Who is morally permitted to tell jokes about Jews? Poles? Women? Only those in the group? Only those who would be punching up? Anyone, since they are just jokes? All of the standard approaches are too broad or too narrow. In on the Joke provides a more sophisticated approach according to which each person possesses "joke capital" that can serve as "comic insurance" covering certain jokes in certain contexts. When Bob tells a joke about Jews, we can never know exactly (...) what Bob is intending since we cannot see inside Bob’s mind. But we could reasonably infer, if we knew Bob himself was Jewish, if he worked tirelessly for Jewish causes, or was a card-carrying Neo-Nazi. Each would affect his joke capital, and, in certain circumstances, we would have a moral standing to demand to see his ledger to see how much joke capital he had with respect to Jews. The permissibility of that joke depends upon four factors: the joke, the teller of the joke, the audience, and the setting. The view developed in In on the Joke is the only view that clearly explains how each of these components work together in an integrated, effective ethic of humor. (shrink)

This essay challenges the prevailing view among critical theorists that laughter’s emancipatory power stems from its ability to speak the truth. The disparate accounts of laughter offered by Plato, Hobbes, and Nietzsche exemplify an alternative strategy for theorizing laughter as a performance of deception, or an experience that mystifies rather than enlightens. While a view of laughter as deceptive may at first appear to reduce laughter’s critical leverage over ideology, I argue that this approach offers a stronger account of its (...) emancipatory power. Speaking the truth does little more than reveal the falsity of ideology, and laughter’s capacity to actually transform society hinges on how it deceives differently – namely, in such a way that prompts the imagination and construction of more democratic institutions and modes of relating. The essay concludes by considering the implications of this argument for how we understand the role of truth in critical theory today. (shrink)

This paper investigates the meaning of the smile and how various kinds of disruptions motivate its thematization. In so doing, it broaches experiences in the recent pandemic, as the masked face disrupts the givenness of the smile. Indeed, the paper claims that such a situation affords the possibility of becoming even more attentive to the conditions of meaningfulness at a global scale. It evidences such a claim by first tracing some essential points of the meaning of meaning via the analysis (...) of intentionality in the work of Edmund Husserl and Bernard Lonergan; then, it reviews the classic treatment of the smile’s meaning by Frederick Buytendijk, along with Lonergan’s further clarification of how an pre-thematic or elemental relation between persons conditions the phenomena; it concludes by suggesting how various sorts of disruption might motivate the smile’s thematization, especially in phenomenology’s inquiry back to the elemental dimension of meaning. (shrink)

This article explores the psychoanalytic points of commonality between stand‐up comedy shows and fascist rallies, arguing that both are concerned with the creation of a “mass” audience. The article explores the political significance of this analogy by arguing that while stand‐up shows are not as regressive as fascist rallies, their “mass” character does run counter to any political aspirations they may have toward the end of critical consciousness raising.

Political theorists have traditionally grappled with laughter by posing a simple, normative question: ‘What role, if any, should laughter play in the polis?’ However, the outsized presence of laughter in contemporary politics has rendered this question increasingly obsolete. What good does determining laughter’s role in the polis do when the polis itself is to a large extent shaped by laughter? The present essay argues that Kant’s aesthetic investigations of laughter in the Critique of Judgment and Anthropology from a Pragmatic Point (...) of View offer a much needed alternative to the normative discourse. Kant theorizes laughter as an intensely dialectical experience — at once an aesthetic judgment and an affect. Laughter in Kant enacts dissensus: it disrupts and transforms sensus communis, or the ways subjects see and hear the world in common that organize and structure a political community. The essay illustrates the advantages of a Kantian conception of the politics of laughter over the normative discourse by examining Dave Chappelle’s controversial 2019 stand-up comedy special Sticks & Stones. It concludes that the dissensus enacted by laughter, while not necessarily democratic, provides a privileged opening for democratic politics. (shrink)

The publication is devoted to the analysis of the socio-philosophical concept of laughter, which was presented by a modern Ukrainian scholar Olga Maltseva. Our task is to examine, using the texts of the monograph “Metamorphoses of Laughter in the Dynamics of Sociocultural Space” and the corresponding doctoral dissertation, how it is establishing the “discourse of laughter”, a multidisciplinary research field with fruitful scientific communication, the search for theoretical and methodological foundations, a conceptual and terminological framework, and a special the language (...) of «Gay Science». One of the questions that remains debatable is whether it will be possible to create a “universal scientific theory of laughter”.In the conceptualization of laughter and the development of a methodology for studying it as a sociocultural phenomenon, a special role belongs to social philosophy. On this basis, we highlight the main thematic regions of social and philosophical study of laughter. One of these thematic regions is laughter and national identity. Laughter is considered as a phenomenon of “frontier”. The sources of Ukrainian national identity are studied as a result of the “meta- frontier” existence of our people. The Cossack myth of Ukraine illustrates an unconscious appeal to trickster strategies of self-regulation in borderline situations, revealing the archetypal features of a “cheerful warrior”. Olga Maltseva considers types of post-modern carnivalization. Traditional holidays today are turning into total, artificial “festivity”. There is a carnivalization of the media, intellectual sphere and scientific activity, carnivalization of sports and fashion industry, leisure and recreation practices, carnivalization of eschatology as a anticipation of an apocalyptic carnival. The result of the study became a wide panorama of the consequences of postmodern carnivalization. Laughter in transitional states of social development violated the usual mode of existence of stable spheres of community and culture, changed their societal destination, At the same time, laughter provides an impetus for the emergence of new attitudes, the generation of new meanings that can become the basis of the value paradigm of the future. (shrink)

This dissertation focuses on the social philosophy of humor from the viewpoint of Erich Fromm’s critical humanistic thinking. The work consists of an introduction and four individual articles. The introduction discusses Fromm’s theories in relation to the phenomenon of humor to provide a basis for the articles. The central aim is to understand the dynamic nature of humor and how it is related to the problem of being a paradoxical creature, that is, a human being. It is claimed that humor (...) has to be analyzed and interpreted in a unique historical and cultural situation. The first article discusses Fromm’s concept of social character to offer a theoretical tool to understand how deeply humor is a social phenomenon. It is argued that the social character is a crucial component if we are to reach beyond jokes and laughter, and to grasp their deeper social significance. The second article furthers this thought by developing a critical standpoint on the phenomenon of laughing at oneself. It calls into question the prevailing optimism about the capability to ridicule oneself. Following Fromm, it is claimed that humor needs a serious backbone from which the perceived oddities are evaluated. The third article brings forth the debate of humor and freedom. In opposition to the widely shared idea that humor should be absolutely free, it is argued that humor cannot be separated from the sphere of humanity, and this basic fact sets the ground for the freedom of humor. Freedom has to be obtained within the limits of humanity. This leads to the notion that it is untenable to claim that we should be always able to laugh at everything. The fourth article elaborates the influence of social circumstances for humor, and the competitive nature of contemporary humor is taken under critical scrutiny. It is argued that humor and laughter reflect the current historical situation and, eventually, ourselves. Therefore, from a humanistic perspective, it is concerning how natural and popular humor competitions appear to be. As a whole, the dissertation is a philosophical study, and it aims more at philosophical understanding than to concrete empirical research settings. However, the conducted research is empirically inspired philosophy, and thus intimately connected to the living phenomena of humor and laughter. (shrink)

Dying is easy; comedy is hard. Comedy is sovereign. I begin with an excerpt from Bertolt Brecht’s Fugitive Conversations. Ziffel, a physicist, is chatting with the worker Kalle: For humor, I always think of the philosopher Hegel.... He had the makings of one of the greatest humorists among the philosophers.... I read his book The Great Logic once, when I had rheumatism and couldn’t move. It’s one of the greatest humorous works of world literature. It treats of the way of (...) life of concepts, those slippery, unstable, irresponsible existences; how they abuse one another and fight with knives and then sit down together to supper as though nothing had happened.... They can live... (shrink)

This article explores the relationship between theory and praxis by contrasting three different models of intellectual endeavor: totalizing, particular and decolonial. Attending to the critique that Gayatri Spivak raised against Michel Foucault and Gilles Deleuze in Can the Subaltern Speak?, this article advocates a dramaturgical reading of texts as a model for political theory to address subaltern agency. It reads such agency in the smile that Pier Paolo Pasolini registers in his 1967 film version of Sophocles’ play, Oedipus Tyrannos. Dramaturgically (...) read, Oedipus reveals another text, the tragic history of a yet insufficiently explored democratic alternative that goes against the established democracy and its complicity with inequality in the continued naturalization of slavery despite its foundation in equality. This subtext demands understanding Oedipus as a political production from the speechless agency of dissident servants, a more subversive aspect of democratic politics. (shrink)

_An exploration of philosophical and religious ideas about humor in modern philosophy and their secular implications._.

This paper provides an existential analysis of humour as a social virtue in invasion games at the elite sport level. The main argument is that humour in this particular context can be valuable both in the competitive social training environment and in game performance. This is investigated through philosophical and psychological conceptualisations of humour that are used to reveal and analyse the appearance and possible value of a humorous approach in various social situations experienced during invasion games and the associated (...) training situations. It is concluded that humour can help balance and structure the social training environment as well as facilitate creative game performance. On this basis it is suggested that the existential perspectives on humour presented could make a fruitful contribution to talent development in the domain of invasion games. (shrink)

This paper investigates the meaning of the smile and how various kinds of disruptions motivate its thematization. In so doing, it broaches experiences in the recent pandemic, as the masked face disrupts the givenness of the smile. Indeed, the paper claims that such a situation affords the possibility of becoming even more attentive to the conditions of meaningfulness at a global scale. It evidences such a claim by first tracing some essential points of the meaning of meaning via the analysis (...) of intentionality in the work of Edmund Husserl and Bernard Lonergan; then, it reviews the classic treatment of the smile’s meaning by Frederick Buytendijk, along with Lonergan’s further clarification of how an pre-thematic or elemental relation between persons conditions the phenomena; it concludes by suggesting how various sorts of disruption might motivate the smile’s thematization, especially in phenomenology’s inquiry back to the elemental dimension of meaning. (shrink)

This article focuses on the structures of humor and joke telling that require particular kinds of attentiveness and particular relationships between speaker and audience, or more specifically, between classmates. First, I will analyze the pedagogical and relational preconditions that are necessary for humor to work. If humor is to work well, the person engaging in humor needs to gauge their interlocutors carefully. I discuss, too, the kinds of listening necessary for listening for the joke, including attentiveness to complex possibilities for (...) meaning. This attentiveness to complexity is linked to curiosity and a willingness to be startled, two qualities that are central to the risk and pleasure of learning discussed by Socrates and Maria Lugones. Examining the place of risk in Socrates’ teaching and the place of serious play in Maria Lugones’ discussion of difference, I suggest that humor can help to illuminate complicities and invite more robust interactions with difference, creating pleasurable encounters to work through difficult social divisions. (shrink)

In his later years, Leo Tolstoy wrote numerous books, essays and pamphlets expounding his newly-articulated denunciations of all political violence, whether by dissidents or ostensibly legitimate states. If these writings have inspired many later pacifists and anarchists, it is partly thanks to his masterful deployment of the literary technique of ‘defamiliarisation’ – or looking at the familiar as if new – to shake readers into recognising the absurdity of common justifications of violence, admitting their implicit complicity in it, and noticing (...) the process which numbed them into accepting such complicity. This paper discusses Tolstoy’s use of the imagination to defamiliarise and denounce violence, first by citing several typical examples, then by reflecting on four of its subversive characteristics: its disruption of automated perception, its implicit concession of some recognition, its corrosion of conventional respect for traditional hierarchies, and its encouragement of empathy. (shrink)

ABSTRACT The function of the comic in the midst of tragedy is not clear. After all, is it simply comic relief that wounded nations, communities, or individuals seek? Tragedy has long been cast as memory and mourning while comedy offers for the masses a Nietzschean moment of joyful forgetting and for the Stoic mind a measure of transcendence from our grief. The latter view came into prominence for modern American culture with the nineteenth-century satirist Mark Twain, who wrote that “the (...) secret source of humor itself is not joy but sorrow,” which has been interpreted through the often-quoted formula: comedy is tragedy plus time. The assumption is that we need some distance emotionally in order to mock or transcend the tragic. While we grant the humor of transcendence can produce some momentary relief through emotional distance, we wonder if there might be another way that humor can deal with suffering? Popular psychology often speaks of five stages of grief, and while that progression seems too linear and simplistic, we find that the now much more inclusive comic stage has something to offer their audiences struggling to make sense of a volatile world. (shrink)

I argue that a self-referential sense of humor is positively self-accepting by acknowledging imperfection, abnormality, or average status, without genuinely intending ridicule on oneself. Instead, standards of perfection, normality, and greatness are the implicit targets of ridicule, which can provide a form of bonding among those having this sense of humor, who can then find commonality amongst themselves and relief from the pressure of those exacting standards. This self-accepting sense of humor helps to make life more meaningful by facilitating contentment (...) with imperfection both with respect to oneself and one’s situation. While a sense of humor can certainly be helpful for improving character, a perfectionist argument such as this should be balanced by acknowledgement of the value that can be gained from simply accepting ourselves just as we are. (shrink)

In the first decades of the 21st century, humour has been increasingly embraced as a legitimate means by which to cover, analyse and intervene in political issues. Most frequently, this political application of humour has been interpreted through the lens of ‘satire’: a term that evokes an idea of humour as a politically meaningful cultural act. Such an account of humour connects satire with the long-standing theoretical tradition of ‘cultural politics’ that explores the ability and mechanism of cultural forms to (...) inform, inspire or enact political change. However, while satire may appear as the manifestation or culmination of a cultural political agenda, I argue that the concept ultimately works towards the closure of cultural political possibility. Drawing on the work of Georg Lukács and Fredric Jameson, I argue that satire is better understood as a form of reification that prematurely resolves how, when and why cultural forms can do politics. (shrink)

This article offers an analysis of the role humor plays in the philosophy of Diogenes of Sinope. It argues that the Cynicism authored by Diogenes is a philosophy premised on a number of doctrines, and that among these doctrines humor holds the central place. The Cynical humor of Diogenes is characterized as more than just a feature of his personality or a method through which he communicates his real message, but as the actual state of mind that he intends to (...) impart to his students. (shrink)

This thesis explores and describes the comic features of Samuel Beckett’s prose works. It explores fundamental questions about Beckett’s humour. On the one hand, it investigates the nature of humour, and, on the other, it investigates what counts as humour in Beckett. This twofold investigation requires ‘attuning’ philosophy and literary criticism, where questions and tools of each discipline mutually sharpen and refine each other. Chapter 1 evaluates philosophical accounts of humour and identifies Incongruity Theory as the theory offering the best (...) account of humour. According to this theory, a necessary and not sufficient condition for comic amusement is the perception of an incongruity. Chapter 2 starts exploring what counts as humour in Beckett by examining where comic incongruities are located. By doing so, this chapter puts the Incongruity Theory to the test, and, evaluates the analytical tools ordinarily used in describing humour. This exploration uses Ruby Cohn’s seminal description of Beckett’s humour as a springboard. This chapter individuates a comic layer which Cohn’s description has overlooked – the ‘comic of language acts’. Chapter 3 analyses Beckett’s texts in order to describe the comic devices that depend on the performance of language acts. In order to do so, the discussion makes use of Austin’s Theory of Speech Acts. As a result, this chapter develops a set of tools able to capture ‘the comic of language acts’, a comic layer which crucially shapes Beckett’s writing. Chapter 4 demonstrates how to make use of the set of tools developed in Chapter 3 by examining three key works of Beckett – More Pricks than Kicks, Watt, and Molloy. This examination leads to the individuation of three movements at the level of illocutionary acts – ‘twists’, ‘convolutions’, and ‘oscillations’ – which are informative of Beckett’s writing and of the experience of reading these works. (shrink)

Comedy and philosophy have too often been thought immiscible, a tradition supported by a solemn reading of philosophers such as Plato. A closer look at Plato – and specifically at what may be his most familiar dialogue – the Republic, suggests just the contrary. Far from immiscible, comedy and philosophy are entwined in ways that are mutually illuminating. I argue that a joke in Book V reveals the self-forgetting involved in founding the city in speech, and so illustrates the vitality (...) of self-knowledge to political ventures. Glaucon criticizes the first city in speech as akin to one “of sows”, prompting a new city altogether, and yet the city that he helps to create not only eradicates distinctions between animals and humans but is founded on principles of animal husbandry and described overwhelmingly in animalistic terms. Justice in this city is defined as a minding of one’s own business, but what exactly “one’s own” is expands to accommodate Glaucon’s pleonexia and accompanying tyrannical allowances. Glaucon has forgotten himself. Without a limit – without a restriction on what one’s own is – the city degenerates into a tyranny. Glaucon’s self-forgetting may be a minor, comical incident, but it has significant philosophical consequences, including a radical undercutting of the city in question as well as the distinction between humans and animals. The comical mode employed here suggests that it may be a comical understanding of the self that best supersedes the forgotten self. (shrink)

This essay proposes an alternative reading of David Lewis’s On the Plurality of Worlds (OpW) by drawing parallels between this book and a performance by Andy Kaufman, Andy Wrestles the Ladies (AwL). The proposed reading is ultimately grounded by a joke: that it is more credible to believe that similarly to Kaufman in AwL, Lewis impersonated a character in OpW by performing a reductio ad absurdum than to believe that he seriously defended modal realism. After all, to support this thesis (...) is to face countless objections while showing varied lacks of awareness and justifying the attribution to oneself of Ostrichist. The latter abbreviates the predicate, “to act like an ostrich,” attributable to that which lacks varied kinds of awareness in acting in a way comparable to that of a bizarre ostrich that buries its head in the sand for no good reason. (shrink)

Ludwig Wittgenstein suggests that ?A serious and good philosophical work could be written consisting entirely of jokes?. The idea for this dialogue comes from a conversation that Michael Peters and Morwenna Griffiths had at the Philosophy of Education of Great Britain annual meeting at the University of Oxford, 2011. It was sparked by an account of an assessment of a piece of work where one of the external examiners unexpectedly exclaimed ?I knew Jean-Paul Sartre?, trying to trump the discussion. This (...) conversation is a dialogue about comedy and humor as a basis for philosophy, education and pedagogy that provides an introduction to recent works and a context for ongoing research. The concluding section provides further reflection on some of the main themes, drawing attention to the significance of humor in dialogues within philosophy and education, and suggesting that it has a particular role in resisting managerialism at all levels of educational institutions. (shrink)

An overlooked element in dealing with dissensus is humour. Humor has two vital rhetorical functions here: 1) it dilutes or diffuses volatility, and 2) it elucidates and constructs shared conditions of reasonableness. I will suggest that the rhetorical character of humour, as a productive, creative capacity, is an essential feature of its role in helping to generate and substantiate the ‘common sense’ needed for effective communication in general.

As the “War on Terror” continues, the national myth of veteran-as-hero has given way to a narrative shorthand of veteran-as-villain. Films and television shows depicting the reintegration of veterans tend to focus on the struggle and alienation from the homefront that veterans feel upon their return. In contrast, comedy television portrayals such as One Day at a Time and You’re the Worst, both of which slowly but successfully reintegrate their central veteran characters, do so narratively by shifting their characters’ veteran (...) status from their defining feature to one aspect of their past. Ultimately, I argue that the process of reintegration is one paralleled in the rehumanization that these comedy television portrayals permit, ultimately offering hope that reintegration, while not easy, is possible. (shrink)

Recent iterations in international legal thought of the debate over the transformative potential of law have tended to echo the long-standing assumption that radical movements, when they employ law-based tactics, do so in the same manner as reformist movements: they mobilise the legitimacy of law for short-term goals, only with more radical long-term goals in mind. However, movements such as the 2012 student strike in the Canadian province of Quebec demonstrate more diverse, creative engagements with law that openly mock the (...) legal system in an effort to simultaneously delegitimise the current legal order. This article argues that this movement’s approach is consistent with the notion of an ‘impudent’ use of law as politics but also extends it further to include ideas raised by this movement’s theatrical ‘over-compliance’ with law, through which the movement turned law itself into a public spectacle. The article examines instances of the state’s unprecedented mobilisation of the legal system to contain the student strike and the student strikers’ creative and subversive engagements with law in response, illustrating how the ideas thrown up by this movement can advance theoretical discussion in legal scholarship about law’s transformative potential. (shrink)

This discussion of Infinitely Demanding explores the terms of the paradox with which Critchley is centrally concerned: how an ethico-politics can at once begin in disappointment and yet allow for engagement, the infinite renewal of commitment and optimism. Placing this in critical relation to the paradox Rorty meets with his account of the "private ironist and public liberal" in Contingency, Irony, Solidarity, I argue that Critchley's ethico-politics invokes the possibility of a non-ironical categorical imperative, at the meeting point of finitude (...) and the infinite and at the heart of what is also a political space of intersubjectivity. I examine the logic of humour and of commitment within the Kantian frame thus suggested, arguing for their relevance to certain aspects of anarcho-activism, but also for their limitations in desperate circumstances, posing the risk that Critchley's preferred politics falls back into liberal complacency. (shrink)

We humans laugh often and it is not always because something is funny. We laugh in the face of the pathetic or the powerless; sometimes we laugh at our own powerlessness or pathos.In short, we laugh at both the comical and the difficult. Here I am especially interested in the laughter that is sparked by what is difficult and how that laughter—and all laughter—breaks through to mark a range of emotional states: fear, nervousness, shame, confusion and others not viewed as (...) positive, as well as joy, delight, interest, relief and other states that are viewed as positive. I also am interested in understanding what and how laughter reveals and what and how it conceals. As I explore both interests in this article, I make a compound point about laughter in educational settings: that laughter marks a breakdown of experience and that same laughter creates space for reflective listening and thinking, for diffusion of difficult affect, and for the disruption of habit that makes growth possible (and even likely) if that laughter is taken seriously. (shrink)

This essay examines the results of my attempt to use humorous video clips in a course taught in the Fall of 2010 and 2011. The regular display of these clips was designed to enhance my students' understanding of the central concepts of the course, participation in class discussions and to encourage them to think more critically and creatively. The results of a survey I administered at the end of the semester suggest that there is a positive correlation between the use (...) of the humorous clips and my students' understanding of the content, engagement in the lessons and ability to think critically. Both the quantitative and qualitative results of the survey as well as other methods of data collection indicate that watching and analyzing the humorous clips provided the students with a very valuable perspective that illuminated the ideas that we read. The results of this study also suggest that a course on the philosophy of humor and laughter can be very effective in getting students to think philosophically and appreciate the value of philosophy for their lives. (shrink)

This article explores the relationship between theory and praxis by contrasting three different models of intellectual endeavor: totalizing, particular and decolonial. Attending to the critique that Gayatri Spivak raised against Michel Foucault and Gilles Deleuze in Can the Subaltern Speak?, this article advocates a dramaturgical reading of texts as a model for political theory to address subaltern agency. It reads such agency in the smile that Pier Paolo Pasolini registers in his 1967 film version of Sophocles’ play, Oedipus Tyrannos. Dramaturgically (...) read, Oedipus reveals another text, the tragic history of a yet insufficiently explored democratic alternative that goes against the established democracy and its complicity with inequality in the continued naturalization of slavery despite its foundation in equality. This subtext demands understanding Oedipus as a political production from the speechless agency of dissident servants, a more subversive aspect of democratic politics. (shrink)

“Laughing at Finitude” interprets Slavoj Žižek’s intellectual project as responding to a challenge left by Being and Time. Setting out from discussions of Heidegger’s book in The Parallax View and The Ticklish Subject, the essay exfoliates Žižek’s response to the Heideggerian version of a “philosophy of finitude”—both finding the central insight of Žižek’s work in Heidegger’s radical proposal for “anticipatory resoluteness” and developing Žižek’s critique of Being and Time as indicating Heidegger’s retreat from that proposal within the very book where (...) it appears. Žižek reads Being and Time’s existential thematic as proposing a radical subjectivism and, unlike other Heidegger-critics, praises this aspect of the project. Indeed, Žižek claims that the weakness of Being and Time as a whole is that it is insufficiently radical in its subjectivism. For him, Heidegger is a thinker of ambiguous value, one who develops a program from whose own demands he hides. “Laughing at Finitude” both articulates this accusation of self-deception in Heidegger and examines the imperatives necessary to avoid it, for a dialectical shift from the “tragic” voice in existential treatments of finitude and for a revolutionary collectivist re-conception of social “Mitsein.” It suggests, in the process, Žižek’s own intellectual itinerary. (shrink)