Thoughts on Laughter

Laughter is a funny thing.

Some folks (Plato, Aristotle, Hobbes, etc.) think our laughter is a display of our personal dominance or superiority. Others suggest that laughter is the outward expression of relief from our pent up aggression (Freud and anyone that's ever read Freud). Still others (Kant, Kierkegaard, Bergson, etc.) indicate that laughing is the result of seeing an incongruity where two unlike things--say bacon and an iPhone... Apple may or may not have an app for that--are juxtaposed in such a way that they strike us as unusual or funny.

Of course each group will argue that their view is entirely and exclusively correct. The result of their scholarly territorial pissing is that they fail to see how and where their restrictive ideas about laughter miss the point. All three groups indicate reasons why we might laugh, but they do not explain laughter aside from showing us that laughter is a response to something. Each idea tells us only a little about what laughter does and substantially less about what humor is.

So what do we know about laughter? Well, as demonstrated above, it is a response or a result. Laughter isn't physics, it doesn't happen in a vacuum. Further, not all laughter is created equally. Laughing at a Helen Keller joke is surely not the same as laughing at a children's cartoon--though, it would be pretty funny if SpongeBob's porous, spongy face was the result of his trying to eat with a fork... but I digress.

Henri Bergson would point out that laughter is distinctly social. It is a phenomenon of the collective. This probably explains why laughter is contagious, why it's always more fun to see a Judd Apatow movie in a crowded raucous theater than in your living room with your ex--though that would probably happen in a Judd Apatow movie--and why laughter persists even in the face of its detractors--Eisenhower and his ilk never laughed at Mort Sahl's jokes, but thousands across the country erupted as Sahl lambasted Ike every night on stage in the late 1950s.

While I will not (and cannot) provide the definition of laughter (I'm not even going to offer a definition... it's a blog, deal with it), it is clear that three things are important to understanding this complex, human experience: (1) Laughter is a response to something; (2) Laughter varies based on the the thing to which it responds, its situation, and other such factors; and (3) laughter is profoundly social.

I am not a blogger

I am not a blogger.

I am not a blogger.

I am not a blogger.

I am not a... I think you get the idea.

While I don't think of myself as a blogger--you know, the kind person who constantly updates his/her "followers" on everything that happens to them all of the time up to and including the cornucopia of tedium that we all already experience in day to day living. The kind of person that should know that we have facebook for precisely that purpose--I am a writer. More specifically, I am an academic writer (read: boring).

My hope for this blog is to offer an insight or two from my own work and other scholarship in a few hundred words while building my writing chops with brief commentaries and criticisms tempered by a comic overtone that the oh-so-serious academy so often shuns (the result of constantly trying to be taken seriously).

You can think of this as a kind of learning while doing. Comedy is hard to understand from the outside, so this is my attempt to work my way inside and understand. At times I will be explicitly theoretical, critical and (hopefully) insightful. At other times, I will be silly, hyperbolic and (hopefully) humorous. Regardless, I will always be sarcastic. That doesn't mean you'll find everything that I write funny. In as much as I am not a blogger, I am not a comedian. I urge the reader not to take what I say too seriously, even though comedy, as I see it, is a very serious endeavor.