Henri Bergson did write Laughter: An Essay on the Meaning of the Comic and Freud wrote Jokes and Their Relation to the Unconscious, but it’s hard to believe our current
generation of academics can effectively take time out of their Husserling to make
salient points about the gags, word play, inflexibility (one of Bergson’s
ideas) and farcical cases of mistaken identity (that characterize Roman Comedy
for example). Even Daniel Dennett, a philosopher of consciousness, who is one
of the authors of the volume under consideration, Inside Jokes, in Tim Lewens TLS review, “What’s so funny?” (12/7/12) is suspect. The basic theory is summarized by Lewens as this: “we find things
funny when our expectations are overturned.” Lewens finds that the theory
“performs best” when the authors who also include Matthew M. Hurley and
Reginald B. Adams, Jr. deal with “jokes and riddles.” But the authors are “on
less secure ground when it comes to the comic effects of mimicry.” And Lewens
proves his own mastery of humor when he takes them to task using Mel Brooks’s Blazing Saddles as an example. “Brooks’s
cowboys are a rough, uneducated and vulgar bunch. It would be hard to argue
that the audience has a committed expectation that these cowboys are the sorts
of people who wouldn’t fart in company. Perhaps instead we have committed
expectations for the frequency or loudness of farts, which the cowboys’
exuberance overturns.” To begin with this is a masterful analysis of an iconic
scene and shows that philosophers can foster useful discussion even on a subject as defying of philosophical analysis as humor. It also brings to mind another great moment in the history of humor and that’s the
famous Monty Python vomiting scene in which one person'a hurl produces a chain
reaction. It would be hard to say that expectations are overturned in this
piece of over-the-top vulgarity. Quite the contrary, “the gag reflex,” which is
more at work in its physiologic than humorous form, is what makes the scene so
believable and the viewer is left with only two choices: to laugh, or begin
throwing up him or herself.
