Philosophy Insights General Editor: Mark Addis The Philosophy of Humour Paul McDonald (... JUST JOKING...) Reading t * This book is designed to be read in single page view, using the ‘fit page’ command. * To navigate through the contents use the hyperlinked ‘Book- marks’ at the left of the screen. * To search, click the magnifying glass symbol and select ‘show all results’. * For ease of reading, use <CTRL+L> to enlarge the page to full screen, and return to normal view using < Esc >. * Hyperlinks (if any) appear in Blue Underlined Text. Permissions Your purchase of this ebook licenses you to read this work on-screen. No part of this publication may be otherwise reproduced or trans- mitted or distributed without the prior written permission of both the copyright owner and the publisher. You may print one copy of the book for your own use but copy and paste functions are disabled. Making or distributing copies of this book would constitute copyright infringement and would be liable to prosecution. Thank you for respecting the rights of the author. Philosophy Insights General Editor: Mark Addis The Philosophy of Humour Paul McDonald HEB ☼ Humanities-Ebooks Copyright © Paul McDonald, 2012 The Author has asserted his right to be identified as the author of this Work in accordance with the Copyright, Designs and Patents Act 1988. This edition published by Humanities-Ebooks, LLP, Tirril Hall, Tirril, Penrith CA10 2JE ISBN 978-1-84760-210-7 PDF ISBN 978-1-84760-211-4 Paperback ISBN 978-1-84760-212-1 Kindle Contents 1. Introduction 8 1.1 Humour or Laughter? 9 2. The Origins and Evolution of Humour 12 2.1 The Emergence of Humour 12 2.2 The Benefits of Humour 14 2.3 Is Humour an Emotion? 16 3. The Earliest Philosophies of Humour 21 3.1 Plato 21 3.2 Aristotle 25 3.3 Cicero 28 4. Superiority Theories of Humour 33 4.1 Rene Descartes: The Benefits of Ridicule 33 4.2 Thomas Hobbes: Sudden Glory 35 4.3 Henri Bergson: The Mechanical Encrusted on the Living 38 4.4 Humour as a Game 43 4.5 Roger Scruton: Attentive Demolition 46 5. Incongruity Theory 49 5.1 Frances Hutcheson and James Beattie 49 5.2 Immanuel Kant: Transformations into Nothing 51 5.3 Arthur Schopenhauer: Pleasure in the Defeat of Reason 53 5.4 Søren Kierkegaard 56 5.5 Problems with Incongruity Theory 57 5.6 So Where Does that Leave Us? 59 6. Relief Theories 64 6.1 Herbert Spencer: Nervous Energy 64 6.2 Sigmund Freud: The Unconscious 67 6.3 Freud and Play 70 6.4 Mikhail Bakhtin: Carnival 72 7. Humour and Ethics 77 7.1 John Morreall: On the Positive and Negative Ethics of Humour 77 7.2 Ethnic Humour 81 7.3 Christie Davis 82 7.4 Walsall People Are Stupid 83 7.5 Ted Cohen: Just Joking 89 8. Humour and Religion 92 8.1 Humour and Christianity 93 8.2 Holy Fools 96 8.3 Judaism and Humour 98 8.4 Humour and Buddhism 101 9. Postmodernism and Humour 105 9.1 John A. McClure: The Comically Cosmic 109 9.2 Humour as Philosophy 111 9.3 Susan Purdie: Joking and the Unstable Self 117 9.4 The Laugh of the Medusa 120 10. Laughter and the Limits of Understanding 123 Humour and the Human Predicament 126 11. Bibliography 129 A Note on the Author 136 Humanities Insights 137 The Philosophy of Humour 7 Acknowledgments I’d like to thank Professor Mark Addis whose excellent suggestions influenced the final shape of this volume. I’d also like to thank my two fellow humour enthusiasts at the University of Wolverhampton, Josiane Boutonnet and Jackie Pieterick, with whom I have had many enjoyable discussions about humour, and who have influenced my thinking on the subject markedly. 1. Introduction The American philosopher Ted Cohen refuses to offer a univer- sal theory of joking because he doesn’t think such a thing exists. Certainly there are numerous competing theories of humour and laughter, and the quest to adequately theorise them is as old as phi- losophy itself. The absence of a single theory implies the importance of assessing the various competing theories, of course, and one aim of this book is to do exactly that. Humour has been discussed from a host of different perspectives over the years, many of which fall outside the discipline of philosophy. While concentrating chiefly on philosophical approaches to humour, this discussion inevitably moves into other fields such as cultural studies, literary theory, religion, psychoanalysis, and psychology; the broad focus will hopefully make for a richer account of humour and its bearing on the human condition. Humour is a creative activity, and another aim of this book is to address that aspect of humour. Research shows that people are more receptive to new concepts when they are in a ‘humorous mode,’ and they are also more creative. Throughout the book readers will be invited to engage in creative writing exercises designed to exploit this crucial facet of humour, and to help them explore relevant issues imaginatively. In this way they will deepen their understanding of those issues, whilst at the same time cultivating their own creative skills. Thus the book will be of value both to people interested in the meaning of humour, and to those wishing to explore its creative possibilities. Students of philosophy will find the creative writing exercises useful in helping to engage with the debates that surround humour, whilst creative writers will discover that thinking philosophically about humour can lead to a better appreciation of how it might work for them in their creative lives. Also, at various points The Philosophy of Humour 9 throughout the book, readers will be invited to ‘pause and reflect’ on key issues; again this is intended to encourage active engagement with the topics under the discussion. 1.1 Humour or Laughter? Pause and Reflect What is the difference between laughter and humour? How are they related? The title of this book refers to humour, and it is worth saying some- thing about what this means, and how the word has signified through history. It has its origins in the Latin umor, which meant liquid. In medieval medicine it referred specifically to the liquids that were thought to comprise people, and which need to be in proportion if one is to be healthy. There were four: blood, phlegm, yellow bile, and black bile. Too much blood made people sanguine and over–excited, too much phlegm made them phlegmatic and sluggish, excess yellow bile made them choleric and irritable, while too much black bile caused melancholy, anger and depression. Only with all four fluids in balance were people deemed healthy, and in good humour; attempt- ing to make people feel better came to be known as humouring them. This in turn led to the term being used to indicate a person’s state of mind, with the first evidence of this appearing in the sixteenth cen- tury when ‘good humour’ began to denote cheerfulness. Later one of its connotations was eccentricity, or behaviour incompatible with social norms, and it is this sense of the word that underpins its asso- ciations with the comic; by the eighteenth century it denoted funni- ness and the state of being amused. Laughter can have negative asso- ciations, and in the eighteenth century humanist philosophers began to use the word humour to distinguish acceptable forms of laughter and amusement from morally dubious forms like sarcasm, mockery, and wit, which were thought to demean people. The term humour was reserved for benign and non–aggressive amusement. As a result a ‘sense of humour’ came to be seen as something worth cultivat- 10 Paul McDonald ing, and by the nineteenth century having a capacity for humour was deemed a virtue. In the modern world the word has lost this specific meaning, however, and tends to be used as a general synonym for joking, comedy and laughter. So over the centuries humour meant different things, and the phi- losophers of the ancient world did not use the word at all. Their focus is mostly on laughter. Indeed, throughout this book there is much reference to laughter, and it is worth noting that there is an essential distinction to be made between humour and laughter. Obviously they are often related, but not always. Laughter is a physical activity that can exist without humour; the source of laughter doesn’t have to be comic and can result from being tickled, from inhaling laughing gas, from nervousness, from a shock, or from other non–humorous stim- uli. Similarly, not all instances of humour generate laughter. For one thing, people need to find things funny before they’ll laugh, and what counts as humour for one person won’t necessarily work for another. It is perfectly possible to discern humorous intent in something with- out actually finding it funny enough to laugh at. There are lots of dif- ferent kinds of humour, and some of the subtler forms may not pro- duce physical laughter as such. Here the word amusement is useful, and some modern philosophers actually prefer this to humour. It can denote a humorous state of mind in which laughter may be absent, while the word humour itself can be reserved specifically for refer- ring to objects of amusement. However, not all are so precise with their language, and often, particularly in twentieth century philoso- phy and humour theory, the terms humour, laughter, joking, comedy, amusement, mirth, etc., are used synonymously. As this book deals with a variety of approaches to humour, I will use terms as they are employed by the philosophers in question, while in general discus- sions I will use whichever term is most appropriate in context. Creative Writing Exercise Create a funny scene in which a comic novelist and a stand-up comedian argue about the relationship between humour and laughter, and the importance of the connection between the two. Try to use as many synonyms for humour and laughter as possible