Silly Discoveries and Important Jokes

Good news on the divine comedy front: I procured a cheap copy of a book called Divine Play, Sacred Laughter, and Spiritual Understanding. Bad news: I'm only a few pages in, not far enough for a post. 

However, it looks like we're onto something with our comment yesterday to the effect that the ultimate basis of humor must lie in the distinction between God and man, or Reality and appearances, and related antitheses such as life and death, health and illness, youth and age, pleasure and pain, knowledge and ignorance, etc. According to the the lone reviewer on amazon,

Laude shows that the comic is integral to religious consciousness because it is founded on a sense of the discrepancy between the absolute and relative, the divine and the human.

Yesterday, commenter Randy highlighted the ultimate gag of the omnipotent Creator incarnating as a helpless infant. Whether atheist or believer, that's a hoot. Or at least folly to the wise, while God himself laughs at the wisdom of the world. For Him -- like us -- academia is Comedy Central. Although lately, Koranimal Planet.

Best I can do at the moment is republish some of the material that followed yesterday's repost, although edited and updated in order to meet the current standard:  

It's odd enough that life should suddenly arise in a lifeless universe, but what about laughter? "On the evolutionary level where laughter arises," notes Koestler, "an element of frivolity seems to creep into a humorless universe governed by the laws of thermodynamics and the survival of the fittest."

Which leads to the question: is humor essential to man's nature, or an accident? Put conversely, is an intelligent being without this thing called "humor" conceivable? If Koestler is correct, it would appear not, since it is so bound up with the logic and structure of scientific discovery and artistic creation, and certainly the latter two are essential to man. But is humor just an unintended side effect of these -- a mere spandrel?

If so, the spandrel must have arisen quite early, being that it is so woven into the nervous system. As Koestler writes, "Humor is the only domain of creative activity where a stimulus on a high level of complexity produces a massive and sharply defined response on the level of physiological reflexes. This makes me think of the Law of Inverse analogy, whereby the highest is reflected in the lowest -- as in how, in the reflection of a tree at the far end of a lake, the top will appear closest to us.

Koestler assures us that while the idea "that the Jester should be brother to the Sage may sound like blasphemy, yet our language reflects the close relationship." 

In a too-good-to-check footnote he elaborates on that etymological relationship, suggesting that "wit" is cognate to videre and to the Sanskrit veda, which is in turn related to the ultimate knowledge and the biggest joke of all, which is that Atman is Brahman (or at least not not Brahman), i.e., Moksha-ha-ha.

Koestler writes of "a continuous series" that stretches "from the pun through the play of words to the play of ideas." 

The play of ideas. 

Oh, but it is a game! Only vertical one. 

At any rate, it seems that "getting the joke" is very much related to "solving the problem." I suppose you could say that a joke is a discovery, just as a discovery is a joke. Which makes me want to revisit Polanyi vis-a-vis the logic of scientific discovery, not to mention Bernard Lonergan's Insight.

One difference, according to Koestler, is that the joke generally involves a collision of matrices, whereas a discovery will result from their fusion. Thus, a really important discovery will involve a "permanent fusion of matrices of thought previously believed to be incompatible."

In contrast, the really important joke... 

Could there be such a thing as an important joke? 

Two words: Joe Biden

But seriously.

The first thing that occurs to me is how, in the Soviet Union, it was only possible to discuss certain important truths in the form of generally mordant humor, e.g., "We pretend to work and they pretend to pay us."

And now that I'm thinking about it, the same would be true of certain vital truths that are not to be discussed or even noticed under a logophobic regime of political correctness.

Note also that "the history of science abounds with examples of discoveries greeted with howls of laughter," only later to be confirmed. You know, they all laughed at Christopher Columbus when he said the world was round, just as they snickered at Marconi that wireless was a phony. Same with Whitney and his gin, Fulton and his boat, and Hershey and his bar. 

Someone -- was it Whitehead? -- made a point about the scientific revolution really being the "discovery of discovery." Analogously, it seems we're looking for the punchline of punchlines, the merry Mother of All Gags -- or ho ho ho, who's got the last laugh now -- and always?