Gimbel - Isnt that Clever: A Philosophical Account of Humor and Comedy

Isnt That Clever provides a new account of the nature of humorthe cleverness accountaccording to which humor is intentional conspicuous acts of playful cleverness. By defining humor in this way, answers can be found to longstanding questions about humor ethics (Are there jokes that are wrong to tell? Are there jokes that can only be told by certain people?) and humor aesthetics (What makes for a good joke? Is humor subjective?). In addition to humor in general, Isnt That Clever asks questions about comedy as an art form, such as whether there are limits to what can be said in dealing with a heckler and how to determine whether one comedian has stolen jokes from another.

Steven Gimbel is professor of philosophy and former Edwin T. and Cynthia Shearer Johnson Chair for Distinguished Teaching in the Humanities at Gettysburg College. His recent books include Einstein: His Space and Times and Einsteins Jewish Science: Physics at the Intersection of Politics and Religion.

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94Isnt That Clever

A Philosophical Account of Humor and Comedy

Steven Gimbel

Steven Gimbel

First published 2018
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To Rob Rynasiewicz and Peter Achinsteinthere, I did some real philosophy sort of

I would like to thank many people whose support and/or thought comments were very helpful with this projectChris Kramer, Sophia Stone, Richard Richards, Camille Atkinson, Lydia Amir, Lou Marinoff, Al Gini, John OConnor, Mar Bell, and the members of the Lighthearted Philosophers Society, especially Dave Monroe and Tom Brommage.

Devising a theoretical account of humor has been thought to be a fools errand. E. B. White (1941) said Humor can be dissected, as a frog, but the thing dies in the process and the innards are discouraging to any but the pure scientific mind (xvii). Sigmund Freud, in his book Jokes and Their Relation to the Unconscious, wrote the problem of the comic have proved so complicated and all the efforts of the philosophers at solving them have been so unsuccessful that we cannot hold out any prospect that we shall be able to master them in a sudden onslaught (181). Ted Cohen, in Jokes: Philosophical Thoughts on Joking Matters, says with respect to a theory of humor, I believe there could be no such theory (10).

Despite being so warned, I am fool enough to try. I present here not only an account of humor, but one that I contend gives rise organically to an aesthetic and an ethic for humor. If the view I argue for is correct, then it gives us not only an understanding of what humor is, but also a way to judge humorwhat is a quality jokeand to determine when and which jokes are morally acceptable to tell and enjoy.

The fundamental flaw that plagues the contemporary discussion in the philosophy of humor is the claimimplicit or explicitthat humor is essentially connected to laughter, mirth, or amusement. The first move made by virtually all humor theorists is to connect humor with positive emotional or physiological effects. Nol Carroll contends that the object of humor theory is that which generates the emotional state of comic amusement and experiences of levity (5). Michael Clark writes, There can be no adequate account of the notion of humor without one of the notion of amusement. For the humorous is so characterized in virtue of the human attitude or response to it (142). Victor Raskin contends that for his work in giving an account of humor, The goal of the theory is to formulate the necessary and sufficient conditions, in purely semantic terms, for a text to be funny (xiii).

The reason for this presupposition that humor is essentially and necessarily connected to laughter, mirth, or amusement is that philosophical analyses of humor are written by people who greatly enjoy both laughing at jokes and getting laughs by telling jokes. From their perspective, jokes are things, externalized texts that you hear at a dinner party and try to remember so that you can tell at the next dinner party or the contents of e-mails that you can use to annoy your relatives by mass forwarding it to everyone in your address book.

Jokes are pleasure nuggets delivered unto humanity by a loving comedic God. They are not seen as human-created works of art. Christie Davies holds that [Jokes] have no authors and travel mainly by word of mouth (4) and A jokes origins are collective and social (10). In the introduction to his book Semantic Mechanisms of Humor, Raskin apologizes for having to create some of the jokes he will analyze in his work, calling them artificial products, as if joke creation is something dirty and the fact that he is using jokes that have not been repeated makes them lesser jokes.

What has led me to undertake this philosophical inquiry is finding that these two presuppositionsthat humor is for mirth-generation and that jokes are authorless textsare both wrong. The realization occurred to me during my time trying to be a stand-up comic. To be clear, I am not citing this limited experience as a claim to any sort of authority on matters humorous. I am not and have never been a professional comedian. I worked the comedy open mic scene regularly in the Baltimore/Washington D.C. area for five years and worked a small handful of paid college shows as M.C., feature, or headliner. I have been on stage many times and have both killed and bombed. Some of the jokes used in this work are mine. Unlike Raskin, I do not apologize for a lack of philosophical rigor in using my own jokesI apologize just for the quality of the jokes. Theres a reason I didnt quit my day job.