his belief that no comprehensive theory of jokes is possible (10). He does suggest understanding jokes as a form of "performance" (11), a position which his text, rife as it is with jokes, reinforces. In this, he offers perhaps the most explicit linkage between performativity and humour studies.

His last chapter, "Taste, Morality, and the Propriety of Joking" offers an explicit consideration of black humour and dark jokes. He asks,

Do I think we should joke about absurdities? Should we be laughing at the fact of death? Death is a bleak topic. Jokes about death can be bleak. But apart from all that bleakness, joke-telling about death has a special dark side, which it shares with much joke-telling.

Though this statement is provocative, Cohen does not go on to suggest what this "special dark side" of jokes around death might consist of. However, he goes on to offer a discussion around contentious issue of morality and ethnic or other jokes often considered objectionable. At the beginning of this chapter, Cohen posits a line determining when a joke is "out of place," at the question of avoidance. He suggests a joke is objectionable when it is a mechanism used to avoid, rather than address a topic head on (69). At the same time, Cohen goes on to suggest that ethnic jokes are not necessarily objectionable because they "purvey stereotypes" (78). All jokes, he argues, portray fictions and falsehoods. With ethnic jokes, Cohen acknowledges there may be something "especially disagreeable or obnoxious in this particular idea's being believed" (79). However, he stops short of condemning jokes that take African Americans, for instance, as their butts because he believes making moral declarations on jokes is an impossible task. In trying to imagine the moral response of an "ideal observer"—a figure often used in analytical moral theory—to ethnically-charged jokes, Cohen argues that one cannot definitively say whether such a creature would object or welcome such jokes (81). So far, he goes on to argue, it cannot be shown that such jokes produce genuine harm to someone (81). Thus, rather than arguments over whether jokes are good or bad, funny or unfunny, Cohen argues that analysts should be interested in the fact that even objectionable jokes can be funny and wonder why this might be so (84).

Zizek, Slavoj. “The Christian-Hegelian Comedy.” The Artist’s Joke. Ed. Jennifer Higgie. London: Whitechapel, 2007. 216-220.

More than any other writer on humour/joking, Zizek parses an understanding of comedy and joking (in the case of this essay) within the terrain of Continental philosophy and critical theory. In this essay, he describes the character of what he calls the Hegelian joke, further offering an analysis of Christianity as based on a comic structure. This annotation will focus on the former, though the latter is also interesting, and typically mind-boggling, in Zizekian fashion. Zizek describes a tripartite joke structure that fits within the typical Hegelian dialectic. Thus, the "Hegelian" joke for Zizek is that which the butt's subjective position is undermined, in which he/she finds him/herself part of the group he/she is ridiculing (216). The negation of this joke, or its antithesis, is a joke in which the punchline involves the exclusion or othering of the subject outside of the group. Finally, the third term Zizek describes is the joke correlative of "infinite judgement," or tautological "supreme contradiction" (216—all of these terms are explained with great jokes in the text, which I won't quote here).

 

Going on to further parse the comic in Hegelian terms, Zizek describes the difference between a tragic and comic hero in terms of the actor's distance from the role: where the tragic hero is representative of a universal character and is separated from him/herself, the comic character "is never fully identified with his role; he always retains the ability to observe himself from outside: 'making fun of himself'" (217). That is: this self-reflexivity is built into the character him/herself. Linking this analysis with Hegel's notions of comedy, Zizek notes that "what happens in comedy is that the Universal appears directly" (218).

 

Seeming to offer a direct rebuttal to analyses such as that offered by Paul Lewis of killing jokes as our response to a fallen world, Zizek writes,

Comedy does not rely on the undermining of our dignity with reminders of the ridiculous contingencies of our terrestrial existence. On the contrary, comedy is the full assertion of universality, the immediate coincidence of universality with the character's/actor's singularity. Or to put it another way, what effectively happens when all universal features of dignity are mocked and subverted? The negative force that undermines them is that of the individual, of the hero with his attitude of disrespect towards all elevated universal values, and this negativity itself is the only true remaining universal force. (218)

This quote also offers a counterpoint to the view that negation through comedy (perhaps also cynicism) need only lead to a universalized negativity. Instead, Zizek positions individuality and/or subjective experience and the ability to harness negativity through comedy as a counterforce to a kind of blasé nihilism. Perhaps nihilism only becomes such when we treat it as hopeless—we reify it in naming and lamenting it as such.

 

Zizek goes on to write "the comic effect proper occurs when, after the act of unveiling, one confronts the ridicule and nullity of the unveiled content—in contrast to encountering behind the veil the terrifying Thing too traumatic for our gaze. Which is why the ultimate comical effect occurs when, after removing the mask , we confront exactly the same face as that of the mask" (219). This quote links Zizek's discussion of comedy here with his analysis of ideology in Sublime Object of Ideology, where he describes our relationship to ideology in very similar terms.

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.

Ewin, R. E. “Hobbes on Laughter.”

Ewin, R. E. “Hobbes on Laughter.” The Philosophical Quarterly 51.202 (2001) : 29 – 40.

Drawing on Hobbes' wider corpus and contemporay accounts of his character, Ewin argues that Hobbes oft-quoted remarks on laughter should not be understood as a dismisal of laughter all together as a generally disagreable condition. Rather, Ewin suggests, Hobbes considers laughter at another's misfortune to be symptomatic of a particularly uncharitable and malicious passion that does not befit a great mind or a gentleman. Thus, Hobess does not rule out all laughter, but simply that which lacks compassion, which Ewin argues is the often overlooked central tenet of Hobbes's political and social theory.

Zupančič, Alenka. The Odd One In: On Comedy.

Zupančič, Alenka. The Odd One In: On Comedy. Cambridge, MA: MIT Press, 2008.

A pupil of Zizek, Zupančič offers a philosophically dense and complex interpretation of humour as transcendant incongruity taken up in the context of contemporary examples such as Borat and George Bush Jr jokes.

For Zupančič, Comedy is not a simplistic liberation: irony and laughter can function well in conditions of true ideology wherein the subject feels profoundly free – freedom and humour constitute an important aspect of the contemporary dominant ideology (4). The subversion of humour is not to be found in its intellectual resistance, indeed currently all that is negative must be seen as positive, happiness is a virtue (6). Contemporary ideology biologises difference in a form of inverse racism (6). The current ideology celebrates the absence of ideology which is replaced with happiness and comedy (7).

In dense Hegelian and Lacanian language, Zupančič argues that “true comedy” constitutes a split between the actual and abstract realisation of an Universal ideal thereby revealing the gaps in the implied finitude of the social order (30-52).Taking up the Freudian notion of the tendentious, Zupančič argues that comedy allows us to realise, and thereby laugh at, the paradoxical functioning of our symbolic and contingent universe (142-7). This is carnival on a transcendent, rather than social level.

Zupančič suggests that humour acts to question the sanctity of what Hegel dubs the symbolic Universal by revealing how it emerges out of the concrete Particular (27-9) or, in other words, how seemingly eternal unquestionable aspects of existence are really products of the transient everyday. This occurs because humour reveals how the Universal arises out of concrete forms, a process that creates a short-circuit between the lofty nature of the Universal and the “obscene other side” that emerges from its materialist consequences (32), the two aspects stitched together in a comic contradiction. Humour, in Zupančič’s conception, can therefore accommodate the existence of two mutually exclusive frames of reference that are compelled to co-exist, which leads to a perceptual break-down of the symbolic order and allows us to draw nearer to the Lacanian kernel of the Real (142). In this scheme, comic characters are funny because they embody a single universal notion, be it piety or cleanliness, for example, to the detriment of their particular existence as an embodied subject – they put the universal desire of their self before their actual existence which creates comic consequences wherein the Universal, which is revealed to only exist in the Particular, comes into conflict with it (Zupančič 49-51). The comic character is thus not subversive because they challenge the dominant ideology or what Zupančič refers to as the Universal, but because they reveal how that ideology emerges out of the material and how it must therefore always exist within a particularity even as it feigns an essential nature.

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).

Kant, Immanuel. Critique of Judgement.

Kant, Immanuel. Critique of Judgement. Trans. James Creed Mered. Oxford, NY: Oxford University Publishing, 2007.

In Kant’s account, humour, or laughter as he has it, is conceived as a form of pleasure that is entertaining and lively, but that is without consequence or intention (208). For Kant, humour is a gratifying and enjoyable bodily sensation produced by an “oscillation” of the mind, “inner motion” and body, but with little wider philosophical importance (208-10).

Kant argues that humour, because it is an aesthetic characteristic, is without intention or effect beyond aesthetic pleasure. Thus humour, or laughter as he would have it, does not arise out of social relations but rather, “is an affect resulting from the sudden transformation of a heightened expectation into nothing.”

QUOTES:

“Something absurd (something in which, therefore, the understanding can of itself find no delight) must be present in whatever is to raise a healthy convulsive laugh. Laughter is an affect arising from a strained expectation being suddenly reduced to nothing. This very reduction, at which certainly understanding cannot rejoice, is still indirectly a source of very lively enjoyment for a moment. Its cause must consequently lie in the influence of the representation upon the body, and the reciprocal effect of this upon the mind. This, moreover, cannot depend upon the representation being objectively an object of gratification, (for how can we derive gratification from a disappointment?) but must rest solely upon the fact that that reduction is a mere play of representations, and, as such, produces an equilibrium of the vital forces of the body.” (209)

“It is noteworthy that in all such cases the joke must have something in it capable of momentarily deceiving us. Hence, when the semblance vanishes into nothing, the mind looks back in order to try it over again, and thus by a rapidly succeeding tension and relaxation it is thrown to and fro and put into oscillation. Since the snapping of what was, as it were, tightening up the string takes place suddenly (not by a gradual loosening), the oscillation must bring about a mental movement and a sympathetic internal movement of the body.” (210)