Number 92 : May 1998 |
Well you asked for it (C91, p17) so, passing over Dave Botting's remarks (C91, p11) which seem to me to demonstrate nothing so much as his ability to misconstrue what I'm saying (possibly quite understandably as I'm sure I say it quite badly) I shall take up your invitation to delve into - or rather (in the case of this present contribution) to scratch ineffectually at the surface of - the philosophy of humour.
Occasionally I glance at the contact ads. in the local press, where I find that one of the most frequently used abbreviations that people use to squeeze themselves into twenty words or less, is 'GSOH' : "good sense of humour". Now it strikes me that anyone who asserts that they have a sense of humour is actually quite likely to have little or none. Humour generally seems to me to be paradoxical in some way. Thus it is potentially far more humorous to assert that one has absolutely no sense of humour whatsoever, than to say that one has a GSOH.
Anyone familiar with the work of Henri Bergson must correct me, but I seem to recall something about how, in his view, humour involves the conjunction of the organic and the mechanical. The example that springs (unimaginatively) to mind - if I am not myself guilty of misconstruction here - is someone slipping up on a banana skin: a juxtaposition of the law of gravitation with the live corporeality of our being.
Someone else - I don't know who - said that the ur-joke is the fact that we have bodies i.e. that we are conscious subjects and at the same time physical objects: another paradox. Then Arthur Koestler says something about disparate but converging planes of discourse producing humorous effects when they intersect. Of course he had a lot more to say on the subject but I couldn't be bothered to read the whole of 'The Act of Creation' and I can't properly recall what I did read: perhaps someone who could and does would like to expand on this. Certainly your example from Monty Python would seem to serve as an example by intersecting - as it were - the elevated nature of philosophical discourse with the horizontal effects of inebriation.
Didn't Aristotle also have something to say about humour (despite or because of being "a bugger for the bottle"?) or was that all a fantasy in 'The Name of the Rose'?
One way or another, it seems to me that these thinkers have probably got the subject more or less wrapped up, and that it only remains for us to turn the pages of Commensal and have a good laugh at the sociopathic opinings of certain of my fellow contributors.
Michael : You’re right about Bergson (or at least my Encyclopaedia Britannica agrees !). As far as Aristotle is concerned, I think Umberto Eco invented the work featuring in TNOTR, though I don’t know this for sure.
You may be right that earlier thinkers have the subject wrapped up, but I’d be interested to know what others think. Why do our senses of humour differ ? Sometimes we laugh at someone, sometimes with them and sometimes merely about a situation or verbal incongruity. For instance, recently someone in the US emailed me a list of (allegedly) real-life ridiculous newspaper headlines. One of these - "eye drops off shelf" - I found particularly amusing. I could be laughing at the person who didn’t "play back" the phrase after they’d written it, or with the person who was clever enough to think up something with a double meaning (and get it past their editor) or I could treat the phrase impersonally. Why do I find this more amusing than "new bridge held up by red tape", especially as the former is more likely to be contrived than the latter - or is this the reason ?
Theo