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)

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)

Se ensaya una filosofía de la risa en el doble sentido del genitivo. El objetivo es el habitual en la historia del pensamiento. La opinión común es la de considerar el humor como lo otro del pensamiento. Paradigmáticamente la filosofía, como metafísica, sería la posición intelectual agelasta por antonomasia: el grado cero del humor. Sin embargo, interpretado el genitivo en sentido subjetivo, la risa se muestra como pensamiento y el pensamiento como continuación de la risa mediante el cerebro como músculo (...) cigomático. Pensar y reír amplían la realidad. El sentido del humor revela ser quizá el sentido filosófico genuino. (shrink)

The present book addresses the background, rationale, general structure, and particular aims and arguments characterizing our third and last volume about "humor" and "cruelty". A guiding foray is provided into the vast expert literature that can be retrieved in the Western humanities and social sciences on these two terms. Pivotal thinkers and crucial notions are duly identified, highlighted, and examined. Apposite subsidiary references are also included, especially with regard to psychodynamics and clinical psychology, existentialism, feminism, liberalism, Marxism, and representative recent (...) studies in the philosophy of humor and its cognates. The stage is thus set for the exploration and assessment of the conflicts between humor and cruelty unfolding in Part 2 of Volume 3. Being the philosophical terminus of our entire research project, Volume 3 counterbalances, complements, and, occasionally, complexifies the numerous forms of mutual cooperation between humor and cruelty that the preceding Volume 2 had unearthed and discussed. (shrink)

Part 2 of Volume 3 addresses in detail the conflicts between humor and cruelty, i.e., how cruelty can be unleashed against humor and, conversely, humor can be utilized against cruelty. Potent enmities to mirth and jollity are retrieved from a variety of socio-historical contexts, ranging from Europe’s medieval monasteries to the 2015 Charlie Hebdo massacre. Special attention is paid to the cruel humor and humorous cruelty arising thereof, insofar as such phenomena can reveal critical aspects of today’s neoliberal socio-economic order. (...) In parallel, settings where humor has been used as an instrument to cope with suffered cruelty, whether natural or human in origin, are also retrieved and discussed. These also vary greatly and encompass domains such as hospital wards, 20th-century Jewish ghettoes, and contemporary funeral homes. A set of concluding reflections is then offered on the psychological, theological, ethical, and metaphysical roots of humor—and its cruel rejection. (shrink)