By Keith Tidman
Funny philosophers, as envisaged by Zolumio for ‘The Ah-Ha Moment’ |
Humor is one of those rarer things in the world that is universal, though what is funny is seen at least a little bit differently by everyone. Plato was particularly grumpy about the subject, proposing that the guardians of utopia, who rule the city, should never laugh. But for most of us, a sense of humor is always valued in a person, whether a spouse, a friend, a work colleague, an academic, or a public figure. Humor is a welcome palliative for all that ails. It appears to be deep-seated in human nature.
The oldest surviving book of jokes, called Philogelos (which translates from the ancient Greek to “laughter lover”), dated back to roughly the 5th century CE — a compilation of some 265 probably preexisting jokes, though of uncertain attribution. Some of the jokes are wittier than others, and some admittedly aren’t at all funny by today’s standards, but their place in history gives them a respected cachet. That being said, of course, humor, and jokes in particular, presumably extend much farther back into prehistory.
Humor can be subtle or brash, or found to hover anywhere in-between. Through its seemingly hard-wired ubiquity and variety, there’s plenty for all tastes — often effortlessly crossing cultural borders, on other occasions stopping hard in its track at the lands’ edge to accommodate local norms, or sometimes even to irreverently challenge them.
We might observe that humor and philosophy share similar aspirations, especially in the realm concerned with the exploratory disassembly and reassembly of reality, where insights are sovereign. Of course, different motives linger under the mantle, ready to surprise. And yet, most philosophers, going back to the ancient world, gave humor only transitory discussion, largely obscured as asides within other topics. Arguably the first major philosopher who treated humor as a central theme was the Frenchman, Henri Bergson, in his 1900 work bearing the to-the-point title Laughter. This, in its time, was a bestseller and a key philosophical reference.
But back to humor’s omnipresence, though: Where would the following joke fit, for example?
“The heir of a rich relative wished to arrange for an imposing funeral, but he lamented that he could not properly succeed because the more money he gave the mourners to look sad, the more cheerful they looked.”
Everywhere? Nowhere? At least multiple somewheres? That, by the way, is said to have been one of Immanuel Kant’s favorite jokes, which he used to exemplify the particular theory of humor to which he subscribed, which I’ll get to in a moment.
And so to an entertaining soon to be released book, The Ah-Ha Moment: Exploring Philosophical Ideas Through Jokes and Puzzles* by philosopher and author Martin Cohen. This invites us to renavigate — or perhaps out of curiosity, to navigate for the first time — what’s funny, how, and why. At its core, the book’s aim seems to be to revisit what might tickle our own funny bones. Humor that might on occasion ruffle feathers in either annoyingly or amusingly provocative ways; while for other people, cause a full-on, hard-to-stop belly laugh.
This might be a good place, before digging into theories of humor, to catalogue something that should be obvious, but might not be. That is, the many benefits of humor, starting with joy, camaraderie, enhanced attention, stress reduction, lightened burdens, physical and mental health, alertness, anger release, stronger relationships, improved mood, conflict diffusion, happiness, confidence, coping with loss, creativity, release of inhibitions, diffusion of defensiveness, acceptance of own imperfections, confronting challenges, and more.
Yet, somehow these prime factors just listed, which are perhaps more the stuff of sociology and psychology, seemed to skirt by the awareness of many earlier philosophers, some of whom simply distrusted humor and laughter.
Several theories of humor have been explored over the many centuries; however, of all these, it’s fair to say that standing front and center among the pack is what’s called the “incongruity theory.”
Incongruity theory says that a joke acquires its funniness by first setting up an expectation and then winding up with a surprisingly contrary, even absurd ending. A concise description of this theory came, perhaps unlikely, from the otherwise solemn Kant, who stated in his Critique of Judgment that “In everything that is to excite a lively laugh there must be something absurd.” No bone to pick with that.
Laughter is a response to that “absurdity.” It is the ah-ha incongruity between what’s expected and what’s actually delivered. Anything that conflicts with expectation according to, say, some familiar standard, can be funny. Often, we don’t anticipate the imminent humor, which often firstly hangs back unassumingly, only to emerge from a cogent play on words or ideas.
For example, as shared with us by Martin Cohen, let’s take a line, basted in dry humor, delivered by the charmingly self-effacing former president, Ronald Reagan. In response to a question, he pokes fun at his own age and reputation for laziness, saying, “I have left orders to be awakened at any time in case of a national emergency … even if I’m in a Cabinet meeting.”
A buildup ending with a punchline in which is embedded an element of fun, self-effacement, harmless dissonance, pleasant silliness, and unanticipated surprise. Our expectation of what Reagan was about to reveal at first led us down a different path of humor disguised in a cloak of faked seriousness.
In short, there are occasions, primarily when we are upset for other reasons, that life’s inconsistencies might simply distress us further. However, when our thoughts are darting around and in the mood to think playfully, those same inconsistencies may take on a different, more palatable, even amusing light. When what we misguidedly anticipate from the setting up of a joke is infringed upon in some inoffensive manner, where one feels secure, the result is often a laugh.
According to Arthur Schopenhauer, this distinguishing of safe incongruity is essential for humor and today, the incongruity theory overwhelmingly prevails in philosophy’s and psychology’s explanations of the what, how, and why of humor — which is why Cohen’s book devotes ample space to examples of how it works.
An alternative approach, somewhat less princely than that of incongruity, is the “superiority theory” of humor, favored by René Descartes. Thomas Hobbes was also an ardent protagonist of this take on humor, saying, in Human Nature, that:
“…the passion of laughter is nothing else but sudden glory arising from some sudden conception of some eminency in ourselves.”
Put simply, Hobbes is saying that when we tell a joke, we’re poking fun at someone or something, as in what might Americans today call a roast. Not to make someone the butt of mean-spirited jokes, but in a form of ironic adoration, to exaggerate the funnier peccadilloes of the person celebrated. Possibly the most effective form of superiority theory is making fun of oneself; the glee embedded in self-deprecation (self-roasting, let’s say) nearly always works and makes for safe, inoffensive fodder, a modesty appreciated by an audience.
Let’s turn now to another form of humor, based in relief theory, which plays on how humor influences the overall mood of the listener, particularly an emotionally wound-up listener. John Dewey was a subscriber to this theory. His opinion was that laughter “marks the ending … of a period of suspense, or expectation.” It is a “sudden relaxation of strain.... The laugh is thus a phenomenon of the same general kind as the sigh of relief.”
Sigmund Freud offered a story; this time of a prisoner being escorted to his execution on a Monday morning. While on his way to the room of doom, the prisoner quips, “Well, this is a good beginning to the week.” Tension is teed up at first, as we squirm at least little uneasily over the pending execution. However, the criminal’s unanticipated light-hearted reaction to his circumstance, and perhaps the gentle laughter that ensues, lessens that unease.
Another story concerns a construction worker hurled into the air when a planned detonation happened too soon. Because the stunned worker fell back to land’s surface far from the construction site, his pay was cut for the half-day’s “absence from his place of employment.” Freud suggested that, by the end of the story, we might chuckle to release tension over initially sympathizing with the worker’s misfortune. We therefore ultimately laugh at the incident rather than continue to fret over it.
Bertrand Russell once noted that “The point of philosophy is to start with something so simple as not to seem worth stating, and to end with something so paradoxical that no one will believe it.” Might some forms of humor similarly playfully make that paradoxical transition, too?
Among Russell’s many thought-provoking one-liners, which represent a particular delivery mode of humor he clearly seemed to relish, were these zingers, in modern parlance.
“There are two motives for reading a book; one, that you enjoy it; and the other that you can boast about it.”
“Most people would sooner die than think; in fact, they do so.”
“I would never die for my beliefs, because I might be wrong.”
“There is no reason to worry about mere size.... Sir Isaac Newton was very much smaller than a hippopotamus, but we do not on that account value him any less.”
Thank goodness we’re a long way from that kind of stuffiness. I wonder how Epictetus would react if transported through time to sit in front of today’s standup comedians, like Sarah Silverman and Chris Rock, or to episodes of Fawlty Towers, Seinfeld, and The Office, or to movies like Bridesmaids and Beetlejuice. Or, switching media, perhaps entirely different genres of comedy — including the world’s rich body of literary humor of course, as well as the amazingly brazen political cartoons of Thomas Nash — that likewise reflect people’s and cultures’ assorted predilections.
The Ah-Ha Moment: Exploring Philosophical Ideas Through Jokes and Puzzles splendidly introduces us to much of all that and more: the eclecticism, the subjectivity, and the what, how, and why of humor through the ages, all the way up to the contemporaneously comical — with examples of jokes abundantly inserted throughout the prose (for those “ah-ha!” moments). Oh, and there is a closing “how-to” account of being funny.
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* Martin Cohen, The Ah-Ha Moment: Exploring Philosophical Ideas Through Jokes and Puzzles. Austin Macauley Publishers (September 2024), https://www.amazon.com/Ah-Ha-Moment-Exploring-Philosophical-through/dp/1685628982.