A Funny Thing Happened On the Way To the Post

Putting the wit into Wittgenstein, 

A serious and good philosophical work could be written consisting entirely of jokes.

Why not? Maybe because "serious" and "joke" are contradictory terms -- unless you're the kind of person who jokes around due to anxiety or awkwardness when things get serious. In other words, humor as a psychological defense mechanism. I've never seriously looked into the dynamics of it, nor do I recall any particularly witty patients. Excuse me while I do a quick search.

Says here that

Historically, psychologists framed humor negatively, suggesting it demonstrated superiority, vulgarity, Freudian id conflict or a defense mechanism to hide one’s true feelings. In this view, an individual used humor to demean or disparage others, or to inflate one’s own self-worth. As such, it was treated as an undesirable behavior to be avoided. And psychologists tended to ignore it as worthy of study. 

And 

Humor and laughter were not seen as valuable topics for philosophical or scientific study until the 1980s, perhaps due to their assumed connection to body instead of mind and because laughter, like other bodily functions, is often difficult to control. Humor is also often thought of as “low”-- that is, enjoyed by the people as opposed to the elite.

But "Recently, scientific research on the neuroscience of laughter has showcased the potential intellectual benefits of a brain wired to find humor and the connections between humor responses and common biases and heuristics."

The following explanation of the form of humor may explain why it can be applied to philosophy; in order to "To be in on the joke," one must "Detect an incongruity in its multiple interpretations" and "Resolve the incongruity by inhibiting the literal, nonfunny interpretations and appreciating the meaning of the funny one."

Hmm. I guess this means that the possibility of metaphysical humor is grounded in the inevitable incongruity between reality and appearances, or one appearance and another. The

currently most broadly popular of the major philosophical theories of humor is the incongruity theory, developed by Immanuel Kant. 

Now that's funny. 

Later adherents included Arthur Schopenhauer and Søren Kierkegaard. This theory holds that humor results when our brains perceive two things as coexisting in a manner that does not at first appear to make logical sense and that laughter or humor occurs when the discomfort caused by this incongruity is resolved in some way. 

A simple example of this is a pun. Humor results when we discover that a word that initially appears incongruent in the context in which we first encounter it has another meaning that makes logical sense when a different context is revealed.

Back to the basis of philosophical humor, or humorous philosophy: two things coexist in a manner that doesn't appear to make logical sense, but then a sudden resolution of incongruity results in the guffaw-HA! experience. It seems that in the absence of verticality -- i.e., different planes of being -- humor would be strictly impossible, since there could be no clash of planes. 

Then again, even my dog has a rudimentary sense of humor, because at the moment she is playing with her three-foot long squeaking snake, and for her the squeak never gets old. 

What are some of the most serious -- and therefore potentially humorous -- ontological and existential incongruities we confront? Well, there's the fact that we are alive but someday won't be. That's a rather shocking incongruity. Then there's sickness and health, youth and age, pleasure and pain. There's a lot of humor around sex, because of its many incongruities. There's also civilization vs. barbarism, knowledge and ignorance, in-group vs. out-group. 

How about God and man? In a way, the first joke recorded in the Bible is when God asks Adam "Where are you," and Adam improvises the totally implausible response that "I was afraid because I was naked so I hid myself." As if God hasn't seen you naked.

Death. I'm thinking of a morbid joke about two Jews facing a Russian firing squad, and one of them asks for a blindfold. The other Jew says to him, "Shh! Don't make trouble!"

Considering that Jews are the most persecuted people in history, perhaps this is why -- certainly pound for pound -- they are the funniest, because there's the most potential for incongruity.

Is there humor in the Palestinian terrortories? That doesn't involve persecution of Jews? It reminds me of the old saying that peace will come to the Middle East when Palestinians love their children as much as they hate the Jews. It will also come if they can ever laugh at their own pathetically self-defeating culture, one that "never misses an opportunity to miss an opportunity," and that has no idea how far to go in going too far.

The guy quoted above who says humor wasn't subject to serious study until the 1980s is wrong, because I remember blogging about Arthur Koestler's book on the subject, which was published in 1964. It's been almost ten years since that series of posts, long enough to revisit it. The following is from a post that asks, Is God Laughing At Us or With Us?

Does the Creator have a sense of humor? I don't see how one can avoid the conclusion, or humor would be deprived of its sufficient reason. It certainly has no Darwinian utility.

According to Koestler, there are exactly 29 references to humor -- or at least laughter -- in the Hebrew Bible. Interestingly, only two are "born out of a joyful and merry heart," while thirteen "are linked with scorn, derision, mocking, or contempt" -- with the sarcastic ha ha of Nelson Muntz.

I've been reading Koestler's The Act of Creation, which regards humor as the equal of scientific discovery and artistic creation. You might say that each of these three quintessentially human activities has the identical deep structure.

Many people have noticed, for example, that the theory of anthropocentric global warming is a joke. Problem is, it is a bad joke, because instead of seeing an implicit connection between two frames of reference -- in this case, weather and human activity -- it just makes one up. So the humor is forced and not spontaneous. 

Or sometimes the PC [now woke] world forbids seeing the real comedic connection, therefore barring certain subjects from ridicule for the purpose of avoiding threats to power. This article, for example, explains why comedians have somehow failed to exploit the comedic goldmine that is Obama:

We learn this from Jim Downey, the longtime Saturday Night Live specialist in political japery: "If I had to describe Obama as a comedy project, I would say, ‘Degree of difficulty, 10 point 10...

“It’s like being a rock climber looking up at a thousand-foot-high face of solid obsidian, polished and oiled,” Downey says. “There’s not a single thing to grab onto -- certainly not a flaw or hook that you can caricature."'

Not a single flaw -- for example, the gulf between his pompousness and vacuity, or between the form and content of his platitudinous pronouncements. Let us not forget 

The charter Choom Ganger, confessed eater of dog and snorter of coke. The doofus who thinks the language spoken by Austrians is 'Austrian,' that you pronounce the p in 'corpsman' and that ATMs are the reason why job growth is sluggish. The egomaniac who gave the queen of England an iPod loaded with his own speeches and said he was better at everything than the people who work for him. The empty suit with so little real-world knowledge that he referred to his brief stint working for an ordinary profit-seeking company as time 'behind enemy lines.' The phony who tells everyone he’s from Chicago, though he didn’t live there until his 20s, and lets you know that he’s talking to people he believes to be stupid by droppin’ his g’s. The world-saving Kal-El from a distant solar system who told us he’d heal the planet and cause the oceans to stop rising. 

Not to mention the smokin' hot wife, the mom jeans, the intellectual laziness, the corruption, the provincial liberal insularity, the straw man arguments, the thin skin, the media sycophancy, the fascination with celebrity trash, etc.

Anyway, Koestler's book is the only one I know of that gives humor its proper due, and treats it with the metacosmic seriousness it deserves (which itself is kind of funny).

The frontispiece of the book has a helpful (?) cosmic cartography that looks like this:

Koestler suggests that "all patterns of creative activity are tri-valent," in that they may "enter the service of humour, discovery, or art" (left, center, and right, respectively), or from the "absurd through an abstract to a tragic or lyric view of existence."

Which I guess goes to the observation by Goethe in the sidebar, that The intelligent man finds almost everything ridiculous, the sensible man hardly anything.